Class Room 1 (CR1)

The journey to Planet-E and back: A walk down memory lane

A series of blogs about my alma mater - Amrita School of Business(ASB) located in the beautiful village of Ettimadai which we Amritians fondly call ‘Planet-E’ and the happenings in the eventful two years of my life there. Dedicated to all Amritians.

Class Room 1 (CR1) 

It had been three years since I last entered a class room. I felt like it had been ages since I left my engineering college. I was thrilled at the prospect of being a college student after a long time, but I was nervous too. When I joined Wipro after completing my graduation, I remember we had a training called ‘College to Corporate’. It was to help fresh college graduates get accustomed to the corporate culture at Wipro. During the initial days at Ettimadai, I felt like I very badly needed a ‘Corporate to College’ training to get back to being a student again.

I realized very early on that the transition from Corporate to College life was not going to be as easy as I thought it was. Long working hours, conference calls, deliverables, appraisals, work pressure, and deadlines – Corporate work was too taxing. The atmosphere in Ettimadai was entirely different. It was calm and peaceful. All was well until the classes began.

Firstly, I was struggling to stay awake in the class, especially during the first session in the morning. Many a time, I even dozed off in the class during the Morning Prayer before the first session! After the initial struggle however, I found a way around it. The solution was none other than the most popular item served in the ASB canteen – ‘Tea’. Never before in my life had I enjoyed and appreciated tea as much as I did during the two years that I was at Ettimadai.

That problem was far from solved, when I met my arch nemesis – ‘Financial Accounting’ (FA). Now that is one subject that still sends shivers down my spine each time I think about it. Finance was never (and I guess will never be) my favorite subject. My first encounter with finance did not go very well. Despite the efforts put in by our Financial Accounting Professor and my ‘finance nerd’ friends , I was struggling to make sense out of the finance concepts I was being taught. The mid-term exam for FA was a disaster; the end-term was even worse!

While FA was dreaded by most of us, there was one subject that almost all of us liked – ‘Micro Economics’ taken by Bala Sir. That was one session which all of us looked forward to. One can never forget Bala Sir’s inimitable style of saying ‘’People are rational’’ and also the various ET reading sessions in Sir’s class. I totally disliked reading ET back then, however I developed a liking for ET towards the end of the course.   

And that’s how classes began in ‘CR1’ (short for ‘Class Room 1’), a little bit of struggle in the beginning, but all went well afterwards. CR1 was our class room for the entire first year at Ettimadai. Though the initial days in CR1 were terrifying, thanks to FA, I have very fond memories of the time that I spent in CR1. Lots of learning, lots of discussions, lots of presentations, and not to forget, lots of exams happened in CR1. How I wish I could just go back in time and sit on one of those benches in CR1 and listen to those lectures once again!