Before I move on to my next tryst, on Public Demand, here is a brief account of my preparation for the interviews:

I will start from when I came to know that I had calls..

I started attending those IMS workshops..there was this person called Raj Iyer there, most of the IMS students will know him..he is an IIM C alumnus and has done a lot of stuff..service, entreprenuership and is currently into counselling B-school aspirants..I am sure there are other things he does/has done that I don't know about..btw, this is not an advertisement for IMS!! :)

So this man along with some other staff, plus the workshop that I have talked about earlier, gave us some fundas about GDs and PIs..very basic stuff..but stuff that was important..

More importantly, these sessions gave us a lot of interaction and hands-on experience of being in GDs and with people that you didn't know..the group was different for every GD, and so, was excellent practice!

As far as reading up goes, I have always been aware of current affairs..I do not think being aware of each and every detail about every bit of news is what is important. Also it is not important to have knowledge like 'GDPs of every country in Asia' or the 'Length, breadth, population, staple diet etc' of every country in India..you get the drift..all this is data, not information, and definitely not knowledge! All this information can be brought to you at the click of a mouse, why do you need managers for it!! :D (Some people are of the opinion, that managers, as they exist today, are wholly unnecessary..but let's hold that for now)!

What one does need is the ability to form opinions about most things that are going on..the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff..N we all know, considering all the news channels that are 'a dime a dozen', that there is A LOT of chaff!!

So I did some intelligent reading up, magazines like Business World, India Today, The Week, The Economic Times, etc..anything of interest that I could find basically..I also did a lot of reading up Online..

A couple of workshops I attended cleared out my fundas of Finance, the Budget (not that I am a pundit now, far from it, but it got me started)..so I then followed up on that..took an interest in the Budget for the first time ever..learnt to actually think and read up on and about stuff like the 'nucleur deal', how it will help us (btw, I think this nucleur deal is just a whole lot of hog-wash..we have better sources of alternative energy, more financially viable and less dangerous, also more freely available..some people are of the same opinion..ull can read up on stuff like the benefits of nucleur energy etc online..an eye-opener')!

I did a lot of introspection..in fact, there was no other choice I had, considering that the forms had such disgusting questions:) Forced me to think about myself with a vengeance like never before!

Engineering subjects! Yeah, I was really apprehensive about this one, I didn't remember anything from those days..me decided to pick up a few subjects, some that I liked and might be asked about, some of my core subjects, etc and do some minimal brushing up..

So I picked up the TVV (Television and Video) textbook (Gulati for all those who earned their stripes as telecom engineers too)..and read the first chapter..I was satisfied with that much..aldo in the interview, they might ask me some stuff that even Gulati might have a tuff time answering;)..I was satisfied that I knew some basic stuff about the subject..they cannot expect me to know more than that after two years after it's been mugged and regurgitated;)

I read a lil bit of OFC..again first chapter and that's where it stopped because I could not locate any other books:) I went through my Final Year project though, such as it was!

So that was it, my preparation for the GDs and PIs..all in all, I can safely say that those were good times!