Dilli Game

Dilli's never been home to me - surprising me in ways that I ought not to be surprised in, throwing up the unexpected with frequent regularity and on much rarer occasions, does me the bizarre.

Its 11.30 p.m. on a warm Saturday evening in Dilli, and the trance beats at Mojo weave their way into my body. The cold club air washes over me, the energy is crackling out of my fingertips  - I am feeling good, and am about to let someone know it.

I see her at the bar, nursing a scotch on the rocks. Dressed in a long black dress, the smooth shiny fabric clinging on to every curve like an old girlfriend - she looks cool, calm and confident as she tosses her long hair back in one sinewy motion as she brings diamond studded fingers to her mouth, to drag deeply on a Camel.

I catch her eye - and her gaze lingers for a heartbeat before washing over the rest of the gyrating crowd. I know its my night. The beats accelerate as I seat on the empty bar stool next to her, nod over at her emptying scotch glass and say "buy you another of those?".

She leans over, sending a wave of Bvlgari up my senses, clears a curtain of black shiny tresses from her shoulder, tucks it neatly behind her ear in one sweet motion and says "Henh-ji?"

The beats stopped.

More dilli...

And this can happen only here.....and you will not believe me, but this actually happened...


Smart young purchase officer of BLC (Big Large corporation) saunters into the cabin of his boss - a balding, pot bellied general manager (PBGM)
"Sir, here are the - " he stops and stares at PBGM - "sir, pardon me, but dont you think your hair looks like Shahrukh Khan's today?"
PBGM blushes embarassedly and self consciously pats down a decidedly scrooge duck-like tuft at the back of his head..."really?" ....more patting..." ahh..hemm..well...i ..er...DID get my hair cut yesterday..."


"I swear sir....! my heart almost stopped thinking I am giving my leave application to Shahrukh khan" ....he shuffles a piece of paper unobtrusively onto PBGM's table...
"well..my wife has been making this special egg yolk based henna, y'know...." PBGM scrawls enthusiastically  


"Sir, its WORKING...you look YOUNG"...pockets the paper...." I will come after my leave for this recipe sir!"


Told you...this is dilli ...!

and more chaiiii...

Its a wintry morning, Singhsaab and I have decided to go wild and walk down to Kamal tea stall instead of the pantry for our 11 o clock cuppa. I am in deep in thought about global warming, megan foxxxy and whathaveyou while Singhsaab has just taken a break from building another complex BI query.

We are walking along companionably when singhsaab nods his head vigorously in response to nothing in particular and announces "Medical doesn't cover OPD charges, y'know". "Eh?" I go. "Swines" he carries on smoothly "its all a scam...!" I am now utterly tongue-tied at this scholarly holding of the forth. "you tell me, how many times will you get a brain tumour?" he looks at me and before I turn my fuddled brain to the actual mathematics of the knotty problem, he thunders on "and how many times will you get a viral fever?" I close my eyes and shake my head in amazement at one more of singhsaab's unbelievably profound conversations. I open my eyes to find him calmly looking at me.

"Chai?"

Chai!

Dilli has a vigor and zest all its own, most of which even the sweeping surge of modernity is hard pressed to contain.

Picture this: its about 11 a.m on a thursday morning and my first day in the offices of a busy large corporation (BLC). Hundreds of worker bees hunched over flickering screens and busy excel sheets, the hum of profitable conversations counting millions of rupees of buying and selling, I trundle over to the office table size pantry room where weary old kattoo is hunched beside the coffee machine. I am about to politely interrupt his reverie when something large and busy bustles past me into the pantry room rubbing his hands in utterly undeserved glee and booms "Kattoo , yaar - ek BADHIYA si chai pila de..!"

Kattoo bursts into action as if called by Dalai Lama to invade China and turning purposefully towards the coffee machine, with as much zest as his twenty year old body and 7.2 mm of turning radius will allow, pushes the big red button which says TEA on it, watches intently as weak tepid tea dribbles into a cup and produces it with a flourish. One sip by big bustling man and he erupts "waah kattoo! mazaa aa gaya!!" and trundles away happily.

Its inane - a meaninglessly celebrated and overinvested moment of the day and yeah, its incredibly Dilli!

the truckdriver and the cellphone..

