Lost Anchors, Fairy Lights, and Hedged Bets - My IIM Calcutta Story
April 04, 2026
April 04, 2026
I entered IIM Calcutta wanting to leave. I still remember my first day on campus. It was incredibly humid and I was sweating through my t-shirt. My mother and I drove across campus in our car after I had kept my stuff in my room, and while I could see others overjoyed, all I could think of was if I was making the right choice? Since I was already there, I decided to at least talk to people around me.
That evening, a couple of people were going to play volleyball, and while I had no clue how to play volleyball, I went any way. What is sports but a means to meet new people? So I went out, and I met two of my to-be classmates. The three of us spent a couple of hours together, walking through the land of 7-lakes and speaking to a bunch of other people.
After five hours spent with them, the one thought that kept ringing in my mind was that this is not the place for me. People here had come with one goal and one goal only: they needed the best job possible; they wanted the best placements, and that’s not an unfair goal to have, but that was not why I was there. I wanted to build the biggest company, I wanted to be an entrepreneur; but an MBA is not for people who want to be outliers. An MBA is a place for people to be the best they can be in a hedged environment.
I remember talking to my then-girlfriend that night — “five hours in, I know this is not my place”. I knew I was not meant to be here, but what would I do that night? I spoke to her for a couple of hours, and I went to sleep, barely being able to sleep in that heat. IIM Calcutta hostels did not have any AC then; they do not. It was a small, dingy room with one lumpy bed and a fan that sometimes sped up and sometimes slowed down. I don’t know how, but it became a room I eventually came to love quite a bit.
I woke up the next day, and I went 35 km from my hostel to meet my then-girlfriend. I showed all of the different joining papers I got, and my MBA name tag — with the pride of getting into IIM Calcutta, while constantly talking about the disappointment of actually being there.
But I couldn’t leave just then. I had to find a way out. I tried different things: I went back to a previous employer, he came back with a job offer a month later, and I decided it made no sense to leave an MBA for a standard job; the only way I’d leave was for something bigger. I could always get a good job on campus. It was August 10th and the placement season was in full steam. I had only applied for McKinsey, BCG, and Bain — the only three companies that would meaningfully push me towards my goal of becoming an entrepreneur. Looking at the packages, I realized once again that it made no sense to leave just to be an employee. It only made sense to leave for a bigger goal, for starting my own company, so that is where I shifted my focus. I applied to a bunch of accelerators like Entrepreneur First and YCombinator. Got selected for EF and decided not to go and got rejected from YC (this is the first time I am actually telling the world that I applied for YC).
In that process, things got rough. I remember September of 2024 very starkly. It was a month I was in a “rut akin to depression”. It was the month I could not get out of bed. I tried, but I just wanted to sleep and keep sleeping and keep sleeping. I had a new business idea in mind, an idea to this day I think could have been a very good one, but I just did not have it in me to build it, to run it. I did build a website; I did start reaching out to people, trying to get my first sale, but I did not have it in me then mentally to breakthrough that phase. My relationship was also in a mess and we broke up soon after.
In mid-October, I got an internship offer from Bain & Co for the summer and I think that really helped me get out of the depression. I needed a change of mental space. I was stuck in my head and the massive employer brand of Bain, helped me mentally break out of the loop to some extent. I decided — five days after my internship offer, three days after my breakup, completely broken, not achieving what I wanted to achieve but having that Bain offer — that it’s time to bounce back. I decided it’s time to stop pushing myself. It was hilarious that the way I got out of that rut was by slowing down. I decided not to push anymore. I started going out with friends, dancing my heart out at parties, seeing Monty - the monitor lizard on the Joka campus - tear a bird apart, going to prom without a date - without my three-year relationship - but still being bittersweet about it — in a journey to become freer, to become more calm, to not push myself as hard, to be easier on myself. It was showing an effect. I think I was a little bit happier. Not for very long, though.
