Ravikant Kisana
A Long Overdue Love Letter to the Mediocrity of the Millennial Savarna MBAs & their Feckless Technobabble
There was a time in the early 2000s when tired of decades of stagnant economic growth, claustrophobic wholesale markets and bureaucratic sarkaari offices staffed with unambitious professionals of legendary inefficiency—the savarna middle class in India wholeheartedly jumped up and embraced market capitalism. Such was their rejection of the society that they themselves had set up, that the then naïve BJP regime had based its entire election campaign on the ‘India Shining’ slogan. Their electoral loss notwithstanding, that savarna generation did however convince itself that India was beginning to shine. And not only was it shining brightly but it was their innovative labors which was leading them towards a golden dawn. This was to be the generation that was supposed to be making India a ‘superpower’ by the year 2020. No one led the charge in a more Quixotic manner than the army of millennial savarna MBAs being churned out from batches of 2002 to roughly about 2012. In many ways this is where the generation that powers Modi’s technocratic development fantasies, was forged.
The small blip of the 2008 recession notwithstanding, this was the era of cheap B-school fees, small batch-sizes and rising placement packages (sometimes increasing by 20-30% on previous years highest packages). The MBA was suddenly the new dream job. For a generation of young students, the Common Admission Test (CAT) was all that stood between them and earning lakhs of rupees—amounts of money that frankly their fathers had toiled their whole lives to secure. As most B-schools expanded their batch-sizes and new ones popped up in this era, the conversation on reservation and diversity in admission and hiring was completely silenced. In fact, many savarna ‘intellectuals’ gleefully claimed that the ‘MBA revolution’ in India had been possible because it was merit based and free of reservation. How far that is true, is open to question because it seems to have been driven more by the ebbs and flows of global capital shifts and neoliberal state policy than any unique talent of pedagogy innovated in these MBA programs. But the lack of empirical evidence has never been a barrier for savarna thinkers to propound their preconceived ideas confidently. In fact, the contemporary hype of the alleged eliteness and superiority of international schools and private universities charging lakhs of rupees as fees, with no reservations, verily mirrors the earlier hype of the MBA era. It seems with every generation the savarna discourse must invent new exclusionary spaces to keep Bahujan students out and prevent a level playing field. The entry to these spaces, now as back then, has always been based on inherited and acquired cultural capital. The entrance exam for the MBA typifies this.
CAT as an exam has always had a relatively simple syllabus, relying more instead on the time crunch for competitive selection. Aspirants did not just have to find the correct answers, they had to do it in the shortest possible time to do well in the exam. This led to a whole parallel industry of coaching centres coming up where they would teach you to find ‘shortcuts’, tips and tricks to cut down on time. Ultimately doing well in the exam was not just a matter of knowledge or skill, but rather boiled down to the practice of time management tips passed on at these centres. The access to these coaching centres was always prohibitively expensive. When I was writing the CAT in 2005, these centres were already charging Rs 20,000 and upwards for preparation ‘packages’ starting from 3 months to a year. These prices have only gone up since then. In a country where a vast majority of families have average monthly incomes of less than Rs 10,000, this was essentially pricing out nearly 90% (if not more) people from a shot at MBA and upward mobility. Furthermore, only the top metropolitan cities had top tier teachers and coaching infrastructure leading to a very heavy urban savarna bias in the MBA batches from the first decade of 2000s. This was also heavily skewed by the admission process itself.
The CAT was just the first step of the process, the admission was contingent on a good performance in the ‘Group Discussion and Personal Interview’ (GD/PI) round. This is where rich savarnas who had studied in top tier English medium schools had a distinct advantage. The admission committee would routinely look for intangible, unverifiable criterion like ‘X-factor’, confidence and charisma—which essentially boiled down to smooth English speaking, fashion sense and personal grooming. Often the interview round would degenerate into straight up aggressive intimidation (justified as preparing candidates for the ‘stress’ of the job). If you were a first-generation learner, who had come from a school where spoken English was not the norm, and you did not have the money or cultural awareness to groom yourself in sync with formal fashion trends— this sort of aggressive environment put you at a distinct disadvantage as you operated from a place of very low confidence. You would need to take another ‘GD/PI Preparation package’ at the coaching centre where they would teach you things like body posture, hand gestures and other such inane criteria which had nothing to do with the academic or professional talent of the student.
In fact, so deeply is this belief internalized within the Indian corporate setup that it is very common even in 2022 to see mandatory formal dress codes for MBA students who are then constantly expected to ‘perform’ confidence via power poses and direct rhetorical speech (usually while delivering a fancy PowerPoint spectacle). I read this as the contribution of savarna institutionalized pedagogy which has structurally prioritized the spectacle instead of the performance. Like most other Brahmanized spaces, savarna educational structures also inevitably reproduce this mistaken notion of performed cultural-capital as professional excellence. This is possibly because this performance (denied to Bahujans due to structural gatekeeping) is often the only competitive advantage that savarnas inherently possess and without it, their hegemony could be easily challenged.