“Hanji Sirji”…
Omkar screeched amidst the grating noise of the gearbox "Damn!” he thought “cheapskate Nattoo!” he thought of his pan chewing, Laajo-wooing, potbellied owner of the rattletrap that used to pass for a truck about twenty years ago….the rattletrap which Omkar now drove …. “that whoring Nattoo spends thousands on lottery tickets but hands me a hundred and twenty rupees for the truck’s maintenance “rakh le yaar” he would go as if Omkar could buy the Tata factory with the spare change…

But he had to be polite. Ever since he quit his secure job as a clerk in the garment factory citing ideological differences with his work supervisor, becoming a driver for Jai Mata Di transport brought him more prestige in his native Lakhana than a clerk’s job which paid him twice as much (at least officially). Omkar mused for a bit while he screeched up another gear up Khanki ghat and concluded that the people of Lakhana had an unnatural respect for size. The villagers were fascinated by Gangoo who was rumored to be the tallest boy in the entire district. Speaking of size he thought his neighbour Gomti had the largest, milkiest ….”CLANG!!!” his musings about the lush Gomti were interrupted as he heard the unmistakable noise of a policeman’s lathi clanging on his trucks’ bonnet. He slammed his brakes…slammed in manner of speaking since the truck didn’t do anything even remotely as urgent instead dissipating speed like a vessel of boiling milk simmering down . He managed to calm down the juddering and decidedly nervous steering wheel and clambered down. His heart started hammering strangely and he mused again and realized this probably had to do with the bloody arrack in the back of the truck.

His stomach decided to shrink away from his hammering heart and sink down to his knees, which were setting a calm beat of their own. He remembered the SP had decided to clamp down on arrack ever since Khaderbhai had had decided to stand for elections.


The policeman rushed over with his lathi raised and face set in the kind of mean scowl that policemen are trained to use in the middle of a potentially fatal raid. He stopped and looked over at Omkar and glanced with a curious respect at Omkar’s left hand. Omkar himself sportingly decided to share in the cop’s curiosity and did some glancing himself. He realized the cellphone was still in his hand, and now that he thought of it, he remembered the burning sensation in his left ear from the tongue lashing Natwar had given him. “Malik hain ya driver?” the cop murmured in an almost seductive baritone. “he-enn?” Omkar murmured nervously, not quite matching the cop’s chocolate-rich tone.


“Aap Malik hain ya driver?” the cop repeated. The ‘aap” triggered off a whole chain of chemical reactions in his body, which calmed the knees and sent his tummy back to its original position. His body seemed to enlarge and steel crept into his tone “Tere se mathlab?” He almost convulsed as he heard what he had just said. But the cop reacted, in almost a mirror image of his earlier physical change and he seemed to shrink as he said “Aa—aapki gaadi…” Omkar decided to seize the moment much as his mother always said he was born to do and replied “haan hain tho? Akkal nahin hain tereko…ghaat pe gaadi roktha hain? Patha nahin hum kiske kaam se jaa rahe hain?” Omkar himself had no idea who he was referring to but decided that calling on a invisible higher power was called for. “phone lagaaoon kya?” he waved the cellphone menacingly.


The cop paled, as much as the madhya pradeshi sun allowed him to, “sirji …one look at you knew you were not a driver..! I was just trying to alert you about the dacoits in Khanki..!”


He clambered regally back into the truck and rested his head on the still-trembling wheel. After a minute, he got up, sent up a silent prayer for Natwar and his next seven generations. If it weren’t for Natwar’s suspicious nature, he would have never had the cellphone…he jumped as the phone rang “kaahaan pahuncha hain? Maa ke shaadi pe jaa raha kya?” as the familiar honeydewed tones of Natwar screeched.

Life was back to normal.

entrepreneurship in india....

Big board meeting of big company in big bustling metropolis....


BigBossManfromBigcompany (BBMFBC): "We need to look for entrepreneurs in this country…to kickstart our business model..that will earn us untold billions...."


Many hundred miles and a dozen grazing cows away.....


an Ageing woman entrepreneur (AWE) in the hinterlands of S. India hears of big company's intentions and new business, and calls up BBMFBC.


AWE to BBMFBC: "Dear sir, I am an AWE - wanting to invest in your big compani's big bizness. We even have son with MBA working in esteemed but lowly position in your big compani."
BBMFBC: " yes yes…we are looking for budding entrepreneurs like you madam…..well …the investment is like in XXXX zillions of rupess…revenues of YYYY Gazillions of rupees and RoI of a mindboggling 14.28% - almost a FULL percent above what you would get by parking your money safely in the bank."
AWE: "Thank you thank you sir....please do let us know what else we need to do"
BBMFBC: "oh its simple.....please set up a private limited company with XX millions rupees as paidup capital, and email us details with sales tax registration etc. If you have no email, you can even fax! we will duly consider."


