My favorite feel-good review

This is one book that I have been waiting for long and have not been able to keep it away from my mind ever since I have heard about the same. This weird sounding book is one of the best my-college life-experience books that I have ever read. If you have ever been to a B-school, you can easily relate to the madness that is described in it. It is like the wet mud that reminds you of the beautiful days of the rat race.

The novel has beautifully captured the emotions of each milestone and integrated it with personalization of the cities. The entry to hell, CVs, lecture, break ups, hook ups, Placecom, recession, this book has colored every aspect of the MBA life. My favorite chapter is Joker & the Thief & the Night with the madness at its peak, it just reminds of that one incidence that happens in those two years which you love telling to the rest of the world describing your filmy – otherwise slogging – b school life.

At the end the book just left me thinking of HP, the guy that everyone wants to be in THAT moment of self realization but then abandons him for the fear of the social world around us. An awesome read for anyone and everyone who is or has ever been a student.

-Komal Deep Kaur

Wings

I mourn oftentimes for
that bird- no flight
-Windless Wings yet its
sweet song of delight.

Lessons From Chittagong

Watched Khelien Hum Jee Jaan Sey yesterday. I must say I had not much clue about the scale of the Chittagong revolution. History books have a tendency of reducing historic efforts to short answer questions. Write two lines on the Chittagong revolution.

However the movie then set me thinking on the inherent lack of any kind of patriotism/ regionalism in my own core. I have a flagrant disregard for most things national- flag, anthem, bird, animal, etc. National holidays are good, however. We should have a few more of those.

My point, before I choose to meander again, is- how different is the average Chittagong revolutionary- undoubtedly heroic, jaw droppingly inspiring and profitable in terms of the movie business- from a revolutionary/ terrorist belonging to the LeT or ULFA or Babbar Khalsa? All these organizations have their roots in the same psyche that a national revolution germinates from- a recognition of regional/ potential national identity, aided perhaps by injustices of whoever be the current ruling authority. What allures the terrorist also is the fact that the terrorist of today would be the revolutionary of tomorrow; might be read about in history books; might have small tortured souls write short notes on him to pass exams.

I do not have an issue with the forefathers of India who chose the path of violence. I do not also have any intention of belittling the efforts of people like Surjya Sen or Nirmal Sen or Azad or Bhagat Singh. I think however that a nation conquered/ forged by violence will inevitably disintegrate. Bhagat Singh was smart enough to realize this- he had the foresight to look beyond the British rule- how India must be governed, etc. My point is- and stay with me here- is that every nation or at least nations that I can think of that emerged from some kind of foreign overlordship have had their eventual paths forged by their first leaders. 

 The birthing years of a new/ young nation are very important and steady hand at the centre, whatever his inclinations/ leanings/ ideas, will define the state of the nation in the future. Nehru’s socialistic designs on India, even though outdated in today’s capitalistic context, gave India a steady, rock solid childhood. Lincoln’s concept of building roads & infrastructure in a newly freed America, gave its childhood, eventual adolescence, youth and now middle age the kind of nutritional support that sees it as the world’s largest economy. Look at Pakistan however- a nation whose father died six months into independence- leaving it an orphan- leaving it to stepfathers who abused its potential entirely.

My point thus, with all my segues, is that I oppose patriotism/ regionalism for two reasons. Inevitably patriotism/ regionalism will create revolutionaries/ terrorists who are infinitely more dangerous should they succeed. A set of people consumed wholly by the thought of independence will be incredibly clueless as to what to do after becoming independent- perhaps like in Pakistan/ Afghanistan. Revolution/ terrorism, in my mind, shall create a bloodlust- an easy route out- that no end goal, not even another independence, will be able to satiate. Also the kind of birthing process a nation has will define its entire life- a violently obtained nation has a tendency to stay violent. Which is where a victory through terror is dangerous.

