Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  ‘Damn it,’ I said aloud, ready to quit, when Chetan himself slid in next to me. ‘Can I help you with that? I just finished mine an hour ago,’ he said.

  Hmm, that’s weird, I thought. I’d been here two months and Chetan hadn’t bothered to acknowledge my existence after our lunch together the first day.

  Should I sell my soul for a five per cent quiz? I briefly contemplated refusing him, but didn’t pursue that line of thinking. I was learning slowly that stopping oneself from thinking too hard was one of the best qualities a manager could acquire.

  ‘Yes, thanks a ton. I was struggling with how to calculate the variance of a random distribution. I don’t seem to recall the professor talking about it in class,’ I said.

  Quickly, Chetan showed me how to use some obscure toolbar options in the statistical software, fill in some imposing Greek-looking variables in an open dialog box and pressed the Run button to submit the analyses.

  ‘Thanks, dude, I owe you one.’ I let out a sigh of relief as the ticker hit 2 a.m. and I got the confirmation that I had submitted the assignment in time.

  ‘Glad I could help. Do you want to grab some tea?’ he responded unexpectedly. I looked at him curiously, trying to guess the reason for this chumminess. Chetan, like most of the class, was conducting transactions in business school—you give me something, I’ll give you something in return—and wasn’t seeking any meaningful emotional attachment, love, friendship or memories from the institute. Gordon Gekko in Wall Street would have been proud to mentor him. Chetan symbolized what Gekko stood for: ‘If you need a friend, get a dog, kiddo… It’s all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.’

  Why then the need for this conversation? As far as I could see, I had nothing whatsoever to offer in this transaction. I was the beacon of mediocrity, and shone not in a single class or assignment. I tried to recall if I had done anything exceptional lately and realized with shame that I couldn’t think of anything since I had come to India.

  Chetan revealed his intentions over tea. ‘Have you started preparing for summer placements yet?’ he asked. Summer placement season or the crazy three-day company recruitment process for summer internships was supposed to begin in a month, a fact that had completely slipped my mind. A month seemed several lifetimes away. But I wasn’t about to reveal the sorry state of my affairs to Chetan. I said, ‘I’ve started to create some plans and schedules.’ In reality, the brief moments I had spent thinking of summer placements were all in the context of returning to the illusion of happiness I had created in Manhattan. I had a standing offer from my ex-employer in Wall Street and was sorely tempted to go back and pick up the fragments of my old life.

  ‘Well, I wanted to ask you,’ Chetan went on, smiling like a Catholic priest about to stick it into an altar boy, ‘if you would like to join our placement preparation group—Jain and Nitin and me, that is.’ The other two names he had just mentioned were the top-rankers in the class, rarely seen, seldom heard, always buried up to their arse in books.

  Chetan continued, ‘We could really benefit from your experience in investment banking.’ Now it was starting to make sense. ‘And,’ he hesitated, ‘your contacts in the banking industry.’ Oh, Chetan, you pathetic bastard, couldn’t you have done this with a little more finesse? I should have guessed. My supposed contacts in investment banking would soon make me a hot property in the batch and Chetan, as usual, had figured it out quicker than anyone else.

  ‘Thanks for your offer, man. I’m honoured, of course, but I guess I’ll just plod along on my own,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want to drag you guys down since I don’t know what my schedule is going to be. I’m more a solitary preparation kinda guy anyway.’

  Even if I wanted to ace summer placements, I couldn’t see myself closeted for hours in Chetan’s room discussing interview questions with his insufferable crew. He looked somewhat surprised and very disappointed. He hadn’t expected that answer, especially since he had just dropped Jain’s name. Jain had become something of a legend after his perfect score in a recent brutal economics quiz in which half the class had failed to get a single mark.

