M4

-Not Hamlet. Not Gimlet either. “That moment, I felt like jumping out of that window,” he said. “Why didn’t you?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. I am notorious for such out-of-time comments. “Dude,” he said with what sounded like exasperation, “I’m hungry. Besides, that’s gonna happen soon anyways.” The last time we talked was exactly a year ago and I vaguely remember him talking of something not very different. Decembers never did him any good- Poor guy! Last year, he had just been ditched by a girl he loved. This year, he was ditched yet again. By the same girl. So, yeah! Anyways, while I was thus regaled confided in, I was part-amused, part-appalled at his monumental stupidity. I mean, I got burnt only once before I’m awfully cautious every morning with the geyser. Mind you, this was the guy who once told me: “A tragedy is that moment where a hero comes face to face with his true identity…” Of course I later found he nicked the line from Aristotle. ...

“Sorry, I didn’t get your name,” she said with an accent that sounded a little too normal than what is heard in this part of the world. Mentally, I was in the vacant space between two very interesting tasks I had listed for my workday. Physically, I was in a crowded cubicle in a cloistered corridor in a cramped floor of a marketing office. Hey, the world itself is crowded and the planet is cramped, what am I complaining about! I was expecting yet another of the continuous stream of pretentious agency folk that were filing along this corridor over the past couple of days. They had no choice as it was the only path to the coffee machine and I had no choice as there was no other seat vacant on the floor. Sometimes, the voices carried over from the closed meeting room next door, perhaps when someone wanted a quick escape from all the storm in the teacup inside. Strong, confident, assertive and the kind of adjectives that self-help writers attribute to successful orators could very...

I’m a consultant, a ‘con’sultant. One of the group of tens of thousands of people in tens of organizations who claim to be masters in their trade, who claim to know about running companies better than the people who run companies, though many consultants have never run a real company- let alone build one. Well, that’s the charm of it all- you get to tell people how to mind their business! Come on, you can’t deny it’s fun! Ever taught a little kid how to hold a cricket bat? Imagine now that little kid is a Sachin in the making. And imagine the teacher being someone like me whose knowledge of cricket ends with ‘an over has 6 balls, and they use just 1 ball really to bowl all 6 times’. Yeah, that ironic! Now that we got that out of the way, here’s what we do in a simple sentence: “we ‘guide’, ‘mentor’, ‘lead’ the legacy of yesterdays’ great firms to the bright dawn of the tomorrows” (Please don’t tell my boss I put it in 1 sentence, he’d treat anything shorter than a full pres...