Straight from nowhere...

That Feeling!

2009-02-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

You look at the clock. It's 5 minutes to 10. You know you have five minutes to gather yourself, draw the legs of your pressed pair of trousers upon yourself, wrap the trouser waist around your hanging striped shirt with buttons yet to find their respective holes, plug that fattening (from credit card slips, forgotten invoices, occasional self-photos and a motley of obscure visiting cards) wallet into your back pocket, toss the car keys into left side pocket and mobile into right, guess out belt hoops and weave the snaking leather into it, grab a stale sandwich from the covered plate on the dining table, run the fingery comb through the still-wet hair, glance for a second at your reflection passing behind the mirror, secure your feet and rush out, half closing the door. You know all that. And you have done that, year after year after year. With practiced ease and nonchalance.

Today, however, it's a bit different. You still look at the ticking clock. Yes, five minutes to 10.

Just as you pull the trouser on yourself, pull blood to your leg muscles in an attempt to sprint, you see a pair of little legs on your bed kick air. You see little hands clenching and unclenching and cutting the cake of air at random angles. You hear faint cough sounds, exaggerated breath sounds. You hear this beside your pale sleepless wife, who has just closed her eyes, swollen with unspent nights. You have faint memory of that previous night; lights being turned on, cry-sounds, someone sitting up on the bed with bleary drowsy eyes till the next time you woke up again. To find her still sitting on the bed, with a bundle in hand, hushing it, shaking it to silence. You had gone back to sleep, partly concerned, partly unconcerned. But when you have taken your bath and have freshened up, the faint images of last night pin you to the wall and spills guilt from your perforated skins.

So you decide, while still looking at the clock. Unsure. For sure. You take the bundle in your hand before it explodes and wakes up everyone in its wake. You don't want that to happen. You feel responsible. Embarrassed. Guilty. Loved. Rather possessed by love. A salad of emotions.

Little legs kick your gut. They rumple the pressed shirt. They enter the gaps between button holes. A warm softness presses against your chest. Tiny nails scratch your face-wash dried cheeks. Ooops! hurts. You bring your face closer. Milky air hangs loosely around. And the clock ticks away. It shatters your thresholds, limits, estimations, calculations. No, you can't reach in time. You know that by now. But you are fettered. By the looks from large eyeballs in small sockets. A tiny mound of a nose with flared nostrils. Two lines of lips that curve like a beak.

The expression on the face of the bundle changes. Thousands lines of white appear on the skin of pink. You know that explosion is not far away. In a Hollywoodian effort, you throw all your tricks in diffusing the bomb. In silence. With each tick of the ignored clock, you see your efforts failing. What if he starts a full-scale weep? You sweat from concern. From anticipation. But you still keep at it.

Your hands ache from patting. Your waist feel numb. But there isn't much scope to correct the position and restart the diffusion process. So you hang on. With an aching body, you shake that soft puddle of moving flesh and soak up every moment of it. You are now playing against yourself. Those large eyes are still looking from behind the wide-open lids. You feel tired. Spent.

You look around. Your wife's sleepy face. The ceiling with a fan hanging from it. The trespassing rays of the morning sun through curtain gaps. And then back to your undulating lap. And you notice tiny lids closing down. An elation runs through your anatomy like an electric spark. You feel the moment of "Yes, I can" as you keep working at it till the tiny lump falls silent, motionless.

What you feel is a strange feeling. Of course mixed with warmth from warm water running down your trousers. As if nothing else matters. Your 35-hours work-days fade into trivialities, tight deadlines lose their significance, boardroom presentations seem like water cooler talks. That rush of blood tells you that NOW you have really arrived. The sense of achievement and even more, the contentment dwarfs every bit of success that you have ever felt in your life.

You look at the loveliest thing you have ever created and smile into the thinning air at that defining moment of success. What a feeling! The clock stops. It runs out of ticks.

Slamina

2009-02-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

They saw Heaven get emptied. They knew timing was everything. Because who doesn't want a piece of the Heaven? So they both came running. From opposite sides. The thin fast. The thinner a little slow. While they ran for the Heaven, the Gods watched. But how did they watch? Amused or Confused?

The climb was steep. But who thinks the Heaven is in easy reach, anyway? They both clambered, fell, retried. Oh, a game had started. Between two luckiest beings of the earth. Because you don't get around to have this everyday. A chance to rip open the oh-so-beautiful Heaven and drown yourself in it. What a feeling!

Yes, that is what they did. When they finally climbed into where it lay, the rummaged through it, desperate, expectant, delighted and...and disppointed at the other's presence. They snatched it from each other. The dog and the girl. In the municipality garbage bin, they put their faces into the now-torn polyethylene bags from which the stinky yellowy stale Heaven flowed out. The Gods after watching for a while, moved back into the restaurant kitchen.

I tried to stay away from the Heaven, like all human being would for as long as they could. Behind the dark glasses of my vehicle. I pulled the button to lift the glass shut, but it was too late. The stink had entered. And had invaded my insides. I was dead.

A tinted-glassed four-wheeler with a dead human being inside kicked off dirt on the heaven, inside which the struggle for life (not death mind you, as you would usually expect) raged between two four-leggeds.

Oh..., if you are still wondering about the title, read it backwards. Does it matter what sequence I write it? For some, does it matter if they were alive or dead? Or in The Heaven, does it matter if you a human or an...?

Did someone say Trucker?

2009-02-04T08:35:00.000-08:00

The muddy amber light in a shape of a round-edged square flashed through my windscreen as I waited at the signal. The rusted wood-metal body of the weathered truck stood in front of me, its tattered tires still on the tar of the drain-water polished road, blocking my view of the signal lights. Slightly irriatated, I turned my car a little to the left and could see the hanging digital clock counting down to green. The blazing red of the signal glowed hopelessly as the santros marutis optras civics of the civilized world nochalantly turned right and moved on, on the lawless road.

I couldn't see what stood ahead of the truck. I was almost certain that there was some sensible head inside a car that blocked that truck's way, which otherwise would most certainly have jumped the alternating sequence of indifferent colours.

And then the truck moved. As it turned right, I looked ahead and realized that nothing was blocking its way. All this while, the truck judiciously had followed the traffic rule at signal that many of my colleagues gleefully jumped. And then, a naked black body rotating a black wheel while sitting high above the optras and civics faded into the the black of the night, away from civilized headlights as the truck took another turn, onto a path less travelled.

Yes, he could. But many of us couldn't. Because civilization is not about what you sit inside. It's about what sits inside you!

The Business of Tragedy

2008-12-02T01:14:00.000-08:00

As most of us seated on their drawing room sofas watched with horror the terrible turn of events unfold on the tv screen and read from the internet real-life terror accounts of survivors - for whom clock had stopped inside the two ill-fated luxury hotels Taj and Oberoi-Trident in Mumbai - I couldn't stop looking at the business angle to all this. You can call me perverse, but let me tell you, I wouldn't be writing this if it were not for one particular utterly money-worshipping news channel that tried to mint money even at this hour of national tragedy.

But first, the innocuous business connections. This was probabaly unintended, but I couldn't help but notice the number of times the word "Blackberry" appeared in all the news articles. Many people held hostage inside the hotels got continuous feed of the developments through their Blackberry devices. Others sent out SOS emails to officials and their relatives. Couple of foreign journalists provided minute-by-minute update of the NSG operation to their respective international news sites through their Blackberrys. Given that this was an event watched closely by the international community, Blackberry couldn't be happier. The attention it drew to its handheld device was tremendous and worth hundreds of million of advertisement dollars. All for absolutely free. Another obvious beneficiary is Kuoni Travels, whose board neatly placed at the Taj entrace was aired for several hundred minutes on all news channels without the company spending even a penny for such huge airtime.

Now the true champions of tradegy-business - the news channel I was talking about. On the channel, I was looking at the screen that played images of the last journey of martyrs who died fighting for the country. Suddenly, the screen started showing names of each of the serving officers who laid down his life and urged viewers to start SMSing! I can understand if the SMS is to provide an opinion on the terror strickes or vote for a sensitive question on national security. To my utter disgust, the screen showed a glowing "digital" candle with a text below urging viewers to "keep sending SMSes by typing 'SALAAM' and sending it to some goddamn number so that the candle keeps burning in the honour of the martyrs"! Basically it wanted us to believe that as long as we kept sending SMSes, the candle would keep burning. As if it costs the channel a bomb to keep the digital candle "burning" on the screen. What the hell, I thought. How would it help if all of us were to send 'SALAAM' messages to the channel's number?

Of course, it won't help anybody except the channel which would make a lot of money out of all the SMSes. Each SMS is a premium SMS and while you end up paying Rs. 3 or 6 or whatever for each message, the money that you pay is comfortably distributed by the Telecom company and the Channel. What a perverted way to make money!

Life or Religion?

2008-11-20T17:23:00.000-08:00

Every time I go into a discussion with someone on the kind of things (read blasts) happening in our country, I come out frustrated. People talk about how the members of a community should be out of this country, how they are better off in Pakistan and how they are meant to do things like that, because their religion is like that only. How true! And what about us? We hindus? We are a great bunch of people, peace loving, unharming. Isn’t it? What about Babri Masjid and Godhra carnage, where either with full state support or with state turning a blind eye, thousands of innocent people were murdered in broad daylight? I know we have a torn and painful history, but leaving aside the incidents during the partition of India, how many blasts took place in independent India carried out by the members of the other community before the Babri Masjid and Mumbai riots?

If with state support we kill people who are already marginalized, have less access to education and are fewer in number, what do you think the reaction would be? It is there for all of us to see. While terrorism can never be justified, what needs to be understood is its causes and reasons. I have no doubt that Hindus are primarily responsible. And now it seems that some of our spiritual leaders have left pursuing the spirit and started collecting RDX instead. Does the path to God lead via RDX?

Now let’s talk about Hinduism a bit. You see Hinduism is, without a speck of doubt, the greatest religion the world has ever produced. We are a bunch of peace-loving, unharming people who grew up on Bhagawat Gita and the valiant deeds of Ram and Krishna. Valiant they were, because they represented the prevail of good over evil. And how? Since our childhoods, We have been fed on the minutest details of how the good vanquished the evil…the gorier it is, the better is the prevalence of good, probably. The blood dripping arm of Dushasan - severed by the brute force of Bhima - wetting the untied hair of Draupadi, Krishna splitting the body of Jarasandha into two, ripping him from his groin to head by pulling apart his legs, A lion-faced Narsimha laying flat Hiranyakashipu on his laps and tearing apart his heart in his lion-nails…the victory of Good marches on. And I am not even talking about the extremely trivial instances of beheading the evil incarnations or killing them in some other way that doesn’t involve too much of their evil blood.

So what? You may ask. Those were mythical instances of driving the message home…that after all good pervades. Perfect, only except the fact that for us mere mortals, differentiating between the Good and Evil may not be such an easy answer after all. And the moment you think someone (or rather some community) to be the Evil, then there is no one stopping you. Because from our Mythology, we know of all the nice, justified and apt methods to finish off the bloody evil (human beings in our case)

You see, we are a religion that believes in Karma and again..may I ask…how? Oh, by dividing the human race (read Hindu race) is so many castes and sub-castes (based on their Karma, right?), super and sub-sub-castes that those who are out there to find the constituent of an atom by breaking it up in an automatic hedron collider would be put to absolute shame. What a belief in Karma!

