Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  He continued to rant: ‘Seriously, what are you supposed to write? All eight questions are asking the same thing in different ways. Listen to the next one: “Give an example of a time when you demonstrated leadership by aligning your team to deliver an important result.” Bastards. How is “setting a vision” different from “leadership” or “aligning your team” different from “collaboration”? I’m going crazy with this nonsense. If this is what marketing is about, at least one field is eliminated from my consideration.’

  Sarkar’s final marketing forms were laughable in their honesty. In answer to a particular question, for example, he wrote, ‘See Question 2. Same answer.’

  Vinod, on the other hand, probably delivered the strongest answers without realizing it. For a typical question like ‘Give an example of a situation where you demonstrated significant risk-taking behaviour’, while the rest of us wrote about the extreme risk of changing the word ‘happy’ to ‘glad’ five minutes before a project submission deadline, Vinod’s answer was, ‘Three soldiers in the eight-member sniper team I led in the Kargil war were killed by enemy fire. Instead of following conventional wisdom and staying together as a group, I split the team into three groups… and finally managed to kill the entire enemy battalion.’

  And I had thought my incident about picking up a penny stock and making a million for my investment bank was risk-taking at its very best!

  The three-day placement season began with a vengeance. It was like a carnival, only a stressful one. At any given time during the three days, there were at least fifty companies and their stuffy executives (‘Will we become assholes like them one day?’ asked Sarkar) on campus, and the buzz of about a hundred students being interviewed simultaneously. The students most in demand were being shuttled between rooms and had to shift gears in seconds from peddling detergents to peddling automobile insurance. The pace of activity was dizzying as job offers were made every second and people either accepted, happy that it was all over, or accepted before rushing for the next interview to negotiate a slightly higher salary or the elusive foreign posting.

  The companies on Day Zero were all international banking and consulting firms and I hadn’t applied for any. Relaxed—probably the only guy on campus to be in that happy state—I strolled down in my loafers and shorts to check on Sarkar, Vinod and a couple of others. But ‘strolling’ was impossible. I found myself being sucked into a thousand different tasks—consoling Nandini who burst into tears after being rejected by both Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank in the space of ten minutes (‘It’s all for the good,’ I told her—and this time, I wasn’t lying), fetching forgotten coats and ties, giving last-minute advice on cracking soulless banking interviews. As I rushed to grab lunch for Chetan, I realized with satisfaction that everyone chipped in when it really mattered. This was placements, not a five per cent stats quiz. It was important and we were all in it together, petty grievances against each other forgotten. Everyone wanted to ace the placements, but no one really wanted anyone else to get screwed in the process.

  Exhausted from running around, I went out for a cigarette break at the tea stall and ran into another classmate, Kunal. He had piqued my curiosity on the first day because he had majored in zoology—a monstrous abnormality in the heavily engineer-dominated class. But things being what they were, I had barely exchanged a word with him in the first few months of being on campus. He looked a bit low, so I decided to make small talk with him.

  ‘No interviews today, huh?’ I enquired, already guessing the answer.

  His tall, lean frame drooped a bit, and he rubbed his red eyes. ‘Nope, neither today, nor tomorrow actually. No one on Day Zero or Day One shortlisted me. My first interview begins only mid-Day Two with a software company I have no interest in, but I guess I don’t have a choice. I just want this to end—get the first job I can and get out of this place for good,’ he replied, a surprisingly long answer to my polite question.

  The dude must be lonely, I thought.

  ‘Don’t take it too hard, man. It’s not like it’s final placements, it’s just an internship,’ I said. I felt bad for him. I liked his quiet, soft-spoken demeanour in class but had hardly had a chance to know him better.

  ‘I’m not sure things are going to be any different then,’ he replied. ‘It’s a vicious cycle: unconventional background = bad internship = bad final placement, if any at all. But I was prepared for this when I came here. I knew that the only way to break the equation was to get good grades here. I thought I could manage that easily, since I have always been a topper. Out here, though, I’m struggling, struggling bad. I am right at the bottom of the class in everything, even in organizational behaviour, which I should be doing well at as a psychology minor. Life is careening out of control… can’t handle things, can’t sleep nights, I keep feeling humiliated at my terrible performance in quizzes, and now this internship fiasco. I’m truly fucked. Back home in Ranchi, things were different, you know. I was a state gold medallist, a tennis champion, and now I’m a miserable nobody. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Don’t I understand, kid? Welcome to my world. While you were being awarded your gold medal in Ranchi, I was being sucked off by the best investment banks on Wall Street. How the mighty fall.

  I tried to cheer him up with an optimism I didn’t feel. ‘I’m no different, man, no interviews lined up for today, and I’m struggling with academics as well. Barring a few folks, I think everybody is going through the same thing, some more than others. Just relax, take it easy. It’s hard enough to get into IIM without setting unreasonable expectations for oneself. Think of all your friends outside who’d give an arm and a leg to be in your position today.’

  I was hardly a credible source for dispensing advice. Can the shipwrecked save the drowning?

  Chetan walked by then for a quick cigarette fix between interviews, said hi to me but barely glanced at Kunal. He finished his cigarette and left. It triggered something in Kunal and all of a sudden he turned angry.