AWE to MBA-son: " son - BBMFBC from your compani has given us permission to invest in your big compani big bizness. We are planning to sell off all our cows for this investment and - "


MBAS: "Amma no..don't believe in these big companies - "


AWE: " son - you are educated but not wise. We are taking risk we know but for your future only!"


MBAS: "please don't sell off our cows - they are all you are leaving me in a diddly-squat inheritance!"


AWE: " don't worry son - we can double number of cows if we invest in this business now. Tomorrow, you can be a cow-king!"


MBAS: " Lord shivaaa - "


AWE starts marching to the market every day for best price to sell her cows, and meet investment criteria of BBMFBC.


After a few weeks......


AWE to BBMFBC:"Sir, our shiny cows gauri and kaveri are fetching good rates in the market, we are almost ready with investment- and wanting to invest - -"


BBMFBC: " oh madam, after deep consideration, we have decided that due to family relations with your son working our big company, we are unable to entertain your request for entrepreneurship in our big business.


Many regards".

Deeds...and Damn Dads...

One is used to dads being fairly benign influences during childhood…. the gentle rap on the knuckle for the occasional window smashed by the wild square cut…or errant facial hair.. and the odd knowing glance when one’s convincing mothers about lack of examinations being a recent educational trend that’s catching on fast….but like I said, mostly benign…or so I thought…until that fateful summer of ’97…

I started…on seeing two cigs on the bookcase, right next to the copy of the Godfather. And it wouldn’t have been cause to start, or even stir gently for that matter, except that I was seventeen, just beginning to enjoy the heady rush of early manhood, and inevitably, nicotine…and I was home from university for the summer break. And there they were…cigs on the bookcase… and no one home.

I pondered about it for a while… quickly filched the smokes and dragged 'em on the terrace. Deed done…mouth disinfected with Listerine..and some really foul chicken gravy (always the criminal mind) …I waited for my folks to come back home from work.

All went reasonably well when they did… they didn’t sniff out any carcinogenic behaviour.. enquired politely about falling grades, a touch more hostility about my increasing allowance needs…but like I said, it went well…

Next morning, a Saturday- I remember, after a fabulous egg and some sweet tea,...I was sprawled on the floor over the cricket pages.....Mom going over the Reader's Digest...“you smoke?” she said without looking up ….I started, with considerably more momentum than the previous morning…”ummm…of course not, mom.. what on earth gave you the idea?”…”Dad was saying last night….there were a couple of cigarettes on the bookca-“

“Oh that!” I carried on….with the air of one who’s seen the better part of the world’s pair of missing cigs being ascribed to innocent folk….”Oh that!....Hunch (a univ mate) was over yesterday afternoon….and he’s started to smoke these days, you know…and he smoked them…utterly disgusting I know…but what's one to do?”…"I see…for a moment there, I-" "Oh c’mon ma…me? smoke?” I uttered…with the perfect balance of righteous indignation..and nonchalance….”some more tea, ma?”

And that was that.

Until the next morning…..like a moment from a parallel universe...me poring over the newspaper and mom again in that matter of fact voice, as if she was carrying on from where she left off....”well.. you know…dad found it interesting….that hunch smoked TWO cigs….well.. you know…when two people are together….felt it was far more likely that he smoked one….and the other…you know…”

I collapsed into my crossword.

Masses..and class

So okay, Simpson, this one’s yours..! I’ll try and write it as well as you tell it…and we’ll both peel off for a beer, and decide who’s one up.

Simpson keeps telling us that we are stubbornly middle classed in our beer-addled minds, and no amount of wealth will ever change it. "We-can-never-be-cool!" he pronounces,...and last Sunday, he comprehensively got me.

Here's how it goes for the Classes…wake up Sunday morning generously hung over….shower, shave by noon…call the blokes for a round of chasers…toddle over to the gizmo shop…for a new set of Blaupunkts for the wheels… kill a few beers while good ol’ Mahmud handles the cabling…toddle back…whip out the Amex…tip a few hundred bucks…and go over the club and hit the pool. All in a day’s work.

