Because Shit Happened

by Harsh Snehanshu

  Our strategies worked out well as the already-hired BDMs assisted us in conducting future interviews. It was a sudden status symbol for them as well, for they could now sit on the opposite side of the table and be the interviewer instead of the interviewee. We called Tanay and his articulate friend Sumeet as well to help us look professional as an interview panel. The criterion for selection was simple. Anyone who was eloquent in Hindi or English stood a better chance of selection. However, the criterion was more relaxed for girls as we hired any good-looking girl, who could motivate guys to work. Maintaining a fairly balanced sex-ratio was our bigger concern and when the interviews came to an end, we were happy to observe that we had 15 girls versus 45 guys.

  But little did we know what was to come ahead. The mighty team size brought with it its fair share of difficulties. It was so difficult to firstly memorize all the names of the team members and secondly induct them into work, so much so that all other members of core team withdrew from taking responsibility. Even I was one of them, owing to my fear of confrontation. Rishabh, however, took it as a challenge and executed it with great skill and knowhow. He was good with people.

  February is a relaxed month for us with no exams for a month and plenty of free time at our disposal. We started training programs for all the 60 hired students. The empty rooms in the isolated blocks which had earlier served as a mating point for college students now became our meeting point. I had the task of educating people about social media, how to use Twitter and Facebook to foster the growth of our brand while Rishabh took on the real deal—educating our juniors about marketing, or The Art of Hot and Cold Calling.

  Hot calling implies pitching to a prospective customer who you know is interested. Cold calling is reaching the marketing head of a company via customer care and making them interested in using your product or services. This was precisely the reason why we placed greater importance on articulation while shortlisting.

  The first two weeks went really well, with the newly inducted students from myriad departments getting to know each other and enjoying the exposure, the knowhow of how start-ups operate. We were absolutely delighted at how things were proceeding. We had managed to scale from 8 employees to 60 while spending less than 5,000 rupees.

  It was February 10 when I finally got time to meet Priya. She had come to IIT to see me. As we walked through the campus hand in hand, I was greeted by around a dozen juniors whom we had newly welcomed in our team.

  ‘Wow, you’re famous around here. Is this because of your book?’

  ‘No, it’s because of YourQuote,’ I said flashing a million dollar grin.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many girls are there in the team?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I answered.

  ‘Wow, Sabharwal saheb. You are on a roll. Anyone pretty?’

  ‘Umm, two or three. Why?’

  ‘I hope you are not counting that bitch Shikha as pretty?’ She remarked. I had told Priya about the rejuvenating shoulder massage that I was offered for free.

  ‘Ha! Still angry about the Mumbai trip?

  ‘If I was with another girl’s boyfriend 24/7, wouldn’t you have felt bad?’

  ‘No. If I know that you are just friends with that guy, no.’

  ‘It’s very easy to say that. Are you really sure?’

  ‘Come on, why are you getting angry with me? I was honest enough to tell you everything,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not angry with you. My problem is with her. When she knows that you are committed, how could she even touch you?’

  ‘You know what? You have turned into a psycho. Why did you have to come to meet me when all you want to do is fight?’ I was annoyed. She lost her temper. She threw my phone so suddenly at me that my reflexes failed to respond. The phone fell on the ground with a thud, vibrated for a few seconds, and turned off. I was so angry at her then! I picked up my phone from the ground and switched it on. Thankfully, it was still working.

  ‘I’m leaving. Bye,’ she said and started walking away from me.

  ‘You’re fighting again. Why can’t you be cool about these things?’

  ‘I am fighting? You are the one screaming at me for that bitch.’

  ‘I thought somebody was leaving,’ I remarked intentionally to hurt her. She left without saying a word. I could see her footsteps racing to reach the main gate. I stood there, near the roundabout, staring at her disappear. When she was out of my sight, my heart whirled and I unconsciously started running. Running after her as fast as I could.

  I saw her just at the bus stop outside the campus. She carried a dejected look on her face. She was boarding a crowded bus en route the Hauz Khas metro station. I managed to board the bus just in the nick of time. It was not until we descended at the next bus stop that she saw me. She tried her best to hide the delight at seeing me by turning her face away and walking towards the metro escalator. I caught hold of her hand and pulled her towards me. Grinding her teeth, she said, ‘Amol, let go of my hand or I’ll scream.’

  ‘I will kiss you right here if you scream.’

  ‘You will be beaten to pulp by the people around.’

  ‘I am ready for it, if I get to kiss you in the process.’

  ‘Jerk,’ she said with a hint of smile. We boarded the next bus to IIT and used the isolated block to our service. She was kind enough to not turn me into pulp.

  Mishra joined us as a CTO in late January and had promised to deliver our website by March 13, his birthday, as a return gift. It was a very sincere promise from his end and I was designated with the task of keeping track on his activities. I frequented his hostel room often, discussing about prospective functionalities and design, and forbidding him to smoke while I was there.

  I didn’t like the smell of cigarettes. Not that I was allergic to it, but it just sent me coughing. No wonder, all my smoker friends had stopped counting me as their friend. Mishra, being junior to me, willingly put out the cigarette. I was touched by his readiness to do so.

