Website: The CAT Writer Blog
By the summer of 2014, I had spent more than two and a half hot and humid years in Chennai running the IMS Franchise for the city. I had mentored more than two thousand students across four centres and I was busier than ever. My office in the evenings resembled a doctor’s clinic. From about 5 P.M. every day, there would be a line of students waiting for a chat with me about their prep, their career plans, their dilemmas, and their fears and on most days, I would end up shutting shop—literally pulling the shutters down—by around 10 P.M.
Any MBA worth his or her salt will always try to simplify things, and I saw that most of the students ended up having the same doubts, dilemmas, and fears. That is when I thought that a blog handling all the typical queries I have heard over the two years would make things mightily easy for everyone. Students need not travel far to meet me; I need not explain everything from scratch to every single student.
Once I decided to do it, I drew up a list of titles for all the posts I would do and the sequence in which I would do them and set about writing one post a week. When I look back now, it was one of the best things I did for myself and for my students. Thus, once a week, instead of going to the centre in the morning, where I would get sucked into things, I stopped at the coffee shop on the way to the centre, sat down for three to four hours at a stretch and finished a post.
Why did I say it was good for me?
Because it gave me what I like most to recharge in the middle of the busyness of running a business—a few hours by myself, immersed in a task, usually writing.
Sometimes, we do not realise the good times or the good moments when we are in them, so it was with me in Chennai. It is only after I left Chennai that I realised that some parts of life there were really good. Especially, the mornings spent at the coffee shop overlooking the small little beach—Bessie, as it is affectionately called mornings spent absorbed in writing and the occasional raise of the head to watch the sea—indigo shimmering under a blazing yellow with scarcely a soul moving about both outside and inside.
Since then, what was intended to make my job in Chennai easy has taken on a national life, with aspirants across the country reading and reaching out to me to help them out with their queries (no number of blogs or videos can ever stop that).
Tony Xavier 