And here I was… after having shamelessly codged the ol' wheels off my old folks… I couldn’t have a drink on Saturday night cos’ I was so excited about getting a “system” for the wheels. And that wasn't the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

Woke up at six thirty the next day.... twiddled fingers and banana chips until Simpson woke up.. and proposed the following strategy “Haul me over to young Kumar’s under the bridge and let’s get the cheap speakers you’ve been telling me about. Will buy you beer after.” Simpson, of course, agrees to most things that have beer in it… (I think that’s how he got married in the first place…).

We landed up at Kumar’s at about ten thirty on what turned out to be a nice sunny morning….. waded vigorously into a debate about systems… Kumar generally carrying on about tweeters, woofers and whathaveyous, me shaking my head and simultaneously working out impact on my fragile finances, and Simp just shaking his head. We eventually landed on a JVC ("Japanese, sir!) system with no guarantee (“24% discount sir, and of course, there will be no trouble!”)

Simpson vigorously nodding his support, and off we were. Kumar took to his wiring job with a couple of pliers and great gusto, knocked over half the car, but it very satisfyingly looked like a set piece of seriously demanding engineering in about four minutes. Simp and I trundled over to take in by-two chaias and cigs….talking about kimi’s chances in the 2007 season, poked around in the shop looking at mag alloy wheels, and racing steering wheels, basically stuff I could afford when I hit sixty, was divorced and on the right side of the alimony cheques.

Job done, we played a couple of floyd numbers on it… and we were good. “Do you take a credit card?” “Yes sir yes sir.. Only 2% surcharge sir!” This (the surcharge which worked out to 349 bucks) of course blew my financial projections right out the window. Simpson of course generously agreed to ride with me to the nearest ATM and draw cash. Kumar nodded understandingly but sent young Thippu (who doesn't have a major role to play in the story) anyway to keep an eye on us.

We were at the ATM in about forty minutes of breakneck driving (and I mean that-I broke mine on the speedhump on airport road…..and Simp was on the side of the car which didn’t have a suspension). Sweating a little in our Nike tees but then it was noon, and the car’s AC …ummm….it didn’t have one.

I rushed into the ATM….and realized I didn’t have my card with me. Simpson, thoroughly understanding as ever, wiped the sweat off his dripping brow and smiled at me...through gritted teeth “Now what? Use your credit card?”

I, being the middle classed clod that I am, and horrified of paying a "surcharge", of course waved away such rational courses of action, and traveled at rapid pace over to Chet’s who was nursing a beer over the Sunday crossword. At the end of a conversation which had furious pleading on one end and raucous laughter on the other, Chet lent me his card, and we drove to another ATM, while I rambled on about how we’d get this sorted out in no time. Simpson looked me squarely in the eye, “Do you have the code?” “Of course” I rushed off once again.

Simp decided to cool off with some fruit juice, and I was back just as he had the straw in his parched lips. “Umm…I think I have forgotten the code….” Simpson dropping the juice “Call Che-" “…but I kept trying and I think the card is locked now”.

So there we were...on a hot Sunday afternoon......with a fairly simple task of getting some speakers fitted on the car, beer promised at the end of it.......but simply not the way of the wannabe. One surcharge, one lost debit card, one blocked card with seriously pissed-off card owner, an eventually homicidal Simpson and six sunny hours later ....we hit the bar..........."Bagini Bar- Closed for the Afternoon”

Simpson looks at me…" We just weren’t meant to be cool, were we?”

Conversations....and Menopause

One of the things that set apart human beings from various other beings on the planet is conversation. Animals more or less have simple sounds and gestures and (apparently) use it to convey simple messages in a "I want food" or "Need sex" kinda way while Humans have developed complex syntax of words, gestures and intonations that can convey deep and profound meaning to each other.

Or So I thought....

Of late, I have begun to realize that the whole conversation deal works fine for the human race...up to a point ..somewhere around menopause...beyond which they lapse into deep and profound communication with themselves....and when people meet...the basic idea is to look for a few gaps in the rival's tirade...so one can continue one's conversation with oneself... loudly and vocally....

Mrs. Killjoy, an old family friend and also matriarch of a fairly screwed up family, over to have a cup of tea with my own fabulous mother....sitting on a porch on a fairly pleasant day...

My Mum "Spew's girlfriend is a very nice girl, you know....very sweet...and her parents...even nicer... Spewdad and I are planning to go over to Dilley on the 17th...."

