It’s 5:59:59 PM! So as promised, presenting the feature we talked about – PaGaLGuY’s own weekly comic strip, “Mind your Business, Anna!” (MBA!) (to be pronounced with a South Indian twist to your tongue).

The ‘Group Discussions and Personal Interviews’ system at Indian b-schools make for perhaps one of the fastest admission processes to an MBA program worldwide. Does a 20-minute conversation with a candidate make for a strong enough judgment on his/her capability to be the best for that seat? We’re not so sure, and a lot of Admission Directors of top b-schools we interact with agree to not selecting the best possible class using this method. However, they attribute the huge number of applications they receive as a reason for not being able to spend more time with a candidate.

Mind your Business, Anna!

“Mind your Business, Anna!” (MBA!) came out of a need and suggestions a lot of people were throwing at us. Every well-read media needs a space dedicated to expressing what would otherwise be politically incorrect. Which is why newspapers, magazines and popular websites have a cartoon strip, where the devices of humour and satire can be used to essentially call a spade a spade. For long, we’ve been wanting one on PaGaLGuY, where we could tell you what *really* happens in B-schools, Life as an MBA student, admission processes and GD-PIs, beyond the glamorous and infallible glaze built around MBA and Business Schools in people’s minds. Following is our Preamble for “Mind your Business, Anna!”

1. MBA! will be honest and unmerciful (in the words of the great Lester Bangs)
2. At times, MBA! might be slightly offensive. Though, for a fair and just cause
3. MBA! will try (a really honest try, but no promises) to publish one cartoon per week
4. MBA! will happily embrace those that appreciate it and be agnostic about those who don’t. In short, our detractors don’t exist
5. No women, children or animals will be hurt in the creation of MBA!

RSS Feed for “Mind your Business, Anna!”.

As for the pre-announcement of the feature, I could see that all of you were expecting us to launch something serious. But we had other plans this time.

On a serious note, we also realised that a lot of the ideas provided by you in the comments were real implementable ideas and could be added to PG for the benefit of you all (do I smell some of PG’s competitors doing ctrl-C ctrl-V of the comments?). It is our promise that we will give these ideas a serious thought and implement as many as we can in due course. We are delighted to be part of a community of such super_awesome people who consider themselves stakeholders in building the site.

As for the winner of the contest, all of us agreed that while nobody could guess what the new feature was (except one comment by someone who was privy to inside news), but the best set of features was suggested by Alex_Mahone, quite passionately so. We will get in touch with you for your free t-shirt!

Credits of Mind your Business Anna! – chuck_gopal (blog, PG profile) for the concept ideas+illustrations and Apurv for illustrations+graphics+photographs. The protagonist’s picture was taken by Manasi Kothari. People used in the pictures are all from PaGaLGuY HQ.

While we will experiment with various graphical styles for MBA!, the strip above owes a nod of respect to Saad Akhtar, the creator of FlyYouFools.

If you have funny ideas for MBA!, please email them to [email protected] .