Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  Sarkar’s unwitting display of his intellectual prowess had frightened me, and he wasn’t even supposed to be the most illustrious of the IITians. It was as if the more driven ones went to the US for higher studies, eventually becoming tech-billionaires in Silicon Valley, while the drifters went to the IIM and unwittingly dazzled the management sector with their sheer brain power.

  It was a tough lesson to learn on my first day at B-school when I was struggling with my own apparent shortcomings. I walked back with him in silence as he continued to extol the virtues of the professor’s teaching methods.

  ‘You’ve suddenly become quiet, yaar. Things okay? I think you’ll find the challenge you’re looking for in marketing. By its nature, it is a pretty local field. I mean, marketing Diet Coke to an obese American who is dying of overeating should be inherently different from getting a starving Indian to replace one of his two meals a day with Coke,’ Sarkar said.

  I hadn’t thought of that before, but now it gave me something else to worry about. If financial accounting, a subject that I knew in exactly the same form in the US, could be such a challenge, then the essentially local nature of disciplines such as marketing could well mean that I might be entering the elite 10 per cent club who didn’t graduate from the IIM.

  I am fucked, I thought. Absolutely, royally fucked. I had quit my job and travelled several thousand miles to flunk out of a course that didn’t even really matter in the first place.

  As it turned out, I survived marketing. The satisfying conversation Vinod and I had at the beginning of the class helped. (‘Did you understand anything in accounting?’ Vinod asked. ‘Not after the first sentence on balance sheets,’ I said. ‘That’s more than what I did. I didn’t get past the grading system,’ he said.) In fact, I was so engrossed in the marketing lecture that I didn’t even notice Sarkar make an exit ten minutes before the scheduled end of the class. He didn’t come back when the marketing lecture ended or even when the next class, advanced statistics for management, began.

  ‘Has he gone back to his room in protest at having to attend classes?’ whispered Vinod as the statistics professor walked in. I had no time to respond as the professor immediately launched into the intricacies of the course work.

  It was Monday, 10:30 a.m., and whether it was the lack of sleep mixed with harsh Indian cigarettes or simply the superior Indian education system prevailing over an overused American banker’s mind, statistics turned out to be another unmitigated disaster. I struggled to stay focused as the cherubic Bengali professor lectured about stuff that I vaguely remembered from another lifetime. However, just like accounting, the pace was far too intense for me to convert the vaguely familiar matter into anything clear. Just as I gave up pretending that I could figure anything out, Sarkar strolled into class nonchalantly—a full twenty minutes late.

  ‘Today is the first class,’ the professor said, interrupting the lecture to throw him an angry scowl, ‘so I will let you in. But this won’t do in the future. Now spare the apologies and take a seat so I can resume.’

  Sarkar didn’t seem particularly apologetic as he lazily walked up to the empty seat next to me. He reeked of marijuana. I stared at him in surprise.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I whispered. ‘Did you leave the marketing class to go smoke up? It’s the first day of school for heaven’s sake. I just don’t believe you’re doing this.’

  ‘I couldn’t tolerate that marketing nonsense, man. I went to get some pills actually, but ended up smoking an unfinished joint from yesterday,’ he replied, showing me a vial packed with little white pills. I stared at his bloodshot eyes in disbelief as he washed down one with some water from the bottle on the desk. Just what’s wrong with him, I thought.

  Completely oblivious to my astonishment or the professor’s steady drone, Sarkar began to draw in his notepad. Bored with scribbling down the comprehensible bits from the lecture after a while, I stole a glance at his doodling and was stunned once again. There, on the ordinary ruled page of his notepad, instead of a single word of what the professor had said was an elaborate sketch of Michelangelo’s The Fall of Man—complete with the nudes, the tempting Satan and the avenging angel. He had taken all of ten minutes to create the replica. Unbelievable, I thought, shaking my head. Why was he wasting his time in business school?

