“Hello and welcome ladies, gentlemen and inconsequential scum-beings from the outer fringes of the galaxy”. If I were to have my way, those would be the opening lines of the ‘Exceptionally Deceiving B-School Oscars 2006’. Honestly, if I were to have my way at all, there would actually be a ‘Deceiving B-School Oscars’ every year – “Commemorating the merciless, heartless conduct of top B-schools in the country” – that, of course, would be the awards’ tag-line. And did you ask why do we have a tag-line at all? Well, that is primarily because it is fashionable to have a tag-line for everything today. So I wake up in the morning and start my day sitting on the pot – ‘Classic, Stinky, and nothing else’. I move on to brush my teeth in the wash-basin – ‘Dirty, perennially choked piece of pointless ceramic’. So the story goes about tag-lines, but we digress.

And we come back on track again. Without further ado about stinky toilets – ‘Functioning flushes form fabulous fantasies’, let us get straight to the point and kick off the awards…err, the awards ceremony.

1. Multiple Fraudulent Revenue Stream Award

Symbiosis Group of a xrilliofentiwillion Institutes, All over the Milky Way
This year’s top honours are bagged by Symbiosis – an education giant that has so many business schools on its list that on the latest (and super-prestigious) ‘Maharashtra’s Top 1000 Business Schools’, more than half are Symbi (as it is ‘fondly’ called) institutes. So much for Symbi’s undying commitment towards making an MBA out of every engineer, doctor, lawyer and street-side mongrel!
Symbi snatches the Oscar from its nearest rivals (and quite a few of them, too) by sheer dint of its innovative use of size. While unsuspecting wannabe MBAs dig deep within their cash reservoirs to stitch together five hundred whole rupees to register for the Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), Symbi mercilessly snaps all their necks and on the very next registration page asks them to select the institutes they would want to apply to. The catch? You are required to pay in excess of Rs 1,200 for every institute you are interested in. Neat, eh? You bet it is. The money, needless to say, is pumped right back into the system. Symbi builds more institutes to reap more cash which then builds more institutes…it’s a vicious circle, don’t you think? In effect, over the years, Symbi’s repertoire has now expanded to generously include the ‘Symbiosis Institute of Business Technology for Engineers’ and the ‘Symbiosis School of Management for Deranged Monkeys’.

1. Award for Maximum Opaque Black Holes

S P Jain Institute of Management Research, Mumbai
Transparency is not a basic (or even expected) B-School selection procedure parameter, but the boffins at SPJIMR have this year tasted the inimitable high of success, after years of a relentless pursuit of making their admission process as unfathomable and opaque as possible. Group Interviews, questions on ‘character, morals, values and ethics’ were some of the most crucial elements that made the goal achievable. Young men and women applying next year to SPJIMR: the interview questions are some of the simplest you will ever answer – “In case you are offered a bribe to blah blah, will you accept it?” Try answering, “Of course I will. What kind of silly question is that?” At the time of answering, roll your eyes, stick your tongue out and generally act as if the panel has lost its bearings. It will surely ease the pressure for your peers accompanying you at the GIs.

1. Award for Most Innovative Revenue Generation Strategies

Management Development Institute, Gurgaon
When it comes to developing hitherto unheard of strategies for maximizing revenue generated from the sale of admission forms, MDI is in a stratospheric league of its own. None of the institutes, even with their Rs 1,000+ admission form pricing, come close to MDI’s fool-proof methodologies. MDI requires applicants to fill ‘bubbles’ in the admission form in pen. Yes, you read that right. Mistakes, you must have guessed by now, entail our desperate wannabe MBA to purchase a second form. Then a third. And then a fourth. So the trick lies in maximizing the probability of form-filling errors. The answer, just change the ordering of the ‘bubbles’ to start with a ‘1’ instead of a ‘0’. For next year, pilot projects being beta-tested currently include ordering the ‘bubbles’ using a random number generator. So the bubbles will now be randomly ordered instead of 0-9. Ah, I think MDI should be pre-awarded this award for the next three and a half decades.

