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On a rainy day last month, 22-year-old Vishalakshi Bharadwaj put on a freshly ironed blazer and headed for Vashi railway station platform with a laptop in one hand and a shoe brush in the other. Forty other girls and boys squatted on the floor with her, all keeping an eye out for customers wearing dirty leather shoes.

Some commuters did mistake them for ticketcheckers but had they noticed the PowerPoint presentation running on their laptop, they would have realised that the blazer-clad kids weren't there to check passes but to sell some. The shoe-polish exercise was their way of publicising a charity rock show and raising funds for an orphanage. "Some people gave us Rs 100 while some shooed us away. It was a lesson on how to handle people," says Bharadwaj.

Today's B-school students are fast realising that management is not just about wearing a tie and drawing obscene salaries. And learning the art can mean getting your hands dirty.

It's these kinds of projects that professors like Sridhar Iyer of Father Agnel's , who is called 'Zara Hatke' and 'Adolf Hitler' alternately, insist on including in the curriculum. "We have moved from a knowledge economy to a creative one. We don't want to churn out management technicians but those with a genuine concern for society and country," he says. Students, he adds, have to be made capable "to face their graveyard which is on the road" .

On one such road in Lucknow, SP Jain student Bikash Agarwal sold carrots and tomatoes and even shooed away the cows that tried to eat them. As part of a competition 'The Next CEO' , organised by IIM-Lucknow , Agarwal and other contenders had to sell vegetables on a busy Lucknow street and come back with profits. Among the candidates were some who didn't even know the Hindi names of certain greens.

Agarwal sold his veggies at almost double the cost price and went on to win the competition. "We had to shout and scream to attract attention. The trick was to make a pitch at people who looked well-off ," recalls Agarwal, who managed to emotionally blackmail a smoker into buying vegetables with the money he had kept aside for two cigarettes and a curious journalist into buying a lemon for Rs 5. His father, however, was not very impressed. "You went all the way to IIM to sell vegetables?" he asked.

Agarwal is used to such comments. Back in Mumbai , when he had to knock on stubborn doors to sell a children's comic called Dimdima, someone said, "If you had studied and not wasted your childhood, you wouldn't have had to do this job." Others were polite enough to slam the door in his face, some watchmen threw him out of the building and finally, there were the odd ones who showed interest. "I now have more respect for salesmen," Agarwal says.

Earlier this year, Lolita D'souza and her 25 batchmates delivered newspapers to 25 homes in Vashi before dawn. "Some residents refused to take the paper from us as they thought we were trying to break in," says D'souza , adding that while climbing those zillion stairs, she learnt the essence of 'time management' .

Professors have their own term for such personality enriching initiatives - 'Interventions' . In Rustomji business school in Dahisar, principal Hanif Kanjer has made flute and salsa classes a mandatory part of the first year syllabus. "Playing the flute regulates breathing and improves speech, while salsa is necessary for social skills. If you dance well, you are noticed," says Kanjer. A boy who hesitates to dance with a girl at first is made to dance with two, "to overcome his inhibitions" , he says.

There are also compulsory bootcamps during which students are treated like participants in an adventure reality show. They are made to swing from trees, cook without utensils and handle disaster management situations. "One girl broke down after climbing a tree as she didn't want to swing. After one and a half hours of coaxing by her teammates, she completed the task," Kanjer recalls.

Impromptu situations like these don't just pump students with adrenaline but also equip them with the grit and determination required to complete presentations overnight and deal with extreme situations like zero capital.

At the Innowe lab in Matunga's Welingkar Institute of Management, professor of business design Kaustubh Dhargalkar, who says he hates academics, recalls a morning not so long ago when teachers frisked every student and took away cash and mobile phones. "The students' challenge was to go out that day and make money by ethical means," he says.

The class of 60 came back with a total of about Rs 12,000 and some exemplary stories. "One student helped a tea stall vendor make an extra profit of 50 paise per vada pao. After 12 or 13 sales, he bought a train ticket to Churchgate, took foreigners on a tour around south Mumbai and made $12," says Dhargalkar . Another worked at a library and yet another student gave a lecture at his alma mater on a subject that he could claim mastery over - 'How to enter a business school' .