Pandavas

by Anil Chawla

  He realized that his glass was still half full. The movie had helped him loosen up a bit, and with a smile, he said, ‘Yes.’ And added, ‘On the rocks, please.’

  She brought it in a jiffy along with some triangles of cheese and olives, neatly speared, and a bowl of roasted cashew nuts. He thanked her and humoured himself: ‘After all, she’s just a flight attendant. And she has seen me fly so many times that it’s no big deal that she understands my preferences.’

  His earlier thoughts of data and analytics helped him regain control and made him feel lighter. He started thinking about the next day. He was visiting his hometown to settle some property-related matters.

  Rewind_Rendezvous@One

  Venue: Kapadia residence, Vadodara

  It was a Saturday morning at Kalpu’s home and it was the Pandavas’ first ‘Rewind_Rendezvous’. The concept of Rewind_Rendezvous—a modern, voluntary exile from corporate life—went back to their final semester at LEC Surat. The glorious four years, and perhaps the most remarkable chapter of their lives, were coming to an end. None wanted this beautiful journey to cease but life is cruel sometimes. Like in the first year, Sammy had arranged a booze party for the Pandavas in one of the hostel rooms. Strangely, the excitement of the first year was missing. In fact, the atmosphere in the room was sad and the mood sombre. Goky, Sammy, and Pantu held onto their drinks for a long while before taking their first sips. Kalpu’s glass of juice had gone similarly unattended. Sri had taken only occasional sips of his Limca. It was Sammy who broke the silence,

  ‘Guys, a lot of money has been spent on this Black Dog. Let’s do justice to it.’

  Nobody responded.

  After some time, Goky philosophically said, ‘It’s a part of life, guys. Our meeting was ordained; so is our separation.’

  Nobody was impressed.

  Suddenly, Pantu got up and asked for a candle and matchbox. Everybody was bemused. After some searching, they found one small candle and matches. Pantu placed the candle on a small tray and lit it. And then, in typical Pantu-Bollywood style, he proclaimed:

  ‘We, the Pandavas, do hereby solemnly pledge that we shall never let the fire of our friendship dim. We shall meet intermittently but surely, and renew our friendship. Periodically, we shall take a break from our routine life and come for a “Rewind_Rendezvous”. Nobody will be allowed to back out, whatever the circumstances. Now, guys, come and put your hand over this flame and take this pledge.’

  As he stretched his hand towards the flame, Kalpu pulled it back and yelled, ‘Enough melodrama, Pantu. It’s not a film. The flame will really burn your hand, which, by the way, could be quite painful.’

  Sri, who was generally the coolest of them, looked quite excited and said, ‘I believe this is a great idea and needs serious attention.’

  While arguments flew left, right and centre, it was gradually sinking into their minds that this pledge was, indeed, a fantastic idea and they should really make it. After a pause, they committed to the promise. Pantu and Sammy came up with some good ideas to put the concept into operation.

  It was nearly a year after they separated that Pantu initiated a conversation about the first get-together. Nobody had settled down in life yet, not in the true sense. Neither did they have proper homes of their own. As a temporary solution, Kalpu suggested that they meet at her parents’ place in Vadodara, which was quite convenient for Goky, Kalpu, Sammy, and Sri. Pantu, although in Delhi, would have crossed seven seas to meet his buddies. He booked a ticket on the August Kranti Express and reached early in the morning. The other four travelled from Mumbai together.

  Kalpu’s parents had arranged for all of them to stay in their palatial house. They had a huge hall and at Kalpu’s request, a few mattresses were placed on the floor of this hall. The whole idea was that for those two days, they would always be together. Courtesy Kalpu’s mother and a battery of servants, they were plied with food all the time. No one minded, least of all Pantu. In the first year of their working life, they had been living rather frugally and this was an opportunity to gorge. The only tinge of regret for three of them was the absence of liquor.

