The 'Mahamndi' Tale

Once upon a time a student went to an MBA college where he was being induced for MBA life ahead. He was very confused and was feeling bored then came a day when a an intriguing entity came for introducing Business communication to him, a short man carrying innovative products, wearing Gandi Topi and announcing an event called MAHAMANDI.

That student was none other than me and that entity was none other than our Business communication professor Dr. T Prasad. As days went on, I came to know all the natty gritty of this event. It is a one day socio-marketing celebration in which students from across the nation make their hands dirty to sell educational toys on the streets of Mumbai and the profit goes to NGO which work for education of poor children. I was highly impressed by its overall framework and on the very first day I decided that I would be also be a part of it.

Then came the Mahamadi day,8^th august 2015. I remember the day was not like any other day for me, I woke up at 7:00 (too early for MBA’s) out of excitement, packed my outing kit along with my two other team members.  At around 10:00 am the event was flagged off by a famous Bollywood celebrity and thousands of students thronged into the streets for selling. To make the challenge more challenging we decided to go to Juhu Beach, Mumbai were the target customers would be not so educated and selling would be difficult. Once we reached there we were very disgruntled seeing that there were already 7 teams present over there and also customers were very few. We were disheartened and became very apprehensive, whether we would be able to sell even a single product. And yes, so it happened, not a single product could be in first three hours. We felt dejected and realised how difficult is the job of sales person whose entire livelihood depends on selling the product. We did some soul searching only to become more confused, if it is product that is not up to the mark or venue is wrong or whether we need to improve our perusing skills. We changed venues, changed our approach to pitch in to the customers and tried everything that we could do. Then came our first sale and a stream of happiness and confidence ran down my spines and I could find a ray of hope. And then came 2^nd, 3^rd and it went on counting. I remember how we were trying to spot out the potential customers by reading their faces, engaging with them around and changing the USP of our product as per the customer’s need, I say it was extreme fun. It was around 6:00pm when we thought of experimenting with our selling style. We spread out newspapers on the beach, put all the products on display and played some good songs on portable speakers (Thanks to my JBL Flip). Soon we could find that people we riddled by our so called store and in a fraction of minutes we could find 100’s of people surrounding us and we were completely engaged in explaining them our product. It was just like a flash sale for us, we went out of stock in a fraction of seconds.  A sense of victory gushed into us and we were celebrating.

I believe that our education system needs a complete overhaul. Instead of mugging the concepts, we should promote students to do practical, gain hands on experience. Form my experience of four years working a coal mines I can say very confidently that there is a major gap between theories and practical and it is events like MAHAMANDI which can bridge up this gap by teaching the intricacies and making the learning complete.