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.