  Their conversation in the first Rewind_Rendezvous largely focused on:

  •How was their company/ work and life treating them?

  •What were their colleagues like?

  •Did they like what they were doing? Even before that came the question—was their work giving them time to think about this question?

  •Bosses—enough said!

  •Were they moving towards the objectives they had set for themselves?

  Each had a different take on the year gone by. The simplest one was Pantu’s, who was struggling on all fronts but whose spirits were as high as ever. The silver lining for him was the gut feel that the future was bright and the sky was the limit. Kalpu was quite unhappy and was not enjoying her work at all. Her work conditions were not good, and she had realized that she was not cut out for a programming job. Sri had interesting stories to tell about his undersea experience, the solitude he enjoyed while being on the rig, and the excitement of going underwater. Overall, he was happy with his work. The only glitch was his nincompoop boss. Sammy was doing well and making good progress in Special Electric. Goky’s life hardly gave him time to think. He often had 14- to 16-hour workdays plus working weekends. The big excitement for him was the prospect of going overseas, which looked to be possible earlier than he had thought.

  In a nutshell, the five of them relived almost the entire year past, and felt energized for the battles ahead. Come Monday, life was going to be the same. But for now, they were upbeat.

  While parting, they agreed that the next Rewind_Rendezvous would be held at a different place, which was to be decided later.

  The Queen

  Life’s dreams are like glass balls: if you keep juggling them, there is a chance that one of them will fall and shatter.

  It was an unusually hot July evening in suburban Chicago. Kalpu was sitting on her front porch and reflecting on her life. Over the last couple of years, things had just been falling apart. Her eight-year marriage with Steve was in trouble. He had moved out of their single-family home in Naperville, and was staying in a motel. Her six-year-old son Neel was puzzled by his daddy’s continuing absence. Her father had had a heart attack and passed away a year ago. Her mother now stayed with her brother in Ahmedabad. She was as worried about her daughter’s personal situation as she was about explaining it to her relatives and neighbours.

  This is not how Kalpu had imagined her life would pan out. Coming out of LEC Surat in 1988, she worked at an IT company in what was then Bombay for two years. Those days, IT was just coming up and the salary was meagre; it used to barely cover her expenses and then there was the long commute to and from work. It just did not suit her. She had been born in a rich family and wasn’t the type to take to moderate living, let alone a daily dose of hardship. Her father did offer to buy her a car and appoint a chauffeur to drive her round but Kalpu did not want to take any help from her father, now that she was earning. Anyway, considering the traffic in Bombay, it was better to travel by train than by car.

  Given her background and inclination, she wanted to have a better-paying and more glamorous job. So while still working in the IT company, she prepared and appeared for CAT, did very well, and got into the most prestigious management institute in India: the World-class Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (WIMA). She joined in 1990.

  During her school years in Ahmedabad, she had been to the WIMA campus a few times with her classmates. Those were the days when they would go to the Vastrapur area and roam around in the campus and nearby ATIRA (Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association), admiring the smart young men and women who would one day rule the corporate world in India and abroad. But she had never imagined that she would one day find herself pursuing WIMA’s prestigious two-year Post-graduate Diploma in Management.

  The state of education, particularly higher education, in Gujarat was dismal
except for islands of excellence such as the National Institute of Design and WIMA. Both centres were held in awe by locals, especially because out of the total intake in each institute, the number of Amdavadis was minuscule.

