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53 schools and colleges, 30,000 students:
Every building you see is an educational institution
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RINGSIDE
VIEW
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Dr.
Ramdas Pai is a stocky, self effacing and taciturn 66-year-old,
who looks every inch what he is: A relatively well-heeled, middle-aged
gentleman from western Karnataka. There's nothing to suggest that
he is, at once, the de facto emperor of a small town, India's most
successful (and, arguably, its richest) educationist, and the man
behind a large educational empire. Pai is all that.
Manipal (74°46' E, 13°20' N) lies 400
kilometres north-west of Bangalore, a small town tucked in the Western
Ghats and it would have probably remained just another beautiful
village overlooking the Arabian Sea had it not been for one family,
the Pais. Dr. Tonse Madhav Anant Pai (father of Ramdas Pai) was
a physician by qualification, but a banker at heart. He founded
Syndicate Bank, which was later nationalised and is today among
the 10 largest psu banks in India. It is as the progenitor of a
chain of educational institutions, however, that he is remembered.
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DOCTORS-TO-BE AMONG
BOOKS
The Pais don't stint on investing in infrastructure as this
Manipal Medical College Library amply proves
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Rainy Manipal-it received some 280 cm of rain
last year and has already got 200 cm this year-boasts some 53 schools
and colleges, 30,000 students from 32 countries, and 3,000 instructors
and administrators. From usual suspects such as engineering, medicine,
and management to nursing, communication, even journalism, there's
a course for everyone at Manipal. And the Pais, whose corporate
entity is called the Manipal Group own it all: Of the 1,000 acres
of land that constitute the town of Manipal, they own 700 acres.
All told, the group's revenues from its educational institutions
could range from anything between Rs 600 crore and Rs 750 crore.
Ramdas Pai himself is loath to put a number to this, and argues
that the Manipal Group runs its educational institutions more as
a "service". "Thanks to the medical colleges (there
are five in all), Manipal has hospitals such as Kasturba Hospital,
Shirdi Sai Baba Cancer Hospital and Dr. T.M.A. Pai Hospital which
between them have over 7,000 beds and serve the deserving from villages
around the town."
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EDUCATION'S ENTREPRENEUR
#1
Ramdas Pai of the Manipal Group is, arguably, India's most
successful (and richest) educationist
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The Manipal Group's schools and colleges have
always followed a unique self-financing model. Simply put, that
means admission is on the basis of merit and ability to pay. Today,
25 per cent of the seats in all institutions run by the group is
set apart for NRIs (non-resident Indians) or PIOs (people of Indian
origin) like Vikram Rathore, a second-generation American and a
student of medicine. "The cost of my studies have halved and
I am picking up Indian cultural nuances which my family is keen
on," he says. Then there are foreign students like Mohammed
Bakr, a Malaysian pursuing a course in dentistry. Students who fall
under any of these categories are charged a tuition fee that is
typically four-times what Indian students pay. For instance, an
NRI student of medicine shells out $12,000 (Rs 5.65 lakh) a year.
Pai hastens to add that this doesn't mean students can buy their
way to a degree in Manipal. Popular perception has it that they
can. "Last year, the cut-off for our medical colleges was 92
per cent," he gloats. "My own son, who scored 78 per cent
had to go elsewhere to study."
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KARNATAKA'S SECOND
COSMOPOLIS
As this scene outside International Centre for Health Sciences
shows, Manipal is hip and happening
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The town's other residents (some 20,000 of them)
aren't complaining. Thanks to the Manipal Group, the town has a
cosmopolitan profile and a booming economy. For the past 20 years
Ganapathi Bhat has run Shanta Hotel, a Manipal eatery famed for
its Bunn (made out of mashed and deep fried bananas mixed with atta).
"If not for the educational institutions," says Bhat,
who does Rs 1.2 lakh of business every month, "Manipal would
be nothing." "It is money from the students that drives
the economy of this place." There are adventitious benefits
as well. "We are in the rocky hinterland and even agriculture
wouldn't have flourished here," says Vishweshwar Hegde, an
autorickshaw driver. "Today, if there are modern means of transport,
communication facilities, and banks in Manipal, it is because of
the colleges." And the Manipal Group has, on the strength of
its experience in India, established colleges in Malyasia, Nepal
and Sri Lanka, "with cumulative investments of Rs 550 crore",
according to Pai. That's some money, pal.
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TREADMILL
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 Ripped
Diet
One of the ways to get ripped
is to add a generous portion of cardiovascular exercise to
your regime. That was what Treadmill talked about last time.
Sensible weight training combined with a nice dose of cardio
equals lean, ripped body. Provided you follow a sensible diet.
It's a no-brainer that everything about maintaining a good
weight and lean muscles depends not only on how you expend
your calories but also how much you take in. That's why diet
is an important part of any exercise regime. Many people tend
to overlook that and figure that since they're working out,
what they eat hardly matters. They couldn't be more wrong.
First off, let's begin with a simple question. How many
meals do you eat in a day? If your answer is three or less,
everything's wrong with your diet. Break your meals into four
or, better still, five meals a day. Eat smaller portions but
spread your eating pattern across the day. That helps the
body metabolise food more easily. A typical meal schedule
could be breakfast at 8 a.m., followed by a small meal at
11 a.m., lunch at 2 p.m., an evening snack at 5.30 pm and
dinner at 8 p.m. If you can squeeze in a fruit break between
the evening snack and dinner, all the better.
Now for the toughie. What do you eat at all these meals?
The idea is to keep a good balanced diet going through the
day. A good mix of carbohydrates, proteins and, well, fat.
Also, it's good to keep your meal pattern like an inverted
pyramid. A big (not heavy!) breakfast, a big lunch and a small
dinner, with tiny snacks in between. A friend at the gym calls
those tiny in-betweens "boosters". He's 38, in good
shape and works out four days a week. Here's what he says
he eats. Breakfast is 2 slices of toasted wholewheat bread,
1 egg white omelette cooked in olive oil, a glass of low-fat
milk. This is followed by an in-between of around 10 grams
of fresh bean sprouts. For lunch, he has 2 rotis (or a cup
of rice), dal, lots of green salad (sans dressing) and a cup
of lightly cooked vegetables. The next in-between booster
is a couple of wholewheat cookies and a glass of milk and
some fruit. For dinner, my ripped (yeah, he's really ripped!)
friend has a soup, two rotis and 100 grams of chicken.
Dull diet? Well, if you say so. But then if you really want
to get ripped, you have to work for it. Oh, and lest you lose
faith in all this, here's a secret that I didn't mention before.
You can go on a binge once a week. Yes, bring on the pizzas
and that case of beer. But remember, just once a week.
-MUSCLES MANI
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