The intention of my article is not to bash my own community. It’s meant for some introspection. Just because we are a majority, we needn’t always be right. Just because we ourselves belong to a religion, it need not be the best thing the world has ever produced.

Memories of a Man

2008-10-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

Exactly one year ago, after my dinner at night, my mom had called me to say that my grandfather is probably no more. She used probably to lessen the shock it would have on me, because last time I had seen him, he showed no signs of the plans he had in his mind. Plans to leave us, me, unexpectedly, for a place from where painful memories stream into you for as long as you live. He was perfectly fit, an athletic that he was, walked upright and enquired about me, from my job to bringing home his grand grand kid. How would he have loved to see the four generations of us sitting in the lap of one another smiling smiles from different ages! From different worlds separated by times of a lifetime.

I remember the days when I used to walk holding his hand. He was the tallest at home and hence, I loved most to climb onto his shoulders, as it afforded me the maximun view of the world around me. And also the thrill of maximum height from ground. When about to fall, I held on to his hair, not realizing then how it must have hurt him. He would smile and say, "Don't make me like your father". He hadn't lost his hair till he lost his life. Before his aftennoon siestas I used to sit hear him with a grain of paddy to pick and pull his grey hairs. And massage his enormous body to sleep.

He was my greatest saviour. I hid behind him to save myself from my parent's fury when I messed up with my homework or hit my younger sister. Or ventured into the kitchen and ate something I shouldn't have eaten. No one dared pull me from his clutches. It was a place where I got supreme protection from the vagaries of the world. In the loving cocoon of his arms I saw myself grow into an unfaithful someone who hardly now remembers him, unless he is called up and made to remember his grandfather's death anniversary.

There have been innumerable wintry nights when I had escaped from my bed and slipped under his blanket into the warm comforting feeling of his chest. I would put my legs on top of him and dig my face into his neck. He would curl his hands around me and I would sleep stiller than death. He slept only after I did and when I ran a temperature and couldn't sleep, he would pat me and run his fingers through my hair. I would love the coolness of his body then. He would caress his hot and ill grandson till the the smaller of the two fell asleep.

I wouldn't let him go when he left me for a couple of days for work. I would hold onto his fingers, legs, shirt hem, hair - anything I could lay my hands on - to plead my mom not to separate me from him so ruthlessly. I would scream and roll to the floor crying, tears making of mud of the floor-dust. He was my life, then. And I was his life, all through his life.

I called him all kinds of names. Some male, some female. He had come to accept all the naming I did for him and answered when I called him with his weird names. I watched with rapturous attention when he shaved or - even more interestingly - took out his test tube to check his blood sugar. I have ran several times trying to fetch like mad his medicines when he felt pain in his chest. His heart was so heavy with all the love he had for me that it faltered. But, then, I too had loved him as much as one can love someone. I had learnt from him lessons to last a lifetime. Under starry nights, sitting in his lap amind wafting fragrance of mogra flower, I have been lifted off to different worlds, from magic cities in the sky to unknown depth of the ocean. His stories have spun my imagination. They have given wings to my thoughts.

We all go through the grinds of our days. Running, competing, travelling, worrying, trying to keep pace with a world that mostly seem to run faster than us. To hold our head above the rising waters of competition. I do, too. And in all these, we sometimes tend to forget or at least forget to acknowledge adequately people (such as our parents) who shaped our lives and made it what it is today. It was their sweat, their pains, their unslept nights that had kept fueling our lives. At the risk of sounding silly, I wonder, why so beautiful loving human beings ever have have to leave us.

I don't know if my kids would love their grandparents as much. They wouldn't grow up with my parents. They will only get to see their grandparents in summer vacations. They are the children of a nuclear world. They would miss the love from many who could love them probably more than I ever could. Like my grandfather did to me. More than my parents.

When I think deeply in solitude, I can feel a hole inside me. A hole from the realization that I would never be able to see my grandfather again. I will never have his comforting hug. As I write this with welling eyes, I see my grandfather sitting in his usual place - on the verandah in the morning sun - holding the newspaper, tea cup sitting beside him. I turn into a little kid, run to him, lift the flaps of the newspaper, part his legs a little and escape from the world. Into his lap. My face dug into his wrinkled stomach.

You are a matchstick!

2008-10-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

All human beings are like matchsticks.

Lined up in the womb you wait for the day, when you slither through the anatomy of your mom into the world. To get a name. And to take up your role in the crowd. Much like a stick lined up inside the box waiting for its turn. Looks apart, fundamentally there isn't much difference between an unborn baby and an idle stick. It's when you come out, your worth is proved. Agreed, some foetuses have congential malformation, but so do matchsticks. Some don't have a head and others are too thin to be striked against. But keeping these exceptions aside, I think most of them would be indinguishable.

All of us come to this world with a purpose. But you may ask, what purpose? Who decides why we came to the world? There is a purpose, but it doesn't always have to be predetermined. The purpose comes blank along with our life, like a tag in a new piece of cloth. We fill it up with our deeds and give a meaning to our existence in the world.

There are people who probably live just because they can't die. I mean there is nothing their sane selves can do to die. Of course, there will always be some who kill themselves. The insane lot. But that isn't easy. It takes extreme motivation to kill oneself. Leaving the suicidal souls, many live because dying is not an option.

Some matchsticks don't light. Even after repeated strikes. They refuse to entertain their pupose. They come out of their womb. But their birth is futile. They live an unlived life. Because a matchstick truly lives when it burns. Only when fire eats it away does it have a meaningful existence.

Some others burn, but they don't light up anything. You hold them to a candle, but they go out before even starting a speck of flame. They die before doing anything of worth. They leave their entire length with you, but that entire body is useless. And there is no second chance here, as there is no second life. Once a stick burns and goes out, it doesn't get to burn again. It doesn't serve any purpose again.

Finally, matchsticks that last and light others, such as a candle or an incense stick, live with a purpose. Some light just one, and others light several before putting out. The later ones live a life of contentment, of supreme purpose. They serve that purpose until their entire body is withered away by fire. They live life to the fullest.

We all have been striked upon. And we are burning. How much can we light up before we put out? How many good deeds? What can we do that stands out of the crowd? Have we thought about our purpose? How do we live our purpose till our entire length burns out?

Can we think of a life beyond (even a little beyond) earning enough to sustain a family, get married, have kids, save for retirement, get the kids to study and get them married and live off pension and die off pension?

A passing thought at the middle of the night. But I am sure this will pass multiple times.

The Three Mistakes of My Life: Another review, a bit different

2008-06-23T01:20:00.000-07:00

I had decided not to buy the book. I had read quite a few reviews on the net and more importantly, the maturity I was hoping to see with his successive writings was missing in the excerpts. Assuming that the excerpts of a book are some of its best texts, I was disappointed. I was disppointed even with the first few pages. The starting pages, where Chetan receives an email from an Ahmedabad based businessman - who is quite dramatically popping a sleeping pill after writing each sentence - seemed to me more as a bait to create artificial interest rather than a genuine start to a good story.

However, I almost bought the book (you can't avoid looking at the book at a Crossword store given the sheer volume of the stacks and how it occupies every conceivable corner in the store, sometimes balanced like a house of cards and sometimes like a DNA spiral. Sometimes like the now-stabilized Tower of Pisa and sometimes like Shanghai financial buildings. Wherever you look, the yellow-black book unmistakably stares at you). But as fate would have it, one of the trainees reporting to me got so happy with my paternal mentoring that he decided to gift me this title. So he innocently asked me one day whether I have read the book and I just said "No" (I didn't say "I don't plan to either"). The next day, he was there with this book, neatly wrapped in Crossword gift-wrap paper. I had to read it. It's someone's gift and the feelings of someone ought to be respected.

You can get an idea of the story in many of the reviews splattered across the internet (I plan to do different things) - it's about three poor small town ("Small Town" Ahmedabad, one of India's biggest cities) friends (okay, one was probably not so poor) who won't stop talking the hippiest language ever invented, the language even college going students in some Mumbai suburbs hardly speak (at least in my experience, I have not found many in those places talking like that), who start a business of a sports store that was destined to doom because of the unfortunate turn of events in Gujarat and the "Mistakes" of the protagonist. Don't bother if the "Mistakes" aren't really mistakes. They are made to look like mistakes because they needed to lend their support to the catchy title "The Three Mistakes of My Life".

So what are the "Real" mistakes in "The Three Mistakes of My Life"? Here they are:
- A bit of complacency on Chetan's part that anything he writes sells. I am okay with his language; that's his style. But what an author needs is more thought going into his/her work. That was missing. Why do I say that? There is a three page description of something terribly unlikely happening atop a terrace. But there is absolutely no description when these three "small town" friends landed up for the first time in the dazzling "Australia" (and How?). No description of their feelings, the place, the "wow" factor they must have felt. Nothing.

- Unaccustomed Earth (borrowed from Jhumpa Lahiri's title) and No research. What it means it, when you write about environs that surround you, you may need little or no research. But when you write an entire book about some place you might have only visited once or probably seen through the car window, you need to do a bit of homework. Chetan with his limited bandwidth of time couldn't have known much about how people live in the old town of Ahmedabad. Sadly, that clearly shows.

- Misfit between storyline and the lines of thought of the author. The story is serious. It's about the hopes and aspirations of young people. Of loss. Desperation. It's the feeling of getting caged when you really wanted to fly. Chetan, in all likelihood, may not have felt a lot of these feelings in his life. It's fine if you haven't felt. But somehow, you need to assimilate that longing even though its vicarious, probably by observing the real-life counterparts of the protagonists from close quarters. Chetan can pretty well write about the longings and desperations of IIM grads, or IIM wannabes even though he may not have felt those feelings himself. Because that is his familiar territory. Actually this book is a misfit in my expected Trilogy - "IIT - Call Centre - IIM". When you don't share the feelings of your lead characters, it shows. There is a strange detachment in the narrator's voice.

Having said all that (Puh, it's way too long than I expected!), the book is not entirely without its moments of pride. Few witty lines from Chetan pop up like fire moths in a dark tunnel. But those are too few and far between to make any substantial damage to this review. :)

Who wants to burn money?

2008-05-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was reading an article on how to cut down on expenses, in one of the weekend issues of Time of India. The author talked at length about how you should shop fewer times in a month, how you should track and payoff credit card bills regularly, how you should make a note of where most of your money is getting burnt etc. All that is fine. I think most of us know that paying credit cards bills in time saves us the interest cost. But if that was so easy, wouldn't the credit card companies have shut shop buy now? Obviously, no one enjoys paying the interest and only when you can not make the entire payment, do you pay the exorbitant interest charges.

How do you then cut down on your expenses? One thing is certain: Cutting down on expenses always doesn't necessarily mean living a lesser life. "Spending Money" and "Blowing Money" are different things. Spending money can buy you a better lifestyle, Blowing money wouldn't. It would keep on cutting larger holes into your wallet, something I will write about in this article.

1. Understand Differential Pricing

I have made it a point to visit Multiplexes only on Saturday mornings. On weekend prime shows, the ticket rates shoot upto Rs. 150 each, while the morning show price is a mere Rs. 50. Why? Does it cost more to handle the prime time crowd? Absolutely not.

Business owners know that different people have different paying capacity. Their intention is simple: To make you pay the maximum you are willing to pay for a particular product or service. Each one of us have a threshold. For example, you can say, "Boss, I can pay a maximum 130 bucks for a movie at Inox, not beyond that". Now, if for some reason, Inox ticket price is 100 bucks, it's losing 30 bucks from you, given that you are willing to pay 130. If it charges 150 for a ticket, it will lose you entirely, of course.