  ‘You don’t understand. Everyone has issues, but they all have some redeeming quality that makes them different. In your case, it is your investment-banking background or your American accent or your going around in Bermudas or your Bob Marley T-Shirt or whatever—you’re special, you’re different. I have nothing, NOTHING that makes me stand out.’ He was almost shouting now. ‘And that’s why people act as if I don’t exist, as if I’m a piece of furniture or something. Look at Chetan, he didn’t even acknowledge me.’

  I thought he was overreacting; everyone knew that Chetan was an unsocial bastard. But I let it be.

  He came close to me and I smelt alcohol on his breath. ‘Anyway, I’m leaving now, thanks for listening. Best of luck for the placements, I hope you get what you want.’ He walked off abruptly.

  This can’t be good, I thought, you don’t get drunk on Day Zero even if you aren’t shortlisted for interviews. I guess Kunal’s isolation and subsequent humiliation had increased manifold on seeing his colleagues dressed up in black suits and fancy ties, ready to be interviewed by the best companies of the world. Two months ago, he must have aspired to get into these companies, but he had probably realized the futility of his ambitions. I vowed to stop wallowing in self-pity and start being more sensitive to people around me. I was sure that I behaved like Chetan without knowing or meaning to. I thought of walking back with Kunal and grabbing lunch or something, but decided against it. I’ll talk to him after placements, I thought, and went back to the main building to see whether Sarkar had managed to reach the final round of Deutsche Bank, London.

  *

  Three days later, Kunal killed himself. As a final act of defiance against an uncaring world, he decided to be different in death, and didn’t select the textbook method of suspending himself from the ceiling fan with a rope. We found out later that he had electrocuted himself by making a scientific circuit between his body, the wire cable and the electrical switch in his room. He had probably thought that this gave him
an option until the very end. He would have time to think while carefully constructing the circuit and could decide not to pull the switch. But then, he had probably realized that his past visions of glory would soon be replaced by a life of hopeless mediocrity. He had chosen the ultimate release and pulled the switch.

  Could I have stopped it from happening if I had followed him that day? Probably not, although I felt guilty as hell for not doing anything despite seeing him cry out for help. But a lot had happened in those three days, and I was reasonably certain that a shoulder to cry on, on Day Zero, would not have helped Kunal get over the rejections of seventy companies between Day Two and the end of Day Three. The whole system was at fault, I tried to rationalize, and I could hardly have corrected the problem by myself.

  Neither was the problem uniquely Indian, I thought on my daily run. In every top institution in the world, the burden of unreasonable expectations takes lives. We keep striving for bigger and bigger goals until we forget what we are striving for. Why else would a banker with a net worth of fifty million dollars work one hundred-hour weeks and risk a breakdown to generate his next ten million-dollar bonus? In India, the phenomenon is probably exacerbated because kids, particularly sons, are the unparalleled centre of their parents’ existence. The son enters this inhuman pressure cauldron of overachievers and is surprised to see that the world doesn’t care about him as much as his mother does. His lonely mind starts creating its own private hell. If he’s lucky, he’ll survive, get a decent job, find a nice Indian wife who worships him like his mother did, and slowly forget these confused, tormented years. But if he isn’t, he’ll become one of the few odd suicides that are recorded every year at the IITs and IIMs.

  Vinod had a different prognosis. ‘Loneliness, boss, that’s what it is,’ he told me. ‘It fucks you up. An officer in my barracks in Jodhpur also killed himself. Can you believe that? A soldier who almost died in the war defending himself and others from enemy attacks every minute of the day for weeks on end, came back to peaceful, quiet little Jodhpur, and one day, boom! He shoots himself in the head, just like that. He lived in the next room and I was the first to see him. It was ghastly. Have you ever seen anyone’s brains come out of their head?’

  I shook my head, fascinated as usual by his stories.

  ‘Well, you don’t want to. Blood was splattered all over the walls. It seemed like such a waste that I remember feeling angry rather than sorry. I wanted to shake him up and tell him, “For God’s sake, couldn’t you have just walked up to my room and talked about what was going on in your head? I have nightmares, too, about all that we did during the war. Even I feel that it was all in vain.” Man, I wish I could have told Kunal to just get out there, make some real friends and talk to people. It doesn’t get simpler than that.’

  I couldn’t help smiling when he completed his story. The good Dr Vinod, with no medical training but many strong opinions, had just dismissed the entire Post Traumatic Stress Disorder industry in the US in a flash with his able diagnosis.

  Easily explained or not, Kunal’s suicide did shake us up and for a while we couldn’t stop talking about it. Vinod, Sarkar and I had been successful in our placements, but our petty triumphs seemed meaningless. Not surprisingly, Sarkar had landed a banking internship in London, one of the plum jobs going. I knew he would be exceptionally good as a trader with his decisiveness and devil-may-care attitude. Whether he wanted to do well or not was an entirely different question, and one even he probably didn’t have an answer to.

