READY, STEADY,GO! Students cheering at an IIM Calcutta convocation

Confucius once said ?choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life?. This popular adage seems to be the anthem for a growing section of management graduates. Rejecting plum placement offers, many of them are turning their passions into entrepreneurial ventures.

If Nikhil Vaswani and Rohit Shankar from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, plan to launch ?Be Positive Wellness Services?, then 23-year-old Kunal Mahipal from IIM Bangalore is all set to bring to life Kriti Lifestyle, a company that will make designerwear accessible to the man on the street. Or take, for instance, Satyajit Sadanandan. This national-level football player from IIM Lucknow rejected a Rs 9 lakh offer from JP Morgan Chase to build a football academy. Again, Gaurav Dagaonkar from IIM Ahmedabad plans to use his managerial skills to start a music company. At present, he is all set to launch his maiden album. This IT engineer from Mumbai composes, sings and writes all his songs himself.

So, what is driving these students to push their luck at a time when the eye-popping salaries of their classmates are making headlines? ?The challenge and excitement of starting a new business is unique,? says Yash Sehgal, from IIM Kozhikode. Sehgal, one of the founding members of the entrepreneurship cell at IIM (K), admits to have always yearned to launch a start-up. He plans to work in the area of high-speed laser-based dimensional measurement devices and has already entered into a collaboration with an Italian firm, Tecnogamma.

Agrees Pankaj Kumar, associate professor at IIM Lucknow, ?Increasingly, students are finding that doing something differently is challenging and satisfying. This is a welcome trend in management education and we should encourage it.? The booming Indian economy has also helped these students in realising their dreams. ?If you have a good idea, people are ready to invest capital in you,? assures Mahipal.

?Doing your own thing? has captured the imagination of management grads previously too. Vardan Kabra and Arvind Kumar from the IIM (A) batch of 2004 started Fountainhead schools, columnist Rashmi Bansal, an IIM (A) passout left a corporate career to kickstart JAM, a youth magazine. But unlike this year such instances were few and far between earlier.

The immense scope for creativity and innovation seems to be the major pull-factors for the budding entrepreneurs. ?Further, in your own start-up you are restricted only by your own imagination,? feels Mahipal.

But these suave managers know that giving life to their crazy ideas is as important as making them economically viable. So, before plunging into entrepreneurship, they do their homework well. For instance, batchmates Shankar and Vaswani hit upon the idea to launch their health care services company in September 2005. In the ensuing months they presented their idea in business plan contests at various B-schools. Their wellness service that offers healthcare programmes to individuals and corporates was selected in the finals at three such contests. ?This gave us tremendous confidence and we felt that this was a good business opportunity in the long run,? says Vaswani. The duo also conducted market surveys in various cities.

Unlike the popular perception that entrepreneurship brings with it the perks of not reporting to a boss which in turn results in an easy worklife, the new age managers understand that the road ahead is hard. ?Whoever said that being an entrepreneur is easy. It is much more stressful. You have to be ready to do all kinds of jobs from secretarial to administrative to managerial,? says Vaswani.

In the recent past entrepreneurship cells have mushroomed at various B-schools adding to the buzz around entrepreneurship. It seems that ?doing your own thing? is here to stay for a long time to come.