Nodding from Mrs. K "....17th..yes....Motley (her maniac daughter in law) is also planning to go over to her folks place on the 17th...its been so long, you know ...and ever since she had a baby...."

Cluck clucking from Mum...."Apparently, they have been living in Dilley ever since spewgirl has been a baby.....and they are both so well educated you know.....They are both professors in university....."

Mrs. K still in her stride ".....and hopefully she'll get some time to herself you know...she has been planning to go to university for her post graduation, you know....between one thing and another....she's not really had the time ever since the marriage...."

Mum doing adequately herself "....and the good part is they want the marriage to happen as early as possible.....Mr.Spew Sr. also hopes that we can arrive on a date as soon as possible and start making the necessary arrangements, you know"

and on....and on...and amazingly....even more ...on....and the best part is, they finish their cups of tea, and look fabulously content with the whole exchange....having divested deeply inane content onto each other, They hug and they part.

Tea, anyone?

How are preparations....and more such

As a race, we are susceptible to change, and one of the changes is usually progress. This can be cut a million different ways but I think its safe to say that each generation improves vastly on the previous one, and is completely dumped on the wayside by the next. All this is fine, but there are some topics which bind these generations together with vines of mind numbing inanity, and one of them, to my utter grief, is weddings.


I am getting married in the next few days, and while I am quite looking forward to marriage in all its mundane fullness, it is the damn wedding which is getting my goat to roast over a slow flame.


"how are wedding preparations going?"


A fairly innocuous question, you might say, and innocuous I might agree, if I was haggling with my tailor a few hours before I am supposed to wear the damn thing and turn out in decorous glory to receive splendorously turned out guests, and badly wrapped gifts.


Not, and I repeat, NOT a full ONE HUNDRED days before the wedding. I just failed to see what on earth I supposed to be doing a full three months before the wedding. To me, my wedding prep was dusting off a suit and logging online to book some travel tickets.


and this question doesn't come a few dozen times. It comes in five times a day, day in and day out from every one...old tottering grandfolk, neighbors walking their dog, from the hot girl in tight tee you used to go jogging for, ex girlfriends from whom you were hoping for a "one for old times sake" rout in bed, bosses in the middle of appraisal meetings....it just doesn't stop.


And I still haven't picked up my suit from the tailors.

minds of married people..

Saturday afternoon at Pecos. In the middle of a rather vigorous session of beer and various animals cooked in a variety of ways but mainly beer, S leaned forward and queried earnestly "Isn't it strange how married couples tend to hang out with married couples? Isn't it even stranger that even newly married couples are more at ease with married couples?"
Oog burped "yes ra! she's got it! ...for the past four minutes, I've been wondering how it is that I like my wife so much and why it is that i hate being married to her! and yes..this here is it! It is because married couples have to hang out with only married couples! why does it have to be like that?" (oog would have been happier meeting hola-hola dancers from taikwiki, preferably in the nude but that doesn't take away from the question, does it?)

About twenty minutes later, I knew why.

I'd love to say this was due to concentrated thought and gazillion calculations of multiple scenarios i ran in my head at the speed of gossip, but no. A rather smashed but severely tickled Nari started howling in my ear. Howling is what Nari normally does and that, in itself, was insufficient to draw the interest of my own rather pickled senses. No..it was that he howled 0.026 mm from my ear was what probably did it. But moving on, he proceeded to relate a telephonic conversation he'd just had with Soda (who at that moment in time was a picture of content respectability, walking as he was hand in hand with his wife of four years on a romantic evening in Bandstand).

"Maccha...Soda's gonna be a DAD!!" I choked - I'd met soda four days ago, and I'd be damned if a drunken and unmarried Nari managed to worm this intimate info out of himin a 3 minute conversation! "how do you know?" I barked at him having trouble seeing his face which was fading in and out. Probably cos I was waving my fist at it.

Apparently this is the conversation that happened between Nari and Soda.

"Sodaaaaaaa....&!@&@%.....@%$@%$@%$........&@%@$$...^&@!#@@....how are you, ra?

"Umm..hey..taking a walk n bandstand with my wife. Wha-"

"%$@##!!! we spent 7 years in college passing our 4 year course!! Good times, eh ?"

"umm..sure..yeah man.."

2.5 min conversation. Nari definitely with larger share of voice.

