The key to master and employ any language lies in the knowledge of its auxiliary/helping verbs,” read the Facebook status message of my friend Yash, a teacher at a GRE (Graduate Record Examination) coaching institute. He should know. Grammar is often the toughest thing to master when learning a language. Reason perhaps that the grammar classes taken by Joy sir, a senior English faculty at the CAT (Common Admission Test) training centre for which I work, are a superhit.
He holds forth dramatically on the “trash” that is lodged inside students’ brains by the “Little Red Book”, the cuboidal, carmine-covered grammar bible generations of Indians have grown up reading. I refer, of course, to Wren & Martin, its ennobling contents the perfect repository for Macaulay’s, er, less-than-noble burden. Be that as it may, Wren & Martin transports you to a time of pink-faced teachers and magical phrases. Ah, romance.
Not so fast. The Little Red Book, it seems, got plenty wrong. When students are asked to point out the difference between the simple and the perfect tenses, this is what runs through their minds: “Let’s see. I ate an hour ago (simple past tense.) I have eaten (present perfect). I have eaten, which means, I have just eaten, and so, the present perfect must be an action just completed.” This, of course, is bollocks. The origin of such confusions can be located squarely within the sacred pages of the Little Red Book. Indeed, it defines the present perfect tense as an action recently completed.
Most students present this as the definition in class. Joy sir rubs his hands in benign sarcasm and says: “I have been to New York. Does that mean I went to New York recently?” Uhm, no. Then, with a flourish, he waxes eloquent on the first principles: the past tense is about the past. “I ate 20 minutes ago” is an action completed in the past. “I have eaten” is about the present — it implies I am not hungry now. It has nothing to do with recency.
Simple as apple pie, grammar can also throw even devoted proponents off. Students hanker after simplicity. CAT’s biting rigour makes them look for easier exams. SNAP (Symbiosis National Aptitude Test) conducted by the Symbiosis Group of Institutes is one such — an umbrella exam for admission to 15 institutes. Fifteen? Yes. Only SIBM (Symbiosis Institute of Business Management) and SCMHRD (Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development) are well-known. As for the others, there’s a joke that when they need to find a new name, Symbiosis simply picks letters and prefixes them with “SI”. I kid you not: SIMS, SIIB, SICSR, SITM — these are actual institutes in Pune.
SNAP is a feeble copy of CAT with an additional general awareness section. Sample question: “Which of the following is an eight-time National Badminton champion? A: Manmohan Singh; B: Sonia Gandhi; C: Syed Modi; and D: Saina Nehwal.” Ha ha ha, and yet there are those who flunk it. To be sure, the Symbiosis Group has emerged as the bellwether of the Pune B-school scene. Increasingly, SIBM gets the same placements (both monetarily and in terms of profiles) that the lower-rung Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) boast. Today, there isn’t one company that visits IIM Indore and does not go to SIBM.
How did this happen? Why is an institute that conducts a farce of an exam routinely in the top-10 lists of best B-schools in the country?
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SIBM’s not-so-secret sauce is a focused attention on developing its human resource (HR) specialisation. For several decades after Independence, XLRI (Xaviers Labour Relations Institute, aka XL) in Jamshedpur was the only respectable HR institute in the country. Then came TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), established before XLRI, but always the bridesmaid in rankings. By 2000, both these institutes held a near monopoly on the HR function in leading business houses.
The HR function singularly drives the campus placement process. For obvious reasons, therefore, it wields tremendous power. Never mind the many subcutaneous connections the educated elite forge with members of their caste, community and so on. They still reserve pride of place to the campuses they attend. There is no stronger tie that binds generations of professionals than the B-school they went to.
With XL and TISS running the affairs at India’s corporate HR, there is little doubt that other B-schools are keen to replicate their success. Towards this end, MDI (Management Development Institute) Gurgaon started the Post Graduate Programme in Human Resource Management in 2004. The Symbiosis institutes, too, including the HR-only SCMHRD, follow this strategy. The idea is to build a pipeline of exclusive professionals to take over sizeable chunks of HR profiles and keep filling new roles through alumni connections.
To SNAP then. You may not know your Manmohan Singh from your Syed Modi but you can still earn enough to give the IIM braggarts a run for their money.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one