Despite the lack of reservations in private colleges, several SC/ST/OBC students did get into MBA programs but in the absence of any critical introspective pedagogy as a part of their management training—many ended up epistemically internalizing the savarna worldview. It has not been uncommon to find many such Dalit Bahujan MBAs—all incredibly successful in their fields—still pinning the onus of personality development, ‘skill enhancement’ and gaining cultural polish upon marginalized students. Many will still say “look at me, I could do it so can you”—such an approach effectively forgives the unequal educational system for its lack of accessibility and instead puts the pressure on the marginalized students to ‘improve themselves.’ Meanwhile in public institutions like IIMs, where reservations must mandatorily be implemented, a constant rhetoric against the policy has been historically nurtured. There are very few management faculty (most of whom are from savarna backgrounds since reservation mandates in hiring are routinely flouted) who defend affirmative action as a positive step in admissions and fewer still who advocate for reservations within the private sector. In fact, reservation within the private sector is held as one of those self-evidently fulfilling axiomatic worldviews which cannot ever be supported academically or empirically. This is because the B-school has been projected by savarna management faculty as a casteless space as which mirrors a marketplace that is expected to be equally wishfully sanitized of caste structures.
But like it or not, South Asia’s material economy is deeply ingrained upon the labors of caste. White collar industries which have a pre-requisite of high-level technical education are dominated by Brahmans (owing to generations of cultural and material privilege), finance and start-up economies are dominated by Banias and gruelling ‘unskilled’ physical labor is always the burden of Bahujans. In most city neighbourhoods, especially on the newly urbanizing outskirts—the very land upon which luxury housing projects are built has usually been usurped from Bahujans. The workforce which literally builds these luxury housing is hired as contract labor, always without any insurance or rights, and hail predominantly from semi-nomadic, DNT and SC backgrounds. The sanitation work in these housing societies is almost exclusively carried out SCs who are often employed by dominant OBC contractors. The neighbourhood grocery stores are often run by middle class Bania families with roots in Rajasthan. The petty laundry or saloon is the reserve of SCs (often from UP or Bihar) while the humble chicken shops are managed by Pasmanda muslim qasai castes. Posh restaurants and pubs will be owned by Brahman or Bania capital (usually a fourth or fifth generation educated ‘irreverent’ type from a long family of successful professionals/entrepreneurs) while the waiting and kitchen staff will inevitably be Bahujans from Bengal, Odisha or Assam. These are not light conjectures but instead are neatly replicating patterns across major Indian cities —give or take a little owing to geographic dispersion. Yet, management education is silent on any of this easily observable mosaic of capital and labor movement and stratifications.
Instruments of capital and credit which built the backbone of real-world political economy in India such as hawala, hundi, parcha, etc., were the preserve of caste linked informal and cloaked banking systems. Yet no MBA program covers their history or impact in the shaping of the Indian economy. Even today in 2022, a massive black money economy exists. Where does this capital come from? Where does it go? Is this a question only for investigative journalists? Does a finance MBA not need any in-depth knowledge on this? Especially considering that astronomical amounts of black money is locked up in agro-business trades, real estate, mining and infrastructure projects—all of which are key economic sectors.
Most B-school education considers the political and economic spheres as distinctly separate. The millennial savarnas MBAs are today mid to top level managers in big corporations, yet most have almost no understanding of the interconnections between political activity and the business world. They will laugh at jokes by savarna comics (incidentally also sourced heavily from the stock of engineers and/or MBAs from early 2000s) about how MLAs are bought and sold daily. But who are these MLAs? Vast majority of them businessmen, contractors and real estate magnates and it is their profits which fund electoral rise and fall of political parties and dictates public policy. Should this not be a point of introspection, discussion, and research within management training circles?
Similar lack of application is seen among the savarna marketing MBAs from the millennial era, who now head corporate communications, advertising and digital marketing firms. A cursory look of their LinkedIn feed reveals many of them gushing over obscure advertising campaigns from across the world. Terms like innovation, game-changing, etc are routinely thrown around for campaigns which have no real ground application in India. In fact, from my experience in the media and advertising industry, most savarna MBAs have a very low opinion of the brands and the campaigns they work on. They all want to do ‘creative’ work which is stymied because the customers of their clients are ‘not ready’ for good work. Many a strategy planner thinks of himself as some neo-Don Draper or more contemporarily like a desi Elon Musk, and many more either already have inane podcasts or want to start one to emulate their hero, Joe Rogan. What is interesting is that none of their cultural reference point circle back to non-savarna audiences beyond the bubble of their elite urbanized lives. It is perhaps the reason that why no major brands have ever built a campaign around Babasaheb Ambedkar Jayanti, preferring instead to clog the already cluttered Diwali and Holi dates.