Also my issue with patriotism is that where does it stop? Do I call myself an Asian? Or an Indian? Or a Punjabi? Or a Delhiite? It is very easy for the common man to confuse patriotism and regionalism & as regionalism (look at the Maratha Manus movement) will eventually disintegrate a nation, patriotism- overt that is- shall disintegrate the world.

However, to each his own.

IGWTBS In Bookstores!

What's in a name?

How did we come up with the title? Well, I was very clear (had eventually became clear) that ‘God’ had to be somewhere in the title because it made the book sound interesting. In my own experience, I have never picked up a book that had a useless title (if I didn’t know the author himself).

When the writing started, I had started with the title “CV Point” in mind- something of an internal MBA joke- since everything in a B-school is about CV Points. Several people told me that this wasn’t catchy enough. The folder containing the various novel related docs/ jpegs/ etc on my laptop is still called CV Point, however.

My next choice was “If God were an MBA”. DV aka Dharam (who I talked to a month before going to the publishers) didn’t like it; said it reminded him too much of “If God was a Banker” which I didn’t want- considering the writing in IGWTBS and Ravi Subramanium’s horny novel is quite a class apart. The next solution that my brain threw up (whilst sitting in the FMS Delhi lawns with DV) was “If God went to B-school” which both of us instantly liked.

One of my earlier suggestions to MG had been “Delhi 7” which had seemed appropriate and catchy at the time. But “If God went to B-school” was a title none of us could resist, despite the fact that it still sounded similar to the Banker title. However, our case for the title was stronger- the central character fit with the title more than in ‘Banker’, where the justification for the title is somewhat, actually quite, childish.

The subtitle is MG’s creation. We sat for hours and couldn’t come up with one. We were clear that the word ‘love’ had to be there in it. We figured out millions of permutations but they were all rather cheesy or useless. Finally MG blurted “Would love follow him there?” out and the title was complete.

Just so you know the other permutations were:

Me vs. my MBA

The untold story of a B-School in the Recession

God of Delhi 7

The untold story of a Recession MBA

If God were an MBA

The untold story of a B-School in the Recession

If God went to a B-School

The untold story of a Recession MBA

My Recession MBA

The Chronicles of Delhi 7

If God went to a B-School

The Recession Story at Faculty of Management Studies

Love and related disasters

As stated by an incredibly wise human very recently and eloquently- love is but a chemical reaction. An intense overpowering chemical reaction.

As I age and grow wiser in a few respects (while losing wisdom in most), I look around and see people attempt their own versions of the Great Love Story. It is mostly the same- chocolates, flowers, text messages, whispered/ mumbled nothings, proposals, marriages… It is then that I think- why the hell is every goddamn love story I see- so similar.

It is as Hari says in the novel “Maybe I am just in love with the idea…”. I think & believe that the very idea of being in love or being loved is so romantic, alluring, mystical for an average human that us/ we/ they/ everyone falls for the same old lies- roses, chocolates, marriages- believes in the same mirage that novels, movies peddle. Everyone then dances the damned same merry dance that love is- so similar and predictable that it is infuriating for a writer who likes people to be weird/ weirder and display a lack of a pattern in their being. 

Aside from the primary and very animal perspective of finding a mate, I think love’s only purpose aside from fuelling an entire empire of entertainment spanning movies and novels (including mine I must add), is to make human beings- insignificant little specks in the perspective of the universe (Think about it- you are just six billionth of this earth’s human mass) - to make these damn tiny specks feel important. For however insignificant and socially rejected you might be, there is that one person in the world (also six billionth of human significance) who thinks you aren’t insignificant. Not so much.

The worst is peer pressure lovers- the kind that is best illustrated by XYZ who is 24 years old and who won’t stop cribbing to anyone who is willing to listen, about how everyone around her has a boyfriend/ girlfriend while she is lonely. Undoubtedly/ invariably, some poor miserable insignificant chap will eventually end up with this peer pressure lover (for whatever chemical/ biological reasons). I pity him and I pity his eventual diminished significance in the context of the universe.