Deepinder Goyal decided to put out a LinkedIn post asking for a Chief of Staff. I applied, got selected for an interview, was called to Delhi, and then was ghosted. That really broke me for a bit. But to my advantage, there came my convocation for my undergrad degree. It reminded me of where I started and where I am and how I’m doing better and how I’m on a path to do better, and I will eventually figure it out.
I started my year with a disappointment and I was fine with it. I heard back from Deepinder in the first week of January after I kept irritating him on WhatsApp, and I was not selected. These were also the first three months of my life that I actually worked on build a new product which and failed massively at it. Over the last 4 years in the start-up ecosystem, I’ve shipped a lot of product and this was the first time I failed at launching. What I did have in those three months was pure joy — walking around campus at midnight with friends and staring for hours at the foggy IIM Calcutta lakes, just enjoying the view.
Then came the end of the first year. It was time for me to pack up my sweat-inducing hostel room with the lumpy bed and dysfunctional fan that I really did not like on my first day. That hostel room over the course of those 12 months had seen me cry, had seen me fall, had seen me hit a depression I had not learnt how to deal with, and it then saw me bounce back. It had memories and remnants of a person that had grown, remnants of a frenetic individual who learned to be more patient, the remnants of a person who put too much pressure on himself who learned to sometimes let go - a long way to go yet, still a tad bit better. It was difficult saying goodbye to that room, although having Holi on the day I was leaving and getting my shirt torn while playing across campus compensated for a lot of pain.
Then came the MBA internship. I was interning at Bain and Company — the MBB of the world, the biggest consulting firm, this and that. It was fancy. As I landed in Bangalore, I had a chauffeur with a white glove waiting for me with my name in his hand. He greeted me hello, as he took my luggage. I got into an Innova which had glass water bottles and a towel for refreshment. I remember entering the hotel room at JW Marriott that I was going to stay in for two months - it was massive. I was living right next to Vijay Mallya’s White House on top of the Kingfisher Towers. It was as luxurious as it got, until I saw the Bain office. It was a hotel turned into an office. The entrance with a grand chandelier and a marble wall was beyond exquisite.
I went across Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, and Delhi — travelled, met friends, made friends, went out, worked 14-16 hours a day, lived in the fanciest of hotels, gate crashed a wedding, learned a lot in the process, earned quite a bit of money too, had the opportunity to call my mother to a five-star hotel and have her stay with me for two days, saw how the MD of a Nifty 50 company operate on a day-to-day basis, saw Dhoni/ Ashwin/ Sam Curran/ Shubhman Gill (Gill was in a towel), had the fanciest food ever, and also missed my grandparents’ 60th anniversary. It was a whole package. There were days when I found the internship very irritating, but I compensated for that by spending some time on most days with my friends whose company I loved. We were all living in the same hotel, and somehow, my room became our gathering spot for the other interns.
It was time to go back. The first two weeks on campus were difficult. I was struggling with a lot of questions. Where does my romantic relationship stand? What am I going to do with my life? Am I going to complete my MBA or not? Am I going to go for my exchange term to Copenhagen Business School and get a double degree?
To boil it down, the two biggest questions of my life, which I haven’t been able to answer to this day - where does my romantic life go, and where does my professional life go - remained unanswered.
On a random day in early June, somewhere around 2:30 PM — maybe earlier, maybe around 11:30 am — my then-girlfriend & I decided to stop trying to rebuild our relationship. That relationship was my anchor. There were two things I had built my life around - the relationship and my work. I did not plan to do it that way, but that’s the beauty of identity, sometimes you don’t build it; you grow into it, and I’d grown into those identities. Suddenly, a year into my MBA, I was stripped of both. I did not have a business; I did not know what to do; I did not have a relationship; I had no anchor, and I now had a year to choose what I wanted to make of myself.
