Students Corner
Student’s Corner in Lsquare is a platform where students can express their creativity, share their artistic talents, and showcase their literary works and creative content, fostering appreciation and recognition for their artistic endeavors.
To Keep Her Warm
The mountains wore their silence like a second skin. Snowflakes drifted lazily from the sky, catching the light of the small bonfire in tiny bursts of gold. Their tents stood like fragile shelters against the wildness around them, temporary homes, barely enough to keep the cold out, never enough to contain everything that stirred within.
They had laughed too hard earlier. The kind of laughter that hurt your ribs but filled the empty spaces inside. Now, everyone was tucked in, lost in sleeping bags, tangled in their own dreams. The fire crackled, the only voice left in the stillness.
He sat alone, arms hugging his knees, eyes fixed on the flames. She was asleep, just a few feet away, curled inside her tent, her breath fogging the plastic window. Even in the dim flicker of firelight, he thought, God, she is beautiful. Not in the dramatic, magazine-cover way. In the quiet way. The way snow settles without asking for attention. The way songs feel when no one’s listening but you.
He loved her.
God, he loved her.
But love… for him… had always come with rules. With bullet points. With timelines and career plans and checking off boxes that would prove he was “enough.” His life was a blueprint. Neat. Clean. Measured. And she… she was the kind of chaos that made him want to burn the blueprint and build a world with her in it instead.
He couldn’t say it. He hadn’t ever said it. But tonight, with the sky folding into darkness and the fire making shadows dance, all the things he hadn’t said to her became too much to carry. So, he did what he always did when words choked him.
He wrote.
On a scrap torn from a travel guide, with a pen that barely worked, he spilled his heart in jagged lines and smudged ink. He wrote of how he watched her laugh and wondered what it would be like to wake up to that sound every day. How he memorized the curve of her fingers as she tucked her hair behind her ear. How he’d built a life around logic and suddenly wanted nothing more than to ruin it all for her.
“You don’t know it,” he scribbled, “but you’re the only part of my life I haven’t planned for, and the only one I want to keep forever.”
The words sat on the page like confessions he would never speak aloud. And then, movement.
Her tent unzipped gently, and she emerged, sleep still clinging to her lashes. Wrapped in a borrowed jacket, she padded barefoot through the snow and sat beside him, legs crossed, eyes soft and half-awake.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, voice cracked with cold. “You?”
He blinked, heart racing. The paper was still in his hand, hot, trembling. He panicked.
“Was just… looking for something to keep the fire going,” he lied, crumpling the paper in one quick motion and stuffing it in his pocket.
She smiled faintly, pulling her knees to her chest. “Weird, right? How fire needs something to burn to stay alive?”
He laughed, dry, strained. “Yeah,” he said. “We all do, I guess.”
She shivered, just barely, but he noticed. The kind of trembling that ran deeper than the cold. Her teeth clinked gently together, and though she didn’t complain, he understood. She was freezing. Without a word, he reached into his pocket. His fingers found the paper, then pulled it out, crumpled tight in a ball. She glanced at him, curious.
To distract her, he forced a smile. “Hey, watch this,” he said, lifting the paper like it was a basketball. “Bet I can sink it in one shot.”
She raised an eyebrow, playing along. “Ten bucks says you miss.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.”
He arched his arm, aimed, and threw. The paper ball bounced off a log and landed pathetically by her boot. She burst out laughing, the kind that fogged her breath and shook her shoulders. He laughed too, though his chest ached. And then, still chuckling, she reached down, picked it up absently, still chatting, unaware.
“What was that? One of those survival notes of yours?” she teased.
He shook his head, eyes wide, throat dry. “Nah. Just some old trash. Throw it in.”
And she did.
Without a second thought, she tossed it into the flames. The paper hissed, curled, and turned to ash. She kept talking. Something about marshmallows. About who snores the loudest in the group. He nodded, smiled when she smiled, even laughed. But inside, he was watching the fire eat the one thing that had ever come close to telling her the truth.
And maybe that’s what love is sometimes.
Not grand gestures. Not perfect timing. Just sitting in the snow beside the person you’d give your whole life to and burning the only proof of it just to keep them warm a little longer.
~ “If you’re not willing to be a fool for love, you’ll never truly know what it means to love.”
– Banda Sreenivas Prasad
PGP 2025–27
Tens of thousands have crossed this path.
Where do I begin to even comprehend the weight of this moment.
These stone lairs have housed boys and girls,
turning them into men and women.
Did they follow the worldly norms?
Did they abandon them for internal peace?
Or, were there some who challenged the status quo,
moulded the reality for welfare,
And came out bigger than a human life measured in time.
