Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  Sarkar must have sensed my scepticism. ‘Well, don’t be obliged to answer now, man, I know you’re bushed. Let’s talk after the group-work submissions are over so we can book places in the course, get tickets and stuff.’

  He didn’t seem to be put off by my lack of enthusiasm. Sarkar and Vinod had been surprisingly patient when my need for space and privacy asserted itself periodically. Now was one of those times. My immediate problems were more material than spiritual—the lack of sleep, the consistent mediocrity and the most recent one: group project work.

  Life would have been infinitely simpler if Sarkar, Vinod and I had been given a chance to stick together in all our group projects. But then, this place was not geared towards making life easier. In group-work intensive subjects like marketing, the professor created groups via a random selection process, saying, ‘This will be a good experience because you almost never get a chance to pick your team at work—sometimes you need to deal with laziness, free riding, blatant insubordination and headstrong personalities.’

  Seemed like my group was blessed with all those virtues, I thought during one particularly frustrating group assignment As luck would have it, Chetan and Nandini had ended up as part of the five-member group, and both threw dirty glances at me from time to time. Chetan had ended up with a job at a local bank for his internship and probably blamed me for missing the tube to London. Nandini had probably guessed that I had been high as a giraffe’s balls during our date that night. The tension, therefore, was obvious as we worked together on the case study that night. Our task was to create a comprehensive marketing plan for a small regional cereal maker to help him expand his presence in the country, and our discussions went round and round in endless circles. Two o’clock in the morning and tempers were running high.

  Finally, Lala (‘Call me Archie’), a pompous English literature graduate from St Stephen’s College in New Delhi and the fourth member of our illustrious group, opened the door to mayhem. ‘Here, everyone, I don’t think we’ve approached this in the correct manner. We need to think bigger, expand our horizons and have a more stretching vision. The cereal maker doesn’t need a bunch of over-analytical business school grads to tell him to expand to just his neighbouring state.’

  Chetan, who had painstakingly generated the complex data behind the limited-expansion model, took serious offence. He spewed venom: ‘I’m sure he needs people who can’t run a single calculation in their heads to read their poetry books and recommend impractical expansion strategies instead.’

  I applauded him silently for diminishing the entire Bachelors of English Literature course to a poetry lesson.

  But Lala was enraged, and his practised British accent quickly gave way to crude profanities.

  ‘Just what have you achieved by running regression numbers all day anyway? Being a spreadsheet wizard and filling a bunch of Excel workbooks is GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Marketing requires innovation and you can’t deliver that by jerking off all over numbers.’

  Chetan, his face red, opened his mouth to reply when Nandini cut in. Despite our disaster date, I liked Nandini. She was ambitious and focused (which aren’t necessarily bad traits unless you are a very particular kind of loser—a pampered American banker, a tortured Indian engineer or a misfit army officer, for example), yet she wasn’t manically aggressive. She had good communication skills and a reasonably balanced, mature persona—all of which made her a very rare species at the IIM indeed. Usually she seemed pretty calm, but today was her meltdown day as well.

  ‘Stop it, guys. Can we behave like adults? It’s been three hours of vague, pointless discussions and we are getting nowhere. We haven’t typed a word yet and the submission is due tomorrow, or damn, I guess it’s due today, it’s already 2 a.m. If we get started now, the earliest we can wrap up is by 4 a.m., and that is if we really start NOW. I am not prepared to talk any longer. I barely caught a wink of sleep yesterday and I need at least a couple of hours before the 8 a.m. accounting quiz.’

  I agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Personally, guys, I couldn’t care a rat’s ass what this cereal maker decides to do. It’s his hell. Let’s just take a call one way or the other, attach a couple of Excel files and be done with it.’

  Chetan, clearly still carrying a grudge against me for denying him my valuable presence in his interview preparation, turned on me. ‘Easy for you to say that. I would too, if I had Wall Street in one pocket and Shivam Chemicals in another. This case study is graded, and at least someone here needs to worry about grades.’

  Boy, as the rednecks in Kentucky would say, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a touchy person today.

  Dr Pal, the last member of our distinguished group, who’d been quiet so far, suddenly piped up: ‘All I want to say is ki, I think there is a humanitarian aspect of business that the cereal maker should consider in his expansion plans. He should open his plants in Orissa, because generating employment in the poorest state of the country is the moral responsibility of a locally bred entrepreneur.’ The doctor had raised yet another magnificently irrelevant point, and my stomach contracted with silent laughter.

