Is getting an M.B.A. worth the investment?

Perhaps the most decisive moments in a students' life are the times he or she has to decide upon the future course of action they need to follow in their career. Considering the number of options / courses / streams now available, this task of selection becomes all the more difficult. 

A Master's of Business Administration (MBA) a three letter magical word is an advanced degree offered by most business schools to college graduates. MBA coursework teaches students essential skills for the corporate world by focusing on both the technical (e.g., finance and economics) and personal (e.g., leadership and management) abilities. Earning an MBA has become an essential step in establishing a successful career in the business world. Some companies are willing to sponsor their employees' education, either while they are working part-time, or during a hiatus from their employment (with a contract to return afterwards). 

Today most business people in management positions have MBAs. While it is possible to achieve success in the business world without an MBA, not having a degree from a top business school can be a severe handicap because so many people continue their education and training. Both the quantitative and qualitative skills taught in MBA programs are qualities that are in high demand in the real business world. If you decide not to pursue an MBA, it is possible that you are making a decision that will hinder your future success in the corporate world.

As Indians continue to climb the economic ladder, the composition of their spending will change considerably. In a pattern witnessed in many other developing countries, discretionary expenditures, such as mobile phones and personal-care products, will take up more room in the nation’s shopping basket. The middle class in India currently numbers some 50 million people, but by 2025 it will reach to 583 million people—some 41 percent of the population. These households will see their incomes balloon to 51.5 trillion rupees- 11 times the level of today and 58 percent of total Indian income. 

When America's middle class was growing, they bought homes where as Middle class in India put a tremendous amount of investment in education. In rural areas, families emerging from poverty is making educating their children a top priority, while higher-income urbanites is spending more on better-quality education, university degrees, and study-abroad programs. 

Before taking any decision regarding admission for MBA and before one can calculate a personal ROI (return on investment), one should think about the skills, values, and interests, and how this degree could help. Once it’s known where to end up, it’s easy to know more precisely what the potential return is.


Return on investment (ROI) can be used as a primary tool for forecasting and evaluating the benefits of doing MBA. Any investment can be evaluated by three measures: 
• The breakeven point, 
• The internal rate of return, and 
• The net present value. 

The Breakeven point (BEP) represents the number of years it takes for the income from an investment to pay for the investment. For example : In 2009, a 23-year old who had earned a full-time MBA had invested an estimated Rs. 10,00,000 in the degree — Rs. 6,00,000 in tuition, plus Rs. 4,00,000 in lost compensation or opportunity cost (money lost for time you take off from work). He could expect to pay that off in 8 years. 
 
One thing that should be considered while calculating your ROI is the ranking of Business School. The top-rated MBA programs from IIM’s which is not only the most reputed management institute of India but one of the best business schools in the world offers a very strong return on investment and they provide the greatest potential to maximize the future earning power of somebody who graduates from that program.

The Internal rate of return (IRR) is the effective interest yield that results from the investment. If a student paying his tuition fees for the MBA as an investment and the extra money that he earns over the course of his career as return on that investment, The effective interest rate that one is getting is the internal rate of return. The industry average comes to around 18%. So, that is, in layman’s terms, for every Rupee put into tuition for an MBA degree, one can expect a return of Rs. 1.18. 

The Net present value (NPV) of an investment is the present (discounted) value of future cash inflows minus the present value of the investment and any associated future cash outflows. 

NPV accounts for the time value of money by expressing future cash flows in terms of their value today. It recognizes that money has a cost (interest), so that you would prefer to have Rs. 1.00 today to having Rs. 1.00 a year from now. If you earn 10% interest on your money, Rs. 1.00 today will be worth Rs.1.10 a year from now. Or, turning that around, the "Present" value of Rs. 1.10 one year out is Rs. 1.00. Subtract the initial investments from Present value, it is called NPV. One should not make an investment that's estimated to produce a negative NPV. The bigger the NPV—other things being equal—the more attractive the investment is.