Hence the catch is in charging different prices to different consumers, carefully studying their behaviour pattern to figure out how much they would be willing to pay. Rich guys (unlike me!) who would like to enjoy their evenings in the weekends would have to shell out thrice the amount I pay for watching a movie.

2. Early adopters pay through their nose

It's pure economics. I remember what my grandfather used to tell me; "When a new product comes to the market, there are not many buyers. So the cost of producing each item is more. Hence the price is higher". He probably was hinting at "Economies of Scale" that we keep harping on at B-school case discussions. However, that is partly correct. When Nokia N70 came out, it cost almost 30 thousand rupees in India. Do you think people went such mad over N70 and gobbled it in such huge quantities that now it's price is a mere Rs. 7800, because the average cost of producing an N70 dropped drastically? Impossible.

Nokia always had "Economies of Scale". It produces hudreds of thousands of phones everyday. The cost of producing an N70, I am sure, wouldn't have changed much in these years. Even when the price of N70 was thirty thousand, Nokia must be producing it for a couple of thousand rupees, raking in a profit of more than twenty thousand per phone! Boy, someone looted you terribly.

Why would Nokia charge such exorbitant price then? It is again quite related to my point above; Nokia knows that people who love to flaunt a gadget before anyone else does would pay anything for it. A very well known fact on consumer behaviour. Now you know that If you buy a "lifestyle" product right after launch, you are being obsenely charged for a product that doesn't deserve that price tag from a pure quality and feature perspective.

3. What Brand?

Branding is not free. If you pay Rs. 2300 for that pair of Reebok shoes, my guess is about Rs. 1000 is spent on branding (read paying the models, sponsoring cricket and baseball matches, buying TV spots etc.). The cost of producing a Reebok shouldn't be more than a couple hundred bucks (ignore those air suspension and all that non-sense features, they don't cost much to the company and don't help you much anyway).

Brand of course guarantees quality because a lot rides on the consumer (and media) goodwill. But, the price charged is disproportionate to its quality because of the branding overhead. Fine, it gives you an aura (really?) and a standing in the society as many would swear, but is it always wise to stick to brands? Let me give you some examples:

The Rs. 180 T-shirt I purchased from a local shop in my home town is still as new and as usable as it was 7 years back. In these seven years, I have used and thrown (or used as dusting cloth) several Adidas', Reeboks and Louis Phillippes.

Second example: A shaving cream (Nivea, Gillete and the like) costs under Rs. 50. Still, it almost lasts the same as a Gillette Foam Can and provides similar lather and soothing effect. The foam can costs about Rs. 300. Why? Because it's upmarket. Same for Gillete Mach III razor (Rs. 300) versus Gillete Presto (Rs. 45 perhaps).

Functionality wise, I see almost no difference. Yet there is a huge difference in price. Who sees what razor I use or what foam I smear on my face?

So here is the bottomline

Go ahead and buy the latest gadgets. But be ready to pay much more than what it's really worth. Be ready to pay for features that you would never use your entire life (like printing image directly from my Nokia mobile). Secondly understand differential pricing. Change your behaviour (if possible, like my saturday morning movie trips) so that you take advantage of the differential pricing (and not taken advantage of). Splurge on brands only when it makes a significant difference to your status, standing, ego etc. etc. Don't spend for the sake of spending on a brand.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are entirely personal. Brand names mentioned are only for illustrative purposes and not intended to reveal any opinion about any brand. These brands belong to their respective owners.

My second note on CAT after "CATme If You Can"

2008-05-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Repost from my blog catmeifyoucan.blogspot.com . I will cease to update the "catme..." blog as it's too difficult for me to maintain so many channels for CAT related discussion. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Foreword
Welcome back to my second note on CAT. I think CAT is a game. It is not exactly a test of intelligence. Neither is it a test of your memory. It just a tricky two hour game where you need to be alert, agile and cool. Believe me, a large part of CAT is a test of your personality - how quickly you make decisions, how poised you are under extreme tension, how you allocate and manage time and how you seek out easy questions.This note is rather comprehensive in coverage, including groundwork for CAT, preparation strategies, learning from mock CATs, sailing through the D-day and tips for GD/Interview. Hope it helps you in your endeavor.Good Luck!

To add some credibility to this note, let’s also add that the author Ashutosh Kar is part of IIM Ahmedabad 2007 batch. He received final admission calls from all the six IIMs. Please refer to his earlier note “CATch Me If You Can” for short-cuts and problem solving techniques for the Quantitative section. You can download both these notes from his website http://www.geocities.com/get2reach . He can be reached at get2reach@yahoo.com.

Let’s Play
I sometimes wonder – where would I be and what I would be doing if I didn’t make it to the IIMs. I honestly don’t see myself anywhere, except of course trying to bell the CAT one more time. Before I go on to tell you what to do, what not to do and how to prepare, let me make one thing clear. CAT is not for people who can do without an IIM. I have harped on this point earlier too. If you think IIMs are where you ever wanted to be, there is a good chance that you actually land up there. Stay passionate and top it up with pure unadulterated HARD WORK. There is surely no easy way out to grab the CAT.

Words such as these may sure sound like a dragged on cliché – but let me tell you, Quants, Verbals or LRs come much later in your preparation for CAT. You start with a passion and that passion alone can see you through the exam. Everything else is just a byproduct, be it confidence, expertise, performance.

Having said that let me go straight to how you prepare for the various sections.

A little bit of a disclaimer before you start. The views expressed here are solely my own and the strategies I have employed have worked for me. I don’t claim that they would work for everyone. During the course of your preparation, you would find many experts saying many things about how to prepare. My word of caution to you – don’t ask around a lot of people about how to prepare. Everyone has his/her own opinion and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the opinions run exactly opposite to each other. A lot of suggestions will ultimately get you confused. I asked no one. I did what I thought was right for me.

Preparation
If someone were to ask me – what takes the maximum time to build expertise in - I would say ‘Verbals’. Because a command over English doesn’t get built overnight. But if you already have a good reading habit and if you are good at grammar, there is good news. You just need to refine that skill with fast reading, a vocabulary brush-up and certain not-so-obvious rules of English grammar. GMAT English section is really good in these. You can buy the GMAT official guide and other guide books from Princeton or Kaplan and work the verbal section out.

Let me also tell you the advantages of a good reading habit. Even if you think you aren’t exactly improving your grammar or English language skills, you pickup certain things subconsciously. The sentence syntaxes get stored in your mind and when you see a sentence correction question in CAT, you would automatically know whether the sentence is wrong. Or when you see a word whose meaning you don’t know exactly, you would recall automatically the context the word was used and you would be surprised how accurately you can guess its meaning.

As for vocabulary, there is a word of caution. Don’t get obsessed with it. That won’t help you get anywhere. CAT is moving away from vocabulary testing, though the coaching classes still hang on to pure Vocabulary questions in mock CATs. Don’t mug up the Vocabulary lists. Look through them and find words familiar to you. Try to see if you know their meanings. However, while reading if you see a new word, note it down along with a couple of words that followed and preceded it so that when you later look the word up in the dictionary, you exactly know how it was used in the text.

Regarding reading comprehension, what you need most is concentration with a little bit of technique. When you read a passage that is not engaging (which many of them certainly are), your attention tends to drift away. Though you keep on running your eyes over the text, you actually don’t understand anything of what is written. Relax, that is very common.

You can start by having a positive attitude towards reading comprehension passages. Think in your mind that the passage is interesting and you are going to know what is there inside. ‘It’s sure something new to me and I want to learn what the author is trying to say’. This attitude makes your task easier and you start understanding what is written. Moreover, if you have developed liking in a wide array of subjects, there is a high probability that you would enjoy reading whatever is given in the passage. But I must say that you should learn to concentrate while reading those difficult passages. If you are not able to, work on it – forget everything else while reading a passage and try to get absorbed in the subject.

The eye-span thing worked well for me. I could improve my speed by not going through each word one by one, but by breaking a single line into two parts and reading a single line in just two eye movements. This is called increasing your eye-span. You can try this out. It works! So, you read half a line at a time and not 5 words one at a time. Don’t get too bogged down by a line if you don’t understand it. That line may not be needed at all for answering the questions. However, try to be extra-cautious about the starting and ending lines in a paragraph because in a well written article, the first line explains why the paragraph is written and the last line gives a short summary of the whole paragraph. Even if that is not the case, reading these two lines gives you a fairly good idea about what the paragraph is trying to say. If you don’t understand what is inside the paragraph, you can revisit it if a question is asked from that paragraph. But don’t spend undue time in trying to understand each and every line, unless the line seems to absolutely critical.

Some say it’s a good idea to run an eye through the questions before reading the paragraph. I have found it dangerous. I lose valuable time in reading the questions. Sometimes the questions themselves are so difficult that unless you read the paragraph, you won’t understand what the questions mean. You are in a soup if you end up spending 2 minutes in reading the questions and understand nothing. My suggestion – forget the questions. Start reading the paragraph right away. Underline important names, keywords etc. as you go along.

Now coming to Logical reasoning, I believe it’s a skill you can’t do much about. You need to have the knack to crack the logic behind the question. Your thinking should be clear and systematic. However, I feel there are couple of things which if taken care of could improve your speed further in that section.

First, try to use visual tools to understand the question faster and build a map so that you don’t jumble up thing later. Say if Sita is the sister of Nita and Radha is the mother in law of Nita and Gita is the daughter of Nita, there is a high chance that you end up confusing the names and end up with Sita being the daughter of Gita. You could do well to draw a family chart and keep it in front of your eyes while you solve the question. Develop your own shorthand notation for various things. For example, don’t write ‘Nita’, just write N (provided all the names start with different letters). Similarly for questions in which you are given some clues and you need to fill up all others (Prof A, B, C teach subjects X, Y, Z on days P, Q, R, then some clues and the question asks you who teaches what on which day), draw a grid immediately with one column each for Prof, Subject and Day and try to match them. You can employ various techniques such as writing all possible options in a grid and eliminating them progressively as you keep on reading the clues and apply your logic.

Logical reasoning is unlike any other section in CAT. It is a high risk game. From my personal experience I can tell you – sometimes it’s like a nasty trap. You think the question is simple and you go after it. Say even after spending 5 minutes you are not able to crack it. You think why leave the question when I already have spent 5 minutes on it? Just one more minute of try and I can quickly answer the 3 questions that follow. You are already into a trap where you think that the question can be solved anytime with a little more effort. After 10 crucial minutes are gone, your heart starts racing. You don’t know whether to leave it or not. It’s painful because you have spent so much time on it – Do you then move on? When do you decide to move on?

There is no simple answer to this. If you think CAT is all about having strong fundamentals in Quants and a great deal of knowledge in English language, you are probably not correct. CAT is also about making decisions quickly. Which questions to attempt, when to leave a question and move on, what to attempt first, how to allocate time. These softer things play as much a role as any Quant or verbal skill does. Read a question and see if you have solved anything like that before. Can I crack it in given time? Does the number of questions that follow the LR justify the time I am going to spend on it? Learn to make these decisions.

Logical reasoning questions can’t have a well explainable strategy. I gave some hints; you can develop your own strategy that suits you the most.