Love is not a mystery. Human beings are.

Kelas

Read at your own risk.

 

Bombay

A plane takes off about a kilometer off from my place. A train, a fast local, passes by making the windows reverberate. And the rains- it’s raining as if it were a frigging tropical rainforest. There are pigeons living in my AC duct- the AC that doesn’t really work- who make loud mating calls at odd hours in the night. And the walls- though seemingly thick- are made of some super sound-conducting medium so that I can hear most of what goes on in the adjoining flat. The lift sings an irritating Mozart tune everytime it’s in use- a tune that my flatmate has decided to whistle whenever I am in his presence, compounding my agony.

I open my window and there is Bombay outside my window. I can see slums and sewage and flooded streets. I have been a Delhiite all through my life until Citi packed me off here. Here, to the City of Lights Blinding Even More. To Bombay. Probably one of the worst cities to live in.

I wonder why I am so in love with it.

Eve6

For those of you wondering if the song mentioned in the epilogue is real or made up, here’s some news. The song is real indeed. It belongs to my favorite band of all time- a little known alternate rock band called Eve 6.

If you’re still interested, you can read how the band got named here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_6

You can listen to the song here. http://www.4shared.com/audio/VtrJC3y1/Eve_6_-_At_Least_Were_Dreaming.htm

Big Words

I have realized that in B-schools and thereafter in companies, several words are used simply because they sound nice and big. Perhaps, there will come a point in my life when I will get accustomed to using these words but as of today, if I hear any five Big Words in quick succession, my brain recedes into stupor or I get an uncontrollable urge to burst out laughing. Examples of a few Big Words are:

Leverage/ leveraging (By far the most overabused word by MBAkind)

Counterparty

Value proposition

Liability Heavy

Stake enhancement

Genesis

Anchor relationship

Selldowns

Metrics

Product architecture


Will keep adding more...

More Bhatia

Bhatia, the unpaid unofficial brand ambassador of BOP, during one of the many ad film shoots we involved him in (at FMS, Delhi).

Nifty Notes

And hence we researched the recession...

Bhatia vs IGWTBS

Covers that did not make it

About Scooby

It’s probably hardly any surprise to most of you that Scooby’s character is based on Barney Stinson from HIMYM. Mani Ganesh defines him the best- “An Unlucky Barney”. But not for lack of trying.

In fact, HIMYM (among other things) is one of the few things that inspired me to write. It’s an incredible show with an incredible back story (read about it on Wikipedia). The best damn thing about the show is that the creators (Carter Bays & Craig Thomas) are also members of a band called “The Solids”- who have composed the song “Hey Beautiful”- a 12 second part of which you hear as the opening theme of HIMYM. (Hear it here… http://www.4shared.com/audio/6BxlCwNL/Hey_Beautiful_-_The_Solids.htm  The HIMYM theme is from the last 30 seconds.)

Excerpt- Editor's Cut

One of my favorite bits that we had to remove from the book for some reason.

Matar raised his hand. “I still don’t understand… Tell me in hindi… (sic) Credit mein paisa andar aaya ke bahaar gaya? And if paisa bahar aaya, then why the fuck are we writing ‘To’ with it and not ‘From’?”

The entire Sem Hall exploded with laughter. Only Prakash- the senior from FinSoc who had been taking the Gyaan Session for the past hour- stood expressionless except for a shadow of disgust on his face. I think what he desperately wanted to do next was shout, “Bloody Engineers!” but he sighed, turned back to the whiteboard and started to explain again.

But at the end of the ten minutes he took to reply to Matar’s query, neither Matar nor I nor by the looks on his face, Scooby knew the reply to Matar’s original question. What we, as engineers, needed was a “Yes/ No” type of construct- a formula that could be applied again & again. However, Prakash who was a CFA level 2 passout and who had perhaps started studying finance in his mother’s womb, was loathe to give us finance as simple digestible edible facts. The same happened in Finance classes where all I caught were random phrases like GAAP, FASB, WACC, Capex, etc. without fully absorbing the import of these heavy words.

