Course Review
Course Name: The Remains of the MBA (ID ODSFC102x)
Instructor Name: Dr Saral Mukherjee
Curriculum Type: Reflective, 5 English Sessions, Free, Online IIMA
Inspired by: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
I came to The Remains of the Day through an academic doorway, but the book did not remain academic for long. I had been searching for material related to sentimental longing, reminiscence, and nostalgia when I accidentally found Professor Saral Mukherjee’s course, The Remains of the MBA, on the IIM Ahmedabad platform. The course frames Ishiguro’s novel as a prompt for reflection on what really matters at the end of a career and how one might live with fewer regrets, and that framing stayed with me as I watched all five lectures. Professor Saral Mukherjee teaches at IIM Ahmedabad and lists The Remains of the MBA among the courses he offers there, which gave the whole experience an unusual seriousness and warmth.
What moved me first was not only the book, but the manner of the teaching. Professor Mukherjee came across as deeply caring and accommodating toward the students attending from different outdoor spots and indoor auditoriums across the IIM Ahmedabad campus. He kept asking those sitting outside to shift away from the harsh glare of the sunlight, and that small gesture revealed something about his way of teaching. It did not feel like he was merely delivering content. It felt as though he was looking after attention itself, protecting the conditions in which thought becomes possible.
My favorite moment came in session four, or rather in the feeling that moment left behind. At the close of the lecture, he asked the students, many of them final-year MBA students on the edge of graduation, to put everything aside for a moment and turn backward to look at the IIMA building and the sky above it as sunset slipped into twilight. That gesture seemed perfectly aligned with the course’s central aim, which is to make future leaders pause and reflect before the momentum of professional life carries them too far into a career they have not fully examined. It was a beautiful pedagogic act because it asked them, and by extension asked me, to look back before moving ahead.
Then I returned to Ishiguro’s novel with a different kind of attention. Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, initially appeared to me as a man of remarkable discipline. He believes that dignity lies in restraint, in flawless service, and in never allowing one’s personal feelings to interfere with duty. In the book, he explicitly links dignity to emotional control and to the professionalism of the great English butler, and he devotes himself to that ideal with near-religious seriousness. At first, I admired him. Then, slowly, I began to feel sorrow for him.
Stevens is tragic because he has mistaken suppression for strength. He is so committed to the role of the perfect butler that he becomes unable to respond honestly to pain, affection, desire, and moral doubt. He cannot comfort his own dying father as a son might wish to do, because he is too busy being impeccable in service. He cannot meet Miss Kenton in the emotional space she repeatedly opens for him, because he is frightened by what honesty may demand. He even continues to defend Lord Darlington long after history has exposed the limits of that loyalty. What looks like dignity slowly reveals itself as a life built on refusal.
Miss Kenton affected me differently. She is warm, observant, spirited, and brave in ways that Stevens is not. She brings flowers to his dark pantry, challenges his evasions, notices his father’s decline, and refuses to let the rituals of the house erase ordinary human truth. She is not sentimental in any weak sense. Rather, she is emotionally intelligent. She understands that care sometimes arrives in the form of insistence. When she confronts Stevens, she is not trying to humiliate him. She is trying to bring him back into life.
What I learned from Stevens and Miss Kenton is that two people may inhabit the same house and yet live by radically different moral vocabularies. Stevens believes dignity means composure. Miss Kenton suggests, without ever stating it so abstractly, that dignity may also mean responsiveness, tenderness, and the courage to name what is fading before it is too late. Stevens clings to form. Miss Kenton leans toward truth. The heartbreak of the novel is that he understands her too late.
This deeply altered my own feeling about dignity. Before reading the book closely, I think I associated dignity with stoicism, self-command, and a capacity to carry one’s burden quietly. Ishiguro unsettled that view. After Stevens, I cannot think of dignity only as control. There is something undignified about a life so disciplined that it loses touch with love, grief, and moral judgment. Dignity, I now feel, is not the absence of feeling. It is the ability to remain answerable to feeling without being destroyed by it.
At the same time, something remains unresolved for me. I still admire Stevens. That is the uncomfortable truth. I admire his seriousness, his devotion to work, his instinct for excellence, and his desire to serve something larger than himself. Those are not trivial virtues. Yet the novel leaves me with the question that the course also seems to raise for ambitious professionals: what if excellence, pursued without reflection, becomes a refined form of loss? What if a person can be admirable in method and mistaken in life?
That unresolved feeling matters to me because I came to this book through research on nostalgia. The novel shows that nostalgia is not simply a soft longing for the past. It is also a painful reckoning with the selves we might have been. Miss Kenton’s letter is full of memory, but memory in this novel is not decorative. It exposes what was missed, what was deferred, and what can no longer be repaired. Stevens’s journey becomes less a trip across England than a belated journey into self-recognition.
What I want to carry forward from the book, and from Professor Mukherjee’s thoughtful course, is a more demanding idea of self-reflection. I want to carry the reminder that one must occasionally turn around, as those students were asked to do, and look at the building behind, the sky above, the evening arriving. Not every backward glance is weakness. Some backward glances save us from living mechanically. Some teach us how not to confuse role with self.
If Stevens has stayed with me, it is because he represents a danger familiar to many serious people. One can become so invested in competence that one forgets to ask whether one is giving one’s best years to the right ends, the right loyalties, the right silences. Miss Kenton stays with me for the opposite reason. She reminds me that emotional truth is not an interruption of life. It is life calling us back to itself.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
Reference
Ishiguro, K. (2009). The Remains of the Day. Faber & Faber.
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Reviewed by
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive PhD Candidate
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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