Turning our gaze on the millennial savarna MBAs trained in HR who have in many ways shaped the employee policies across much of modern corporate India, we are similarly disappointed. Forget the talk of diversity hiring based on caste, most of these organizations have a terrible record when it comes to ensuring safety and dignity of even savarna women and queer folx. HR has done little to rein in the fragile masculine chauvinism of savarna men and the ‘dudebro’ culture that it has evolved into. Almost no firm pays fair wages to its interns and service staff. The business model, especially of marketing communication firms, is built on the exploitation of cheap intern labor who are often paid in ‘learning’ and not money. While this is not a barrier of entry for wealthy savarnas, most Bahujans are unable to commit to working without sustainable pay leading to more exclusion. The service staff is almost always hired via contractors so that the HR has no liability towards them. The very architecture of most offices has no physical space designed for the rest and dignity of such staff. Lakhs of Bahujans who toil daily, providing cleaning, security and other sundry services, in IT parks, office complexes and co-working spaces across the country—have to quietly sit under stairs, in cabinets, storerooms or toilets, to have their lunch. Only an exclusionary system such as Brahmanism which is built on obfuscating and dehumanizing service labors could normalize the utter lack human sensitivity present in corporate India today. Interestingly in 2015-16, when the Essar leaks surfaced, it revealed a whole chain of mails between HR departments of the company discussing how to accommodate informal requests for favors by leading politicians. This included the then President, Pranab Mukherjee, getting Essar to hire his granddaughter and the son of his spiritual ‘guruji’. Rules of hiring appear differently for disenfranchised SC, ST, OBCs it would seem—something no HR program in this country appears to be interested in addressing.
Now in most societies plagued by the ills of late capitalism-induced globalized economy there is usually a strong parallel discourse led either by the right- or left-wing mobilization. In India, both the liberal left and conservative right discourse is led by Brahman, Kayastha and other such savarna interlocuters. This leads to a bizarre alchemy of narratives wherein the diagnosis of social issues and their subsequent solutions are never relevant to vast sections of Bahujan populations. Indeed, on both the right and left there is a major tendency to import discursive points from the West, even as the same Brahman-Kayastha academic complex regurgitates the mantra of decolonizing knowledge epistemology ad nauseum.
In effect, we are left with a peculiar generation of MBAs whose constant bravado talk about technocratic fantasies of nation building have now reached the speeches of the PM as well as the highest echelons of policy making. Since 2014, there has been much talk of smart cities, ‘aspirational districts,’ gig economy, Make in India, etc. It would be safe to say that in 2022, the cities are not smart, the startup bubble has collapsed, their apps did not solve the endemic social problems and gig economy workers’ exploitation from Zomato, Swiggy, Uber etc has made national headlines. Now even the most partisan commentators will admit that most of these initiatives have not truly delivered as hoped for.
Yet instead of a sobering soul-searching review the millennial savarna MBA generation is aggressively peddling the same solutions, same buzzwords with the same hype, like a wind-up toy which has no other gear and continues to rattle forward mindlessly like a gormless, dull-witted goon bereft of any endearing charm or gentleness, hellbent on bludgeoning any and all naysayers with the same aggressive loaded technobabble.
And so it is, that today when the average consumer faith in MNCs globally is an all-time low, when their billionaire owners are not seen as role-models but out of touch elites who have largely been responsible for destabilizing entire economies and wrecking the planet—the savarna MBA still walks into the room like its 2007. For an academic discipline of industry praxis that is always alight with the latest buzzwords about ‘staying ahead of the curve’—management pedagogy in India has been strangely static, bereft of imagination and utterly deaf to a rapidly changing socio-economic climate.
The arrogant dismissal by management professionals and professors alike, of the social sciences as a whole, has resulted in a discipline which has increasingly no real world bearing to ‘job market’ it is ‘farming’ its students out to. At a time when the management professors should be grappling with the aftershocks of three decades of unrestrained neoliberal accumulation globally which has resulted in massive social unrest, economic precarity, devastation of the environment and an pervasive lack of faith in ‘pro-big-business’ political elites—the savarna MBA still pretends like these variables are simply not relevant to their day-to-day operations and any attempt to theorize on the same is dismissed as being overtly sensitive to media hype by social justice snowflakes.
It has created a pedagogy especially in India where a class of feckless managers have entered the marketplace whose WhatsApp is deeply political, and LinkedIn is a sanitized celebration of asinine corporate milestones. Where boldness is required to respond to the ever-changing workplace—you get a manager who is cringingly subservient to status quo and whose only method of effective crisis management is to pretend there is no crisis. Even as vast masses of excluded Bahujans heave and expand in the shadows; corporate India struggles with its stagnation and mediocrity in large measure due to the millennial savarna MBAs.
In the days of the 1970s and 1980s, a recurring character trope in popular culture was the savarna ‘clerk’. He was always shown to be placed in a stagnant job that required him to be overtly bureaucratic and a cringing lickspittle to his bosses. This archetype has been lampooned a lot.
But I wonder, twenty years from now, how this current crop of MBAs will be seen in retrospect. A generation of loud-mouthed, technobabble spouting, Allen-Solly formalwear flaunting MBAs who were ultimately utterly timid, totally subservient, and unimaginatively boring in their roles. Will they be seen as true successors of the sarkaari clerk from the 1970s?
Or will the millennial MBA be considered not even worthy of that.
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Prof Ravikant Kisana teaches in a private college.