Four days after the call with my then-girlfriend I got another call. This time at 1:00PM from an IIM Calcutta alum and a partner at Bain. Those days I tried to sleep through most hours to not deal with life and was woken up by this phone call. He said, “Congratulations, Prannay. I’m calling from Bain. You got a PPO. Rest up; you have a lot of work to do next year. Thank you.” I called my mother to tell her in a 30 sec call and went back to sleep. I woke up to go down for lunch at about 1:45PM, still with groggy eyes, half yawning, hair messy, telling my friends, “Ho gaya, PPO.” They almost thought I did not get it. How could somebody be so nonchalant about getting a PPO from Bain and Company? But I’ll be honest — I was happy. I was happy for that split second when I heard the congratulations, but the minute after that, my mind was, “But is this what I want to do?”
It wasn’t. Which is why I decided not to go for the exchange. I wanted to give something up to prove to myself that I did want to start up. Starting up or not was probably not even the point then; it was just to make that sacrifice, just to prove to myself that I am not just saying I want to be a founder — I am taking a tangible, actionable step, giving up on something, giving up on an experience of a lifetime to be one. I ended up not doing a lot to start up though.
June to August of the second year were probably the most difficult months I’ve ever had. I had a PPO, but I had lost all hope of getting back into the relationship with my ex. I did not know how to build my startup. I was lost.
That was the weakest I’ve ever felt, but that was not the weakest I ever seemed. I seemed more fragile in September of the first year, but I was weaker in June to August of the second year. I think I may have just learned how to live with that fragility. The decisions I was making were worse; my approach to life was significantly worse. I just managed to start knowing how to mask it better.
Having a PPO from Bain kind of helped here. Way too many juniors at IIM Calcutta started coming to me for help for their internships. They wanted CV reviews, help with case preparation, just how to manage all of these interviews, which company to choose, and what to do. I probably helped about 150 people and 50 of them intimately.
To be honest, I wasn’t really doing it to help people. I was doing it for the dopamine hit; I was doing it to feel important at a time when nothing was working out in my life. I was using their lives to feel competent, to feel like I knew things. Seeing them achieve things through guidance that was appropriated to me was amazing, and that acknowledgement helped me get through a lot. Which is why I probably did not stop at 25, did not stop at 50. I had to hit the 150 number. It was tiring. There were days where I spoke to 12 people for an hour each, consoling them as they wept, getting to know their deepest insecurities, pushing them to do more, all while I felt numb inside. I was guiding them to get the same jobs and excel in the same system that I was desperately trying to escape.
August passed, and things started seeming better in September. There was no one particular day or reason.
My advisory sessions with my juniors were at an absolute peak at this time. I was still running on that borrowed dopamine hit—the feeling of being powerful and useful to others gave me just enough momentum to start looking outward again.
I met friends who began pulling me out of my cycle of despair without even knowing they were doing it. The aching founder in me also struck a new business idea in the wealth-tech space — something that could be my life’s work, might not be; I don’t know, but something that was definitely at least worth looking at.
I dove obsessively into the financial regulatory landscape in India, writing what would become a comprehensive 28-page thesis on the Indian FinTech space and would end up becoming a novel framework called Structural-Market Fit. The thesis eventually earned me a lot of praise, but more importantly, it elevated my understanding of state-architected markets and businesses more than my entire four years in the startup ecosystem had. My new friends, the dopamine highs from helping and the intellectual thrill of building new knowledge had me finally moving again.
October came. I volunteered for the placement season — the summer internship placement season, arguably the most important event in IIM Calcutta’s year. I was a volunteer for Accenture’s placement process. In simple words, I had to help out HR - get them food and water, push them to consider people’s profiles if they were not hiring enough, and keep the placement representatives updated.
Accenture interviews about half of IIM Calcutta. It is one of the top-tier consulting firms and it hires in bulk. Because of that, Accenture is everybody’s fallback and dream option. Being a volunteer there is always fairly stressful. I went in at 7:00 AM and came back at 8:00 PM at night. Through the 13-hour long day I pushed profiles, asked for re-interviews for candidates, fought with the HRs when they were not releasing a candidate. The job was just to keep things moving. I, along with two other people, were handling 250 highly emotional people who were at a make-or-break stage in their careers. That taxing environment really showed me at least a glimpse of what I enjoy — the ability to push, the ability to just enjoy stress and excitement and the ability to love a dopamine-filled high-zone where most people crawl into their shells.