  Chetan’s interjection did force me to start thinking seriously about summer placements and despite it being about 3 a.m., I decided to sort things out in my head by going for a run. Unlike American schools, which have a steady progression of companies coming to recruit on campus over several months, Indian B-schools have an illogically intense three-day window where more than a hundred companies arrive to recruit from a class of 200-odd students. To ensure most people get their pick, company visits are slotted in this period based on student preferences. The first day of recruiting, enigmatically titled Day Zero, features all the top-ticket investment banking and consulting companies since these usually pay the most lucrative salaries and offer foreign postings—clearly the most important factors in luring B-School students (who cares about minutiae like job satisfaction?). The next day’s top slots go to top global consumer goods companies followed by hot regional-banking jobs with IT companies making up the rear. The following day goes to second-notch companies in these sectors. The final day is reserved for public sector and government companies because serving the Government of India is firmly in the backseat for salary-hungry students in the (government-subsidized) IIM.

  The system works well for the top-rankers as they are given several job offers before they pick one on Day Zero. An average student, however, goes through approximately 25-30 stressful interviews and is rejected by several companies in the space of a couple of days before finally landing a job. Which merely exhausts you. What kills you is when you are among the bottom-rung folks who have to go through as many as 70-80 interviews in three torturous days, and correspondingly as many rejections, before getting a job.

  Even that is still okay, I guess, an essential, traumatic B-school experience that becomes a distant memory as the years go by. The worst off are those who are left without a job at the end of the process and are slowly, painfully absorbed over the next couple of months via the random act of a company seeking a last-minute candidate to fill a gap. Their spirit is completely broken by then. After being openly rejected for a dumb corporate internship almost a hundred times, only the toughest manage to hold on to any illusion of self-worth.

  And then there are the mumbled discussions of fellow students—‘He hasn’t got a job yet!’ —in hallways to contend with, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. ‘B-school kills many an innocent mockingbird,’ Sarkar used to say, and the first ones to break completely are the summer placement rejects. As we were to discover, failure in summer placements coupled with the crushing feeling of shabby academic performance could often have hazardous consequences.

  ‘I’m not afraid of summer placements. Interviews have always been my strength,’ I told myself. ‘Well, so was academics until now.’

  ‘But interviews are different.’

  ‘Oh, really, what is different about them?’

  ‘Well, go back then! The whole class wants to get into investment banking and you already have an offer from the best bank.’

  I started my run that night with the familiar havoc in my head.

  Maybe it was the absolute solitude of the 3 a.m. run or the haunted, eerie desolation of the beautiful campus, but I did end up arriving at a decision by the end of the run. Although, I thought ironically, it was a decision arrived at by elimination rather than selection. I wasn’t going back to Manhattan for my internship, I decided. I had come here in search of something, however abstract, and I wasn’t going to take the soft option so early in the game. Was my search more personal than professional? I didn’t know, so with a numerical flourish that would make Chubby Charlie proud, I decided to give both equal probability and eliminated all foreign jobs and local banking jobs from my consideration.

  IT companies were out of the question, of course. Even in the US, at the height of the Indian technology outsourcing boom, I had been dreadful at computers. I was routinely embarrassed by
the white computer administrator in the investment bank who would stare confounded at me when I called him with alarming frequency to fix my computer issues.

  ‘What is the world coming to? How can an Indian ask an American to fix his computer?’ would be the unasked question in his eyes.

  ‘You stereotyping bastard, it’s because I’m an American investment banker like everyone around here. This isn’t my skill set,’ was my unspoken answer.

  Anyhow, this left only India-based management consulting and marketing jobs, and I decided to go after them wholeheartedly. I felt good about my decision and almost looked forward to the perverse randomness of consulting the manager of a sugar factory plant somewhere in rural Uttar Pradesh. He would likely have hair growing out of his ears and would be surprised by my complete lack of knowledge about manufacturing, silently wondering why his useless bosses sitting in Mumbai had found the need to hire a bozo with a thick American accent to help with a broken supply chain in Uttar Pradesh. Best of luck, bastards, here I come, I thought, suddenly exhilarated. I felt good again—the silent agony of indecision no longer troubled me.

  What is it about running and me, I thought, returning to my hostel room. Every time I came back from a run, all my problems seemed to dissolve in the rivulets of sweat that poured down my back.

