Snapshots from Hell - Peter Robinson

This is a book a lot of my friends had been talking about during my MBA days. When I saw it at the bookstore of my company, I finally decided to give it a read. I wasn’t disappointed.

There is a line on the cover which sums up the whole book, “The making of an MBA”. Now my MBA was quite ok compared to my engineering, which was my hell. And believe-you-me, it was much more of a hell than Mr. Robinson can ever imagine. In fact, it reminds me of a line in the popular TV Series (my favorite) F.R.I.E.N.D.S, in which Phoebe gives Rachel a piece of her mind, shouting, “Yeah, mine was a real problem, while yours is some high school drama…” Well, but I know what it feels like to feel like in hell. And it’s never the quantum of problems that make life, or a place, hell. It’s just the existence of problems, and not knowing how to get around them. So while I’d like to believe that my problems in engineering were a lot greater than Peter’s (I somehow can relate to the author so well, that I feel I am on a first name basis with him) problems, as I am sure every person believes that his problems are greater than his peers, I do understand the mental and the emotional state Peter, and all of his classmates were going through.

And that is quite the brilliance of the book. To convey what exactly was hellish about what the 333 students in the Stanford Class of 1990. It’s not melodramatic. It is not about getting abducted by a gang of fundamentalists or the operations of a secret anti-normal-pro-weird cult or a heart rending romantic tragedy or raining-bullets action or any such thing. Actually, it is what every single troubled student would go through in his academic course. Which is why everyone can relate to the book and enjoy it, and not enjoy it sadistically, enjoy it the way we would look at our troubled past and smile at it, silently applauding ourselves that we got through it. And you can relate to the “Snapshots from hell” even more if you have done, or are doing, MBA, which was the case with me. Of course my MBA was very, very different than what Peter went through. Any present day autobiography of a modern day MBA would be laden with “Google”, “MS Word”, “ppt”, “laptop/computer” etc. They are conspicuously absent in Peter’s MBA during late 80s.

Another achievement of the book is that it captures the aspirations of the fellow MBAs very accurately. The desperate struggle for grades, the summer jobs, the final jobs, dating scene, all of it… the frame of mind of the student is very accurately captured. And the best thing about the book is that it is a very, very candid, something stronger… honest, shall I say, expose of the MBA grads. The slumbering in the class, the getting through MBA with the help of partial-credit-for-partially-correct-answers in exams… yeah… the MBAs who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, indulge in all of that. One of my friends, who is doing an MBA in IIM-A, the most prestigious B-School in India, says that IIM-A grads can’t bend spoons with their minds. They are just humans. Well they are humans in Stanford as well. And Peter makes that point.
It is a delightful read, and I would recommend it highly to people who have anything to do with an MBA. I would handcuff people, gag them and forcefully read the book to the people who have airs of being a superhero because of an “MBA” from a prestigious B-School. Just to remind them to get real. And lastly, MBA is no requisite for happiness. You need to be doing what you like for a living. As Peter has taken up what he enjoys best even after his MBA… writing. And am I glad he took up writing. Because otherwise, the book would never have been born.