Nari: " Okay ra soda %$##, you take care, %$%$...and yeah! HAVE SAFE SEX TONIGHT!" (giggle giggle)

Soda: "um."

Nari: "OR MAYBE NOT! JUST HAVE SEX" (howling howling)

Soda hangs up.

Nari says"Maccha...Soda's gonna be a DAD".

Day in the life of a rural marketeer....

"Glow signs!" I exclaimed! "bloody glow signs -its what we'll do!".

I looked at someone who is probably the most important person in my life right now - Mr.S- a world-weary businessman who also doubles up as my distributor in his less-sane
frames of mind. We were discussing some brand signage formats -basically my company name in font size 17,745 - for our village dealers. The kind of paradoxes and existential issues for our business the last phrase raises are worth peering into, in fact, the entire business is a bit questionable,if you ask me, but considering I chucked up obscene dollar money to do this, I am perhaps less than adequate as a rational questionee.

"Glow signs?" Mr. S. mutters. "Glow signs? in villages that are lucky if they have a cock and a lame buffalo to distract them?" He's gettin' that look again in his eye, and I am about to tell him as much. "Where do you think you are retailing? Bangkok? or MG road?" he rails.
"You may have something there" I concede instead while he rolls his eyes in a gesture I don't exactly approve of.

We decide on cloth banners, and order another round of tea.

Out of the mouths of babes and ...bosses

In my new avataar as mint-fresh b-grad, i rather too wholeheartedly took to the job of designing a new channel structure for a widget product offer from Acme Global. Ol' John Silver warned me about how important this was to Acme global, and sternly demanded rigorous detail in the research and analysis. "We like to think we hire the best people, and here's your chance to show we did right!!"


Followed weeks of dust-filled days of interviewing customers and consumers (aha!), gathering data, wringing out all my meagre knowledge to squeeze out sensible conclusions on the channel structure, crunching the distribution cost figures into respectable looking excel sheets -complete with linked sheets,modify-able assumption figures each neatly fonted in red, with comments in the important cells.




Two weeks later, Ol' John Silver beckons me into the meeting room "Slave - you ready with the numbers?" "ulp!..eh..sure" ... I stumble into the glassed in meeting room.....begin gaining confidence as i open my laptop like a an egyptian peddler about to show off his new range of aprodisiacs .....the screen blinks into life...and emerges my tabbed, highlighted, commented 17days, twenty two hours and 3 zillion grey cell worth excel file - row upon row of gleaming ratios and percentages.....kilos and tons of product....hundreds of thousands of consumers...just waiting to make millions for Acme Global....I launch into my spiel....take care to bring out the nuances in the channel structure - different options i'd considered but discarded in the face of crystal clear consumer insights before arriving on this gleaming model, different combinations of which are laid out in the shining specimen now awaiting his razor-sharp, analytical brain's incisive attention.


....pause..


Ol' John narrows his brows, scratches his chin thoughtfully ....." I am not interested in numbers, slave". "Eh, Lord John?" (they are quite informal around here..no tedious usage of full names unlike other stuffy companies. Even a cheery "your highness" could pass muster on saturdays)


"I said i am not interested in the numbers.." leans back in sleek, ergonomic chair....and looks at the ceiling..."I want to know what exactly is the moral ground holding your channel structure together?"


Kerrrr-whump!...... "eh, what?"


"I said what exactly is the MORAL GROUND HOLDING YOUR CHANNEL TOGETHER?"


"eh? ....er...moral..uh..well...economic incentives?" (this while cursing myself for the classes i've slept through.)


Ol' John is in into his stride now "You mean to say that the only thing holding your channel together is economic rationale?"


"err....well...no...i mean..there is ..umm..bonding.. mutual resp--"


"blah blah blah ........anyway, we'll talk about this tomorrow -it is too important to ignore in our business. Channel members must be morally bound as well as economically incentivized and you should have thought of this".


May the sweet lord help me.

A pub conversation between an MBA and..well..read on

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and I was sittin' in a pub with a rollercoaster depressive-creative woman in one of her more stable moods and getting introduced to this succession of wonderful women (esther, karen, zoe, tang and sowmya -I hope you're readin' this) absolutely lolling happily in the high spot of post-pubescent male life (its been a calmish life so far, I must say), lunchin' on pork and swimming in beer, I was a content man. Until he happened. (if you think HE's going to be turn out to be handsome hunk with honey drop eyes….you should be reading cosmo!).

