Saturday, November 19, 2005

A Forgotten 'Cause': IIPM Revisited

To the best of my knowledge, nothing has happened when it comes to the Bloggers Vs IIPM tussle. At worst, it has been negative publicity for IIPM, limited only to the few pairs of eyes that browse through web logs.

Let’s deduct from those, the ones who happened to nonchalantly read through the posts featuring the institute, very much passively. Then, there must have been among the readers, those who are in no way related to management education, belonging to a different academic field, perhaps. Of those who joined in the protests, some seemed to have already completed their Masters in Business from other Institutes; of course, they wouldn’t consider pursuing another degree at IIPM. The Mainstream Media displayed a lukewarm response, reporting the news lethargically as if forced into action by some long-suppressed voice of conscience, to do some justice to what they owe to the society they belong to. So, the antagonist of IIPM virtually bank on “Word-of-mouth” and hope better sense would prevail among the hordes of graduates who are in a frenzy to get an MBA after their names.

I must confess I haven’t been able to spend much time of late on the blogs that were involved deep in the IIPM controversy. So, correct me if I’m wrong: Now that it well seems nothing has really been effected after all the hue and cry raised about the full page advertisements by the Institute, the whole episode merely seems to have been the result of reactions from a few IIM graduates who were obviously irked when their Institute’s name was drawn in the Ads by IIPM; and it definitely doesn’t seem a crusade, as it has come to be portrayed as, against some unscrupulous propaganda unleashed by a vicious organization, to rope in aspiring kids to pay for its courses. For, if it had really been in the cause of public good, the defenders of morality wouldn’t have stopped in their tracks of hunting the villain down, but would have walked the full lengths in bringing him to his knees.

IIPM may claim the credits for taking the sting out of the attack from blogs, initially by deploying its troops to malign the crusaders, then putting bloggers on the defensive by serving them ‘legal’ notices, and carrying on with its way of life, bothering the least about the noise around. And, it counters blogs, continuing to wield its Advertising might. All the wrong news that a prospective student would find through search engines about IIPM would be a few distorted sounds through a bunch of posts from a weird new-economy syndrome called blogs!

Did we ever have a match at all?