Curious Minds

Discussions on aliens and life on other planets or brewing beer or thoroughbred horses is not something one often gets to hear in a B-school. However, there are some who are keen on bucking this notion. These are students from the PGP class of 2014 at the Mohali campus.

These “Curious Minds” huddle every week and share with their fellow classmates interesting topics and facts hitherto unknown to most of us. “Curious Minds“is the brain child of Nakul Vakil. He reasons that the multifaceted peers he met at the ISB stimulated him into ideating this group while the support from his peer Roshan Krishnan made it a reality. “My classmates are from different geographical locations, diverse professional and cultural backgrounds with varied interests. I loved to listen to them and believed that there was more to learn from each one of us beyond the classroom curriculum “ shared Vakil.

In the first meeting, Vakil spoke about the Federal Reserve Bank and the Conspiracy theory of the Rothschild family. Kunal Shah, a regular at the huddles recollected that he was surprised to learn that the Federal Reserve was not really a government institution, but its own little empire. In the following weeks the group heard Harsh Raghava talk about Outer Space, Black Holes and Asteroids while Shah, Riddhi Gupta and HarKaran Virk, spoke about Brewing Beer and Single Malts.

Vaibhav Ganesh Perinkulam spoke about Aliens, the myths surrounding them and debunked a lot of the conspiracy theories surrounding extraterrestrial life with interesting pictures of Nazca lines, excavations of elongated skulls and 25 feet long skeletons.

Himanshu Chhabra’s talk on Thoroughbred Horses and the Secrets of the Race Tracks provided plenty of fodder for thought for the “Curious Minds”. “I was surprised to know that young horses were the ones which ran in a derby” exclaimed Shah, while Krishnan was amazed to know that all thoroughbred horses today have descended from just 3 stallions brought to the UK in the 1600’s.

More recently, Ashwin Balasubramanian demystified the Cult of Rajinikanth and spoke about Management & Entrepreneurship - Rajini style. The audience nearly split their sides with laughter on hearing Balasubramanian make Porter’s five forces analysis of the Superstar. “It was one of the funniest Curious Minds sessions we have had so far” recollected Roshan.
In the coming weeks, the students will discuss Birth of Religions, Weapons of World War II, Everything is a Remix, Life of a Sailor and so on.

Thus began the weekly saga of “Curious Minds” with the huddle swelling with every passing week. The students arrive “curious” and return “astounded” learning about lesser known facts, with a quest for wanting to know more.