Let’s come to my favourite subject. The quantitative section. There is not really any ground work to be done in quants except mugging up the multiplication tables, squares and cubes. You would find information on these and on various short-cut techniques in the ‘CATch Me If You Can’ document that I prepared. Most of what you will need in Quants section would anyway be provided by your coaching class, if you join one. If you are not joining one, you should seriously consider buying the material from someone else and register at least for the mock tests. If you don’t appear All India mock tests, you probably don’t want to appear in CAT.

Quants is one area you can improve upon a lot if you work systematically and intelligently. I remember when I started solving Quants, I used to solve the section tests of IMS. I could solve only about 10 questions in 40 minutes with an average of 3 mistakes per test. This is no doubt a fairly poor performance. Not that I was bad at Quants or something; I was pretty good in Quants having been selected for the National Mathematics Olympiad – just that I didn’t have the kind of agility needed for CAT kind of questions. Weeks before the actual CAT, I could easily solve about 20 questions with an average of 2 mistakes only. This number improved to about 23-24 while my target was 27-28. Though I don’t remember attempting 27 questions ever in any mock test, 22 was a fairly good number given that the cutoffs normally hover in the range of 10-12 (again this is my perception and not a vedic dictum)

If I list down the factors that helped me improve my speed, they would in the order of significance be:
1. Practice, practice and more practice
2. Use of shortcuts, quick calculation etc. (Refer to my guide on shortcuts ‘CATch Me If You Can’)
3. Careful analysis of which questions took more time and why, which questions were omitted, why were some easy questions not attempted, how do I figure out which questions can be solved in a flash etc.
4. Willingness to improve my speed every time I attempted a paper
5. Confidence that if I solve a question, it would be right because I have done similar question many times before.

You see, practice gives you confidence. If you have attempted CAT-like full length papers many times and have scored well, in actual CAT you would not be that nervous. Most of CAT questions would look easy to you and you would know how exactly to solve them. I was surprised to find that the CAT-2004 Quant section seemed like a kid’s job to me and I finished answering 30 marks in just 15 minutes!

How much time per day?
This is a nagging concern. Given that many of you would also be appearing for their finals in your respective degrees, devoting time towards preparing for CAT could be difficult. If you start very early, say in December, you could devote 1 hour a day till say July and still be fine. But if you start in April or May, you might need about 2 hours every day. Don’t increase the number of hours per day drastically as CAT approaches. You will break yourself. 4-5 hours a day is okay couple of weeks before the CAT. You should be preparing at a healthy pace when CAT approaches. Not last moment cramming.

I would any day suggest joining a class-room coaching. I have benefited a lot from it. Not that the professors there are great and you get to learn a lot from them. In most cases, they just solve what is scheduled for the day and then leave immediately as their billed hours get over. Most don’t stay back after the class to answer your personal questions because they are not paid for that. But yeah, some good professors in my coaching class did stay back.

What helps you most when you join a class is that you fall into a routine. Everyday you attend the classes, spend two hours solving questions, work for the next day and appear for tests almost every other day. More importantly, you get to mix with sharper people, learn from them and get motivated by them. Additionally, the handouts given by the coaching class that I joined had some real good questions not given in the material.

The best thing you can do while preparing is be regular. Appear classes regularly, write tests regularly and judge your improvements regularly. That way you maintain a healthy pace and slowly build up confidence. If you stop preparing for say a month, you speed drops significantly and you start worrying.

Mock CAT and the D-day CAT
Mock tests are extremely important. However, don’t enroll for all kinds of tests being conducted out there by all kinds of coaching classes. I think the 8 SIMCATs by IMS is just the right number of tests you need before the D-day. Prepare well before the tests and don’t take them lightly. Every time you appear for a SIMCAT, try to surpass your previous score and percentile.

However, don’t get frustrated with the mock CAT percentiles. I never scored great percentiles in mock CATs for various reasons. However, I kept on improving and that is important. It never ceases to surprise me how wildly the mock CAT and actual CAT percentiles vary for many people. I have seen friends do extremely well in mock CATs and yet not get a single call from anyone of the IIMs. I believe what happens on the actual day is a different ball game altogether. And you need to play that ball well. By staying confident and cool.

Tell yourself that you are better than all other guys who have come to the exam hall. The astronomical number of people appearing for CAT is not a true representation of how tough the exam is. About 80% of them don’t have any clue as to what it takes to crack the CAT. I have never heard any of my friends ever securing less than 80 percentile, no matter how under-prepared they were. So, you are not competing with 1.6 lakh people; it’s just 32,000. And you need to be in the top 3000 or so to get a call. That means it’s just about one in 11 and not 1 in 100 as the coaching classes and the media want you to believe. Boy that does something to boost your confidence!

Every time I came out of mock CATs, I found myself not satisfied with the kind of questions asked. I was even more disillusioned with the answers to RC passages. I always thought that in an actual CAT there won’t be any controversial questions and whatever I answer would be right.

Whoa! I just scrolled up and realized how long this note has become. Okay, let me wind up quickly. The final hurdle in your journey towards one of most hallowed places in the country is the GD/Interview.

GD/Interview
I don’t have much to say about interviews because they are like any other interviews where you just go and present yourself. No rocket science involved. Plain vanilla commonsense. Be it having proper dress sense, showing confidence, making eye-contact or greeting the interviewer while going in and coming out. I don’t think I need to harp on these any further.

What really amazes me is the kind of stories that go around about preparing for a GD. They are further fuelled by the coaching classes that try to scare your guts out by asking you to remember scores of strategies you must use to cut into the discussion. Shall I mention those strategies? Those are utter crap!

Let me tell you some of the strategies I was taught in my mock GD session:
Better be the first one to start. You get an added advantage. You lead the discussion.
Try to figure out who is the weakest speaker. It’s easy to cut him/her short.
Try to raise your voice which getting into the discussion and level your voice afterwards.
Try to summarize the discussion when you see no one else is talking much sense.
Try to bring the discussion to track if it goes off-track
You should be coming into the discussion at regular intervals and when you come, try to speak for about 30 seconds for the judges to take note of you.
See if someone is pausing for breath. That is the right time to come in and just grab it!

Utter nonsense! Don’t buy into these terrible strategies that go around year after year. I would probably not speak at all if I try to apply some of these in an actual GD, let alone cutting someone short.Probably these stories go around because there are far fewer people attending GDs than the CAT. Many are not aware of what actually happens in a GD. Moreover, the coaching classes probably want to psyche you out so that you fall back on them for a decent dose of GD tactics.

While it would be far from correct to say that these strategies are never going to help anyone perform well in a GD, I believe it’s senseless trying to apply some foreign knowledge and manipulate your natural self.

I am about to end my note. I would say that before you go to a GD, talk to the people present there. Show a GENUINE interest to be friends with them. Ask them about their calls, place, background, name and everything else. Don’t play tricks. Just be friends. It helps you in two ways. One, your nervousness withers away. Two, when you go the GD, it’s not a GD anymore. It’s just a canteen discussion among friends. Speak your heart out. Speak as if you feel for the topic and feel for your stand.

You would not realize when you cut someone short, when you talked for 30 seconds, when you argued hard, when you supported someone and when you summarized what you understood. Be in the discussion. Forget everything else.

Good Luck!
Gaurav said... hi ashutosh!gr8 work man! i hope i can share ur work elsewhere with credits to u.2:04 AM
Santosh said... Hi AshutoshReally a great work.I have got the untold and real picture of cracking the CAT.Based on your personal and practical experience.The points mentioned about RC is touching to almost every candidate.Hope I'll share this info to my friends.Thanks for tips.Santosh10:40 PM
Bharat Jhurani said... Thnk u so much Ashutosh.. the tips r really useful... Do keep us updated...1:18 AM
kulkarniy2k said... Hi Ashutosh!!That really did a lot of good to my confidnce... Thanks a lot!3:05 AM kulkarniy2k said... Hi Ashutosh!!That really did a lot of good to my confidnce... Thanks a lot!3:05 AM
s said... hi your catch me if u can document requires a password. wt wud it b7:44 AM
Ashutosh Deo said... Great Article! Boosted my confidence!Thanks a lot for your sharing your clear and practical thoughts.5:41 AM
Adwait Deshpande said... hi ashutoshreally nice to hear ur views about the cat exm and gd's tooi am sure they will help all the cat aspirants .so just 15 days for catany last minute tipsPS i too do not support last minute cramming9:09 AM
abcde19282002 said... Hey dude cn v hv a link exchangemba-knowledge.blogspot.comb-school.blogspot.comjust reply me if u wanna go ahead...11:04 AM
shyam said... hi ashutosh thank u so much........the tips are really useful.........but ashutosh i need u cat 1998-2006papers so please help me again.....thank's a lot your bettre idea for methank u9:43 PM
Apsara said... wow! what an awesome article :)....im feeling so positive...the best part is where you say "starting early, like in december...1 hr is okay". actually, i have started preparing for CAT-2008 since last month,and i try to give 2 hrs each day, but i still felt insecure thinking about people who started 2 yrs before, or 1.5 years ahead of the eaxm , but i feel better now!i need to work on my general awareness, bus. economics etc along with basic cat prep. , butthat seemed too tough until now :)...a very inspiring artile, thank you "sir":)8:51 PM

CAT Related Questions and Answers

2008-05-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Friends, as it's difficult for me to maintain so many channels for CAT related discussion, I will be henceforth posting all related stuff on this blog and NOT on catmeifyoucan.blogspot.com . I reposting this article from the "catmeifyoucan" blog here.

Questions and Answers:Following are answers to some of the queries I received from readers of my website and blogs. I will keep adding to this list as I get more mails. Please go through the answers thorougly before asking any question. Your concern might have aleady been answered!

Q. Which books to refer?
A. There is an overwhelming number of books available in the market that try to teach you everything from logical reasoning to reading comprehension. From quantitative skills to GD/PI. Would it help to get hold of a book?Well, may and may not. If you think you lack the bare minimums in a particular area, say in Quantitative ability or in Logical Reasoning questions, you might look for a book. But honestly, in my opinion, that is not necessary.I prepared off IMS materials and I didn't feel the need for buying any other book to help me in my preparation. What was given in the IMS materials were more than enough. CAT is not exactly predictable and what you really need to crack CAT is an experience in solving a variety of questions. You can do that by solving all the questions handed out to you by your coaching institute. You might also want to solve previous years' CAT papers. I have found that to be helpful. There are publishers who publish last 10 years' CAT papers. Solve them if you find time.Books wouldn't teach you anything out of the world. Ultimately the basics you need to crack the CAT Quantitative section are the 10th standard maths with some +2 level stuff such as logs thrown in. The coaching classes cover in just sufficient details these aspects of CAT and I never had any problems getting back to the basics. I thought I would buy a Reading Comprehension book, but abandoned that thought later. I didn't see any value add. RC is all about how fast you read and understand a passage. I thought that would come more from my regular reading habits, a conscious effort to increase speed, clear focus everytime I read and repeated practice, rather than some bookish gyaan. I think I took the right decision.In my opinion, don't bother about books before you even start preparation. Take a coaching class stuff, read and solve the questions and test papers. If you think you seriously lack an ability that is not duly fulfilled by the coaching material, consider buying books.

Q. Only 5 months are left. Is it too late?
A. The best answer to this question is of course 'It depends'. But I know that won't serve your purpose; especially for those of you who want to know if they can hope to crack CAT in such a little time. Well, I think 5 months is not that small for preparation. All you need to aggression in preparation. If you good at Quants, you can easily brush up your skills in 5 months. However, Verbal ability wouldn't be easy to refine. Logical reasoning doesn't take a long time to be a master at. It depends only your reasoning and thinking ability - how clear, concise and systematic you think. I think logical reasoning is more of a gifted skill rather thancultivated. However, as I already have told you in my cat blog entry 'CATbolism', one can improve his/her speed by adopting certain structured ways of LR solving.So the bottomline is, if you think you are good and just need to brush up things and get upto speed, 5 months could be just right with a little bit of extra effort. However, if you are not confident of your abilities vis-a-vis CAT, you might need more than 5 months.

