Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  ‘We shouldn’t do this, you know,’ I said. My head felt heavy and I was struggling to form a coherent, complete thought.

  ‘Do what?’ Sarkar said.

  ‘What?’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘You said we shouldn’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘We shouldn’t do what?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what I asked,’ Sarkar said.

  ‘No, I asked that,’ I said, struggling to understand.

  ‘No, you said we shouldn’t do this,’ Sarkar said.

  ‘Do what?’ I asked.

  ‘What you said...’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You are stoned out of your minds. I can’t listen to this conversation,’ Vinod said unbearably loudly.

  I sprawled on the cot, supporting my head with my right hand and holding the joint in my left, staring at the empty earthenware cups strewn on the ground.

  Many peaceful, stoned hours passed. The dhaba began buzzing with night-time activity. Truck drivers with their cargo, large families on long journeys, random groups of college students on their dinner break—all arrived, made arbitrary conversation and left, each lost in their own world, trudging along, trying to make sense of the fundamental incomprehensibility that surrounded them every day. ‘It’s all a cosmic conspiracy,’ the software engineer’s words came back to me. I giggled at the recollection of the previous night.

  A lazy, vacant eternity passed.

  I saw Vinod get up to strike up a conversation with a group of soldiers who had just disembarked from their gigantic, oddly shaped green metallic monster of a vehicle. (‘It’s called a three-ton,’ he told me. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because it weighs three tons, of course,’ he said. ‘But a car isn’t called half-a-ton,’ I said. ‘I think I should go,’ he said.)

  Sarkar yawned lazily beside me.

  Sarkar and Vinod were pretty cool, I thought, but could we ever become friends? Real friends, I mean. I had asked Baba once why all his friends were Indians.

  ‘Dad, why don’t you have a single close American friend?’ I had asked somewhat tactlessly.

  He was surprisingly forthright: ‘There is always a chasm between us, the divide caused by the absence of a common past. There are no shared memories of frat parties, tailgating, hazing and ball games that I can reminisce with them about, the same way they can’t understand Sholay and Kapil Dev.’

  Maybe he was right, I thought, and I’d never be able to get really close to my Indian friends. I had hardly caught any of the references—Annu whatever, some Sidhu. But it didn’t seem to matter. Then again, maybe our generation was different. We had, after all, grown up in a flatter, more concordant world.

  I turned to Sarkar. ‘Do you think the absence of a common past matters, dude?’ I asked.

  He looked up drowsily, spewing blue smoke. ‘Huh?’ he said. ‘What? Do you want to go back?’

  ‘Go back where?’ I asked.

  ‘Back.’ Sarkar sounded dazed.

  ‘Okay, back,’ I said.

  ‘I can go, I guess, if you’re tired,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m fine. You decide if…’ I said.

  ‘No, I’m fine. You decide,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m fine. You decide,’ I replied, liking the sound of the words.

  ‘No, I’m fine. You decide,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m fine. You decide,’ I said.

  ‘Okay, I guess neither of us can make a decision,’ he said.

  Vinod came back just then and asked, ‘Should we go back?’

  Sarkar and I looked at each other and burst out laughing, nearly falling off the cot and rolling about uncontrollably. The hot ash from the joint fell on my forearms and the sudden burning sensation felt good.

  ‘Let me ask again. Should we leave now? It’s almost dawn and classes begin in a few hours. We’ve been sitting here for almost ten hours,’ Vinod said.

  I couldn’t expend the effort to dissect the issue logically. Sarkar seemed lost in thought as well.

  ‘Let’s just go,’ Vinod said. ‘This is what happens when you smoke that gaanja of yours.’

  Sarkar seemed to break from his trance at this comment and uttered his only coherent thought of the day.

  ‘I smoke it in protest, man,’ he said. ‘Marijuana exists naturally as a plant. Who is the government to ban God’s creation? It’s like me wanting to make potatoes illegal because I don’t like the way they taste.’

  Wow, I thought, this sounds profound. What did he say again?

  The chilly Bangalore air slowly knocked me back into my senses on the ride back. As we went back to our rooms, I was a trifle worried about the classes scheduled to begin in a few hours, as was Vinod, no doubt. Sarkar didn’t seem to care one way or the other, and in fact suggested a final round back in our rooms, which both Vinod and I declined. I checked the time: 4:30 a.m. Classes began at eight in the morning. Of course, none of us had done any pre-work whatsoever. For the second day in a row, I had smoked up and barely slept, and though IIM seemed like a cool place so far, an assortment of unsolicited advisors had assured me that academics would be brutal and unmanageable. Lying on my bed stoned, this seemed incomprehensible. Whatever, I thought, as I drifted off to sleep.

  I had seen worse before. How bad could this be?

  4

  How Bad Could This Be?

  I could almost smell the testosterone when I entered the class the next day. I could see not more than five girls, and about sixty or seventy guys. Although no one else seemed remotely surprised by this, I found it astounding, given the global thrust for executive diversity.