1. Lifetime Achievement Award for Achieving Nothing At All

Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Swimming Pool equipped Branches across India
Mr Pony-Tail is a mastermind strategist. He has been reading ‘The Art of War’ since he was a little kid. The downer? He hasn’t been reading anything else. He reckoned that by adding a ‘Planning’ somewhere in ‘IIM’, he would convince the youth to ‘dare to dream beyond the IIMs’. Alas, somewhere the planning failed, and Pony uncle just ended up planning his downfall. Lately, Pony uncle’s cheerful visage graces full-page ads in national dailies, encouraging the common man to bet on IIPM’s placement statistics for this year. What better way to create a larger-than-life compelling brand, I say? Master stroke, indeed!
Speculation is rife that next year Pony uncle will take on Harvard, Stanford, Yale and other such pitiful foreign business schools in a fight to the end…the end of management education in the world, that is. His eventful chronicles will form part of a movie titled ‘Tum Toh Thehre Pardesi – A Planman Consulting Mega-success Venture’.

This is, by no means, an exhaustive list of upcoming B-Schools with more than a few tricks up their sleeve to dupe young men and women who want to do an MBA in times when MBAs are paid no less than a crore for a year’s work.

Anyway, we shall be returning to the saga in a while – the view from the other side: ten IE windows open at once, each on a different thread at pagalguy.com; the anxious wait for results; the begging and pleading (on your knees, boy) in front of the higher authorities and the Highest Force; the list is endless. To use a clichéd term – watch this space.

Yesterday was a rainy Sunday evening. I was stepping into a new profession, a new home, and a new life. New friends had laid out a spread of the most delectable…liquor to welcome me into the new friend-circle. Noble thought indeed, but bottles of Kingfisher jostling for space with pints of Romanov was not exactly my idea of a ‘welcome’ party. Couple that with the detestable smoke from an assortment of cigarettes, and this was looking like it would to be a very, very tough journey ahead.

I was wrong. The ‘Booze Binges’ evaporated into nothingness as mysteriously as the first one had appeared – Next Gen never paid enough, I figured. A week into the new life, I also figured it was not likely to be a difficult journey at all; rather this was going to be one helluva roller-coaster ride with the whackiest characters ever seen and the weirdest situations ever experienced.

I was right. It did not take me too much time to blend in with my new colleagues and, rather surprisingly, join the heavy-duty bitching sessions at a level of competency and proficiency that my colleagues had acquired only after ‘working’ hard for a few months before I came. Also surprising was the fact that I – a documented, proven snob – had no trouble in opening up to the threesome.

It is surprising how people can make such a massive impact in such a short period of time. Of course, certain things helped. We were bound by a common thread of interest that was so strong it was almost like a massive iron rope. We were in a small-ish office that was home (and rather literally too) to just about ten people. Weekday evenings, Saturday nights and whole weekends were spent sitting like losers in the eerie glow of CRT monitors (cheap ones). Needless to say, in a setting like this, peppered by the catalyst of having so few people doing generally nothing, relationships and bonds solidified swiftly.

Bonding leads to changes, and it was no different in our case. As we gingerly sampled the others’ choice of music, food and girls (the last one, only figuratively – pun unintended), it was turning out to be a thoroughly enjoyable learning curve, almost like the curves that chic-in-white-with-the-wet-hair-who-got-a-lift-on-one-young-man’s-bike sported. Anyway, Bunny gave up his repeat-till-kingdom-come bouts of listening to ‘Aur kya’…and nothing else. His new Winamp playlist had just one song: ‘Coming Back to Life’ – repeat-till-kingdom-come, of course. Amit was building a reputation (or a notoriety) for demolishing lunch boxes with disdain. Especially when Kartik’s came full of ‘Dhansak’. Kartik, meanwhile, was turning out to be a big ‘hothead across over there’, taking pangas with the rest as if he would be the first to kick the job and ‘b-b-b-b-buzz off’. What an ensemble cast, I say!

It is also astonishing how years of a dead existence often end up as blank pages in the book of life, and but a few weeks of a colourful being can effortlessly fill up innumerable chapters with accounts of thoroughly enjoyable episodes. In many ways, this is what happened to me. While the years from Standard X to Standard XII have been effectively whitewashed out of my memory, it is these last few months that have added a generous dash of eastmancolour to what was a dull, dreary, nerdy life experience. The stories are too many to recount…most of them will now be tinged...

