August 6th, 2016, students of NITIE- one of the top 10 B-Schools in India wearing a T-Shirt which had a caption written on it- "Socho, Becho, Seekho, Repeat", inundated the streets of Mumbai to learn the basic fundas of business from Project Management to Planning, Marketing to Finance, almost all of it in the best possible way.'MANDI' - A word which we heard on the very first day of joining NITIE, a word which is a brainchild of one of the esteemed faculties of NITIE, Dr. Prasad aka Dr Mandi, a word which has a very deep meaning for an MBA student of NITIE. And today (i.e.Aug 6th), we are going to celebrate THE word MAHA-MANDI.
The concept behind ''MANDI" can be aptly summarised by the slogan "Socho-Socho-Becho, Becho-Becho-Seekho, Seekho-Seekho-Socho" i.e experiential learning.
The concept behind ''MANDI" can be aptly summarised by the slogan "Socho-Socho-Becho, Becho-Becho-Seekho, Seekho-Seekho-Socho" i.e experiential learning.
In Mandi, we take an NGO's product "Navnirmiti” (www.navnirmiti.org) and try to sell them in the market, thus learning and practically implementing basic management principles. Also the whole money earned through this goes to the NGO.
We had products, all of them educational toys, named ‘JODO’, which can be used to make different structures using straws and connectors, ‘RANGOMETRY’ had different shapes made of foam which can be used to form any kind of designs and ‘TANGRAM’, a puzzle to sharpen your mind, ‘NUMBER BALANCE’, a tool to strengthen understanding and computation of numerical expressions and equality.
Loaded with the items, we, a team of four, started our mission to gather the thrilling experience, which other B-school students miss.The principle of marketing includes the place where we can find our customers to whom we can sell. This includes PLANNING of the place. We chose to sell outside Phoenix mall.With full enthusiasm, we reached there. We found our first customer, we approached him with our product "JODO " and so it happened, we got the reply we used to give to any other seller we met on the street "Sorry Not Interested", then came to our mind our first lesson taught to us in marketing, the very concept of "SEGMENTATION" and "TARGETING", so we decided to market Tangram to customers of different age with different approachtowards the product, for an elderly person it was a way to keep their grey cells active, for a youngster like us it was a good way to do time pass, for kids just some pieces in different shapes and colors to unleash their creativity and guess what!! We were able to sell Tangram to our very next customer who was a foreigner. We did the same thing with Jodo and Rangometry, soon the sales picked up.
Here is one incident I would definitely like to mention while we were selling, we saw a child with his mother. I started to explain them about the product and then the mother of the child, indicating towards the child, told us that he could not speak as well as hear. At that moment I was really stuck and thought how would I explain about the product to the child and then realised the importance of expressing yourself i.e. "COMMUNICATION SKILLS". I tried by making some structures and giving the products in his hands. When he saw the coloured photographs on brochure along with our hand movements, he was very happy and waved his hand to his mother that he wanted to purchase it.I consider myself very lucky to get this opportunity to learn and also contribute something and in someway to the society. I think MANDI is the best way to learn, to apply and to experiment what a person has learned as well as try something new. I exercised team work, proper planning and above all, I have gained confidence, now I can speak my point of view without any hesitation and also looking forward to "MAHAMANDI" being organized by Dr Mandi next year. Once again I would say "Mandi was really a great experience."