  Mishra belonged to the same state as me—Jharkhand. But unlike me, Mishra had a different lifestyle. Owing to a severe financial crisis at home, he didn’t take any money from his parents and paid his own bills. That was the reason he got into web development in the first place.

  The work sparked off at a good pace and I could see Mishra reflecting the same zeal we held for the idea. As I worked more and more with him, I realized that he was the ideal guy to be our technical partner. Along with gifted coding skills, he had an astute business sense, a natural penchant for networking, and above all, an impeccable work ethic.

  I discussed with Rishabh the possibility of having Mishra as a prospective partner to which he agreed. But ultimately we dismissed the thought because he still had two years of education left and he couldn’t have gone full-time with the venture four months later.

  The thing that every college student fears most is having one’s parents send them a friend request on Facebook. In February, the fearful moment arrived. My parents had signed up on Facebook and every day, they would like my posts or share them in their profile.

  My fear was born from the fact that now I could not share things related to Priya on my profile anymore and I had to monitor the comments that my friends posted. I also had to monitor YourQuote page’s content as we had started entertaining adult quotes like: ‘The greatest irony of life is that adults suck more than children.’ So while I made sure that I posted nothing containing any scandalous or offensive content, they dug older posts of my profile. They got a hint about Priya who had posted some photos of us cozying with each other at a friend’s party. They didn’t tell me but they interrogated my sister about it. My sister told me that mother had quizzed her whether it was a non-serious relationship between us or whether I was looking at marrying Priya in the long run. I was taken aback, not understanding why my parents were suddenly interested in my ongoing love story.

  I wouldn’t have faced any inhibitions about telling them about Pr
iya had Priya been as comfortable telling her parents about us. If I had told my parents, their first question would have been: ‘Do her parents know? Will they agree?’ to which I would have had no answer.

  During that period, we were desperate to increase the number of fans on our Facebook fan page as it would have further cemented the wow factor of the brand. Rishabh had taken out time from training the newly recruited juniors in business development to join us in Mishra’s room for a discussion on how to increase our Facebook fans.We thought that before the website was up, if we could reach a significant figure of fans, we could easily convince corporates to advertise on our platform. We were already seeing a targeted demographic of 80 percent in the 18-24 years of age, which was seen as a very lucrative segment for advertisers.

  Mishra’s room had a characteristic smell of cigarette mixed with sweat, which was repugnant at first, but one slowly get used to it. When Rishabh arrived, he immediately got repulsed by it and tactfully led us out in the corridor to carry forth the discussion, which Mishra polluted with his propensity to smoke.

  We started with the topic of social media marketing. Ever since Mishra came on board, the discussions were always very practical and technically sound, since he was very well acquainted with technology. Mishra told us how he had discovered a website where you could buy Facebook likes. He said that most brands which had suddenly got over a lakh likes had been buying it. When he showed us the websites that facilitated such ‘buying’, we were shocked. The Facebook likes were worth 2 rupees each while Twitter followers cost 1 rupee each. We were lured but realized that this wouldn’t help, because more than half of the profiles would be fake and wouldn’t add any significant value.

  After half an hour of brainstorming, we figured out a way wherein our followers could invite their friends on our company’s fan page and the one who invited the maximum people would get a prize. Rishabh suggested that we should give a very catchy prize like an iPhone or an iPad to attract more participants. My eyebrows furrowed in disbelief. Here we were with hardly any money at our disposal and had encountered a hefty loss of around 1 lakh rupees barely three months ago, and Rishabh was thinking about gifting a phone worth 30,000 rupees for merely increasing our fan number by a few hundreds? I told them it was a bad idea. Even Mishra seconded me, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Rishabh smiling cunningly in my direction.

  ‘Who is asking you to gift the iPhone?’ Rishabh said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We will create a fake profile for the winner. Since it’ll be a contest where our followers have to mail us, nobody is going to ascertain whether the winner exists in reality or not.’

  He looked visibly happy and argued that besides the obvious purpose of creating a buzz about our brand across the social media space, a catchy prize would serve an important purpose of making our well-placed batchmates turn green with envy upon realizing that we are doing great. We had been victims of peer criticism lately, when almost every batchmate of ours cursed us for inducting a large number of juniors and leaving them with no time for other work. At first, the entire concept and the purpose looked brilliant. In fact, it seemed so lucrative and mind-boggling that it had numbed my conscience. But thankfully, Mishra was unmoved.

  ‘I won’t give it a green signal. It’s unethical. It’s dishonest,’ he said fearlessly.

  ‘But no one is getting to know,’ Rishabh argued.

  ‘We are. And we would always know.’

  ‘But we are cool with it, aren’t we?’ Rishabh said.

  ‘Not me at least.’

  ‘Neither me. This is not the way to grow as a venture by instilling dishonesty as a core value,’ I said.

  Rishabh was visibly dejected and asked us to provide him logic to prove our point. There was no logic to it, except that it was morally wrong. When Rishabh persisted, accusing us of lacking business acumen and getting governed by heart instead of brain, I figured out a logical explanation for him. I argued that any of the participants could file an RTI against us and we would be charged with fraud. He retraced, gave in and we agreed. After much arguing, we unanimously agreed to give an iPod Nano to the winner.