...tinged by a feeling of emptiness, of having to see one of us go off in pursuit of greener pastures (and better babes, though how that will be effected in the absence of broadband, beats me). Life will never be the same again. And though it sounds too filmy to be penned down, it is true. We will go through the motions of everyday office. Once in a while the vacant seat will hit with the hard ferociousness born out of longing. The booze will not stop – it will reduce to a trickle. The bitching will not stop – it will abate just a little. The chuckles will not stop – there will just be one laugh less. Life will not stop – it will trundle along, on three wheels instead of four. You know what the sad part is? Soon, it will have to wheelie along on two wheels instead of three. Will miss you guys!

I have realised that this is increasingly looking like the prayer meeting readout to pray for the soul of the departed to rest in peace. It is not! Broadband lives on, and budget airlines thrive. The Golden Quadrilateral is 95.483% complete. Ab Dilli durr nahin. India is growing at 8%+. Our salaries will grow at 80. Soon we will have all the money in the world to fly down (or ride, or drive) to a common location once every month, eat good food, drink sophisticated wine and bitch about life and wife. We’ll have the resources to meet up once every six months, have a pyjama party, relive the haunted house with the dysfunctional flushes and bitch some more about life and Bunny’s latest flings.

Till then gentlemen...

PS: Mein rehta toh…;)

It is the kind of moment people wait a lifetime for. As I sit in the driver’s seat and stare over the hood right into the eye of the famed three-pointed star, I wonder where the sense of heightened excitement is. Why are my sweat glands hibernating when they should be working overtime to create beads of sweat on my forehead? Why are my adrenaline producers shaming me by putting up this public display of their depressing impotency? Where is the customary lump in the throat? The mandatory quickening pulse?

It is a white Mercedes-Benz E-class that costs in excess of Rs 40 lakh. Note that I eschew quoting an exact price. In the segment we are talking about, it is unfashionable – even insulting – to speak in terms of ‘rupees’. The ‘Least Count’ that buyers in this segment can identify with is ‘Ten lakhs’. On the same lines, whether the car produces 280bhp or 300, whether it does 0-100 in the elevty-fourth xrillionth of a second or three-twelveteenth fraction of a moment is a matter of scarce consequence. Honestly, even trying to find out whether this super-luxury barge is an E240 or an E280 would prove futile, because apart from a tiny difference in badges on the boot, you would not be able to make out. I wasn’t. Well, for the record, this one is an E280. Petrol or diesel, then? And with a Mercedes-Benz, does even that matter? Anyway, a petrol it is.

I am trying to squeeze myself rather clumsily into the elegant leather-crafted driver’s seat. Some debut this is starting off to be. I realise – in good time, of course – that the seat has a few zillion adjustments that can allow every crest and trough of the body to fit snugly into the seat. All of the settings, mind you, are electric, lest you waste your million-dollar-a-minute time trying to figure out which lever on the seat will adjust what. Thirty seconds into the activity, though, and I figure (with much chagrin) that I can’t seem to make up my mind with respect to the precise seat height I want, to go with the exact degree of under-thigh support, to match with just the right amount of lumbar cushion. Confusing already? I haven’t even spoken about how the addition of three more parameters can increase the number of possibilities exponentially. Anyway, after playing around with the switches for a while (and pretending that I can really differentiate between the levels of comfort different settings offer), I reckon it has been quite a while. I cannot allow my debut to sink in never-ending permutations of what the Merc’s magic seat can do. There surely is much more to the car. Or is there?