– Yogesh Singla
PGP 2025-27
A Sprint to 8:30:59 AM
At 8:29 AM, the hostel corridor is eerily silent, as everyone had already left for the class. As I lock the door to my room, there is only one thought that flashes through my mind:
“Run, Chethan. Run.”
What begins as a jog turns into a sprint, and then into a full-blown attendance-defining race. My backpack hits my spine again and again, urging me to run faster. Each step echoes through the stairs louder than my heartbeat, though both of them are fighting for the same rhythm.
8:29:58
As I burst through NDR, a guard sips his tea leisurely while Garfield watches me with the disappointment of a retired athlete. The wind slaps my face awake.
8:30:31
The world narrows down to the tiny gap in the wall of Central Pergola, past which lies my classroom where attendance decides the grade. I dodge the uneven rocky terrain, sprinting like my life depends on it. I take a leap of faith over the stairs and make a sharp turn that defies physics.
8:30:55
I skid into the classroom, breathless, dishevelled, and unhinged. I slam dunk my index finger on the biometric machine.
8:30:58
Okay.
A green tick glows on the screen like the blessing of the gods.
Another day, another 8:30 AM class, another near-miss, and the streak lives on.
And then, as my breath recovers, the professor calmly says, “Good morning, class.”
Alas, they missed the action movie I lived through for the last couple of minutes.
– Chethan Ragala
PGP 2025-27
Chasing, Fading, Gauging, Saving
I must be lying if I were to say that my IIMB journey has gone like clockwork so far. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Better a hundred potholes than one smooth road, I say: how else will you learn how to swerve past them?
What did go like clockwork for me was the CAT. The stepping stone. The moonshot. I was among the luckiest of the lucky, so much so that I did not even need to look beyond the big six at the top of the B-school pecking order. It’s been a year since I was on the other side of the fence, asking advice from all and sundry, writing mock WAT essays, learning from the mistakes others did in their mock interviews…
Do you perhaps get the feeling that this is going to sound like a TED talk on paper? Coincidentially, the latest edition of TEDxIIM Bangalore, which I was part of, had the theme ‘Stories Shaping Tomorrow’. If I could leave a well-paying job in Singapore, if I could chance my arm with one attempt, if I could move home and hearth and have people call me crazy for deliberately choosing Bilekahalli over Vastrapur, then I, too, have a story to tell that is shaping my today and my tomorrow.
So here’s mine.
From the beginning, I had this mentality: ‘Fate has a way of evening things out, so if the exam and the interviews were smooth, the journey needn’t be. But you, young man, are going to stick it out and always be cheerfully peaceful.’
The first blow was dealt when I was bedridden throughout the orientation week. When everyone else was shooting 3 Idiots reels in their hostels, I could scarcely put pen to paper at home. And then AI171 crashed. The burning bodies, the destroyed dreams, the wretched wreckage. And the one man who escaped with his life but lost everything. Had I been in the largest city of Gujarat, which I very well could, I might’ve been filled with a sense of foreboding. ‘That could have been me.’
But I wasn’t, and gritted my teeth, telling myself: ‘It’s only been four days. Salvage the rest of the week and see how it goes.’ So it was that, on the evening of Friday the 13th (yes, that date), I made it to the campus, which was fortunately a twenty-minute drive from home. One of the reasons that I had picked Bilekahalli over Vastrapur, by the way.
I told myself that I could chase the dreams that I’d come here for.
In days, I’d made an impact, standing out as the one who’d ask tough questions in class, who’d remember others’ birthdays and gather them together, who had an exceptional memory. And that memory is, as you might call in Competition & Strategy, my sustained competitive advantage.
Milestones came and went — the resume-making tasks and travails being chief among them — but what stayed were the memories. The sumptuous chicken biryani at a regional dinner. The skits and dances at Aarambh and War of Sections. The comedy that ensued as a result, intentionally and otherwise. The faculty dinners, with people turning out in their ethnic finery, all posing for the ’gram.
It helps that I like to record a lot: both with my phone camera and with my mind. Together, they create a veritable treasure trove.
It also helps that the class WhatsApp group serves as a constant source of entertainment. Often the section feels less a group of 75-odd people and more like a bunch of quirky characters in a play. With the lead actors turning a humdrum marketing presentation into a no-holds-barred challenge in how many times one can say ‘frugal innovation’. Oh, the laughs, the creative juices: you really had to be there.
Or the group with PGP2s. You never know when an ordinary conversation about curry drops on rotis may devolve into an existential debate that would put half of India’s TV news channels to shame. (True story.)
I mention these little moments because it’s what kept me going through the more trying times. The times where I saw some of my dreams fading. The times where I doubted my self-worth, saw a little bit of that chipper exterior diminish. It’s my friends, near and far, who saw me through.