  Nandini missed the humour, though. She rose from the table, infuriated.

  ‘I’m done, guys. I’ll type the case on my own and in case you guys manage to get anything done, you can replace my case with yours. You can also choose not to have my name on it. I can live without grading for this assignment,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll join you,’ I said immediately. ‘I’m at the bottom of the class, anyway. It’s not like the gold medal is going to slip away from my hands if I don’t get graded in this case.’ I couldn’t help but direct a small barb at Chetan’s obsession with the gold medal.

  Dr Pal rose as well. Lala and Chetan joined us after a moment’s hesitation and we walked silently to the computer lab, rueing the day we had decided to pursue a business school degree. Under Nandini’s military leadership, we suspended all attempts to think and diligently typed out our ten-page case analyses, dividing it among us in discrete sections so that there would be no more arguments. Chetan set the consumer context, Lala created the brand positioning, Nandini and I drafted the expansion strategy and Dr Pal prepared the media and advertising plans.

  Our final case study had Chetan’s detailed regression analyses that quantitatively rated the variables that most influence brand choices of cereal in India. The variable with the most impact on purchase turned out to be health benefits (almost a perfect correlation) and the least important, which had almost zero impact on purchase, were taste and packaging. However, the city-bred Lala’s brand positioning reflected his personality and was all about hip, cool cereal with taste and packaging as the major differentiating factors. Our media plans, prepared by Dr Pal, focused on humanitarian, community-building efforts in states that our expansion plan didn’t cover. For our core expansion strategy, Nandini and I had chosen to please everyone and recommended expanding to more than one state but not the whole country (this part of the case was not backed with any data, only vague qualitative rationale such as ‘he should be ambitious but practical’).

  When we finally got done at 5 a.m., an hour later than planned, and collated the final case study, we realized it was a disaster. Okay, there goes the marketing course as well, I thought with a familiar sinking sensation, and the same thought seemed to be going through everyone’s heads.

  ‘We need to do the case again,’ said Nandini. ‘We can’t submit it this way.’

  I did a quick mental calculation. There were three hours left before the 8 a.m. accounting quiz. If I didn’t go back and study for that. I would definitely get a D in the quiz. We were likely to get a D in the marketing case study as it stood currently and could probably manage a C if we tried to salvage it in the next couple of hours. What a conundrum: should I choose a C in accounting or marketing? I didn’t want to be the rat that deserted the sinking ship, so I chose the C in marketing.

  ‘But an hour means an hour, folks—no philosophical
discussions, let’s decide the main things to fix and attack it,’ I said.

  The ‘main things to fix’ turned out to be the whole case, of course. One hour turned into two, and then three as our aggressive, competitive selves got the better of us and we continued to nitpick and argue over the most inconsequential details.

  ‘I think you are wrong. We should call it “healthy cereal” instead of “cereal for the healthy”,’ said Lala.

  ‘Why?’ said Chetan.

  ‘It sounds better,’ said Lala.

  ‘No, cereal for the healthy sounds better. It calls the consumer healthy,’ said Chetan.

  ‘Why should they have our cereal if they are already healthy? Healthy cereal is better,’ said Lala.

  ‘But that implies they were unhealthy before they had our cereal. Let’s stick with cereal for the healthy,’ said Chetan.

  ‘No, I think…’ said Lala.

  Very soon, I thought, unsuspecting shareholders would be paying them millions of dollars to have exactly such discussions.

  When we rushed to take the prints twenty minutes before 8 a.m., the case analyses looked worse for our efforts over the past few hours. At least earlier we had had some innovative, though disconnected, ideas. Now we had diluted it to a blasé, still disjointed case study without a single original thought. But there was no other option than to submit it as it was.

  Back in my room, I flipped through the pages of the accounting textbook half-heartedly. I gave up reading after a couple of minutes. There was no way I could manage to process anything in the ten minutes I had before the 8 a.m. quiz. On a whim, I decided to smoke a joint instead. What the heck, I thought, it will help me unwind, maybe even trigger off some hidden insight from class which might actually help in the quiz. I rolled a joint, noting proudly that my slow metamorphosis into becoming a manager had started. If I could convince myself that smoking up could actually help with a quiz, I could distort just about anything to prove my point. I felt pleased with myself. I was acquiring some real managerial traits; business school wasn’t turning out to be a complete waste of time.

