Don’t switch it off first Nagmani.

The GSB elections at the ISB are almost always keenly contested and thus declaring the results is a very sensitive activity for the staff of the Co curricular activities (CCA) team. Shiv has been doing this for years and I think I assisted him one year when this entire near fiasco happened.

This was a year when Pavit had declared that he was going to buy world peace after winning the elections and Rajesh Mani had declared that he is not half as bad as he looks. To be honest I always though he did not look all that bad at all … wonder what made him say that. I think Bharat Ayer the future NDTV Profit guy was the third candidate but I don’t remember if there was a fourth.

We had finished counting and were ready to declare results. Shiv’s experience told us that the moment the results would be sent by email, all the candidates and their string of supporters may descend on the CCA office.

The discussion that followed set us on a plan. We called Nagmani the office help woman and Shiv explained to her in great detail how she should use the mouse to click the ‘Send’ and once the screen changes immediately switch off the computer. The plan was to get into a car reach the ISB gate and call Nagmani and ask her to do this. We then planned to switch off the mobile phones and return back on Monday and hoped by then the storm would have subsided.

We reached the ISB gate and Shiv called Nagmani and said something to her in Telgu. A long silence from Shiv followed and after around a min he said ‘Shit’ and started to shout on phone. I could not understand a thing but what unfolded later makes me laugh even today.

Nagmani had first switched off the computer and thus has nothing on the screen to click.

Poor Shiv had to go back and set it up all over again and I don’t think he tried anything smart this time round.

The rationale behind my casual approach to life.

People often ask me how I could have been so causal with big decisions of my life, like my marriage with Anita, my taking up an MBA in a classless college like BVIMK or my not applying my mind to clear the NET exams of the UGC that would have ensured me a permanent job in a college in Bombay.

I too wonder but may be the story of ‘The Verger’ my mum often told me when I was a kid must have had something to do with it.

THE VERGER is a story by W. Somerset Maugham.

It was about an illiterate guy who worked in a Church in London on odd jobs like cleaning, dusting and its upkeep. Suddenly one day a new Catholic priest who was commissioned to reform the parish asked this illiterate and near uneducated verger to pass an exam to retain his job. The poor guy to retain his job tried desperately to clear the test but after several attempts realised that it was not his cup of tea. Desperately dejected he hoped for a miracle but nothing happened and he lost his job.

At such times we all know the walk back home is long and painful. To fumigate his sorrow the guy thought of having a smoke and to his surprise could not find a single cigarette shop on the really long street he was walking on.

A business idea was thus born in his mind and soon he executed it. Thank god he was not an MBA and thus did not waste time writing a ‘business plan.’
His cigarette selling business flourished and within a matter of years he became a rich man; Rich enough for the bankers to notice.

On one of his many regular visits to the bank a high ranking bank official called him to the investments office and explained to him the benefits of investing instead of using the savings option. Convincing as they are, the banker managed to make a kill and convinced our verger to invest. All that the verger was expected to do was read the papers and sign.

This is when the cat was let out of the bag and the verger confess that he could not neither read nor write. The banker almost feeling pity for him said something that provides the ironical climax of the story.

He said “do you mean to say you became such a rich man without knowing how to read or write...? Imagine what you could have become if you only knew to read and write...”

Pat came the verger’s reply... “well I would have been a VERGER at that church around the corner there.”

The Prefect Mistake (How I took up an MBA.)