  And what about me, I thought, now completely distracted. Why was I in this classroom studying correlation and regression equations when I had no interest at all in doing an MBA—or doing just about anything else for that matter? I hadn’t come here to ‘get in touch with my roots’ or understand the ‘duality of my identity’ or any of the other platitudes that second-generation immigrants throw about weightily. Mom was right, I had run away thinking that the farther I went, the deeper the insight I would get into myself. What I hadn’t realized was that there probably wasn’t a lot of depth to peer into in the first place. It had been cool to be decisive for a change and chuck everything, now it felt foolishly impulsive. I looked around the classroom—faces bent in concentration, brows sweating, hands feverishly making notes; none of them had been blessed with the opportunities I had. Yet, I had walked away. How could I have been so stupid?

  ‘What is the real probability?’

  When I looked up from my doodling next, the professor was discussing some funny-sounding probability theorem. He handed out a case study for discussion. The central character, Chubby Charlie, had to figure out whether the next cookie in a jar of mixed cookies would be a chocolate chip cookie or a butter almond one. Vinod caught my eye and grinned. We were both thinking the same thing: the cherubic statistics professor looked like Chubby Charlie. He also seemed uncannily like someone who would agonize over a cookie jar and get caught with his hands in one.

  The professor asked the class to calculate the probability of Chubby Charlie getting another chocolate chip cookie. ‘Why does Chubby Charlie think he has a 50 per cent chance when the probability is lower than that? What is his real probability?’ he asked.

  I could vaguely see the reapplication to the business world, but by then I was way beyond caring. I was sleepy and confused and just wanted the torture to end for the day.

  ‘What is Chubby Charlie doing wrong?’ The professor continued to push us.

  ‘Is this a story from his repressed childhood?’ I muttered to Sarkar, sitting comatose next to me. It wasn’t even that funny, but he exploded into a sudden, stoned laughter.

  The professor looked at him murderously. He already seemed to have made up his mind to dislike Sarkar since the time he had strolled into class twenty minutes late, looking every inch as stoned as he was.

  ‘Seems like you have the answer,’ he sneered at Sarkar.

  ‘Not really, sir. Just got distracted a bit,’ Sarkar mumbled, but the professor continued, ‘Go on, you seem to be in a particularly jovial mood today. The question can’t be that tough for you. What is the answer? Why is Chubby calculating the probability wrong?’

  Sarkar screwed up his eyes for a minute, concentrating on the blackboard and said, ‘Seems like Chubby isn’t using the likelihood of prior events to predict future events and is basing them on just the current scenario. If he factors in the probabilities of the previous events, the overall probability of getting a chocolate-chip cookie would be closer to 45 per cent.’

  Even the professor was surprised. ‘That’s pretty much it. Well stated. I couldn’t have said it better myself,’ he said shortly.

  Sarkar’s quick answer had caught me totally off guard. I could have sworn that like me, he was paying no attention at all. We had been winking and smiling for the past couple of minutes, sharing the Chubby Charlie joke with Vinod, and before that he had been making elaborate replicas of Michelangelo and God knows what else on his notepad. If I were asked the same question, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon even a remotely sensible answer, except probably listing the different types of cookies available at the local Wal-Mart back home.

  There is something inherently wrong with God�
�s distribution of intelligence, I thought, if someone can walk into class twenty minutes late, pop a pill, smoke up, pay as little attention as possible and yet solve these godawful statistical problems without even batting an eyelid. I hope Sarkar is an exception, I said to myself, because if everyone in the class is like him, I had better start packing my bags.

  The professor seemed a bit shaken by the episode too, or maybe he was just tired of droning on to a class of blank, tired faces.

  ‘Let’s break for now. No homework, but remember, the first statistics quiz will be two weeks from today.’

