IIM Director EXPOSES: Is ₹25 Lakh MBA Actually Worth It? | Placement Crisis Reality

He Predicted There Would Be No Jobs. That Was 25 Years Ago.

What India's most decorated institution-builder taught me about philosophy, the future of work, and why Rs 25 lakh for an MBA is the wrong way to think about the question

A conversation with Prof. Debashis Chatterjee, Director of IIM Kozhikode, Fulbright Scholar at Harvard, and author of 18 books including One Minute Wisdom.

Twenty-five years ago, Prof. Debashis Chatterjee wrote a column in the Times of India called Success Sutras. In it, he made a prediction that his editors probably thought was eccentric.

He wrote that there are no jobs. And even if there are now, they will not be there in the future.

This was before the internet had fully arrived. Before smartphones. Before AI was a household word. Before anyone was writing breathless articles about ChatGPT taking away white-collar work.

Today, sitting across from him, I asked him what he meant then and what he means now.

"Have you understood the fundamental meaning of the word job?" he asked.

He did not wait for my answer. A job, he said, means repeated behavior in a particular way. A farmer's son becomes a farmer and does farming the same way his grandfather did. Job means mechanical behavior that earns you a livelihood.

With AI and high-speed computing taking over all cause-and-effect-based work, the mechanical part of work is simply over.

What remains is everything else. And that everything else, he argued, is what humans were always meant to do.

Part 1: Without Philosophy, Man Is a Monkey

Before we talked about jobs or IIM admissions or gender ratios or Harvard, Prof. Chatterjee wanted to establish something foundational.

He reads five books a week. He has written eighteen. And the thing he most wants people to understand is that philosophy is not an academic luxury. It is the condition of being human.

"Without philosophy, man is a monkey. You put one million monkeys on a keyboard and they will not produce a Mozart or a Beethoven. It requires another dimension to create music."

Philosophy, he said, is simply the perspective through which you interpret the world. Every person has one, including the ones who would deny it.

He made a memorable case for this using an unlikely example. A thief has a philosophy. When the Dalai Lama is talking Buddhist philosophy to a thief, the thief's philosophy is how quickly he can pick the Dalai Lama's pocket. The thief wants to be the best thief in the room. That aspiration requires a framework of values, a skill set, and a reason for doing it.

"Crime rate goes down during Durga Puja in Kolkata and Ganesh Chaturthi in Mumbai. The thief has a value system. He takes four days off to be a good person."

Even serial killers, he noted, believe they are performing a service. No human being acts without meaning. It is the meaning that drives everything.

Which is why, he said, management without philosophy is rudderless. You are studying how to manage people without knowing what a person is.

Part 2: The Cosmic Conspiracy in a Cup of Tea

I asked him what his own philosophy is. The answer was one of the most beautiful things I have heard in a podcast conversation.

He was in a hotel in Boston, drinking tea. He was closing his eyes, smelling the aroma, slurping it slowly, almost like a prayer. The man who had brought his tea watched him and eventually asked what he was doing.

Prof. Chatterjee told him: you look at this cup and you think it is tea. It is not tea.

It is sunlight falling on green leaves and turning them brown. Since he cannot drink sunlight directly, he takes the energy that the leaf has condensed, puts one tea leaf in hot water, heats it, and creates a beautiful brown concoction. He does not like the color, so he lifts the sap of the earth through a pump called sugarcane and puts a few crystals of that sap, which we call sugar, inside. Then he takes a black cow eating green grass and producing white milk and puts two drops in. The color and taste now suits him.

"Inside a cup, when I stir it with a spoon, I am stirring the entire cosmos. It is a cosmic conspiracy inside a cup."

He paused.

"And I am also a businessman. So I need to start an algorithm. I need to create an Amazon for tea."

That pivot is the entire philosophy of the man. The cosmic and the commercial are not opposites. Intelligence is not sitting in your head alone. Intelligence is everywhere. In the leaf, the soil, the water, the sugarcane, the cow. And the job of a business is to find that intelligence and translate it into something that reaches a person in the exact form they need.

He gave the example of a tailor in England who puts a sensor on a trial coat and records areas of discomfort on your body before cutting the cloth. Even a button, he said, has become intelligent.

Part 3: Bhagavad Gita and the Problem With Modern Management

He talks about the Bhagavad Gita in MBA classes, which surprises some people.

His reasoning is disarmingly simple. Gita means song. Bhagavad Gita is a celestial song, not a grave treatise. And it is a song about human nature, including the higher dimensions of human nature that we call divine.

"If I do not know my own nature, I am into management. I do not know the man himself. How will I practice management?"