And therefore, I and Matar and Scooby and most of the engineers in the class, who couldn’t solve the Debit- Credit mystery and whose balancesheets tended to be perpetually unbalanced, became Marketing focused. It was not a matter of choosing Marketing over Finance; simply a matter of rejecting Finance as inedible indigestible.

About Meenakshi

There are and there will continue to be several allegations about who Meenakshi is in real life. I have barely gone through any phase of life without being linked to one female or the other. I guess it’s a part of growing up.

The real beauty of Meenakshi (the “fish eyed” love interest) is that even I do not know who she is. But I see her sometimes on the street… a woman beautiful in an unusual way… perhaps tall with a nose too long or sometimes even straightforward pretty or perhaps unbeautiful, in the millions of ways we choose to describe beauty, yet beautiful in the way she smiles or looks at her kid or flicks her hair. Beautiful and beautifully flawed.

Meenakshi is simply a summation of every woman I have ever met. Or perhaps none.

I wish I knew.

Acknowledgments (As they appear in the book)

Grateful acknowledgments to the following (in no particular order):

To our blood relatives- Isha, Mom 1, Mom 2, Dad 1 & Dad 2 for reading the various drafts and versions and supporting this insanity

To Team BOP- Dharam, Rajat, Lisa, Shilpi & Varsha  and all the other wonderfully weird people at Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi

To KV & Avtar for always being there

To the Kansal Group- Piyush, Sartaj, Kakkar, Kaushik, Sharma & Chowdhary

To the Kelas- Anshul, Ankit, Amit, Gagan, Bengali & Sikka

To Ms. Madhu Singh & Ms. Benedict for sparking this insanity years ago

To all our teachers

To God

Inspirations & Tributes

SPOILER ALERT!!!

I have left hints and clues about my inspirations like scattered bread crumbs throughout the book. I hope discerning readers, like voracious birds, have picked them up. Among the most blatant hints are:

The chapter named “Joker & the Thief…”: A tribute to the band Wolfmother (who have sung the song). The chapter is also inspired by “The Hangover”.

The chapter named “Then came the Merrymakers”: Tribute to Harvey Danger (who had an album called “Where have all the Merrymakers gone?”)

The chapter named “City of Blinding Lights”: My second favorite song and my tribute to U2- my other favorite band. Extremely poetic song.

U2 wrote this while touring after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America. The band played in New York a few days later and Bono remembered seeing a bunch of blinding lights after they performed "Where The Streets Have No Name." (songfacts.com)

The dream sequence in the Chapter “Inverse”: Inspired by the last scenes of Fight Club… glass building… world exploding… Beautiful.

Hari’s inversion towards the end is also Fight Club/ Durdenish. There might be several other references to ‘Fight Club’ in the book.

Teaser (If God Went To B-School)

If God Went to B-School

About Hari

Hari Parmeshwar is a cool name. First, both the first and the second names mean God… which has been my intention all through:- take a guy, God-like but corrupted & confused and place him in a B-School, in a recession and then, enjoy his torture from the sidelines.

So that I would not be tempted to infuse too much of my own voice into Hari’s, I decided (took some convincing with Mani Ganesh, who thought I was going overboard, slightly, though Bastard is his favorite character too) to place Bastard in the book- who doesn’t really describe me to the “T” but whose voice is really my own. Hari too, like Meenakshi, is then uninspired (from real life), unreal and unique- a character of flesh & blood, who doesn’t really exist in flesh & blood.

And aah, the second reason why the names is cool? Coz his name abbreviates to HP; same as Harry Potter.

Magical.