  She joined the institute in early July. The first day was exciting. On the back lawns behind the dormitories, the Post-graduate Programme Chairperson addressed the entire batch, comprising three sections, A, B and C, with a strength of around 200. There were jokes and anecdotes about WIMA by teachers and graduates alike, but all with a sense of pride at being numero uno. The general attempt was to instil a mind-set amongst students that they were a class apart. For many of them, as they got into the real WIMA world, the euphoria waned and reality dawned. There was a load of study material which had to be absorbed carefully. A class of 70 minutes typically needed 2-3 hours of preparation. Each day had at least three sessions, the first starting sharp at nine in the morning. There was a 20-minute gap between sessions. Kalpu tried her best to go through the study material for all three sessions of day one, but she could hardly cover 40 per cent of it. While the first session on written communication was not too difficult to get through, she had a real taste of WIMA teaching in the second session. At 10:30 a.m. sharp, the management accounting professor entered the room and closed the door behind him. Those who were standing quickly took their seats. The professor greeted everybody and introduced himself. A bunch of students (who had finished their tea-and-gossip a couple of minutes late) opened the door and tried to enter the class. The professor looked at them and asked, ‘What time does this class start?’

  ‘Sir, at ten-thirty,’ a few of them replied.

  ‘And what is the time now?’ asked the professor.

  ‘It is ten-thirty-two, sir,’ somebody replied.

  ‘Out!’ thundered the professor. The firmness in his voice was unnerving and the late-entry group quietly left. Word spread and nobody dared enter the class late thereafter.

  There was total silence in the class, which was broken by the professor saying that discipline and respect for time was a crucial part of management learning. He then announced a seven-minute quiz, starting immediately. He took questioncum-answer sheets out of his portfolio and gave bunches to the nearest student to pass on, issuing instructions at the same time: he would announce the ‘start’ of the quiz and at the end of exactly seven minutes, he would call ‘pens down’. Anybody found writing after that would get a ‘D’. There was a lot of uneasy movement in the classroom, and some murmurs, but the quiz began. Kalpu found nothing she could answer—she had not seen the study material at all. Being an engineering student, she was at sea on the accounting-related questions. She was sure to score a zero on the quiz. After the professor finished collecting everyone’s answer sheets, he comforted the class, which comprised students of varying backgrounds such as engineering, CA, ICWA, arts and humanities, pure and applied sciences. He told them that if they wanted to, they could master management accounting in the next 28 sessions, and nobody needed to feel that he or she did not have the requisite background. The class went on smoothly from then on as the professor started off with basic accounting principles and practices.

  When the class ended, some students rushed to their friends in other sections where the same professor had a session twenty minutes hence. A lot of students were seen opening their study material and quickly going through the sections relevant to the quiz. It was a different matter that the professor did not administer any quiz in the other section. For the next few days, the paradigm of life was based on surprises until Kalpu (and many others) started expecting surprises in everything, and when there were none, life felt cool but strangely boring too. There were also some interesting lessons learnt, such as:

  •Although this was WIMA, there were professors and there were Professors.

  •There were students who came to learn management and there were students who came to become CEOs as of yesterday, and the former were in a serious minority.

  •Learning how to beat the system was a favourite pastime for some students. If two Fs and four Ds were the criteria for being thrown out of WIMA, there were students who prepared just enough not to get two Fs or four Ds.

  •There were liked and hated courses for almost all students. Calculations were made about which courses one should just not waste time on as they were either of no use, or one could never learn them.

  •Hours were spent on adjustments for courses based on the criteria for evaluation. Different professors gave differing weightage for attendance, class participation (CP), quizzes, mid-term exams, end-term exams, projects, etc. Anything which did not contribute to the grade was not to be worried about.

  •There were those super-confident students who were good at quantitative courses but never attended classes, because attendance and CP had no weightage.

  •There were professors who gave no weightage to attendance and CP but whose classes were packed to capacity.

  •There were quantitative courses, perspective courses, and also-ran courses. The first category could help you be a scholar whereas the last could ensure that you did not fall flat.

  •The intent of encouraging CP was to bring about healthy discussion. Many a time, however, it was reduced to ‘arbit CP’—say anything you want; even if you yourself do not understand what you are saying.

