IIM Calcutta is in West Bengal. West Bengal has a history of having a left-leaning populace that has a huge fascination for football.

Back in the late 1930’s, one of the kids playing football in West Bengal called Bondopadhyay noticed that his football is usually made with hexagonal and pentagonal pieces. He mentioned this to Bonnerjee who found this unusual. Together they decided to try to create a football with either only hexagonal or only pentagonal pieces. They spent nearly 2 years at this and realized they needed lot more capital for this. This is where the left-leaning idea comes in. The government then decided that this was an important enough exploration and set up a small factory to create footballs either exclusively with pentagonal pieces or exclusively with hexagonal pieces. After 4 more years of effort and labour they realized that this was impossible and took the problem to Mr. Chakraborty who promised to solve this for them. Unfortunately, the Bengal famine struck at around this time and this had to be pushed to the backburner as stuff like procuring food became more important.

Finally, in late 1945 there was a breakthrough. Mr. Chakraborty being a mathematician used Graph Theory and established that hexagons and pentagons were required to get to a 3-dimensional shape that was more spherical A truncated icosahedron when filled with air resembles a sphere, apparently. (How would I know). Now, the three men behind this project - Mr. Bondopadhyay, Mr. Bonnerjee and Mr. Chakraborty (BBC hereafter) deemed that this was an important discovery and vowed that they would create a mechanism that would make it more popular. They realized that people would have to be more comfortable with mathematics in order to understand this clearly and so decided to move the state to focus on mathematical learning.

Around this time, IIM Calcutta came into being and the BBC decided that they would use IIM Calcutta as a tool to push through mathematical learning. They decided on that fateful day on 13th November 1961 that IIM Calcutta forever and ever would be distinguished by the fact that it was more quantitative in its leanings and any other IIM created before or since that day. They also strove to communicate this in every avenue possible. This is why IIM Calcutta to this day uses quantitative techniques extensively and elevates mathematical ideas above mere Soft-skills ones.

Thus, it has come to be that every time IIM Calcutta sets the CAT paper, we expect Quant to be tougher. Do not believe anyone who says otherwise.

Anyone else looking to employ some quality Fake News creators, you know whom to ping.

For the record, the current pentagon + hexagon design came into being some time in the 1960’s. So, make of the above story what you will.

Because IIM Calcutta is conducting the CAT, we can expect that it will have three sections, be held on two sessions on November 25th, be computer-based. Any other expectation, surmise, inference, hypothesis, supposition, speculation has as much credence as the story given above.

Best wishes for CAT preparation.