  The initial round of introductions also established that the lack of diversity wasn’t limited to gender. Educational backgrounds were equally homogeneous. Almost all of the class comprised engineers from top technological institutes. A small minority had a background in finance and the remaining were from what could be termed diverse backgrounds—folks like Doctor Jatinder Pal, who had arrived on the honourable (some would say foolhardy) mission of providing unsolicited management acumen to the badly mismanaged world of public health in India. I knew this wasn’t Harvard Business School, and I hadn’t expected musicians, Olympic gold medallists or presidential speechwriters. However, I did find it ironic that an investment banker who would struggle to show how he was different in order to be considered for admission in a US business school, could end up becoming a poster boy for Indian B-School diversity.

  Sarkar explained this phenomenon to me. ‘Man, where do I begin? The whole system is completely screwed up. There are a billion people in this country, most of them right at the bottom of the food chain. Hence, there is no mass market for anything other than the basics, and certainly not for nobler pursuits like philosophy, literature, music or other fancy liberal arts kind of stuff. The only sure way to make a livelihood in India is to be in engineering or medicine, and while medicine requires a certain degree of patience and aptitude, being a software engineer in India requires neither. Look at me, for example. Despite being a computer engineering major, I have barely seen the computer lab at the IIT. India manages to churn out a million worthless engineers like me every year, and they all apply to business school to escape the futility of running backend computer operations for bloodsucking Americans.’

  This was explained to me over a couple of cigarettes and chaar-pachchees (four and twenty-five, or four pieces of bread and twenty-five grams of butter) that we wolfed down between the orientation session and our first class of the day, managerial accounting.

  My head ached from the seventy introductions we had heard during the orientation, Sarkar’s incisive commentary on the sorry state of the Indian system and severe sleep deprivation. I planned to get some shut-eye in accounting class so I could be prepared for the marketing and statistics classes to follow. I was supremely confident of my accounting skills. After all, I had spent the last couple of years in the Mecca of the financial world. I was glad that it would be my first lecture after my two-year hiatus f
rom school. It would help me ease back into academics.

  The accounting professor turned out to be an attractive young woman with an animated face, black shoulder-length hair and alive, energetic eyes. Boy, I thought, the universe did seem to be conspiring to fulfil my dreams. My favourite subject, accounting; a beautiful professor; an Indian odyssey…

  The professor didn’t seem particularly interested in fraternizing with the students, though. She immediately launched into the lecture by explaining the harsh ‘relative grading’ system that she intended to follow in the course. There were four possible grades, A, B, C and D, that you could get, and these would be determined via a series of ten quizzes, a mid-semester exam and a final exam.

  Simple enough. Although a couple of losers whined that twelve examinations over a three-month period seemed a bit of a stretch.

  ‘But ma’am, that’s almost an examination every week!’

  Oh, these kids, I thought, it’s just a quiz for heaven’s sake! Go complain to your mothers.

  I was impatient for the professor to get on with the real lecture so I could start establishing my academic domination in class. All my confusions aside, I had been an academic ace through high school and Yale, and I didn’t expect this to be any different. I also figured that my class must have already stereotyped me as the dumb American and I was eager to make them eat crow. And of course, there was this whole matter of the star student and the cute professor.

  But she wasn’t done with the grading system yet. She explained that there were no absolute grades, all grading was relative and your performance depended on how the class performed. Only a few folks got an A, a majority got a B, some got a C and a few had to get a D or failing grade. This caused immediate dissent in class.

  Someone spoke up. ‘Ma’am, that seems unfair. Technically, even if I get 90 out of 100, I could still get a D because the rest of the class got a higher score. What are we trying to measure here? My ability to understand the subject or whether I can beat others in understanding the subject?’

  The professor was quick with her response. ‘What do you think success in corporate life is about? Your doing well or your doing better than your peers? My classes should simulate the reality you are going to face when you graduate from here, and my course is as much about learning accounting as it is about being the best at learning accounting.’

  ‘Ma’am, do other professors have the same grading system?’ This time the question was from my neighbour Chetan, who seemed particularly agitated that morning.

  ‘Yes, some variation of it,’ the professor said shortly. ‘And let me answer the question you didn’t ask. Some percentage of your class will not graduate from business school. It could be 10 per cent maximum, assuming the same folks get a D in every subject which is rare but has happened in the past, or it could be a lesser number, but there definitely will be a few who are left behind. But that is the nature of the game. It is not a reflection on you, it’s just the way things are, and in a perverse sense, it’s all for the best. Do I have to recount the clichés you all know so well: Albert Einstein failed his high school examinations, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, etc.? Maybe business school is not meant for you because there are bigger and better things awaiting you.’

  There was a fresh note of panic on most faces now. At that point no one wanted anything bigger or better than graduating from school. I remained unperturbed. Relative grading was not an alien concept in the hypercompetitive world of Wall Street, and my academic concerns, if any, were more about being at the top of the class versus not being at the bottom.

  ‘Any last questions before we move on to the real stuff?’ The professor was now eager to begin the lesson. So was I. No hands.

  ‘Okay. Let’s start with the basics. Who can tell me what a balance sheet is?’ she asked.