Q. I am thirty. Would I have problems in getting a placement in investment banks? I only have experience in IT.
A. I don't think that should be a problem. But you still might have a question in your mind, 'Why would i-banks take me in the first place?' Well, if that is the question you have in your mind, let me tell you that i-banks prefer people who are good at numbers and have good analytical ability. If you CV or your Grade point/marks prove this to them, you might be on board!

Q. Is reading newspapers, articles from magazines sufficient for English?
A. IIMs don't need future Bookers prize winners. You don't have to be a literature genious. Nobody expects you to be. What CAT looks for is people who have a good sense of English with a decent vocabulary and knowledge of English grammar so that when you write company reports, you don't embarass your alma mater. That's it.Someone who already has a good reading habit would already know the basic grammar rules and would instantly know if a sentence is correct or wrong. Or whether a sentence would precede or follow another. If you didn't have such a habit, there is nothing to worry. I didn't have a great reading habit. I used to read only Page 3 out of Times of India, and never the editorial. However, I started reading magazines and newspaper editorials when I started preparing. My grammar was never a problem and reading helped me refine those skills.So start reading newspapers and magazines. Any reputed one that you can lay your hands on. For grammar, if you wish, you can buy a grammar book..but that way you would waste time on things that might never be tested. I would suggest working out the GMAT grammar instead. That was really helpful.

Q. Do I need a coaching?
A. Yes you do, in most cases. Even if you are super genious, to channelize your skills to CAT type questions and to practice the 2 hours of gruelling test, you must join a coaching, correspondence or classroom. I have found classroom coaching to be helpful when you are not able to squeeze out time out of your busy schedule to devote to CAT preparation. Once you join a classroom coaching, you must attend the class and you must spend say 1 hour at preparation. It falls into a routine and you don't skip or postpone your preparation. But don't expect to get god-level gyaan from the coaching institute instructors.How many hours of study when only five months are left?I think it's difficult to prepare for more than 3 hours a day when you have other obligations/engagements. For some people even three hours a day could be a luxury. Those guys should start early preparation...say right after CAT is over (not the CAT you want to appear :P ). I don't have much patience. Even if I were absolutely free, I couldn't have prepared for more than three hours because of fatigue. And normally, preparing for more than 3 hours is not required.Avoid taking CAT preparation as a crash course. Build up skills slowly over a period of time. Start early so that you don't have to devote more than 2 hours a day. But yes, in weekends, you need to spend more time. As CAT approaches, those 2 hours can stretch a 'little' longer. But for heaven's sake, don't burn yourself in days leading up to the CAT.

Q. What are the usual cutoffs?
A. This is a gray area that no one has a clear idea about. I would be wrong if I say anything about cutoffs. The reason is simple. Questions change every year, the difficultly levels change and your peer group (I mean other fellow aspirants) changes. Cutoffs are a function of all of these. Better the crop and easier the questions, higher would be the cutoff. Keep track of all cutoffs that various coaching centre guys give out and try to match them and draw a realistic target yourself. But worry about cutoffs only after you have appeared CAT. Until CAT, the last thing you need to worry about is cutoffs. I am sure you don't wanna clear just the cutoffs. Do you? If you do, you are never going to clear to CAT anyway. So why bother? :)

Q. How should I start? When should I start?
A. Pretty global question. I have already answered the when part, more or less. About 'how' part, well read up my post 'CATabolism' and you would get some ideas. Start by visiting various coaching centres, bring their prospectus down and see what you like most in terms of hours of contact, mock test papers etc. Take feedback from any local fellow aspirant/MBA student who has already gone through the same thing. If you are planning to take a correspondence course, visit the coaching centre websites and find out about them. I don't want to suggest joining any particular institute for the simple reason that I haven't got a chance to compare institutes.So my suggestion would have no meaning. Start reading magazines and calculating without the help of a calculator. Mug up tables and use them while solving questions. Follow a strict routine and solve the coaching class stuff in time. Don't postpone things. Stay passionate and have confidence. The moment you lose confidence, you would want to drop out. Say to yourself, 'CAT is not that difficult afterall'. All the best :)

posted by Ashutosh Kar at 6:55 AM on Jun 26, 2006

Bharat Jhurani said...
Yeah!! CAT is not tht difficult afterall.... Jus around 40 dayz 2 go....
8:31 AM
rocky said...
Hey dude....wanna link exchange wid b-schools.blogspot.comIf yes just comment on any of the post.i'l link u up.
11:57 AM
manzu said...
hi.. this is to Ashutosh ... i joined the classes for catbut could attend due to heavy schedule of my job..but now i have resigned and planning to spend my time in preparation.. verbal i finished doing ..but reading i have not spent much time. can u suggest me how to prepare for the remaining days.........

FCB (Don’t tell me you don’t know what it is)

2007-09-17T09:32:00.001-07:00

I am tired of feminists. Of their incessant ranting and fuming about how inconsiderate we men are. How “All” men are the SAME (probably DOGs of the same breed?). How they have robbed women of their rightful place in history and how they have - from the time they became “Men” from apes - subjected women to oppression (And hence caused them depression couple of thousands of years later?).

All you empty-headed “so-called” feminists, give us a break. And please, please spare us that “All Men” nonsense. Understand that there is a fat line between supporting someone’s cause and maligning others. It is indeed commendable that many women have come forward and helped the cause of women, to drag them out of their men-dominated and male-inflicted misery. These are women who work out there on the field, listening to the oppressed, talking to them, understanding their plight and taking their cause to heart. I wouldn’t call them feminists even though they work for women. They are like any other group of people who work for the under-privileged; who believe in a cause and try to help turn around the life of a section of human beings in dire need of someone’s help. They help people in distress. Men or Women isn’t so much of an issue here.

And then there is this metro-bred, well-heeled, hair-frizzed, foundation-covered nothing-much-to-do-at-home-so-let-us-write-some-crap class of feminists. You would find them with remarkable regularity mostly in third grade articles (sadly in weekend issues of leading newspapers, spoiling all the fun of reading a weekend issue) going all out to bash the darker sex. Their unbelievably shallow and insipid articles quote a couple of instances of women (who probably they happen to know personally) who have fought against all odds and secured success in a “Man’s world” (and I thought they would never use this word!). Then they claim - on the back of such handful of instances – that women have indeed “Arrived” (where exactly were they all this while?).

Why don’t these sun-deprived feminists drag their fat bodies to the hinterlands of India - where India truly lives - and find out how terribly insufficient their examples are to prove their point. There are places in rural India where women don’t know if they are meant to be treated at par with Men. That they have the same right to life as Men. That they are women, not slaves. These women don’t see these instances of “Arrived” women and feel proud about it.

Let me tell you what irks me about these feminists. They, almost without fail, quote a couple of instances of successful women (as if women weren’t successful a decade ago, we had a women prime minister, remember?) and go on to claim that women are in no way inferior to men, because there is a women who is a pilot, there is another who is leading a corporate, there is yet another who is fighting for the country at the border. Five percent of their articles is about a couple of women they know, and the rest ninety percent is full of male-bashing and unbearable clichés about how a women effortlessly juggles various roles as a mother, sister, wife, lover etc. etc. (Men can play only one role at a time, say only a father, but not a son, only a husband but not a father, right?). In one of the articles I read recently, a woman wrote that the “only” reason why Men must still be needed has just been taken away with the advancement in technology that fertilizes eggs without requiring sperm, making Men completely dispensable. It’s unfortunate that I can’t show the expression on my face as I write this. “Utter crap” is an understatement. By writing such a text, the author did more harm to Womankind than Man, by showing how air-headed “some” woman could be.

I respect Women. I respect them from the bottom of my heart. Not because they have “Arrived”, or they can juggle several roles with ease, or because they are in the army or the corporate. I respect them because they are fellow human beings representing a different facet of humankind, with different skills and attributes. This mutual difference is at the heart of a beautiful coexistence that we must value and treasure. The charm of this coexistence is in knowing, recognizing and respecting this mutual difference. Men and Women are not meant to be equal in all aspects. They are meant to compliment each other for a beautiful world.

The point I am trying to make is that it makes little sense to bash men while supporting the cause of women. Men are not born to trouble women. I do agree that in many (in fact a lot) of instances, Men have tortured Women, humiliated them and belittled them. I agree that this has happened for generations in India and elsewhere in the world. I do recognize this grossly deplorable and sinister side of Men.

However, I see the problem not as much in Men as in the way the human beings are designed. The problem with Men is that they have been made physically stronger (does anyone dispute that?) by God, which, by default, gives them ready “Power” at their disposal. The lanes of history is littered in examples of misuse of Power by those who had them, because Power comes with an uncontrollable urge to test its limits, to see the effects of its use on those who it can be tried upon. It takes great courage and responsibility to control the urge to misuse power and we have seen many, whether men or women, falling prey to the spell of Power. Men aren’t infallible. Many have failed to restrain their physical Power and not use it on Women to inflict pain upon them.

The other, and probably more relevant reason for why Women have chosen to take a back seat in producing “Tangible Success” is their childbearing and nurturing responsibility, which, to some extent, has been forced upon them by the machinations of Almighty. This reason, however, has been misconstrued by Men (some Men, that is) as a sign of weakness and handicap, because in the days of brawn-centric domination, women couldn’t contribute much. Things, however, are different (though not completely) today.

There is absolutely no doubt that India is changing, albeit slowly. Women today have a better support system than they had in the past. The realization about rights as women is deeper than it was in the past. Media reaches more homes than what would have been imagined by many, a decade ago. The stories of women who have risen above the cut have been beamed to and impressed upon many women who look forward to some inspiration to take that one final leap. India, however, still remains a vast under-penetrated land where women still accept their fate as is; their oppression sometimes explicit and sometimes subtle.

The society is a fabric of crisscrossing threads of men and women. You can’t remove or sever the horizontal threads leaving only the vertical threads and still keep the fabric intact. What women need to realize is that the Men aren’t the only ones to comfortably blame for all their problems. Some part of the blame lies with them too and the major part with all of us, as a society, in failing to protect and nurture women so that they live with respect, dignity and achieve their full potential.

I am sure not many among us would go down on the street and fight for the cause of women. But each of us can do our bit in helping their cause. It could start with our friends, the children we would nurture (or already do), the people we know and most importantly (for Men though), the woman we live with or want to live with. Give women the love and respect they deserve and you will realize that nothing else in the world gives you better returns for what you invest (Sorry for that financial adulteration, blame it on my diploma from IIMA).

In the meanwhile, I have a few words for those big-mouthed feminists who write cheap, insensitive articles on weekend papers: “It doesn’t help being an FCB” (who needs the expansion? Mail me at get2reach@yahoo.com).

Ah, Pune!

