Kerala   

A passage to India for Harvardians

— PHOTO: BY special arrangement

STUDY TOUR: The team from Harvard Business School in the U.S., which visited the State recently.

A land of paradoxes. That was how Kerala was presented to the management students from the prestigious Harvard Business School on their arrival. This was a State, they were told, with a high human development index comparable to the U.S., but was hostile to new investments; a State with a strong Communist presence but a guaranteed market for everything that bourgeois multinationals dish out.

Even as they were weighing the opinions to reach a conclusion on the State, they were led to houseboats at Kumarakom. And as the boat set sail, the academic perusal took a backseat as the scenic beauty just floored them.

Seventy Master of Business Administration students of the 2009 batch from the Harvard Business School in U.S. were in the State recently as part of their annual India trip.

This is perhaps the first visit to the State by Harvardian students in the recent memory, said Thomas C. Rajan, a student and one of the group leaders. Obviously, the name the State has earned in the tourism world has reached Harvard as well. Almost all the students were experiencing a houseboat journey for the first time and they just loved it, Mr. Rajan said.

The aim was to give students a different perspective of India, he said.

Typically, the concept of India revolves around some specific landmarks and places like the Taj Mahal and Mumbai. So, this time the attempt was to give the students an opportunity to see India in its entirety.

Before coming to the State, they visited Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Jaipur and Mumbai. Though most of them had seen the Taj Mahal in pictures, standing right in front of the monument shrouded in romance and history was an altogether different experience.

The annual trip to India is one of the most popular on the campus, said Mr. Rajan. “We conduct a lottery as we have got only a fixed number of spots. And every year there are applicants almost three times the number of actual seats available,” he said.

The students left for Goa after enjoying the backwaters of Kumarakom. As Mr. Rajan said at an interactive session with industrialists organised by the Kerala Management Association, they came to “see, learn and make friends.” And they would return after accomplishing all the three objectives.

M.P. Praveen

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