The entire problem of modern management, he argued, is that we teach people how to manage resources, timelines, and teams without first asking them who they are.

That is why Arjun needed Krishna. That is why Alexander needed Aristotle. That is why Chandragupta needed Chanakya.

"You do not know who you are. You do not know your potential. You do not know what you can do. And you need to come to a place where your potential will be actualized."

He made an important distinction between introspection and reflection. Introspection is turning inward. Reflection is the active software of human growth. Action is the hardware.

"Without the software the hardware will not work. Without the hardware the software cannot express itself."

He described reflection the way Sachin Tendulkar watches his own innings on reverse video after a match: identifying which stroke he should have played, which he should not have. At the end of every day, you can collect the data of what you said that you should not have said, what you did that you should not have done, what you expected to happen that did not. That data, reviewed honestly, becomes the software that changes your behavior the next day.

"Without reflection, the difference between your washing machine and you does not exist."

Part 4: The Sushi Restaurant and What Machines Cannot Do

He was in Japan at Sukiyabashi Jiro, one of the finest sushi restaurants in the world. It seats ten people. The price is so high that he nearly walked out, but he noticed he was wearing a jacket with an Indian flag pin and decided he could not afford to embarrass his country.

Ten courses arrived. He could not eat several of them. He ate five or six.

When the bill came it was one-eighth of the marked price. He called the server and told her there must be a calculation error.

She said: no, sir. I was observing you eat. I billed you for what you enjoyed, not what you ordered.

He went silent when he told me this story.

"Which machine, which algorithm, will bring that empathy? This Japanese woman can do it. And so can Indians."

That is his answer to the AI question. The province of human capability will be everything that does not conform to the predictable, the analyzable, the broken-into-cause-and-effect. Imagination. Empathy. Meaning. Asking why. Not what and how.

Machines, he said, will never ask why. Why am I doing this? Why am I being worked so hard? What will happen to the next generation of machines? These are human questions. The brain is not built for breadth. It is built for depth. And depth is where humans win.

The creative piece of any job, the part that requires intuitive grasp of the whole picture, will be the province of human beings for a very long time. The mechanical piece is gone. The creative piece is expanding.

Part 5: Is Rs 25 Lakh for an MBA Worth It?

He reframed this question in a way that made me rethink it entirely.

"I am not asking you for 25 lakhs for 2 years. I am asking you for 25 lakhs for 30 years of your professional life."

Spread that across three decades, he said, and then calculate what it really means. Your college mates will be the who's who of the business world. Your alumni base grows by five thousand people per year. The campus in Kozhikode sits on a pollution-free hilltop, providing pure air, sunshine, and reflective space alongside a cohort of five hundred of the brightest people in India.

He was also direct about fees. IIM Kozhikode takes no government grants. Its quality of facilities, intellectual capital, and infrastructure requires that level of funding. But every admitted student receives some scholarship. Top performers receive more. Students from economically weaker backgrounds receive tuition waivers. He said he has never known a student who was admitted to IIM but could not study because of money.

On whether startup experience is a better teacher than an MBA: he conceded that doing a startup gives immense learning. But he pushed back gently.

"How many startups succeed? And how many managers succeed? The learning in both cases is immense. In India, people still bet on security. Risk appetite is growing as per capita income grows and fathers can afford to let their children take chances. But you cannot rule out the cultural reality."

Part 6: How to Actually Get Into IIM

One in eight hundred applicants gets in. Three lakh people apply. Five hundred get a seat.

He was refreshingly honest about what that means.

"To have a sure mechanism for success would be very foolish to even think of. You do not know who your competitor is. You cannot predict with certainty what will happen."

What he said does take you very close to success: the ability to practice for a significant period of time. CAT is not primarily a test of intelligence. It is a test of your ability to persevere through preparation for a long time. It measures test-taking ability, which is not the same thing as raw intelligence.

He pointed out that CAT is not an entrance exam. It is an elimination exam. Unless it is relative, you cannot eliminate people from a pool of three lakh. The goal is to filter, not to find a perfect score.

For those who do not make it, his message was clear and important.

"Do not collapse this into your identity. It does not mean you are not as good. It is a feedback that you need to prepare longer and be exam-ready before you take a good shot."

Dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty, he said, is the real life skill. He described how Arjuna became a master archer not by practicing in ideal conditions but by practicing with his eyes tied, shooting at moving targets by sound alone. Preparedness for the uncertain moment is what separates the excellent from the merely skilled.

He also addressed introverts, who often worry that the interview stage will hurt them. His counter-example was Rajat Gupta, who barely spoke in class at Harvard Business School and was nearly passed over by McKinsey because of it. His own professors had to intervene and tell the McKinsey recruiters that Gupta barely spoke but when he did, he changed the entire direction of the conversation.