Finally in conclusion one can say that deciding to pursue MBA can be a solid investment in once career, with the sacrifices being time and money

sanskrIT – The Next Generation Computer Programming Language

Ever since 1786, when Sir William Jones, in a paper presented to the Royal Asiatic Society, in Calcutta, said, "the wonderful structure" of the Sanskrit language, is "more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either," the West has been busy learning from Sanskrit. This Western passion for the oriental classics is visible in Peter Brook’s brilliant dramatic rendering of the Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata,

While we in India today consider Sanskrit a dead language, the Westerners consider it as simply a fascinating language, a language in which the genius of the human civilization was perfected to its fullest. 

In July 1987, Forbes magazine published news, which surprised even the Sanskrit pundits. It said that, “Sanskrit is the most convenient language for computer software programming.” It filled the hearts of all those who love and study Sanskrit with great joy and enthusiasm as it opened the doors to new fascinating world of Sanskrit studies. 

Sanskrit is extremely rich, powerful and expressive language. It potentialities are gradually being appreciated all over the world, and its application is being extended in different field. It is said to be between 5,000 and 7,000 years old. It was developed in the Indian sub-continent and passed from generation to generation in oral traditions for millennia before it made an appearance in written form. The oldest example of written Sanskrit is thought to be the Rigveda, a key Hindu text written about 1,700 BC. The grammar and phonology of this ancient tongue was recorded in great detail in the 5th century BC by an Indian linguist/grammarian named Panini.

Sanskrit (meaning "cultured or refined"), is the oldest and the most systematic language in the world. The vastness and the versatility, and power of expression can be appreciated by the fact that this language has 65 words to describe various forms of earth, 67 words for water, and over 250 words to describe rainfall. 

The Sanskrit grammarians wished to construct a perfect language, which would belong to no one and thus belong to all, which would not develop but remain an ideal instrument of communication and culture for all peoples and all time.

The idea of Sanskrit as programming language seems to stem from NASA researcher Rick Briggs' 1985 paper, "Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence," AI Magazine Vol 6, #1, 1985.

Briggs proposed Sanskrit as a good language for AI-style knowledge representation, i.e. for machine representation of knowledge expressed in a structured form, based on natural language. Sanskrit is apparently well-suited to this application, partly because of its systematized grammar, and its relative lack of ambiguity. Briggs pointed out correspondences between KR structures used in AI, and equivalent structures in Sanskrit. 

Oops! What a language!

In English, the "object" of a sentence is the receiver of an action. For example, in the sentence, "Click the button", the "button" is the object.” Unfortunately, in programming things called "objects" perform "actions". In this sense they are more akin to the English grammar "subject". 

The term object-oriented programming originally comes from the systems development and computer programming world. After years of programming and systems development, someone realized that there are many repetitive functions. For example, file adds, changes, and deletes occur frequently and during multiple processes. It would seem reasonable that one add-change-delete routine could be developed in a modular form that could be accessed any time an add-change-delete process needed to occur. Developers grouped these functions into accessible and executable modules that became known as objects. Developing programs using objects became known as object-oriented programming (OOP).

The design of the OOP process came partially out of a reaction to the slow development time for computer programs, and partly because of the high demand for computer developers. Using object-oriented programming, fewer people can accomplish more.

All modern languages have etymological roots in classical languages. And some say all Indo-European languages are rooted in Sanskrit, but let us not get lost in that debate. Words in Sanskrit are instances of pre-defined classes, a concept that drives object oriented programming [OOP] today. For example, in English 'cow' is a just a sound assigned to mean a particular animal. But if you drill down the word 'gau' --Sanskrit for 'cow'-- you will arrive at a broad class 'gam' which means 'to move. From these derive 'gamanam', 'gatih' etc which are variations of 'movement'. All words have this OOP approach, except that defined classes in Sanskrit are so exhaustive that they cover the material and abstract --indeed cosmic-- experiences known to man. So in Sanskrit the connection is more than etymological.