  At 11:30 a.m., I took stock as classes formally ended for the day. It was brutal. Three lectures to revise, two of which I had barely understood, two case study analyses, the imminent threat of an accounting quiz and, finally, the sudden announcement of the mother of all quizzes—the dreaded statistics quiz: the first serious quiz at the IIM and the one which separated the men from the boys (given the proportion of women in the class, the chauvinistic term was justified). Legend had it that your performance in the first statistics quiz was eerily predictive of your rank in class at the end of two years. In some sense, this was logical since the symbolic value of acing the first quiz ensured that everyone had given their best to the quiz (almost everyone, that is—Sarkar chose not to waste precious smoking-up time preparing for such ‘symbolic irrelevances’).

  As we walked back for lunch, I was determined to get my act together and focus on delivering my best in the quiz. Conquering the innate restlessness of the mind was what I had always been conditioned to do, whether in high school academics or the athletics squad at Yale, and I wasn’t going to back down at the sign of some tough Indian competition. It was just a statistics quiz after all, hadn’t I seen worse?

  5

  Just a Stats Quiz

  I took to running every evening around the picturesque campus, revelling in the sensation of my feet pounding on the paved road, the throbbing pain in my calves and the reassuring river of sweat that drenched me. The sheer physical exhaustion of a six-mile run coupled with the usual sleep deprivation fused together to form a heady cocktail and I derived a perverse enjoyment in chasing my disorganized thoughts:

  ‘Sarkar and Vinod are pretty cool. Glad I met them.’

  But, ‘No more male buddies. Try to get some action.’

  Then, ‘Should probably get connected with Nandini, she studied in the US as well, maybe I can get lucky there… But you don’t even understand her questions in class, you dumb loser. What the hell will you talk about?’

  And, ‘Anyway, academically you are so miserably screwed dude, you have no right to think about anything else.’

  Therefore: ‘Maybe I should just stick to Sarkar and Vinod.’

  And so it went till the run came to an end. While running had always been my mental release, here it evolved into a mystical, transcendental experience—an immediate antidote to the vague sense of impending doom that I hadn’t been able to shake off since the time I landed in India.

  But even the run failed to lift the wretched mood I was in the day before the statistics quiz.

  I walked back to the hostel to be greeted by the usual half-puzzled, half-contemptuous ‘Look at that American idiot, he has time to run! The stats quiz will teach him that this is not America’ look from my hostel mates. But today, their frank bewilderment made me feel guilty instead of irritated. While the rest of the class buried their heads in books every waking moment, I spent almost two hours a day on such trivial pursuits as running and a post-run shower. I thought that running would help clear my head, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Much to my frustration, I capitulated easily to the intellectually overdeveloped Indian brains all around me. I thought I was working hard, averaging four or five hours of sleep at night, but to my surprise I was unable to make a single inspired original comment in class. I soon understood why.

  The short, spiky-haired dude, who had stopped just short of calling me a CIA operative during my first lunch at IIM, ran into me in the cafeteria the night before the quiz. Vikrant was fat, misshapen and delightfully transparent about his obsession with grades, ranks, internships, company recruitment talks and anything else that smelt even remotely of a way to a career. After disposing of the small talk (‘Sorry for that day, I didn’t mean it’, ‘By the way, what was your rank in Yale?’, ‘What was your CGPA?’, ‘How much did you get paid in Wall Street?’, ‘Do all bankers get to screw models?’ etc.), he said he was feeling a bit sleepy that night.

  ‘I haven’t slept at all for the past two nights and have been averaging just about an hour or so for the last ten days. I think I’ll turn in early tonight. I want to be fresh before the quiz,’ he said.

  It was 2:30 a.m. At best, he would manage five hours before the 8 a.m. quiz.

  ‘You’re kidding me, right? How can anyone survive on such little sleep?’ I asked, already experiencing the familiar sinking sensation of knowing there would be another nasty Indian surprise in store.

  ‘That’s not really unusual here, is it? Most of the folks in my study group are doing the same,’ he replied. ‘And I used to follow the same schedule as a code coolie at Infosys pretty regularly. If I could keep those hours while writing software for a flush-valve manufacturer so they could supply screws for your loos in America on time, I can definitely keep them now before the first quiz in business school.’