  Vinod had landed a top consulting job despite his utter disdain for big management consultancy theories (he passionately hated ‘big picture’, ‘value creation’, ‘7E theory’, 2x2 matrices and assorted consultancy jargon). They must have been impressed by his refreshing candour and obvious leadership abilities because his academic credentials were way below the norm.

  I had accepted an offer from Shivam Chemicals, among the best brand management jobs on campus, while rejecting one from McCarthy Consulting, a decision that was to make me an even bigger enigma to the batch. McCarthy Consulting was one of the most coveted jobs that season, given its hot salaries and supposedly glamorous job profile. Money be damned, I had thought, I just didn’t like the ultra-competitive, hyper-aggressive people who came to interview. It was as if they were obliged to act rude and arrogant, because the Man sitting in New York had prescribed that all hotshot consultants behave that way. If I had to live with this nonsense every day, I thought, I might as well earn a better salary on Wall Street, where being obnoxious is a badge of honour that the best bankers wear proudly. Not that I knew what to expect at Shivam Chemicals, but I was looking forward to my internship peddling soaps and shampoos in some obscure small town in the hinterlands. I had a vague sense that something important was going to happen to me there.

  I kept thinking about the unfairness of it all—I had made career choices for frivolous reasons while the person sitting next to me in class had committed suicide because he didn’t even get to a point where he could exercise a choice. Why were our destinies so different? Who decides a privileged birth for one and an endless struggle for another? Is there anything like free will or is everything predetermined? Is there really a point to existence or are we just pawns in a larger, incomprehensible game?

  7

  The Larger, Incomprehensible Game

  The excitement behind summer placements was over, and so was the shock of the first suicide in the batch. Kunal’s death, although disturbing, wasn’t completely unexpected. I think almost everyone had had that question at the back of his or her mind: ‘Who would be the first to break?’

  So, in a cruel, perverse way, his suicide was almost a relief. Some of us realized that our struggles were not unique and, though it wasn’t apparent, people around us were suffering even more than we were. Others realized how thin the line was between being extremely stressed and caving in, and that slowed them down fractionally. The knowledge of shared misery had a redemptive quality and for a while, people were nicer, less competitive and more trustful of each other. But like every event that happens to someone else, Kunal’s suicide also became stale news, and soon some of the fundamental questions that the incident raised were forgotten in the whirlwind of academic activity that surrounded us—quizzes, midterms, end terms, group projects. Grades, once again, triumphed over mundane matters like life and death.

  Sarkar seemed profoundly shaken by the incident, though. He walked into my room late one night, just before the end of the first semester. We had a ten-day break coming up before the second semester began.

  ‘Samrat, boy,’ he said, ‘have you thought of what you plan to do in the break?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, ‘going back home is not an option since it’s too small a break. I guess I just want to catch up on my sleep for the first couple of days, and then I’ll probably go hiking in Coorg or Ooty. Nothing definite yet.’

  I hadn’t made a concrete plan, but I knew that I desperately needed sleep and large breaths of cold mountain air. I also knew that both Vinod and Sarkar would invite me to their respective homes for the break, but I had no desire to go. I was exhausted and couldn’t bear the thought of staying with a large Indian family who would likely overwhelm me with their generosity.

  ‘Sounds good. But I was just thinking that maybe you might… might want to accompany me,’ Sarkar said, sounding unusually hesitant. ‘I’m planning to go for this ten-day meditation course to Dharamsala in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is kind of like a… like a spiritual retreat. No, that sounds terribly phoney. It is more like a scientific course to help you get a taste of salvation or nirvana or liberation or whatever you call it. Shit, that sounds worse!’

  He seemed genuinely uncomfortable now, and I was enjoying his rare discomfiture.

  Hmm… intriguing, both the course and Sarkar’s embarrassed admission that he was being pulled into the great Indian spiritual racket.

  ‘Scientific nirvana? Sounds like a scam. Can’t bel
ieve you fell for it, dude. How much do we pay for this scheme? Is it like a Colgate teeth whitening advertisement—enlightenment in ten days or your money back?’ I replied, attempting to add to his suffering. But Sarkar was back in his element with the question.

  ‘See, that’s the most incredible part. No fee. What’s more, even lodging and meals are completely free, which you can imagine is no mean achievement in India. There is this big Indian industrialist, Mr S.N. Goenka, who pays for the course out of his own pocket and the meagre donations he collects. He practises Buddha’s meditation techniques and is convinced that you can embark on the path to nirvana by practising those. He actively propagates the meditation as his service to humanity.’ Sarkar paused. ‘See, I know you think this is the great Indian spiritual crap. I thought the same way. But I have heard him speak once. He’s the real deal, not your levitating, walking-on-the-water “tap your spiritual potential by giving me a blowjob” kind of phoney sadhu. I’ve seen my share of spiritual bastards and I’m convinced this one won’t be getting sucked off by underage girls while preaching abstinence.’

  I remained cynical. The last thing I wanted to turn into was a pot-smoking American hippie in the Himalayas. But I was too exhausted to prolong the discussion by refusing to participate in Sarkar’s plans.

  ‘Sounds interesting. Count me in,’ I said. It couldn’t hurt much anyway. I didn’t have a plan, and the foothills of the Himalayas seemed as good a place as any to loaf around in.