M4

“These are dark and unprecedented times,” read all of my emails over the past 3 weeks. And I now sign off my phone calls and meetings with a “stay home, stay safe”, though I know that there’s no way anyone can NOT stay home; after all the police are making sure of that! I for one have been tracking the spread of the virus since it was merely a curiosity in China. That was 7 weeks ago, though it feels like donkeys years. In a sense, I saw this lockdown coming, and so also the ensuing chaos. I made a choice to stay put, fighting the instinctive urge to run home where my parents were. In that sense, I don’t deserve to feel surprised by the turn of events. Nothing changed for me - except for some minor inconveniences in the form of increased chores of cooking and cleaning, and perhaps none of that weekend loitering around town. But I must admit that I have felt overwhelmed more than once in these 6 weeks of isolation. The closest a friend could put in words is to call it “a situa...

“Those are not MY memories,” said the girl when someone asks her how she could bear to come to her ancestral home in Berlin, “after all they’ve done to your family here”. She’s a Jew visiting from Israel. I put my pen down and stared for a whole minute at my “memories” that I was trying to fill in a worn out journal; one that I’ve been struggling to keep up with in the recent past. One that nobody would ever read again- not even myself. I used to share stories on this blog a while ago. I thought they’d make me sound cool and smart, I guess. It’s been over 3 years since I wrote something not on slides and not for work, particularly in this blog. There was a story I started writing, but never saw the light of day, because I didn’t like the climax. Yes, the very climax that I wrote myself. So I printed myself a copy, tore up the last chapter and abandoned the rest of the pages in a dark corner somewhere. These 3 years have been eventful: I had stuck with one job all along, ...

-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...

Recently, I have been working on a consulting engagement for a Disaster Management Agency of one of the first-world nations; there had been reports of a fraud in flood insurance claims disbursal. While my job involved figuring out how to predict and avoid such a mess in the future, the task also carries digging into the past and identifying the events that led to the current state of affairs, so to say. As I ploughed through transcripts of thousands of conversations, I realized how vastly different the concepts of “devastation” and “homelessness” are between the people of that mighty nation versus the perceptions of our own compatriots here in India. People there seek government grants and insurance claims (funded by taxpayer money) to repair the wall paint in their basements and to replace consumer electronic appliances- clothes driers, room heaters et al.- that have been damaged in a flood. For a large part, the rest of their homes, the superstructure, the rooms and the res...

“Who smokes beedis these days!?” said my friend. “Quite a lot of people that can’t afford cigarettes…” I replied automatically. We were in a corner booth at a quaint, charming place called Koshy’s early this morning. This place is quite popular with the locals for its English breakfast, but I noticed how much the place looked like your typical eatery scene from the pages of an a British novel. It was quite early in the morning and we barely beat the church-crowd by just a few minutes to get a seat in this deli. On this occasion, that strong beedi smell that intruded our senses came from a few night watchmen we just passed, catching up during their morning tea breaks. As we made a quick arithmetic, we realized that those watchmen must be making no more than 4000 bucks a month and probably had quite a large family to fend for. A simple pack of cigarettes (at 200 bucks) is almost 5% of their monthly wage and it was obviously a luxury they can’t afford. Now, I could go on givin...