Time to lift off. Snick the characterless auto-stick into ‘D’, and floor the accelerator pedal. Good night, then. I am almost lapsing into an afternoon siesta; this car is b****y driving itself. On a ramrod straight section of the expressway, I stare at the needles rather desolately. 140-160-180-200 ticks the speedometer with barely a care in the world for the laws of physics or aerodynamics. The tacho needle swings to 6500, swings back rapidly to 3000, and begins its cold, clinical climb back to its peak – 6500. Inside, it is all so insanely insulated, it is like travelling in a time machine. Wind noise, tyre noise and other noises are reduced to mere concepts in textbooks; the sad part is that you can’t even hear the engine note. It’s a different world inside – eerily quiet, queerly disconnected; much like a video game being played in an airtight room at the top of the Himalayas. Not a single vibe transmits through any body part that is in contact with the car, and that only heightens the feeling of numbness that is only just starting to take over my entire body. Suddenly I am not dejected with the abject unresponsiveness of any of my senses. Come to think of it, this is so undeserving in any case.

Two hundred kilometres an hour, then, is reduced to a mere statistic. One of those things you can brag about at the all-guy pyjama parties. So while the entire gang looks up to you with almost-idolising admiration, your conscience nibbles away at the very heart of your er…heart. Because deep inside, you know that even a novice 18-year old – even George W Bush – can go faster than 200km/h on a straight road in a powerful, self-propelling Merc.

My twenty-minute ‘intimate’ interaction with the E280 is coming to an end. There is no drum roll crescendo to mark the culmination of an especially significant event. Well, by now, I am not expecting any at all. If one were to ever try making love to a pillow, it would be quite a lot like driving the E280. In many ways, then, I am somewhat glad that precious adrenaline was not wasted over a pointless drive, which will forever remain a mere milestone in my automotive life; a milestone devoid of all emotion whatsoever.

As the Merc coasts to an eventless stop, my colleagues rush towards me, expecting to find a three-pointed-starry eyed Jayesh staring dreamily into emptiness. Instead they find a Jayesh with a weird expression on his face. Significantly, he has nothing to say. And that does not happen very often. Well Sirs, it took me a while to collect my thoughts; but now that I have, I am having a tough time controlling the flow of words. So what really is new?

‘Two hundred kilometres an hour’ is new, and it has the potential to radically alter one’s subconscious perception of speed. That speed, even if travelled at, for a meagre ten minutes skews one’s perspectives beyond recognition. I step out of the ‘hallowed’ Merc into a diesel-engined Innova, and trust me, it takes me more than a few minutes to get my bearings in place. In the ten minutes that I travelled at 200km/h, my mind had already made changes to what I perceived as ‘speed’. Without my knowledge. Consequently, driving the Innova flat out in fifth gear turns into a restless experience. I keep trying to figure out what is wrong with the car. Why won’t it go ‘fast’? One glance at the speedo – with the needle refusing to budge beyond the 150 mark – and it strikes me that this is just about as fast as the Innova will go. Outside, the entire world seems to be moving in an extended, all-pervasive, real-life slowmo. Words can never express how thoroughly numbing the entire experience feels. With the sensation of speed metamorphosed so rapidly, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how fast I am going just by looking at the scenery whizzing past backwards. After a couple of significantly scary misjudgements with the speed – cornering at close to 120km/h in the Innova – I resolve to keep a close watch on the speedo to re-tune my mind to come back to its senses.

My mind drifts to my sixteen-year old Maruti 800. All of thirty-seven horses, and yet the most thrilling, the most scintillating, the most memorable and the most enjoyable drives. When you have only 796cc and thirty-seven horses at your disposal, every cubic centimetre and every horse counts. Each one plays a role equally significant; as opposed to an army of a few hundred steeds fighting with each other so bitterly that it has to be kept under wraps of expensive insulation.

It is not about a hundred horses, or even about a thousand. It is about the experience, the joy of communicating with a car that wants to get you familiar with her innards, rather than ruthlessly insulate everything. It is not about how quick you can accelerate, or even about how fast you can go. It is about how wide your grin is at the end of the drive. It is that feeling for the car. It is that raw emotion between man and machine; the emotion that logic is so thoroughly incapable of describing. Suddenly, I miss my 800 a lot; much, much more than I have in a very long time.

It is a white Maruti 800 that is, sadly, worth a few thousand rupees. But deep inside, I know exactly what I would choose, given a choice between a white Maruti 800 and a white Mercedes-Benz E280. Every. Single. Time.

Picture courtesy Kunal Khadse