On the day I was helping people get jobs, was the day I got rejected from a job I was really, really passionate about. At 7:30 AM, I got rejection email, at 8:15AM the first offer from Accenture was raised, at 8:30 was the second. I quietly smiled at the irony, put my phone away, and went back to work. I did not have the time to dwell on my rejection. I had a lot of other people to look after then.
Through October, life started changing. My friendships that were just budding in September started to take shape. We were hanging out a lot more, going to each other’s rooms, just being in each other’s company, doing the typical hostel life. There was a group being formed, a group I would eventually call my best friends - friends I hope to carry all my life, friends that have helped me grow in ways they don’t even know.
It started simple - a common friend’s birthday. We realized we really do enjoy hanging out with each other, so we kept hanging out. Eventually — I don’t know when — we became very good friends. We’d go out once a week. I’ll be honest, there was a lot of drinking involved. I know drinking isn’t the best way to live life, but sometimes bad influences leave the greatest memories:
There was just so much happening, and we loved each other's company!
I have had friends in the past. I have a very, very good friend from school, but building deep friendships has always been a place where I’ve struggled. I have a tough time letting people in, calling people to my home, and letting them enter my room. That was something I found very difficult to do.
Then came my birthday on November 18th. I’ve had a bittersweet relationship with my birthdays. I remember my birthday in class 11 when I went to school, and nobody even knew what day it was until the very next morning. It’s not that I haven’t had special birthdays—my last four were memorable—but none were quite like this. My friends had all gathered around, invited a whole bunch of my acquaintances from campus, and had my personal website displayed on the TV. We popped open two bottles of alcohol, drank through the night, danced around, shared stories, and fell down in the middle of the campus roads while the dawn broke at 5:30 AM, just as winter was entering Kolkata. I quietly felt how life had changed, how things had taken a turn for the better. I’d lost two identities, but I had built something that would help me gain more - something that would end up being a support system I hope to have for life. Actually, they don’t really have a choice. They’ll have to be my support system for life.
December is when the fairy lights room incident happened — what had been forming for months was cemented on that day. You never think of these things in the moment: “Okay, today is when we’ll cement our friendship. Today is when things get memorable. Today is when you become best friends.” But as you go through life, they just start happening.
It was also a day of great character development. I had slowly gone from keeping my doors strictly closed, to letting juniors come to my room for interview prep, to having my friends stay there for a little bit before we went to eat at the night mess. But it had never reached this extent. Never to the point where my room was its absolute worst self, and never to the point where my friends felt the space was theirs to decorate.
I still remember that day. Four of us were sitting in my room which wasn’t feeling the most exciting. There were some old, borrowed fairy lights lying around that I needed to return. Instead, my friends took them and decorated my room just for that day. We drank our hearts out and partied like crazy. I spilled food in my room, I vomited, and my friends danced. When I get drunk, I go to sleep — which is hilarious, and my friends love that I go to sleep. They take very, very embarrassing pictures of me drunk sleeping. That day, through the vomit, through me sleeping, I just felt calm. I felt like I belonged. I felt like people cared. Even as I vomited, there were people there to give me water. Even as I slept, after the embarrassing pictures, there were people to give me a blanket so that I don’t feel cold. When I woke up, there were people ready to dance their hearts out with me.
That group was the group I went to Thailand with for my grad trip. That group is the first group I’ve ever brought to my home, introduced to my mother, let them enter my personal space, and see who I am. I am so grateful that I got to do it with them.
A lot of my MBA has been a quest of fitting in while consistently being out of place. A lot of it has had to do with what I wanted to be in life, but I realized somewhere along the journey — in a moment of defeat — that I could not change IIM Calcutta. The two months at Bain pushed me towards that realization.