  We were in the middle of discussing the technicalities of the proposed competition when Rishabh’s phone buzzed. He got up and announced that it was a call from Anjali who needed to talk to him urgently. So he excused himself from the meeting, leaving us behind to design the contest. A minute after Rishabh left, there was a knock on the door. It was Rishabh again. He called for Mishra and took him outside with him. I was puzzled by it all but I decided not to say anything at the moment. Mishra returned after a minute and when I asked him what the matter was, he simply smiled and said ‘sutta’.

  Mishra, despite the fact that he looked naive, courteous and honest, had a twisted side to him. First of all, he was a first-grade pervert. One of his primary incentives for joining YourQuote had been he could add pretty girls who were active on our fan page on his Facebook profile as the CTO of YourQuote. At first, I presumed that he was single. But then he astounded me by saying that he had been in three relationships in the past and was currently dating a girl from Delhi University who had been his classmate from Ranchi.

  Curious, I quizzed him about his take on fidelity. He said that he was cool with two-timing a girl and wouldn’t mind if his partner two-timed him as well. I was puzzled to note that his stand on relationships and loyalty was in stark contrast to the ethical personality that he projected in business.

  On March 1, I left on a ten-day tour to the Andamans with my parents and I handed over the responsibilty of the website to Mishra and Rishabh. I entrusted Rishabh with an additional responsibility of keeping track on Mishra’s work and asked him to make sure that by the proposed date, March 13, Mishra’s birthday, the website was up and running. Anjali, assisted by one of the recruited juniors, was to take care of social media in my absence.

  When I came back to the campus on March 13, a lot had changed.

  After dropping off my luggage in my room, I went to see Rishabh. Like always, he was not there. I called his number, but he still didn’t pick up. A minute later, I received a message from Anjali’s number saying, ‘I’m in the cinema hall, will return late. Anything urgent? Rishabh’

  Annoyed, I wanted to pour down my anger in my reply. However I chose to write a fake ‘Enjoy’ instead. I checked the development server—the server where the to-be-launched website was hosted. It was stuck at the same status of development as it had been two weeks ago. I called Mishra, but his number was not reachable. I ran to his hostel room only to find that it was locked. I messaged Rishabh to let me know of Mishra’s whereabouts. He replied via Anjali’s number saying, ‘No idea, have not been in touch with him lately.’ It was said with so much callousness and no sense of responsibility that it freaked me out. I didn’t reply to him and came back to my room.

  As I logged into my mail id, one mail struck my attention. It was from Shikha and Rishabh was copied into the mail.

  Dear Amol,

  I’m sorry to inform you that I am leaving YourQuote because of some personal reasons. It’s unfortunate that things unfolded in such a way while you were away. I wish you all the best for YourQuote and hope you succeed in all your future pursuits.

  Regards,

  Shikha

  I was stunned. The mail was four days old. Rishabh, who was copied in the mail, had not replied till then, which confirmed my doubt that it was because of him that our right hand—the only designer of YourQuote—was leaving. I immediately called Shikha and asked her about the mail. She hesitated to talk about it at first but then I played a gimmick ‘I know it’s about Rishabh. Don’t worry, I won’t tell him anything.’

  Shikha finally opened up. She told me that we were an inexperienced group and there was not much to learn for her. I knew that it could not have been the sole reason for her to leave so suddenly. I pestered her to tell me the truth. She then told me about how uncomfortable she felt in Rishabh’s com
pany. Despite their fall-out after the two months fling long back, Rishabh made it impossible for her to maintain a professional relationship between him. She confessed that even though Rishabh had now been seeing Anjali (not officially though), he treated Shikha like his mistress whenever the two were alone.

  Realizing that she had spoken too much in front of me, she digressed from the topic and told me that she had got an internship offer at a prominent design agency and would be working there from the summer onwards. Just when she began wishing me well for the future, I abruptly disconnected her call.

  I was angry at Rishabh but I couldn’t make up my mind about confronting him and charging him for her resignation. What happened between Shikha and him was a private affair and I knew that it would make matters worse if I tried to meddle. I chose to keep mum on the topic until my anger cooled down a little.

  For the next few minutes, I stayed in front of my PC, trying to calm my mind by watching useless feeds of useless people in sheer disgust, when suddenly a picture of Mishra with his girlfriend Swati against a backdrop of mountains appeared on the screen. The caption said, ‘Celebrating this birthday in the mountains of Shimla… with Swati’. It seemed to be the most disgusting post of all but I still couldn’t take my eyes away from it. As it was his birthday, I chose not to spoil his mood and even ‘liked’ the picture before logging out.

  I met Rishabh in his room the next morning. It was the first time my annoyance had given me enough courage to confront him and I began by saying, ‘Rishabh, I’m not happy with how things have been managed in the last fifteen days. Why didn’t you keep a check on Mishra? We need to understand that he’s still an unpaid employee, not a partner, and we can’t expect him to work on his own. He needs to be constantly pushed.’