XLRI n all that jazz!

As most of you know, I am in my second consecutive season of writing MBA entrances. So there has been a series of out-of-the-way exam venues that I have been to in the last two years, but nothing could beat where XLRI sent me today. I live in south Delhi, and I have been to places like Nimri Colony, Ashok Vihar, Keshav Puram, Prasad Nagar and so forth without really complaining too much because I accept the fact that no institute takes into consideration where you live. But today XLRI beat everybody! They sent me to a school called Kamal Model Senior Secondary School in Mohun Garden. This place is anyway quite far from my place, but when I reached there, I could not even allow myself to compare it to a village. It was worse. I know Delhi is huge, and not all areas are as nice as the south, but that does not allow an institute like XLRI to save costs in this manner. Cars could barely manage to go in to the galis that led to the school. And I will really not blame any of the people who reached there half an hour after the commencement of the exam. It took the expertise of my father who’s lived here for 40 years AND Google Maps for me to locate that school. And it didn’t end there. I think the school has been designed for the ideal stampede, if there is any such thing that exists. Apparently there was only one staircase (OR I think they were saving more costs by not deploying another person at some other entrance to guide people) which would have hardly been one metre wide.
So whatever nice things I was saying about them yesterday because they SMSd, emailed, AND called me to inform me of the last minute change in the test centre (unlike what I heard Symbiosis did last year) got negated because of this beautiful experience I had.
And mine was not an isolated one. I really think they saved money by under-staffing all venues, because Army Public School (which was a fairly decent experience last year for the same exam) was in quite a pathetic state too. Apparently, there were hardly any directions given, and people were running all over the school looking for their seats. One might pass off my centre as a small under-equipped school, but APS is supposed to be a good public school, and there is no reason why such things should happen there.

XLRI is supposed to be one of the best B-Schools of our country, one really does not expect such sub-standard stuff from it!