  •Some of the arts and humanities students found subjects like operations management, quantitative methods, and financial management to be from another planet. A quiz in an operations management class left several students close to tears because they could not even understand the questions, let alone answer them. When the quiz marks were announced, about 10 per cent of students got a zero, and many scored less than 10 out of 100. An amusing case was of a married guy who scored 9/100, was quite ashamed of himself, and told his kid—who made fun of her dad for scoring 9/100 and expecting her to get 100/100! Even more interesting was the grades outcome. When the marks were fitted into a normal distribution, the veteran who had got 9 per cent had got a C-minus grade but had not failed—in the traditional sense.

  Overall, life at WIMA was exciting. Kalpu’s batch had some of the brightest students. Kalpu herself was not a rabbit academically, but this was a different world—more like a camel seeing a mountain for the first time. While there were intense intellectual discussions on problems and projects that lasted hours, there was also a palpable sense of keeping knowledge to oneself as if life was a zero-sum game.

  Initially, this made it difficult for her to make friends. Every time she compared her WIMA peers with the Pandava group at LEC, she got nostalgic. There was plenty of openness and selflessness in the LEC lot, but the general attitude of her fellow students at WIMA was very unlike that. In contrast, the institute’s atmosphere was quite open. The professors encouraged students to focus on self-learning, for which there was no substitute.

  As the first semester progressed, things became less stressful; not because the load reduced but because she got accustomed to the pressure and the long hours of work. An interesting part of WIMA life was that it was not all study. Students took active part in sports, dramatics, music, DJing, debating and volunteering activities. There were clubs for each of these and one could start a new club if they wanted to. The placement cell was run by the students’ body which also took turns to run the campus shop that opened in the evening. There was the famous and much-loved Vadilal ice cream parlour. In every batch, there were a few golus who ran a 5- or 10-kilometre lap, came over to the parlour to eat half a kilo of ice cream, and then complained that they didn’t lose weight. There were the usual chai and snack joints in front of the main gate which were busy into the wee hours of the night.

  The students’ mess was a real mess, with a lot of food wasted every day. Kalpu quickly diagnosed the problem: due to the system of self-service, students filled their plates to the brim, then ate only what they liked and left the rest. The tasteless cooking and awful chapatis only made matters worse. All kinds of messaging and p
ersuasion had been tried without success. The wastage had continued. Kalpu took it upon herself to change this. She met the person in-charge of the mess and urged him to do something about it. His ready response was that the students were spoiled brats from rich families and didn’t care about wastage. Kalpu had a different view and tried to find a way to make him see it.

  She challenged him that she could help reduce wastage by at least 25 per cent by adopting some simple steps at minimal cost. She was dismissed because the mess people did not believe that management learning had any role to play in a mundane place like a kitchen.

  A determined Kalpu did not give up. She walked into the director’s office and sought time with him, saying she had a reasonable solution to the problem of wasted food in the mess. The director was surprised at her boldness and decided to hear her out.

  ‘I would like a 50 per cent share of the savings we make, on the lines of the Scanlon Plan. Out of that, I’ll give half to a charity and the other half towards training the kitchen staff and their families on hygiene and sanitation. And we would do it all through one of the students’ clubs,’ Kalpu declared.

  The director paused for a moment and then said, ‘Done’. A meeting was called with the mess in-charge and other stakeholders. He explained the experiment that was to be undertaken and declared Kalpu the CEO of the mess for the next three months. By the end of the meeting, the message had gone home: she was the boss.

  Kalpu remodelled the practice of self-service first, knowing that it was a dysfunctional process, but was considered sacred. The next thing she did was to invite the families of the mess staff—who were all men—to eat in the mess. The men of the house prepared the food, and their wives and children ate. What happened next quickly became folklore. Back at home, the wives gave their husbands a thorough scolding for spoiling the expensive vegetables and making such horrendous, inedible chapatis. The cooks got some serious cooking lessons from their wives over the next few days and there was a dramatic improvement in the quality of food in the mess. Perhaps bruised egos also played a part in their turnaround.