  I raised my hand confidently. ‘A balance sheet is a financial snapshot of a corporation which lists its assets, liabilities and shareholder equity at a fixed point in time,’ I said.

  That’s it, I thought—suave, no rambling, no unnecessary information. I was the investment banker from Wall Street, after all, my time was money.

  ‘Great answer,’ beamed the professor, turning her pretty eyes towards me, ‘I especially like the words “fixed point in time” since that is the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement.’ The class looked awestruck.

  I beamed back at her. I probably knew this stuff as well as she did, I thought. We definitely had a connection here. Maybe we could have a future together. We could live in one of those nice, spacious campus houses with a beautiful garden, have a couple of kids together, and I would teach at the IIM as well. But would it be all right if we both taught the same subject? Maybe I could…

  ‘If you were forced to look at only one before making a decision to invest in a company, what would it be: a balance sheet or a profit-and-loss statement?’ The professor interrupted my daydreams.

  Uh-huh. No one asked that question on Wall Street. I used to work 100-hour weeks because we looked at everything. Why would we be forced to make a choice to look at just one? We had enough money to buy any financial document we wanted. Still, I could analyse the situation intellectually. Well, I would probably go with the income statement, but what about future cash flow estimation? Well, then, maybe a balance sheet…

  ‘Great answer. Let’s move on to financial ratios now,’ I heard the professor say.

  Someone had already answered the question. Hmm… I’ll get the next question, I thought.

  ‘What financial ratios would you look at in the balance sheet?’ the professor asked.

  Hey, this wasn’t very structured! There was a certain method to financial analysis. You couldn’t do it like this. Anyway, I would probably look at…

  ‘Great answer.’ The professor’s voice rang in the background.

  Again, someone had answered before I could process the question in my head.

  ‘Let’s move on to shareholder equity. What constitutes shareholder equity?’ she asked.

  Yep, I know that one. Let’s see, when—

  ‘Great answer,’ I heard her tell someone yet again.

  In that apocalyptic hour, which I would later think of as the turning point in my academic life, I lost all my confidence in accounting and pretty much everything related to business education. As she progressed further with the lesson and I fell progressively behind, my reactions changed from incomprehension to surprise to anger—at the superficiality of my knowledge and my inability to grasp even the most fundamental concepts she was talking about.

  ‘Big deal,’ I tried to console myself, ‘none of this is practical anyway.’

  I knew, though, that this wasn’t true. Lectures like these were precisely the reason why Wall Street investment banking firms encouraged B-school. As Ruth, my boss, had said before I left, ‘Most of it is going to be a waste of time but look out for the nuances. One small, extra insight that you bring back will be worth millions of dollars to the company someday.’

  But today I wasn’t getting any of those nuances as the professor sustained her blistering pace till the sixty-minute class finally screeched to a halt. She handed out the homework assignment for the next class: an analysis of seventeen intimidating financial exhibits, which constituted a consumer goods company’s balance sheet.

  ‘Two-page analysis, double-spaced, Microsoft Word, one-inch margin on all sides, Arial 12. Thought I would tell you so that all pages are created equal and I’m not looking through a magnifying glass to read someone’s poetry. I promise I won’t read after the second page, so go light on the prose and concentrate on the numbers,’ she said as she walked out of class.

  She didn’t seem that sexy any longer. I didn’t want to live with her in the campus housing or teach at the IIM or even study at the IIM any more.

  I turned to Sarkar shakily. ‘Let’s get a quick cigarette fix before marketing begins. I’m fried.’

  As we rushed to the cafeteria in the fiv
e-minute break before the marketing class, I said, ‘Wow, man, that was something!’ I was ready to launch into an account of my utter incomprehension at what just happened, fully expecting him to expand on the theme.

  Instead, Sarkar said, ‘Yep, man, wasn’t it? What a woman, and pretty too! I had heard so much about how difficult accounting is, but this was so damn scientific and logical. Same story as the IITs—meaningless subjects made somewhat meaningful by the excellent faculty. I confess that I usually start off liking my studies before I begin to question their role in my larger turmoil-ridden world. Yet, this was fun.’

  I looked at him, awestruck. ‘Did you understand everything?’ I asked, trying to mask the panic in my voice.

  ‘Yep, I think so. I guess it’s only because it was lesson one and she just covered the basics. But you must be mad at her. How dare she trivialize the noble world of financial statements with such simple explanations? Let it be,’ he said, ‘this stuff is trivial for an investment banker but for us engineering grads, it’s good to get the hang of the fundamentals.’

  I had learned my first lesson at B-school: never compare academic notes with an IITian even if he is your best friend and fellow stoner.

  I wasn’t the first American to reach that conclusion. Bill Gates had once famously said IIT = Harvard + MIT + Princeton. The phenomenon of the IITian was also familiar to me from Scott Adams’s Dilbert which features Asok, the summer intern from IIT, who says in one strip, ‘At the Indian Institute of Technology, I learned to use my huge brain but I try not to frighten ordinary people with any gratuitous displays of mental superiority.’