About Bastard

Bastard is, by far, my favorite character in the book. In fact, Mani Ganesh alleges that I have been almost too partial to him- given him too much footage. That is quite true since (as previously established, colloquially) I am a narcissistic pig. And Bastard is half based on me.

For the other half (of who he is based on), read below.

How to write a novel (Part Two)

The story becomes complicated as my final placements began to approach and the pressure meant that I could not focus on writing anymore. Luckily, with ten days to go to placements, Citi finally gave me a PPO and I could go back to writing again.

Since several months had been wasted due to the placements preparation stupidity, we were way off the timeline for finishing the novel. But I set about writing with a mad zeal, cutting college (already had much more than the required 75% attendance in second year) and socializing. I locked myself up in the stuffy writing room (not literally) and finished the book in three weeks flat.

By the time we were done, we realized that most authors begin with publisher contacts or begin sending synopsis, etc. to publishers when they are anywhere from 20 to 80% done. And here we were- with the novel 100% complete- read, reviewed, attested by members of both families- and with no publisher in sight.

So MG got in touch with a couple of his friends. MG’s this well connected guy and all. Very soon, we landed up with email ids of a few publishers. Also, found out that most publishers didn’t have listed phone numbers. There were just that many manuscripts coming in.

After we had gotten hold of the email ids, we sent our synopsis first to two publishers which were first preferences (in order): Srishti and Rupa. Though most of you would perhaps know Rupa better, because of a certain other Citibanker (ex Citibanker) I might add, our research pointed us towards Srishti. And imagine our surprise, when Mr. Bose, the proprietor of Srishti, got back to us within 2 days.

Within 5 days, I had my first (of many) chats with Mr. Bose. He asked us to come meet him. We did. And the rest, as they say, is history.

PS: Rupa got back to us a month later, saying they were “interested” in the book, basis the synopsis.

On CNBC!

How to write a novel (Part One)

This story begins towards the end of my summer internship at Citi, when completely bored by my miserable & pointless B-School existence, I announced my intention to write a novel to Narendra (Mani Ganesh). I had already quit the FMS Student Body and knew that I would be having a lot of free time in my hands come second year.

MG’s first suggestion was to do a sort of love story inspired by our real lives. But we both decided that however much we may sex them up, neither of our love lives were worth writing much about. The good thing is that having spent so much time together (at school & then at DCE), though we don’t exactly think alike (I am the creative and illogical one- he’s the mathematical genius and logical one) we could always understand the other’s point of view that much more easily.

So when I told MG that I had this story that I had just seen unfold before my eyes, I had his attention. The story began with a FB Update I had read that had set the novel’s story in my mind. Though I don’t remember it word for word, the Update went something like “I have come here and lost everything… I wish I had never left my job to join XXXX.” (Abridged)

Though this guy didn’t belong to FMS, Delhi and I choose not to reveal his identity, it set off this spark in my head. Here was a story- the story of the average recession impacted Premier League B-School guy- a story I had seen unfold before my very eyes, in one hue at least, at FMS. So we sat down one day (the first of many spent in my favorite slightly stuffy drawing room- where most of this book was written later on my Dell laptop) and noted down the broad plot outlines after one marathon session of brainstorming, which MG later meticulously converted to an excel file which became my plot reference.

And then we were off. I started gnawing off at the story one excel row at a time (we started out with 16 Chapters in Excel) which would later be sent to MG for review (and back to me for straightening out), while MG kept straightening out the plot road ahead. Often through impulsive “Flashes of Genius/ Stupidity” I would end up adding more to the plot or usually contorting the plot more than the Chapters Excel had foreseen, creating fresh problems for MG. In the end, though the story is broadly what we had started off with on that long stuffy marathon night, much of it is very very different, several of the characters have turned out very differently than we had started off with. I can only imagine that’s because I have grown with the characters and seen them more closely than anyone ever will.

More Bhatia

McDonald's

Brought to you by BOP Productions.

Slightly shady vid... watch it for Bhatia and Dharam's excellent voiceover.