  I saw a light in Sarkar’s room and decided to see if he had anything I could smoke up in celebration. Vinod was already there and I felt a momentary pang when I saw the easy familiarity that had developed between them over the past two months. I had been so possessed by my own insecurities that barring a spare weekend or two, I had hardly spent any time with them. I felt small and selfish. They were always there when I needed someone to unwind with, but I virtually ignored them otherwise. So wrapped up was I in my desire to succeed in my little world that I had forgotten to define success. Would I be happy if, hypothetically, I managed to ace the course? Probably not, since I had done so consistently in Yale, yet my only truly happy memories of the place were of the time spent with Peter and Radha, of long discussions over coffee and cigarettes and staring out into the hazy, uncertain future together. A weird contradiction—the absence of academic, or for that matter, all material achievement made me unhappy, but its presence made me no happier. Ah, the elusive nature of happiness, I thought, entering the room, noticing immediately that both of them looked very sober. In fact, to my surprise, the characteristically laidback pair was discussing summer placements as well.

  ‘Window of opportunity daab do bhai,’ Sarkar was saying animatedly as I entered, ‘Just grab the window of opportunity, this is not a time for confusion.’

  *

  Apparently, Vinod was going through the same turmoil as I was—should one go for investment-banking, consulting, marketing, human resources or IT, and how does one make the decision after just two months of being swamped with an overload of unfamiliar information in B-school?

  Sarkar’s unasked for advice was whimsical and erratic as usual. ‘Yaar, here is my logic. All these decisions are as simple as deciding where to vacation. Should you go to tourist spots, say Paris or Rome, where everyone goes, for example? You will immediately cringe and cry out no, behenchod, my vacation has to be different. I can’t end up clicking a photograph on a gondola in Venice like Chikli Bua and show it to disinterested relatives over chicken tikkas in the living room. But here is my perspective. Hypothetically, if this was your honeymoon or an occasion that is unlikely to come again, what would you do? Would you go to an unknown, unpredictable location like the Amazon rainforest, or would you find safety in numbers and sip coffee in a café in Paris, knowing you couldn’t possibly go wrong with that? Placements are similar. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just follow the tried-and-tested path. If everyone thinks investment-banking jobs are hot, just go for them. How wrong can you go with that? That’s what I’ve always done. No clue what to do with life? Take the IIT exam because 500,000 people take it every year. No clue what to do after IIT? Take the IIM exam because 300,000 people apply for the IIM. Simple, man. Never over-think.’

  Vinod was laughing. ‘You have a gift for all this pseudo-philosophical bullshit. And you haven’t been helpful at all, by the way.’

  He turned to me. ‘Samrat… wow! You went for a run? Big game. I love this shit, boss. I’ve become a wuss since I came here. Let’s run together tomorrow. So, what’s your plan for placements?’

  I told them my strategy. They were suitably impressed. ‘That is stupendous clarity from the most confused soul among us,’ said Sarkar.

  ‘Most confused? Who, me?’ I whined.

  ‘Why not?’ Sarkar countered. ‘In the thirty-year history of the institute, no one has seen a banker from Wall Street come here to get his MBA, and I’m sure that in the next hundred years, no one will. And while that doesn’t surprise me—I would probably have done something similar—I’m surprised by your manic attention to academics and grades. I mean, I would have expected you to be doping around reading the Gita or the Upanishads, searching for the meaning of life, and yet I barely see you at all because you are busy studying for a petty five per cent weighted statistics quiz.’

  Vinod jumped in as well. ‘It is a bit confounding. What exactly are you going to get out of grades anyway? You already have an open offer from the company that all the top rankers want to get into.’

  ‘I don’t know, okay?’ I said irritably. ‘Who defined this confusion scale anyway? I find it equally confusing that a guy who could be using his mind to do something meaningful is trying to stop himself from thinking by smoking up and popping pills.’