2007-09-16T01:34:00.000-07:00

I apprehensively looked out of the smoky double-glass window of my AC Chair car compartment lest I should miss my station. The almost opaque glass helped little to see and make out the place that came on and went by outside the cold confines of my temperature-controlled bogey. Someone had told me that this was the only express train - fitted also with an air-conditioned car - that stopped at Chinchwad station. My journey so far - along with two heavy-weight boxes, a cabin bag, a laptop bag and couple of books and magazines pushed desperately into a Crossword carry bag - from Mumbai had been as uneventful as most parliamentary debates. I kept feeding on Kiran Desai’s “Inheritance of Loss” while also nibbling away at the superbly cold and semi-insipid bread-veg-cutlet served to me by the attending staff in pale crimson colored uniform made darker by the dirt deposits. Their name-tags hung from their shirt pockets, looking directly at the ground, invisible to the mankind.

Outside, in an orange-tinted haze, platforms came and escaped. Beside the shiny gray metal tracks, the landscape changed; from the sleek high rises in Parel to the shanties and multistoried pile of tin and undercooked bricks enjoying, with sharp contrast, the hip-shaking services offered by Salellite TV; from the garbage mound in Dadar to the overwhelming vistas of Khandala; From the graffiti-spoiled pale bridges in Mumbai to the dark, water-spraying tunnels of Lonavla;

I knew Pune approached. I knew because the size of human construction beside the tracks grew - from one story to two stories to five stories to ten stories. I dragged my heavy-weight luggage slowly through the narrow alley negotiating my way carefully through the protruding ankles and bulging out heads of dozing passengers, towards the inconsiderate door that kept on hitting back on anyone who tried to breach its line; a line that separated the air-conditioned and un-air-conditioned world. The foam-seated class and the wood-seated class. The cold-cutlet eating class and the hot banana-peel eating class. The class that throws food (along with packaging) onto the tracks and the class that searches for food on the tracks.

Blocking the toilet entrance, in shocking and shameful lack of consideration for public convenience were stacked up baggage of passengers who planned to alight some stops later. It didn’t matter if their “planned” stop was about an hour away. For them, it’s nothing short of an achievement to have “reserved” strategic places so that they are the ones to alight first. What a terrible desire to come first!

I pulled with great difficulty all my baggage through the narrow exit, made narrower by these inconsiderate souls. I looked at these people and thought whether they deserved to travel by an air-conditioned coach. Whether they deserved to earn the money they earned. While some merrily spilled groundnut skin on the floor, others thoughtlessly climbed on the seats with their shoes on, to remove baggage from overhead holds. Yet some others emptied Haldiram moong dal into their fat mouths and tossed the packets to the floor in disgusting nonchalance.

Before the soliciting and universally irritating autowallahs mobbed me, I quickly exited the station and moved onto the road. I don’t know if I invented (or discovered) this theory, but I have certainly made it a popular strategy among my friends: that you get the best auto/taxi deal when you hire it from the road, rather than the station stand. When you hire an auto/taxi from the road, there is a significant chance that you are mistaken for a local and quoted the right price. On the other hand, if you actually are a stranger (which some of these unscrupulous elements can read accurately in a flash) and try to hire an auto/taxi from the station stand, you are likeier to be charged twice (or thrice or even more depending on how lost you look).

However, this time, the trick didn’t work; at least for the first time. I flagged down an auto and asked him the price to Talawade (this is where I have my office). The guy was in absolute hurry, almost like a terrorist eager to witness the site of blast. He spat out “180” and almost ordered me to bend myself into his auto. I knew that the price he was quoting was almost double the “fair” value. I stopped just short of saying “F*** off” and continued walking in the other direction. The way I looked at him with scorn and almost laughed off his solicitation must have surely humiliated the auto guy. He came down to “120” in a flash and this time shouted at me to sit in his auto, tilting himself out of his cramped driving position, his fat figure looming out of the timid auto, almost like a fat worm peeping out of its hole. I shouted back and continued walking away from him.

I later caught hold of a shaky old auto driver and thanked myself for doing to good job of reaching office without paying any new-comer premium.

This was my experience so far, in reaching Pune. And it was all well for the first couple of weeks when the climate was pleasant with almost no humidity and the sun sporting a soothing glow. And then it rained. And it RAINED.

What a rain it was! Buckets got emptied in the sky and the water crashed onto the city almost like water gushing out of a dam. The road to my apartment, which I thought was safe enough to save itself from drowning, disappeared along with the vacant plot by its side. In its place, there was water, flattening the terrain inside its belly. Tea-coloured plateau reigned till the concrete-lined horizon, punctuated intermittently by occasional braving cyclist or motorcyclist who waded through the wheel-deep muddy water.

Then I witnessed some misplaced bravado. A corolla stood at the bank of the waters by the roadside and in the drizzle, a semi-wet middle-aged executive stood in a pensive mood. All the four doors of the Toyota Corolla were open. I snail-paced my bike and peeped inside. There was a small pool inside which the driver of the car desparetely tried to empty. I conjectured that the pot-bellied executive must have asked his driver to drive through the water, confident that the water wasn’t deep enough to cause any havoc. Tch Tch!!!

My woes were, however, far worse than the pot-bellied executive. From my apartment, the office took a tiring and irritating 45 minutes, enough time for the rainwater to seep through every square inch of cloth and comfortably wet every square inch of the skin. Almost everyday, I returned home, completely drenched - my neatly washed and pressed shirt polka-dotted by the mud-spitting spinning tires of the four-wheelers that overtook me, my shoes filled up with water and making splotching noises when I walked, my office documents virtually floating in water inside the bag - all dripping and shaking.

Thus I continued my to and fro ordeal to office, completely submitted to the fury and vagary of Pune rain. More unfortunately, my car showed no signs of arriving. The driver who was supposed to drive it to Pune caught flu at the most inopportune moment and was down sine die.

Pune is a great city though. Once you get used to rain, and get used to get drenched, rains matter no more. You enjoy playing hide and seek with it; timing your stay in malls to avoid it; racing your bike just enough to escape it; stopping at the shop-shade at the right time. And I have been doing exactly that. The monstrous Pune-rain, in the mean time, has taken a few days off.

I am back!

2007-09-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

After a long self-imposed hiatus - because of a compulsive desire to do nothing to make up for doing a "lot of things"during a supposedly gruelling two years at IIM Ahmedabad - I am back to blogging again!

The problem with me writing new stuff regularly is that I don't write my daily routine on the blog. I write when I find a topic worthy enough to narrate to others, so that the very few people, who, either by mistake or by innocuously following an innocuous link or are coaxed into or misquided by a fellow blogger to read my blogging page don't waste their time reading it.

I have started to write on many things parallely, but can't sit long enough on an article to give it finishing touches. The article on Pune was supposed to be much longer, but my patience gave away.

So here's presenting you with my first come back article, half-cooked from my literary impatience. Enjoy it, if you must...and you can!

"No more": Bye Bye IIM Ahmedabad

2007-03-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

No more would the swivel wooden chair rock me for 70 restless minutes. No more would I push two doors to enter into the air-conditioned sleeping chamber. No more would I turn back every minute to curse the lazy minute hand that forgot to move every now and then and had to be reminded. No more would my sound-proof head play Sudokus on mobile.

It's all over. The flickering tube light synchronizing itself with the static in the speakers, the room going lightless when the sleepy projector threw slides onto the ageing white screen that painfully dropped down from above, the pale beige curtains that didn't move for decades, the old table in the middle with a new rectangular cut, the eternally covered glass and the water bottle, the empty paper cups playing on the stepped floor, the sleeping heads and dozing faces of friends, the outrageous figures on my notebook's last page, the rectangular square box that hung from belts and took rest on the table in breaks.

I will miss you CR1. Even though I didn't like to sit there waiting for the minute hand to move. Even though I was pained with endless lectures joined in series. Even though it was difficult to negotiate my way out if you ever wanted to go out during a lecture. All I know is that if I ever come back to this place, and sit on those swiveling brown chairs with wood scooped out to the shape of thousands of enlightened souls who passed through these portals, I will surely feel my throat choke a little. I will surely feel the screen dropping from above with that so familiar groan and projector lighting up. And the hands on my watch and those on the eternal witness hanging from the wall going still. As if time has stopped since 2007.

Escape? My foot!

2007-02-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

I am partly asleep! But even at this hour (1 am to be precise) I am going to do what I have never done before. I am going to write my first "Blog". What nonsense, you might think. But, if you look at my other posts, you will see that they really don't qualify as "Blogs" - spontaneous ideas uploaded onto the internet without publishing-like stunts. Without reading, re-reading and proof-reading.

Well, now that the introductory paragraph is over, let's come to what I really wanted to "blog" about.

While flipping through the morning Times of India, I chanced upon an ad by Hutch. The newly-wed company with its peppermint-fresh vigor had put an ad on "Blackberry" - the dainty little wider black device that promises to unload your inbox right into your palm. So, what is the big deal? Yeah it does that, so? In fact it does quite well. But so?

So, I looked a bit more at the half-page ad, trying to digest the selling proposition. And what a proposition it was! "Escape from office" cried the bold line at the bottom. Are you kidding me? Blackberries are one of the most obvious and tyrant ways of hooking an employee to his/her job. To his/her office. People don't use Blackberries for dating or gaming. Or to check their Gmail or Yahoo! mail. They use it to access their office mailbox on the go. To update their bosses of the number of heartbeats they beat. The number of breaths they breathe. And of course the number of mails they read!

And see what this stupid ad says - "Escape from office"! Hah...if these marketers and ad agencies had their way, they would one day sell my kid a Shaving kit. "You will need it when you grow up!", is probably what they are going to say.

Grow up guys! Seriously.

Wordmasters?

2006-11-10T01:46:00.000-08:00

The following is my entry to a creative writing competition called “Wordmasters” organized by Google across 10 cities in India on 30th September 2006. The rules were simple. Contestants were given two topics to choose from and for each topic, a list of 20 words were given which must appear somewhere in the writing, without any kind of alteration. Those words are highlighted in the text below. And yes, one can not exceed the 200 word limit and the whole exercise has to be finished in an hour. The topics given were “Angry? Who me?” and “Innovations”. I wrote on “Innovations”.

It's a different matter that Google didn't like my "Innovation". Probably it was "Beyond Goooooogle's comprehension". :) Nevertheless, here it goes.

I’m a prisoner of my own thinking hat. Ditched by own imagination. Blinded by my own observation. I am trying to create ideas that haven’t yet entered the cranial confines of the human brain.

I conjure up weird images. Of absurd devices and some impossible experiment. I compete with myself. The multi-coloured jelly-like thoughts turn in a blur inside my head. But still, no luck.

I analyze. Do people who innovate think out of the box? It’s strange, because all my thinking devices are placed inside my spherical box of bones. What reaches my inquisitive neurons is filtered by own ability to imagine. Can I transcend myself?

I give up. I feel drained. As if someone has sucked out all my energy. But wait! My horse sense has just taken over. Has anyone really ever innovated? It either struck them out of the blue or they did what everyone knew would be done one day. Can someone really innovate? Something that is so far uncaptured by thoughts, unfettered by imagination? Something beyond what humans already know? No, I don’t think so.
Eureka! I just got a new direction. Innovations are not about thinking what you don’t know. The phenomena are about knowing what you think. That’s practical.

Beyond Gooooooooooooooooogle!

2006-09-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

Many of you would know that our Honourable Railways Minister Mr. Lalu Prasad (the ‘Yadav’ part seems to have been given an odd miss deliberately, for reasons I am blissfully unaware of) paid a visit to the Mecca of Indian Management Education; yeah, the IIM of A. He was here to talk about the turnaround of Indian Railways from a loss making public behemoth to one that now surprisingly has approximately 12,000 crores of surplus cash (give and take a few crores).

