The Indian Institute of Hard Knocks.
This is one institute where the entrance exam comes after years have been spent in it.
Many flunk the entrance and the Hard Knocks continue.
The few who pass the entrance exam immediately graduate to the Masters level and the Hard Knocks get harder.
However a Bachelors degree in Hard Knocks is hot and many wish, after they get it, to get out of the Institute, not do their Masters and just go out and enjoy themselves. Perhaps as hot sh*ts at places like Lehman Brothers (used to be?).
The others might settle for the tamer pleasures of a MBA school.
But boy are they deluding themselves. Because it is Hotel California baby.
You can check out any time you want but you can never leave.
I am now a post-graduate of the Indian Institute of Hard Knocks.
A Master in getting up after the hardest of knocks and quietly filing the pattern away for future reference.
I now can see many a Hard Knock coming and weave deftly around it.
However they are still one too many that get me.
And because I am now a past Master the ones that hit are designed to hit harder than anything I have experienced..well..in the past.
I value this degree from the Indian Institute of Hard Knocks at least as much as the ones I got from IIT Bombay and IIM Bangalore.
Unfortunately I am well past the age when one needs adornments for one's resume and not famous enough or in demand enough on the lecture circuit, to ask my PR girl to keep my profile updated.
I therefore satisfy myself with bragging about it on my blog that has greater depth than width of readership.
Meanwhile like Eliot's Prufrock " I am getting old. I am getting old.I shall wear my trousers rolled".
Not that rolled trouser's are any help in taking the next Hard Knock which like September hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico must be brewing and gathering strength somewhere close by.