A great academic record in a top global university need not, apparently, translate to top consulting shortlists. I learned that the hard way. It was only after half the class had got half a dozen shortlists — some many times that number — did I get my first. I had long been dead set on consulting, and had assiduously prepared for — even expected — it, but then I reminded myself that this was that time when fate decided to even things out.
So I got into the grind. Day 0, with a long line of interviews that went nowhere, came and went; then a day of assessments; then a day of GDs, where no sooner did one get over than I was sent for the next. I was playing a four-day Test match in the truest sense. Many of my classmates played a T20, so to speak, sealing the deal with one sixer. Others played an ODI, but it was those of us who helped each other during that arduous Test match that showed our true camaraderie and spirit.
Checking on those who were yet to be done; queueing up for the latest news on classmates in the process; holding out hope for the best, preparing for the worst. I did it all, even when unsure of my own outcome. Eventually I got a product-management role which, while not consulting, I was somewhat versed with.
It was this trial by fire that really cemented my identity as a proud Stonewaller. If that’s a thing.
Soon I realised that this journey was also a game of gauging where my talents and strengths lay.
And such trials were to continue. The more academic subjects, like Decision Sciences 1/2 and Operations Management, were an uphill climb. While I fared reasonably well in the ‘globe’ subjects, with Competition & Strategy turning out to be my — pun fully intended — competitive advantage, I had to put the pedal to the metal to perform decently in the others. Never mind the fact that MPPO delighted me one day with all the role-plays and insights, only to shock me the next with its exam questions!
Other things eluded me like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. Which, by the way, was one of the two-minute extempore topics of one of the class’s brightest (and most playful) minds: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’. Standing for SR and joining clubs and societies: all the PORs that I thought I’d get but then had to manage without, at least for the time being. Not getting what I wanted made me all the more grateful for what I did have: a strong community and social standing.
Which brings me to my final verb: saving. I think I’ve made it quite clear that I’m an obsessive saver of moments and memories. I create, I celebrate, I cherish. That’s my credo.
Because this is what will stay with me long after the last half-empty paper cups have been swept from the L-Square floor after a manic, exuberant New Year’s party. Long after the last drops of ink have been spilled on the exam answer sheet. It’s the people, the friendships, relationships (no, not that kind), the late nights at Haneena’s, the insightful cups of chai amid the lovely lights and friendly folks at Mitti Café. The memes and the forwards. The rejoinders and the reminders. No number can put a value to what all of that means.
Chasing, fading, gauging, saving. The peaks and troughs, all of it that I signed up for. The ROI is simply immeasurable.
– Soham Bhadra
PGP 2025–27
Sole Mates: The Business and Innovation of On shoes – A Swiss Brand
Today I have come up with an interesting Brand story. Is it a shoe, or a Swiss engineering marvel?👟In another fun- filled learning class of Global Marketing by Prof Malika M mam at IIM Bangalore, we looked into how On shoes disrupted the market. On didn’t just enter the race…they redefined the track!!! Here’s why they are winning the brand game:
1. The Tech: From Garden Hoses to “CloudTec” ☁️
The origin story is pure “scrappy innovation.” Founder Olivier Bernhard glued garden hoses to a sole to solve Achilles pain. Today, CloudTec pods provide a dual-benefit: soft, adaptive landings with a firm, “locked” take-off.
2. The Differentiator: Visual DNA 🧬
On turned their tech into their logo. Those hollow pods are recognizable from a block away. It’s minimalist, “Swiss Alps chic,” looks so stylish that even I want to buy it now…(I’m not an athlete 😂) because, duh! it’s so damn stylish
3. The Take-Off: The Federer x Scarcity Play 🎾
They didn’t chase mass retail immediately. By focusing on specialty stores and bringing Roger Federer on as an investor, they built a “prestige” halo. They didn’t just sell shoes; they sold an association with excellence.
4. Premium Branding: The “No-Discount” Rule 💎
While others fight price wars, On maintains its premium status through strict price discipline and high-fashion collabs with houses like Loewe. That’s where some other show brands faltered as well.
5. The “Netflix” of Shoes: Cyclon™ Subscription 🔄
A friend of mine who had been to Japan for her BPIM told me that, On has pioneered a circular subscription model. For a monthly fee (approx. ¥3,380), you never actually “own” the shoe. Instead, every 6 months (or as soon as they wear out), you ship your old pair back to be 100% recycled into new ones, and they send you a fresh, high-performance pair. It’s a closed-loop system that eliminates waste while ensuring you’re always running on fresh tech. It can’t get cooler than this… environmentally too😂
On proves that if you have a “weird” enough innovation and the discipline to stay premium, you can disrupt even the most crowded industries.
Are you seeing more “Clouds” in your office than at the gym lately? Let’s discuss why this brand shift is happening. 💭
– Shrestha S Bharadwaj
PGP 2024-26
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