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.