You might wonder what all of this has got to do with the rather odd title for this article. There is. There certainly is.

I did not do a research project on Indian Railways. Nor was I part of the 90 odd students who sat through the 3 hours of ‘intensive’ discussion with Lalu on the now-famous Railways story. However, prima facie, it seems that the man at the helm of affairs did something that no one else, who graced the office before him, ever thought of doing. Even if he did not do anything, why not just give him the benefit of doubt? After all, the dying (well, almost) public company started rolling after he assumed office.

Lalu, rather sarcastically, said in his address to the IIMA community that the ‘Corporate THINKTANK’ had almost written the Railways off saying that it was unmistakably heading for disaster. ‘Kuchh nahin ho sakta’ (nothing can be done) was a phrase he often heard from the ‘intellectually’ superior quarters. But, deep inside, the man believed that there was some way out, without raising the passenger fees.

To give you a perspective of what he did, before I come to what all this have to do with Google, Lalu (let’s for a moment submit ourselves completely, at least for ease of description, if for nothing else, to the fact that everything good that happened to Railways was done by the man himself) increased the per wagon load, stopped under-loading and under-charging, increased the number of wagons per train, gave goods trains priority, sped up loading and unloading at the bays, ensured that the wagons did not lie idle. This dramatically improved the capacity utilization, brought back shippers’ goodwill, reduced costs and what not! What an ‘Operations Management’ genius he was! Lalu said that before you do anything to the Railways, you need to know what goes on daily at the loading bay, in the life of the gang man, the fourth grade Railway employee, the daily-wage worker, the challenges of being a station master, a trackman, the life of a Ticket Checker, the poor farmer who takes his milk daily to the city for selling and the man who can no more afford the travel if you hike the fair even by a rupee.

How much of the problems plaguing Railways do you think, assuming for a moment that you are a management student, or a consultant for that matter, you could have unraveled had you been given a task to study the Indian Railways and suggest ways for its resurrection? Honestly, I have fairly dim hopes on that front. If my hopes were not well placed, the turnaround story would have happened much earlier given that we do not have any shortage of ‘Management’ talent in this country.

Given such a task, all we would perhaps do is pull the chair to the keyboard straightaway and start frantically hitting the keys on the Google search box. ‘Indian Railways problems’, ‘Indian Railways way out’, ‘Indian Railways this’, ‘Indian Railways that’ and what not. As results start popping up on the screen in 0.000045 seconds (I still do not understand if that has ANY significance at all) one would be happy that the research is going on the way ‘expected’.

After amassing a fair number of PDFs, opening up a screen-cluttering stack of internet explorer windows and going through them cursorily, as management students we would then look for ‘hardcore’ data. We have been taught from CR1 to CR10 that management decisions should be supported by numbers, because ‘numbers’ do not lie. We have learnt the complex statistical data analysis methods, the techniques of projection, of regression, of extrapolation and of course, manipulation!

So, the natural next stop would be all those Industry Statistics sites on the net that has loads of ‘data’. The keyboard comes to life again; ‘railways 10 years’, ‘railways revenue profit’, ‘indian railways 2006’ and there goes the string of search strings, desperately pushed from the keyboard to the mother of all information, the almighty of database. Her face, the glowing rectangular window of pixels with little ‘go-stop-back-forward’ buttons, blinks at us and unloads right in front of our eyes all the information of the Universe, filtered by our desires, for she knows EVERYTHING. Rows and columns peer down from the screen, graphs rise and fall, get skewed. Lines get curled, get kinks. We just got all the data to make decisions!
.
Oh yeah, the rest of the story flows like a Hindi film climax. Chaotic but predictable. Data gets mixed and matched, pieces are torn from here and there, graphs are lined up on the report with due acknowledgement to the source (We never forget to do that, because intellectual people are sensitive towards ‘Intellectual Property Rights’), projections are made, regressions done and voila! We just proved the hypothesis right. And you see, quite expectedly, the data supports it unequivocally, like VHP supporting every atrocity on the minority community. Indian Railways was such a hopeless entity after all. Man, I never knew RESEARCH was that simple!

I could be called a cynical. A skeptic without reason. I am fairly well aware of the fact that I have exaggerated certain things beyond my comfort. Beyond others’ comfort. But I think (or rather more politically accurately, IMHO i.e. In My Honest Opinion) there is a problem somewhere. Numbers do lie. And do so quite often. What we are building on is what someone else has failed to see. The numbers we juggle around are plain dead figures, not the kicking, vibrant reality. Numbers are lifeless. They do not tell you a story.

Reality lurks behind the sleek power point presentations. Beyond the multi-coloured charts and the three-dimensional steps of the bars. In the Times of India, a student of some business school once naively said, “The world has two kinds of people. Those who know how to Google and those who do not”. It is not that simple after all. Google is like a dead fish in a sea of information. Information does not always flow from computer screens. It is there around us. In stories of lives of people that does not get uploaded.

Just a thought. A strange thought, may be.

Kutte, main tera khoon pee jaunga!

2006-09-04T21:32:00.000-07:00

The other day while listening to Radio Mirchi, I heard something interesting: Dharmendra, our dhishoom-dhishoom Bollywood megastar of yore, along with his two sons, Sunny and Bobby, had come to Gujarat for a film shooting. Well, so? So, all the perpetually hungry street dogs in Gujarat had gone on an indefinite “Hunger Strike” (only the strike part was extra, I suppose) protesting the presence of apna Dharmuji on the soil of Gujarat. Our dogs were reportedly miffed at the presence of someone, who, for all his life, bashed unprovoked the most faithful of the animal species, each time he thrashed a baddie - “Kutte main tera khoon pee jaunga” – in his much-caricatured nasal voice. The canines had two grievances: Why should the dirty, lecherous, ruthless, shameless, dishonest, ugly, yeh-thappad-bahut-bhaari-padega type guys need to be compared to an innocuous (well, almost) and venerable species like dogs? More importantly, why someone thrashing these scums should have to repeatedly insult the species and grievously intimidate some of its members by declaring nonchalantly to drink their blood, with no regards to the substance that they hold so dearly in their veins? Probably the malnourished dogs with precariously low supply of blood in their visible network of veins were too afraid to have this blood-thirsty guy anywhere close to them.

Well, that was a different story. But what the hell did I do to the species? I surely haven’t been great friends with them. Neither have I occasionally been kind enough to toss a slice of bread or a biscuit at them despite their encircling me, begging me and wagging their tail in front me as if they were my childhood friends. But as far as I can remember, I have never been unkind to them, at least in the physical sense. I occasionally might have used certain derogatory phrases against them without their knowledge, but never attempted anything beyond that, in spite of several demanding, or rather apt, circumstances. Nor did I ever pour hot water on them, as one of my friends did, disgust with the persistence of a little brown member of the species who wouldn’t stop entering his house every time he had his lunch. I still see the dog roam around my friend’s place, nude, without the fur coating that once covered his skin.

This is how it all happened. A dotted black and white canine lay peacefully with eyes half closed and tongue rhythmically touching the ground while I purchased chicken from a shop nearby. The apparently well-fed and somehow well-maintained guy was breathing rapidly, displacing the dust near his nostrils, while his shiny black stomach swelled and caved in perfect synchronization with his tongue. The gentleman (so far, in retrospect) coiled his body around his legs poking the snout into the dust underneath. He (yeah, it was a he) was probably taking a cool nap in the tree-shade in the hot may afternoon. I hung the chicken bag onto the rear helmet lock of my black Pulsar and revved the engine, unaware of what the guy lying on the ground thought of me. As I released the clutch, the bike motioned towards him, and then, the unforeseen happened.

Before I could pass him completely, he leapt up, charged, almost like the released cord of a catapult, and with a short loud burst of bark, pierced his teeth into my left knee. Though my Pulsar had picked up considerable speed by now, the dog seemed to be in no mood to let go of his bike-riding attacker. He kept on running along the bike that was about to lose its balance anytime now, and tried hard to hold onto my knee. I was too shocked to understand what was going on, as it all happened even before my factory-fitted default reaction time had elapsed. I kept on hitting the throttle and the dog started to lose against the 150CC engine that raced the bike forward with more speed than he was probably used to. Before he finally let go of me, or rather my bleeding knee, he tore apart a piece from near the knee, from my new bottle-green casual trouser.

Luckily, the bleeding wasn’t profuse because the impact of the bite was almost entirely borne by the trouser seams. Trembling with shock and anger at the unprovoked turn of events, I kept on driving till I was sure that the monster wasn’t following me. I looked back to see if the chicken bag was still there. Yeah it was; only without any chicken in it. I usually drive slowly when hanging those micron-thick flimsy polyethylene bags onto the vehicle, lest they should give away at the slightest jerk. Unfortunately, this day was to be different. Needless to say, the bag behaved in exactly the same manner as I was afraid it would. It fluttered merrily in the air behind the vehicle while the chicken pieces lay spilled on the ground a few yards behind me. Some crows had already started to jump their way up to the chicken pieces looking cautiously at both sides for any impending owners. I watched them from the distance and felt a violent urge to go back to the dog and run my bike over him. But urge has no relation to courage, I think. I didn’t want my other knee to meet the same fate.

Even before I could completely recuperate from the shock and pain of the incident, I found myself in another terrible situation one night, again involving a member of the aforementioned respected species. It was about 1 am at night and the Pulsar was running at not less than 70 kmph when I spotted a big fat brown dog at a distance, about 10 meters off the tar road. There was something about his body language that sent a chill down my spine the moment I saw him. As they say in Hindi, “uske iraade sahi nahin the” (There was something wrong with his motives). I felt as if he was waiting just for me, at that odd hour of the silent treacherous night, meticulously, like a leopard waiting for his prey. I was wondering whether he came alone or had directed his colleagues to keep themselves hidden behind the bushes till he brings me off the vehicle and onto the road. Till it was time.

Before I could finish my thoughts, the beast started to bark wildly while running ferociously at 90 degrees to the direction of the road, to a pre-calculated point on the road where it could meet his prey. I did the calculation myself. Yeah, the bloody beast was right. If I kept driving at the same speed, the dog was surely going to catch me at the point he had so perfectly planned. There was no question of slowing down. Though it would lead to a minor change of plans for the enemy and his troupe, the task would obviously be easier for them. Time to hit the throttle again, I thought. The bike and my heart raced at speeds unknown to me. The tyres slapped the road with atrocious speed. However, the dog wasn’t an easy beast. He increased his speed like a learned student of kinetics, trying to keep his date with the point on the road. The next split second was like a dream, when I narrowly missed the beast (or rather, more accurately, the beast missed me) and had the escape of my life. While zooming away from the spot, for a moment I looked back. The dog barked away standing at the middle of the road, frustrated by the minor miscalculation on his part, while watching his prey vanish into the dark.

After two such unfortunate incidents, the most ubiquitous of species that once merged into the world that surrounds me, much like the cow on the street or the rotting garbage beside the road, has now acquired an identity of its own, at least for me. It no more gels into the background as just another dog running about helter-skelter with tongue hanging out from the snout. Now, every time I see a dog on the street, I try to keep as much distance as possible while involuntarily hitting the throttle hard. I don’t trust their claimed innocuousness anymore. Meanwhile, the quadrupeds prosper, dominating every overlapping spheres of our inseparable existence – ubiquitous as they are – coiled precariously under the railway ticket counter slab, wandering thoughtfully about the platform, rummaging through the dormitory garbage bucket at night, sleeping on the apartment staircase, alighting down the IIM subway stairs, walking about on the street outside, roaming around the mess. And probably the only derogatory phrase I use having anything to do with the species, which I was talking about in the beginning of my story, hardly mattered to them; “Kutte ki aulaad”.

