Learn from the Best faculty member team in India
We’re here to help you improve as fast as possible. With us, you’ll always be studying with the most updated, tried-and-tested videos & study materials. We don't overwhelm you with lot of ineffective materials.
Bundles
LoadingWe've a killer team at the helm
Rajesh Balasubramanian is an Electrical Engineer from IIT, Madras, Class of 2001 and completed his PGDM from IIM Bangalore in 2003. He runs 2IIM's CAT program and handles more than half the classes for CAT preparation at Chennai. He insists on handling the critical topics - Number Theory, Geometry, Permutation and Combinations for all batches. He also runs workshops on the key topics and on test-taking strategies in October every year.
Rajesh builds all the content for 2IIM - class sheets, practice exams, study material, online mock CATs, etc. He designs the pedagogy and trains the teachers at 2IIM as well. As the person responsible for content generation, he greatly values the experience of taking CAT and has taken it every year since 2010.
He scored 100th percentile in CAT 2011, CAT 2012, CAT 2014 and CAT 2017. Rajesh also took up CAT 2018 and scored a fabulous 99.77 but he cribs about it. His scorecard for CAT 2018 can be found here - CAT 2018 scorecard. Rajesh also took up CAT 2019 and scored a fabulous 99.99. His scorecard for CAT 2019 can be found here - 2019 scorecard. He likes few things more than teaching Math and insists to this day that he is a better teacher than exam-taker.
Baskar founded 2IIM and continues to head the parent company. He is a Mechanical Engineer from College of Engineering, Guindy, Class of 1991 and completed his PGDM from IIM Calcutta in 1994.
Post his Mechanical Engineering, Baskar joined the venerable Larsen and Toubro in Mumbai. Once in the job, he realized that for all its strengths, L&T was going to be a tough place to make a mark and threw everything into his CAT preparation. He cracked CAT 1991 and joined IIM Calcutta. Upon completing his PGDM from IIM-C, Baskar spent two years at Kotak Mahindra Finance living it up in an Investment Banking career. He soon got bored, and decided to take up the entrepreneurial route.
He started a number of ventures, with the most notable being a CAT coaching institute in Pune, a medical transcription company in Madurai and then a dotcom Company in Chennai (He has seen it all).
Among all this, the dotcom company is really the one that got away (the other two have helped in laying the foundation for future successes). He started the Company pre-boom, managed to keep external funding at bay for a short while; then finally consented to having investors bring in funds into the firm. As luck would have it, just as investors were preparing to go headlong, the dotcom bust happened, and things ground to a halt.
In many ways, this was a good result. If he had become one of those heady dotcom start-up success stories, 2IIM would never have happened. In hindsight, it is great for the rest of the world that the bust happened when it did. And knowing Baskar, I think he would have never been able to live it down if the bust had happened after he had collected his gazillions.
In any event, Baskar started Ascent Education in 2001. Ascent Education has been training students for the CAT exam ever since (although Baskar's teaching experience predates this). The brand 2IIM came into being a few years later. In the first few years, it was practically a one-man show, with Baskar the counselor, marketer, teacher, web-developer doing everything. Slowly, Ascent Education expanded, the company now has spread to two centers in Chennai, across five product categories.
Baskar has taken CAT more than 10 times and cracked it a number of times. He is probably one of the most experienced trainers in the country. In spite of all this experience, he retains his curiosity and his desire to spend maximum time with students. He probably clocks in the maximum hours in classrooms at Ascent Education even in 2020. In every calendar year since 2001, Baskar has spent at least 500 hours in classroom training students for aptitude-based examinations.
He has coached many of the faculty members at 2IIM and therefore has the license to take many liberties with them. I (Rajesh Balasubramanian) joined as 2IIM's first part-time faculty in 2003, and have learnt a lot about teaching from Baskar ever since.
Bharathwaj is a Mechanical engineer from St.Peters Engineering College. After working as a design engineer in Research & Development of Commercial Vehicle Brakes for 4 years, he decided that he had enough of the corporate sector and joined the Marketing and Sales Department in an EdTech startup (2IIM). Luckily for 2IIM, he is also a great teacher !! He takes Quants, Verbal and Logical Reasoning Classes for TANCET, CAT, XAT, and GMAT whenever he gets a chance. He went on to do his MBA from IIT Madras, batch of 2016-2018 and came back to join us post MBA and currently runs Operations, Media, Marketing & Sales.
Although he started out as a Quants Faculty, he is quickly making inroads as a Verbal Faculty. His reading list, dubbed "Bharath's Reading List for CAT" is a huge hit among CAT aspirants.