IIM Calcutta is a place for economic mobility. It’s a place where people come to be the best at a hedged profession — the best consultant, the best investment banker, probably a decent or very good venture capitalist. That is what the degree is made for. I was wrong to come into that degree expecting more out of it. Every place has specific things to offer, and it is up to me to get that and not work towards changing it. Once that became clear, my approach towards the MBA also became better.
I do not like the degree. I’ll be honest — that campus wasn’t the best place for me. But there were people within that campus, there was warmth within that campus that changed me, that made me into a better person, a more rounded, more grown-up person. I changed from a person who, at the first party at IIM Calcutta, would stand in the corner with maybe a packet of chips and a glass of wine, to a person who tended to become the life of the party. The person who danced the craziest, who laughed the loudest. I changed from a person who would never call somebody home into someone who loved making his room the party house. It is those changes in me that helps me be a better person.
I didn't come out of IIM Calcutta with a massive startup, but I didn't leave empty-handed intellectually, either. Through subjects like Micro-economics with Prof. Runa Sarkar and Strategic Management with Prof. Anirvan Pant, my understanding of business matured. Before my MBA, I always looked at a business like a machine with nuts and bolts, with levers you could move in a simple input-output system. Through these courses, I came to realize that business is a living organism. When they say in accounting that you and your business are two different entities, I would not just hold it figuratively but would mean it literally. I started learning how identities in a business work. I started learning how a business interacts internally and externally with the world, and how literally all of philosophy and psychology that works for humans works the same way for businesses. That maturity is something that I hold very dear, along with, of course, hard skills, in let’s say, understanding of how a financial statement works. Consult prep to get into Bain really helped me move from raw horsepower to structured thinking. I have been a massive hater of structured thinking and MECE frameworks, but over time, I’ve come to realize the need and the value of being MECE when trying to build something that actually scales.
I remember it was February of 2026, just a couple of days away from my last MBA class. The reality that it was all ending was starting to set in, but before the heavy goodbyes, we had one last stretch.
March was beyond imaginable. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had in life. We went to Thailand for my grad trip. Five days of just partying, dancing, touring — sightseeing, jumping on fire ropes, drinking our hearts out, to water sports and snorkeling. I fell from a kayak into the open sea with no land nearby. And then the two weeks after that, before my convocation, we went out every day. We drove 100 km across Kolkata, partied in my undergrad evenings, partied till 6 am, house parties — literally everything possible.
And then came the convocation. I finally got to leave IIM Calcutta — the day I was looking forward to since the day I joined. It did not feel as happy as I felt it would. I felt sad about leaving.
It was probably the hottest day since my first day at IIM Calcutta. I sweated through two t-shirts before I even wore my white shirt and my robe. I probably lost more water through sweat that day than I had in six months prior. I was standing right in front of a friend — a friend I met on the first day of campus. He was literally the first person I met in my class, and he incidentally ended up being the last person I met, taking our degrees together. We kept laughing. We were not emotional friends; we were not people we would call when we are down. We were acquaintances who cared for each other enough to help when we required it, and enough to enjoy each other’s company and the world around us. Every picture and video through the convocation just had us chuckling through hours and hours of boring speeches.
And then the director called out my name. After a very long time, I didn’t know how to stand, how to walk. It is arguably one of my most awkward pictures in a while. I remember getting my undergrad degree — I walked up in confidence, smiled my brightest. Here I was confused. I did not know how I got this degree. Going out, getting all the pictures clicked, it was different. Somewhere along the lines, the grandeur of the event overshadowed the minor achievements of individuals. We again ended up being one in a sea of many — something that the MBA was made to do. But I don’t think that was the emotion running there. It was the distinct feeling of not understanding something - a feeling I still haven't quite figured out.
I still to this day maintain that I lost more here than I ever have. But I gained something different. I do not leave with any of my identities; I do not leave with an anchor for what life is to be for me. I do not know where I’m going to go; I do not know what life holds for me. Yet, I leave with something that is beyond precious. Those friendships, and that personality evolution, made everything worth it.
What did I feel then? What do I feel now? What was the IIM Calcutta journey?
I don’t know.