"It is not how much you spoke. It is the impact value of what you spoke."

Part 7: How He Changed the Gender Ratio at IIM

When Prof. Chatterjee arrived at IIM Kozhikode, he looked at fifty years of demographic data from the top IIMs. Women represented eight to ten percent of students across that entire period.

India is fifty percent women. Something was clearly wrong.

He traced the problem upstream. Not enough women were even taking the exam. And the reason was simple: in middle-class families with a son and a daughter, the money for CAT coaching went to the son.

"It is like getting Sachin Tendulkar to play and then telling him he should get married very soon. That is not a fair playing field."

His intervention was elegant. He added class ten and class twelve marks as selection lenses. Girls who excelled academically before coaching centers started filtering them out now had a pathway into the interview stage. Once they reached the interview, he found they performed just as well as the boys, if not better.

In 2013, IIM Kozhikode took fifty-three percent women in its PGP program. The entire IIM system's female ratio has since shifted to thirty percent across the board. Corporates came looking for those women specifically. P&G, Citibank, and others told him they were running short of women MBAs to fill management roles where women make most of the economic decisions.

"The market was waiting. The institution just needed to stop getting in the way."

Part 8: Three Heads of State in His Class at Harvard

As a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard, he taught a seminar on Gandhian leadership. He mentioned this almost casually.

Three heads of state sat in that class. Kim Campbell, the youngest prime minister of Canada at the time. Jamil Mahuad, president of Ecuador. Esko Aho, prime minister of Finland.

He paused and smiled. "You can imagine the confidence you get after finishing a class like that. We never thought heads of state would be sitting in your session."

Harvard, he said, operates at a scale and scope that is genuinely global. Students there think scale from day one. Two people with an idea decide to register a business the next morning rather than talking about it. The corpus of forty billion dollars means the university can do things that most countries cannot.

He was honest that Indian institutions, as they mature, may acquire that level of aura over time. But the gap is real and worth acknowledging.

Part 9: One Minute Wisdom and the Deserving Quotient

His book One Minute Wisdom is often misunderstood. People assume it promises that you can acquire wisdom in one minute.

What it actually says: one minute is all it takes for wisdom to crystallize through action.

He called this the muhurat, from classical Indian thought. Muhurt means the moment in which the entire cosmic order collapses into this instant. The insight you have right now carries the weight of everything that led to it.

He gave examples. A jeweler looks at a stone for two seconds and says fake. A champagne taster sniffs a glass and tells you the year and the vineyard. These are not tricks. They are years and years of accumulated experience crystallizing in a single moment of perception.

When the book found its original form, he was writing notes on napkins while coaching people. He published one as an article. The line that got the most response was this: do not chase your desires. Improve your deserving quotient. Deserve before you desire.

Penguin asked if he would make a book from his notes. He collected them. Each chapter is designed to be read in one minute. Each one-liner carries thirty years of decoding.

One example he shared: do not chase pleasure. Chase meaning. Pleasure that is meaningless will not be pleasure anymore. But if you chase meaning, pleasure will follow you.

Part 10: What MBA Will Mean in Five Years

At the very end, I asked him whether the MBA is worth it now and will still be worth it in the next five years.

He gave the most precise answer I have heard on this question.

"As long as there is mismanagement, management will be worth it."

Mismanagement is everywhere. Management will always be needed.

But what management means is changing. The MBA of the future, he said, will no longer stand for Master of Business Administration.

"It will be the Master of Business Ambiguity."

How you manage uncertainty. How you operate in conditions where the cause-and-effect map no longer works. How you lead people who are themselves navigating a world that is being rebuilt in real time.

That requires a different orientation than what traditional MBA programs were built on. The content must change. The kind of human being that programs produce must change.

The credential may survive. But the curriculum had better be ready to evolve.

The One Thing

If there is a single thread running through everything Prof. Chatterjee said, it is this:

You have a billion years of evolutionary history inside you. Most people spend their twenties and thirties ignoring it, chasing what someone else is doing, taking the UPSC exam because a cousin passed it or building a startup because someone on Instagram made money from one.

Your natural instinct, the thing you do not get bored and tired by, the thing you could practice for twenty years and still want to get better at, that is the evolutionary scheme you were handed. Going counter to it is not ambition. It is waste.

The schools and systems and credentials are useful. But they are inputs, not destinations. The destination is a life in which you have done justice to what you were actually capable of, not what looked impressive from the outside.

He has been writing since his twenties. Now in his sixties, people have reason to believe he has done justice to his aspiration.

That is the measure he is offering.