The year was 1997. I was working for IMRB for some time now and making reasonably good money. My assignment can today be classified as a KPO/ BPO job but this was a time when no one had any idea what out sourcing was.
Although I worked in the Esplanade Mansion office of the IMRB in Bombay, my work was assigned from an office in Hong Kong. The job was all about analysing market research data that would come via email from Hong Kong. The problem was that the emails were generation next technology at that time and we had to go to our Nirmal Towers office to even check these incoming packets. Yes, believe it or not we did call these attachments to emails as packets. Once we got the email and the relevant attachment, we downloaded them on to the most unreliable storage devises of the time called floppy disks and transport the data to our desktops. This ensured a few trips between the offices a day and if lucky the data to be analysed would be on our desktops only by 6 in the evening. As the processing started after that, I had to stay back nights in office. With firm regularity, I travelled home only in the wee hours of the morning and thus returning back to work by 9 am to sign a muster was almost impossible.
Moreover the work I did was complex, used yet to be relied upon technology, subject to rejection, time consuming, tedious and most importantly not understood by anyone in my reference group. For example, the timekeeper (yes we had one) at the IMRB, employed by the HR of the company never understood that it was impossible for me to come at 9 am to sign a muster when I had just left office at 5 am. The timekeeper would insist on a ‘red mark’ on the register and three such marks would mean a causal leave (CL). Exceeding the number of permitted CLs per week which was 3 invited a Memo. Not replying to the Memo would mean a remark in the service book and no pay until justification. It was only during the clarification interview that the HR head would realise what was going on and for some strange reason even though the pay would be released no corrective procedural action for the red marks or the Memo would be initiated from his end.
More than me it was my parents who were impacted. My parents in their line of work took their service book and muster remarks very seriously. A Memo for them would mean some grave crime committed against organization like neglect of duty or embezzlement of funds. Also my family was a close knit one. Each one of us would usually comeback from outside and sit together and discuss what happened. This ritual though time consuming and almost an invasion of privacy was the binding force in the family. Eating out every day with hardly any physical exercise had now made me 145 kgs. I was finding it very difficult to move the ton around. With my erratic timings and my weight problem I was drifting apart from the family.
I think this is what they call pressure and thus the cookie crumbled. Suddenly one day Mum got palpitations. Not that this was a new sickness as this kind of a problem with mum’s Blood Pressure had happened in the past when I was in college but the difference here was I was not free and available to do the legwork. So dad was stressed out a lot. Almost a month after mum recovered, Dad got a heart attack. My dad who is, was and will always remain the back bone of my existence was never so sick. I had no idea what was happening to me and my life. It as if the rest of life took a back seat. I had to become the man of the house. I had to look in to my mother’s eyes and tell her “My father is not dead, he is just sick.” Not knowing want else to say, we had to simply resort to stopping each other from crying.
This episode jolted us out of our comfort zone.
My mum and I would take turns at the hospital vigil. At the hospital one day I met a college friend of mine. He was there because his father too was admitted to the ICU. In the waiting room outside the ICU, I saw him struggling with some math like problems. I took keen interest in what he was doing and after some time indulged myself in solving the puzzles. Soon he told me that the puzzles I was solving with extraordinary easy were not puzzles as such but aptitude testing material that frequently appears in MBA entrance exams. Later in the day that friend of mine told my mum that I was too good at the MBA entrance stuff and should try my luck at the Common Entrance Test. Convinced that I had no future with the job I was doing both my mum and my dad even in that condition forced me to think of an MBA.
An MBA is a big decision in a students’ life. However like many decisions of my life, I took to an MBA ‘Just like that.’
The World around people take up an MBA after a few years of work. The logic is to use the MBA College like a dictionary and refer to it with problems you encountered at work. Using your MBA years to find solutions for the problems you encountered while working makes your MBA sojourn more meaningful.
However in India we do it differently. We first try and finish all our education at one shot. So we go through our bachelors’ degree and then straight into an MBA. At the MBA we equip ourselves with solutions for the business world, which we have no idea how or were to apply. Then we go out into the big bad corporate world ‘looking for problems’ which would help us apply our knowledge. Now I always thought leading a life looking for problems is not such a great idea.
Once dad was back from the hospital I went back to work and got myself re engrossed in the routine forgetting the MBA preparations. My routine was tough and my schedules were punishing so there was no time to think of anything else.
I still remember the day before my entrance test; I was working till 2.30 in the night. I don’t know how I managed to get up the next morning and go to the examination centre. At the centre I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of people that had come to give the test plus the fact that each one of them was preparing for the test vigorously till the last minute. After the test too I met a few acquaintances furiously debating some college ranking. All this puzzled me as I had not taken my MBA decision seriously.
Once I went back to work I made inquiries about an MBA course and its prospects. Even though I was an educated son of educated parents, I had no idea about how admissions to an MBA work.
The scene was very complex. There were some 2 to 3 hundred MBA colleges in Maharashtra affiliated to the various universities. The admissions to their MBA programme were centralised. Which means a common entrance test was taken and then a group discussion was held and then we were subjected to a personal interview. At the end of this we got a score and a rank. With this rank we were suppose to appear for a counselling session. At the counselling we get to chose from the available colleges from all over Maharashtra. Though the system looks simple, what makes is complex is the stature and reputation of each MBA college and the placement record of the institution.
One day I got my results and I realize I had not done that badly after all. With the kind of score I could comfortably get an admission in a good college in Bombay. However things were made difficult by the fact that most of the seats left in Bombay were ‘paid seats.’ So not knowing the consequences of a bad college, I decided to take the economic option and go out of Bombay to do an MBA….
Moreover what I thought were good colleges were not necessarily the top colleges in Bombay according to the others who were appearing for the counselling. Some of the people who appeared for the counselling ahead of me had taken up colleges in Pune and one had even gone to Nasik. There was hardly any time to think when my turn came. So I asked the polite looking gentleman on the other side of the ‘Counsellor’ sign where would I get a free seat. To my surprise he said Kolhapur. I had once been to Kolhapur so I kind of liked the option. I asked him to tell me which was the number one college in Kolhapur. What I meant was a qualitative numbering implying the best college but he was a simple man and went by the first college on his list as far as Kolhapur is concerned. Bharthi Vidyapeeth Institute of Management was the number one college on extra large register and I don’t think was the best college on any list but not knowing what to do I signed on the dotted line, submitted my certificates (as I had not got the necessary drafts) and took a plunge into the unknown.