Purani Genes

2006-06-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

I had thought I would not write anything about reservation. Much had been written already. Many among us have shouted, opposed and stayed hungry. Others have been hit mercilessly by khaki-clad goons and lived through treatment undeserving of them. And does it matter whether I write or not? For people thronging the circular palace of power in Delhi, it’s an easy decision. Cutting across party lines, every elected (or rather least rejected) representative has chosen to keep mum, offering tacit support to what could possibly draw the curtains on the futures of lakhs of hopefuls, prematurely; unceremoniously. No mud slinging, no blame games. No questions, no debates. There has been nothing that is so typical of these predictable political parties. It seems as if all of them have unanimously united in crime. Isn’t that strange in a country that has hundreds of regional parties, sister parties, offshoots, splinters and what nots? Actually it really isn’t. When it comes to begging votes based on caste, there isn’t any difference in opinion; probably because there isn’t so much of a difference in these parties’ very reason for existence.

I thought I had nothing more to add to this simmering quagmire. But the other day I was watching on NDTV a debate with a dim-witted, measly-informed leader participating. Though most of his foreign language (I took some time to figure out that it was English) was thoroughly incomprehensible, I could make out he made the following point. And I could no more keep quiet.

The leader said, “If you make economic condition a criteria for reservation, sons of rich upper caste people will get a poorness certificate and get into these colleges”. Now you have to agree that it’s completely immoral. Isn’t it? So what is a better way? Ensure that rich people don’t even have to take the pain to get a false certificate. They should already have one – the genuine certificate of backwardness. Never mind their economic condition. How intelligent!

If conspiracy theories are all that these people can offer as an explanation for the reasonableness of caste-based reservation, they should rather fetch themselves a working brain. Anything is possible. Forward caste people can get a backward caste certificate. What is the big deal? Does the possibility of certain wrong things happening to a right decision justify the implementation of something that is patently wrong, unreasonable, and utter nonsense?

The very people who talk about reservation in the higher educational sector wouldn’t lose grabbing the first available opportunity to send their wards off for a foreign education, probably because they think the Indian education system is no good. It’s a different matter whether their wards can even remotely compete on merit (with all legal and illegal support from their elite parents) and get a seat in these hallowed temples of higher education, even if there was no reservation at all. So it doesn’t matter to them whether 50% of seats are reserved or 90%.

Let’s look at another stupidity. They say unless we give the backward castes an opportunity to prove their worth, we possibly can’t ensure social justice. Great thinking I must say. So what do you do? Provide them with a seat in IIT. Once out from IIT, the SAME guy easily gets a seat in an IIM. Now if these brick-heads have their way, they would also reserve a seat for the SAME guy in the private sector jobs as well. How many opportunities do you need to provide to the SAME guy in the name of social justice, mauling the interest of thousands who toil day-in and day-out to keep their heads up in the waters of extremely tough competition? Now, given that reservation (albeit for SCs and STs only) is in effect for three generations now, what do you think is the chance that a person who gets into an IIT or IIM or a medical college for that matter, now, by means of reservation, is the first person in his/her family to get such a privilege? Practically nil.

The logic is simple. It’s same as that provided by some empty-headed politicians and leaders. They say that merit doesn’t know caste. Merit distribution is uniform across castes. The only reason upper castes have over-representation in institutes of higher education is they have access to better nutrition, teaching and social upbringing. The other day another leader was crying aloud on a media channel, “Do you call this merit? What is merit? If you have money, it’s not big deal to get into IITs or IIMs or Medical colleges. Students who cry foul themselves go to some coaching classes on their parents money, cram texts and pass the exam. That is not true merit”. Oh is it? Mr. Leader, that was truly an eye-opener. Can you define what merit is and how the hell are you going to test it? I thought I would invite the same leader to appear for CAT and score 20 percentile, paying all the money he can afford, for coaching and cramming.

Let’s for a moment accept that merit distribution cuts across castes. Now applying the above logic to the sons and daughters of SC/STs who are born to privileged parents (reads parents who already have had availed reservations) and have access to better facilities at home and at school, how do you justify a reservation for them? They have money and they also have merit. Right? These politicians, who are perfectly insulated with their vacuum-filled skulls don’t have any explanation. They don’t (and can’t) argue. They just evade such uncomfortable questions.

In the sixty years since independence, all that the reservation policy has achieved is to create a well-to-do class among SC/STs who, while having access to better nutrition, teaching materials, schools and social upbringing, continue to enjoy all the facilities originally meant for those who were deprived. The others have stayed where they were.

I can’t help but remember a neighbour of ours who we lovingly called ‘nani’ meaning sister in Oriya. She is a brahmin whose husband is unfortunately incapacitated by an accident in the factory he was working in. Ever since he lost his right arm, she had been living in extreme poverty, having lost the sole bread earning hand of the family. Her son studied with us and is now employed as a daily wage labourer somewhere while many of my SC/ST classmates who were as good as him if not worse and who came from much better economic conditions went on to do their engineering and are now well placed. As she tells me, all the doors are shut on her. Her crime? She is a forward caste poor. What a terrible mistake she has done. Forward castes have no business being poor. That is the twisted logic.

I called my mom a few days back. She has been apprehensively following the developments on reservation. Now she tells me that some sections of people within my caste have been demanding for an ‘other backward caste’ status. A status symbol, eh?

I pity these people. I thought we were moving forward and as a country we took pride in being forward. Why do then some people have to fight to earn themselves a ‘backward’ status? It’s not their fault. If by tweaking a word (rather a very influential word) they can secure 27% seats for themselves, there isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t. Quite ironically, moving forward by being ‘backward’. Not a bad idea after all. Ever since I have gathered sense, I have seen, felt, read or learnt no signs of any kind of social deprivation; at least none for the three generations above me. In fact many of my relatives and other members of my caste have held influential positions in the state, some leading various state agencies, purely on merit. My grandfather was a Deputy Collector. But now, if these sections have their way, we could be a backward caste – one among ‘Other [arbitrarily] Backward Castes’. How cool that sounds!

What concerns me more is not the 50% reservation that has been unanimously decided to be implemented; rather it is how long the system is going to be perpetuated. I shudder to think what will happen, if at all it has to happen, when the party in power announces to repeal the reservation system and takes the pie away in a whiff from certain section people who had come to think of it as their fundamental right. What we witnessed in terms of agitation from the medicos would evaporate in comparison. Try to give a toy to a kid with another kid watching. The other kid may cry, but that cry would probably be nothing compared to how the kid who you gave the toy to would, if you ever try to snatch the toy from him to give it back to the other. It is much more painful and several times more provocative when you give someone something, and after years of him/her enjoying that something, one fine day you try to pull that away. I doubt whether any political party in India would ever dare do such a thing. But if at all some party did, it would surely lose miserably in the next election and reservation would be back with a bang before you blinked. I am afraid, once the bill is formally passed in the parliament, it’s going to stay. For a long, long time. More dangerously, it could slowly creep into every other sphere of merit-based selection; like a cancer spreading through the body.

The pity is that there is absolutely no latest, concrete, refined and analyzed data to support the damage being done. The half-attempt displayed by politicians, in arguing – if at we can call that an argument – to support the disastrous decision is based on a census that is about 20 years old. If you watched or read the interview that our honourable HRD minister had with Karan Thapar on CNN, it wouldn’t take you more than a child’s brain to figure out that our minister had absolutely nothing to say in defense of his decision, except that he had the support of virtually all the MPs and he is but a servant of the parliament who is supposed to do what the house decides. What helplessness minister! The apex authority on the educational system in India feigning innocence/ignorance/helplessness or whatever on a matter that can no better relate to the only job he has got to worry about! His was the ultimate answer, repeatedly and desperately hung on to, over the past few weeks by him and his colleagues, when no other unreasonableness could hide their crassness.

Here goes the argument harped on by the perpetrators of this mindless reservation proposal. “We are just trying to reverse the 2000 years of oppression and injustice meted out to the people of the backward castes”. Oh really? What an accelerated way to achieve that! Trying to compress those 2000 years into 100 years probably? Why not then increase the reservation even further, say to 90% so that we can further accelerate the process of social justice and voila! Within the next 20 years, everyone has an equal pie of ‘social justice’.

On a broad level, reservation meant to make up for the oppression the SC/STs have had to live through before independence - and to some extent to even today, including untouchability, menial work and social ostracization by the forward-castes - has a reasonable ground. Though, as I have argued above, the method of implementation is infested with gaping loopholes, the need to give them an advantage to try to reverse the unfair treatment meted out to them for several years makes some sense. But what about the OBCs? Who are these ‘other’ people? Why and how are they socially backward? Is their backwardness consistent across the states? Across their own community? What is the extent of their backwardness? What percentage of population do the represent and what is their representation in the higher education already? Such questions of extreme relevance have comfortably been omitted from the screen presence of our Netas.

To a large extent, the Muslim community in India has been reeling under underdevelopment, poverty and lack of education. The community’s representation in higher education and jobs is well below its demographic share. Its condition can well be compared to that of some backward castes. So what is coming next - a 20% reservation for them as well? How far can we stretch this?

Let’s stretch the defective concept further to expose the flaws. If you must reserve seats based on caste, citing under-representation, lack of facilities, years of oppression or whatever, I don’t see any reason why the national cricket team of India, our Asiad or Olympic representatives, Tennis players, President, Prime-minister and every other position that is based on merit and selection shouldn’t be brought under the quota umbrella. Why, shouldn’t the oppressed people have their righteous place among the high flying team of India? If they shouldn’t, it surely amounts to grave social injustice, looking at their under-representation. If IITs and IIMs are not places of excellence that should be purely and entirely left to merit and market forces, I can’t think of any other position/institution in India that should be left untouched, not fiddled around with. Will the politicians agree to that? Will they keep only 20% for upper castes and leave all other Lok Sabha seats to every possible backward caste?

I am not going to offer any new solution. There have been enough solutions suggested by people who are much more knowledgeable in this field than I am. Many of them are practical and implementable. All they need is dedication and a willingness to make a permanent difference; not a pathetic mindset to play sort-term gimmicks and squeeze out maximum political mileage.

I am not against reservation. Neither am I entirely against caste-based reservation. In a nation still fettered to caste shackles, we can’t ignore the reality completely. But, reservation or no reservation, a decision that affects so many students in the formative stage of their career must be based on objective data, followed by nation-wide debate. The cavalier approach adopted by politicians is definitely deplorable. Reservation - if it must be implemented - should have a strict time-frame that can’t be altered by any dose of constitutional amendment. It should in no case be extended more than once to a family or a person. This would help the person stand up on his/her feet rather than use reservation as a crutch all through his/her life.

I feel concerned about people whose lives would be directly and immediately affected. Considering that less than 1 percent of those who appear CAT make it to the IIMs, any further reduction in seats would only create a growing number of intelligent and meritorious but frustrated students. The same logic applies to other institutions as well. Increasing the seats is not an immediate option. However, even if the seats were increased, the amount of spending it would entail would leave primary education in a lurch; unless of course the government decides to spend the whole of its annual budget on education alone! How would that help the society as a whole?

It’s time the law makers decided whether they want the country to move forward or backward. I keep my fingers crossed for the Supreme Court’s word. May sense prevail!