“XLRI TRAINING HELPS ME SIFT FACTS FROM OPINION IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD”
THE MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE SET UP IN 1949 HAS TRAINED A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE GONE ON TO PURSUE GLOBAL CAREERS
The last exam had just concluded at Delhi University. The results had not been declared. We were in Kolkata where I spent every summer vacation. There was just one nagging doubt—would I get admitted to the XLRI Jamshedpur? The decision would be mailed to our home in Delhi. Baba suggested, “Why don’t you take a train and go to Jamshedpur and find out from the office?” He was in the Railways and believed there was no place in India that the Indian Railway did not connect. But the train station was Tatanagar, and not Jamshedpur.
The XLRI was the first business school in India. It was set up by Jesuit priests in 1949, in what was then the state of Bihar. We were taught by several legendary teachers like Prof. Sharad Sarin and Prof. Tamonash Gangopadhyay. It was Father McGrath S.J., whose lessons remain ingrained in my mind. This handsome American priest spoke Hindi, Bangla and Odia with his heavy New York accent. He taught us basic managerial skills and created immersive experiences. One of the first lessons was to differentiate between facts, inferences, and opinions.
The entire junior batch was sitting in the big hall, one afternoon, as Fr McGrath taught. The door burst open, and a girl rushed in, being chased by some people carrying sticks and knives. She wove through the group of students and ran away while the armed men followed her. A hundred junior students stood by, frozen and shell-shocked. As soon as she left, Fr McGrath asked us to frame a police complaint. Each one of us wrote a different version, with no two students agreeing on the exact number of people involved, what they wore or the weapons they were carrying. In that chaos, we did not even notice that the girl was a classmate, and the “attackers” were our seniors! That was Fr McGrath’s way of teaching us how our own biases filter what we see. In a post-truth world, being able to separate fact from opinion helps me stay sane.
During those two years, we made friends for life. The bonds formed decades ago still endure. Our class fellows went on to pursue global careers. Some became entrepreneurs and ministers. ‘For the greater good’ is not a slogan, it is an ideal that inspires XLers even today. ■
The writer is an author and a columnist who heads Learning and Development globally for Microsoft. He graduated from the XLRI–Xavier School of Management in 1984