From Teaching Literature to Teaching Management---------BHUPINDER

From Teaching Literature to Teaching Management---------BHUPINDER

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“Necessity is the mother of Invention” after retirement I was desperately looking for a teaching job near Chandigarh. Not that my pension benefits were not enough but my vocal chords were too keen to make my tongue speak. After all 35 old years of teaching and four classes a day had made me addict to speaking.

So when Gian Jyoti Institute of Management & Technology Mohali offered me a job I was delighted.

But to my surprise, the jargon and lingua went for a sea change. Here I was to teach BBA, MBA, MCA students and focus was on Management, Grapevine organizational Behavior and Case studies.

So Mr. Bhupinder got totally baffled the first time when asked to fill a 16 column sheet I was petrified. It was such a mumble jumble of class assignments Attendance Percentage, Term tests etc. The coordinator said Mid Term Test, Assignments class tests etc. and uttering these strange words he went away. I thought I was a new IPL player facing Bret Lee. Being much too senior I could not muster courage to seek help. The dead lines in GJIMT are fixed. Imagine a Retired Principal being declared a black sheep. So, I sought help from a professional typist and fixed the MS –Excel 16 columns sheet.

Coming to the point, I found a big change from Keats ‘A thing of Beauty is joy for ever to the expressions (1) the resolution was not passed (2) agenda (3) The committee agreed (4) Minutes of dissent. When I was teaching literature my vocabulary had terms like plot, story, climax, catharsis, imitation alliteration, assonance and pathetic fallacy. And now I was dealing with case studies, grapevine, MNC, Recession, Advertorial, Target Audience, USP etc.

Instead of Hardy’s Tess or ‘Dickens A tale of Two Cities’ or Vikram Seth’s A suitable Boy now I came to know about Peter Lynch, Warren Buffet, Keynesian Economics, Human Resources, Industrial Psychology and Corporate law. Believe me my world has gone upside down Insomnia afflicts me when I have to present a business case study now, I deal with strange things in teaching such as corporate grooming, business English Annexure, Appendix and Project Reports.

I have become a split personality. A Hybrid of literary pursuits and management skills. Oh! Where is my Shakespeare, where is Milton, My. T.S. Eliot now I have assignments, graphs, Emails, Spam, Teleconferencing et al.

I think my friend in GJIMT can have a case study on the topic ‘The sea change of a professor of a literature to a novice of management teaching’ (This will be a model case study which can be programmed and presented to the students as a case of square peg in a round hole. I admit, I am a little fiasco, failure means Bhupinder. I get zero out of ten in all fields of management teaching. Really necessity is the mother of invention.