  Vinod agreed. ‘I think we’re all fucked. We have no right to define degrees of confusion.’ Sensing my irritation, he changed the subject. ‘Can either of you actually imagine working in a corporation and being paid for it? It sounds pretty remote. I mean, I did work in the army, but it was all fun and games, like an extension of the National Defence Academy—versus a real job. It’s difficult to imagine coming to work every day in a suit and tie, running Excel files, attending strategy meetings and such.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ I said shortly.

  That’s how I had felt as well when I was about to graduate from Yale. Working for a living hadn’t seemed possible, but when it did happen, it seemed natural. Or did it? I had never quite settled down at work and on most days, everything had seemed like such a waste. All the talk about beating competition, serving your clients, creating value for shareholders and making a difference to client companies had always sounded hollow, make-believe and unreal. ‘At least stop pretending it matters, please. What difference does it make to the cosmos if the client company’s stock price rises by a dime? Who really gives a fuck?’ I had wanted to say so many times to my chronically overenthusiastic colleagues at the bank.

  ‘I think there are certain kinds of people who’re cut out to work their balls off at work every day and feel fulfilled,’ Sarkar said. ‘For one, it has to be someone who doesn’t think too much because—’

  ‘Let’s analyse all this once we get a job,’ Vinod cut off Sarkar before he launched into his usual monologue about the futility of the cycle of life: getting a job, marriage, kids, death. ‘Let’s make a pact, okay? Let’s study together seriously for the next month, get a job and then discuss all this. I, for one, have no fall-back plans. If it isn’t a job here, I will be back to checking bathrooms for an army general’s visit. Let’s hold on to the life- and system-bashing discussions until summer placements are over.’

  *

  In the following month, not only the three of us, but the whole class became obsessed with placements even as the onslaught of incomprehensible lectures, surprise quizzes and intense case study discussions continued unabated. It was a pressure cauldron. Various incidents of petty politics started coming to light. Chetan had taken Nandini’s case study analysis from the printer and read it before class to poke holes in her presentation in class; Jain had not communicated a message from the professor to the class so tha
t he had the edge before a quiz; Hari, in charge of the tutorial sheets, had ‘forgotten’ to keep a professor’s assignment at the library Xerox counter a day before the exams; someone had forwarded Manik’s e-mail, in which he had called a lecturer an ‘old hag’, to the lecturer in question from an unknown e-mail account. Such mindless incidents became commonplace.

  In the meantime, summer placement preparations began in full earnest. Resumes were sexed up with make-believe incidents of past glory (the winner of a skipping rope competition in first grade called himself an ‘accomplished track and field athlete’), mock interviews were held, agonizing, painstaking research on companies was completed. Everyone had done enough preparation to convince one set of interviewers that analysing spreadsheets in the credit card division of a local bank was their life’s passion, and in the same breath make an impassioned plea to another set of interviewers about how they’d always had wet dreams about selling toothpaste in rural India. Why this charade, I thought. Aren’t the interviewers business school graduates too? Haven’t they experienced the complete lack of direction that one feels in the first few months here? But that’s how the game was played, so that’s how we played it.

  Sarkar, Vinod and I began to gather in my room every night to prepare for interviews. I gave Vinod and Sarkar a snapshot into investment banking interviews.

  ‘Always, always boast unabashedly and show naked, hungry ambition,’ I advised them. ‘A brilliant guy from Yale got rejected because he said he only wanted 50,000 dollars in his bank after five years. I said I wanted at least a million. I was lying, of course. All I wanted was to be happy, but banking interviews are not the place to discuss trivial emotions like happiness.’

  We laboriously filled the long forms that marketing companies thrust on us.

  ‘Should I write about my skills in procuring a certain substance that day?’ Sarkar agonized in mock seriousness over a consumer goods company’s essay-type question: Give an example where you set a vision, successfully overcame obstacles and collaborated with multiple stakeholders to achieve that vision. ‘I think it is a great example of setting a simple vision—get some grass, somehow, anyhow, collaborating with multiple stakeholders—three chai-wallahs and two auto-rickshaw guys, while successfully overcoming obstacles—the auto-wallah turned out to be a bloody pimp and wanted to get us women instead of weed!’