He turned out to be this bearded man with a booming laugh and a seemingly inimitable air of dope and genius about him (I am sorry but this one is NOT gonna be about the women!) and the conversation inevitably veered to love and sex, and to my liberally middle-classed mind- the astonishing exclusivity of these two. (nope - its not about love and sex either - I did recommend the damn cosmo, right?). Anyway, said bearded person was holding forth on some theory that involved him making quadrants with love and sex as the dimensions - the theory itself is another story - but suddenly he thundered ".........this sort of denial is well explained by a term called cognitive dissonance!!!" implying by his tone that us mere mortals couldn't possibly know what it meant. Reading my open-mouthed shock as an unquenched thirst for knowledge, he went on to explain it as "post-decision rationalizing" to feel better about the decision .

OW! I managed to gather my senses and stutter that CD was actually "post decision (purchase) concern/dissatisfaction about decision and possible looking at alternatives at next purchase". (this may not have been the best way i could put it but i was a few down myself).

He looked down his bushy beard to locate the mortal who had dared voice doubts

"ARE YOU FROM MARKETING, BOY?" .... "er..yes" ...." I AM A BEHAVIOURAL SCIENTIST, AND NOT ONE IN A PARTICULARLY ARGUMENTATIVE MOOD EITHER BUT I WILL SAY THIS - ALL YOU MARKETING BOYS DO IS READ STUFF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND FULLY AND TRY TO USE IT TO MAKE SILLY THEORIES TO TRY AND SELL MORE TOOTHPASTE".

Well - he may have had something there but my sunny sunday afternoon had graduated gently to a pleasant evening but my mood had a taken an arc rather more steep and a hue much deeper. Of course, it improved with some unselfish ego massage by karen but that wasn't enough to gloss over the painful fact that my own smugness could be shattered by another's rather more deeply set one.

But what was good about the damn tiff is that the realization that b-school can take you within a sniffer's distance of actual knowledge - and that can be pretty rewarding - as long as you don't think of it as the last bloody word on anything.

Post this sordid episode, I can only fantasize about how that evening would have turned out if he was wrong and ended up grovelling at my feet for more knowledge or - at the opposite end of this miniscule spectrum of knowing and not knowing - wonder about how I would have felt about my existence I hadnt a damn clue about whatever he was talkin' about!

"Absolute knowledge" - utter fiction, I tell you,

A lot of clay to build in my bricks...

It’s interesting how people take my views rather too seriously… and if I were not wiser by the virtue of my follies, I’d probably do the same. Well.. here I was gloating like an egg that had found its bull’s eye .. nestling cheerfully in the yolky satisfaction of my, even if I do say so myself, well-expounded “white trouser” theory.

Until of course, I got pronged, rather rudely I might add, by a few bristling women. “I wear white trousers, don’t you know” as if by the very fact that they did, they completely turned the fact that they were, in fact, exactly the kind of women I was talking about, on its head.

Well… I was jolted, I must admit, by the fury of these hustling bustling women but it does incite me to cast further light on this much-argued about theory of mine. Let me first bung in a disclaimer. Like all theories worth their yolk, “The White Trouser Theory” does the usual thing – rustle up a conclusion first and then build a complicated routine around it. In the face of counter-arguments, cold logic and even hard evidence, the WTT like all theories will simply build natty little corollaries which will, to all intents and purposes, render the theory gloriously impotent, but will not let it relinquish the sensational glory that surrounded its introduction.

And now to business ... Oh yes I agree –– there’s nothing elaborate about white trousers anymore, white trousers have lost their elitist halo, and now every woman worth her waistline has a pair to boot. While this does take away from the trifling detail of relevance from my theory, it does go rather a long way in proving its original premise. After all, where does a woman get her hankering for a new couch .. an antique for the hallway.. and oh before I forget.. a new piece of apparel such as .. hmm.. let’s see now.. a white trouser from? From the happy coincidence of seeing it owned by, with or on another woman, of course! And who are these women next door craving to be like? The quintessential “white trouser” woman.. thus spreading the elitism thinner.. and thinner.. until of course the next “white trouser” comes along .. ridiculously hard to get ... prohibitively expensive .. thoroughly impractical.. and positively leaking style at its seams. And the entire cycle starts over.

And all this while, us enlightened species watch for these tell-tale signs.. and stay well clear of these moody women.

Beer, anyone?