  I vowed to myself that I would immediately reduce my sleeping hours to compete effectively with these bastards. Thus I fell into the great Indian B-school trap of equating productivity with the number of hours spent awake. Soon, like everyone else, I would be benchmarking preparedness for examinations with sleeplessness: a quiz meant four hours of sleep, a midterm meant two hours and you were doomed if you got any sleep at all for the all-important end-term. Efficiency, prioritization and other such trifles became irrelevant. Later, I’d learn that the same principle was very much a part of Indian corporate culture: the number of hours you clocked in at office became a surrogate for how devoted you were to your job. Whether the time was spent in innumerable cigarette breaks or the occasional vada-pao interlude was irrelevant. You just needed to come early, stay late and neglect your family to wear Corporate India’s badge of honour. Ironically, this went against everything you learned in B-school lectures on effective resource utilization, productivity drop with increased time spent on the job and negative impact of action versus result-based reward systems, etc. But then, when did business school claim to provide any vestige of a practical education?

  After hearing about his ‘study-group’, I went to seek out my own—if you could call it that. I knocked on Sarkar’s door to be greeted by the now familiar red eyes.

  ‘Aao, Thakur, aao,’ he said with a flourish. ‘I had forgotten you live next to me. I haven’t seen you at all for two weeks except in class. Are you okay, man?’

  Sarkar himself looked quite well, sprawled on the bed in his smoky room. A glass of something dark, rum maybe, graced one hand and his statistics textbook the other. A joint lay in the ashtray and heavy metal played in the background. How the hell could anybody study this way?

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, just very busy. Just came by to say hi. I have to solve the final tutorial sheet,’ I replied.

  ‘Arre yaar, always the American, never time to stop, never time to talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve looked at the tutorial sheets. I don’t think you need to solve all the problems. Just look at a couple and you’ll get the general sense. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions. I’m not an expert or anything, but I’m okay at mathematics and statistics kind of stuff.’ He paused and took another long drag. ‘None of this matters anyway.’

  Sure, I thought, would you care to elaborate what else matters a day before the first quiz? But I didn’t want to argue with him just then.

  ‘Thanks for the offer, dude. I gotta go now. Let’s catch up tomorrow after the exam,’ I replied, thinking I had seen Goth-rocking stoned punks at Yale and I had seen brilliant analyt
ical minds there, but I had never quite seen them both rolled into one.

  I ran into Vinod on the way to my room. He was coming out of the phone booth, his giant frame dwarfing the small phone attendant, who looked almost scared collecting money from him.

  ‘Calling home?’ I asked. I had a sudden urge to call my parents and say that I was coming back.

  ‘No,’ Vinod replied quietly, unlike his usual cheerful self.

  ‘Is everything okay? You don’t sound too good,’ I said.

  ‘Well… not really. I was talking to a friend’s mother. He was with me in Kashmir, didn’t make it. It’s been a year now, but I guess no amount of time will ever make things okay for her.’

  I felt small worrying about statistics quizzes, business school, Manhattan, investment banking and so on. My existence affected no one’s life other than my own. In another world—very close to mine—people died for their country and grieved for the families of their martyred friends.

  Vinod seemed to read my thoughts. ‘Anyway, forget all that. How is the preparation for the quiz coming along? I’m pretty worried about it,’ he said.

  I knew he didn’t give a flying fuck about the stats quiz, the accounting case study or business school in general. He was just trying to be nice and regular, as if he wasn’t any superior because he had stared death in the face and come back alive.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘How about yours?’

  ‘I haven’t done much, just looked at a sheet or two. Wasn’t very interested, to be honest,’ he said. ‘Call me a rustic military clod, but I just can’t believe managers need all this probability, random number generations and other complex statistics to make decisions in real life. It seems pretty useless.’

  ‘Sarkar shares your views.’ I smiled. ‘He is a couple of steps ahead of you, though. He thinks everything is useless; the stats quiz, business school, life, everything.’