  I glanced at the watch. 7:55 a.m. Five minutes left for the quiz. I should probably be making my way to the examination hall. But the joint seemed too good to let go. Heck, I thought, I could afford to be a couple of minutes late for the one-hour quiz, it wasn’t like I had sixty minutes of sensible content to write. Just a couple of quick drags, and I would leave.

  I watched the hands of the clock slowly hit 8 a.m. The quiz would have started, I thought vaguely, but I still had a ten-minute grace period before they shut the doors of the examination hall. I continued to observe the clock. I wondered briefly why the small hand of the clock denoted hours and the long hand minutes. Hours were longer than minutes, so shouldn’t it be the other way around? I guess it was for the aesthetics; it probably looked more elegant this way. But fuck, it was a clock. At least a clock should be logical. Its primary duty was to restore some order to this disordered world. I was a bit annoyed by the clock so I got up to examine it. 8:20 a.m. It occurred to me that I had just given the accounting quiz a complete pass. I considered the irony of the situation. A former Yale valedictorian couldn’t even be bothered to go for an examination in business school. Why? Because he was watching a fucking clock so intently that he didn’t notice the time. That set me off, and I flopped on the bed laughing, out of control.

  Somehow, I almost felt liberated. In a different life, I would have been in the examination hall, agonizing over the quiz, clocking time, unwilling to accept that I didn’t know a damn thing being tested today. Now, I felt free enough to give up that pretence. I could spend the next forty minutes or so on more meaningful pursuits. Like smoking some more weed. I rolled another joint while contemplating how to spend my time most effectively.

  What is it that would really please me, I wondered. There was no shortage of things to do, of course—assignments galore to finish, preparation for tomorrow’s microeconomics quiz, getting organized for the end-terms, barely two weeks away. But I was stoned enough to admit to myself that I didn’t really have to work all that hard to get a few more Cs and Ds. I was drowning anyway; a quiz here or there wasn’t the straw that could save me. I thought of catching up on some sleep—I had slept less than three hours in the last forty-eight, but again, that seemed too petty a use of the forty delicious minutes of rare, complete solitude. I could go for a run—I had barely seen sunlight in the past twenty-four hours—but I wasn’t quite ready to deal with the voices in my head.

  Ultimately, I ended up calling Peter in Manhattan, trying my hardest to keep the desperation out of my voice. I envied his peace of mind. In the midst of superbusy million-dollar-earning-$5-Chinese-takeout-dinner-eating asshole bankers, here was a guy who could nonchalantly walk away from his office every evening at five, hit the bong, watch a Netflix flick and sleep a contented ten-hour sleep.

  ‘Are you serious about your future?’ one of the thousand vice-presidents in the bank had asked him once when he had brought a half-finished pitch book to some client meeting.

  ‘Not really,’ he had answered frankly.

  That he would be fired was inevitable (and he was blissfully unconcerned about the same); the only question was when. Sometimes I thought he was just too lazy to fill out the paperwork required to resign.

  It was late evening US time when I called and, as usual, he had time to spare. He didn’t hound me about my many unanswered e-mails, or try to unearth the real cause for the momentary lapse of reason that led me to India.

  ‘Finally, my man! Have you found out anything about yourself yet?’ he said as soon as he picked up the phone.

  The only thing I have found out about myself so far, I wanted to say, is that I like my joints best without the filter. No, wait. I’ve also found out that I’m a natural, a real pro, at chasing a joint. Quite the self-discovery, wouldn’t you say?

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘It hasn’t been like I’d thought it would be. I guess Dad was right. What I’m seeking isn’t in India.’ I hesitated. ‘It isn’t anywhere, I guess. Probably inside me, corny though it sounds. Anyway, I’m not coming back anytime soon. I’m gonna give it a chance.’

  ‘Come off it, dude,’ he said. ‘None of your bleakness please, especially now that you have become a role model for all the escapists of the world. With a single stroke, you’ve made finding oneself as hot as Paris Hilton’s chihuahua. People have begun quitting left, right and centre taking inspiration from you. I just quit last month, am planning to backpack across Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for a year.’

  I smiled. So he had done it finally. We had been hitting the bong in a friend’s room at Yale once when Peter had suddenly walked to the world map on the wall. He had pointed vaguely at Central Asia and said, ‘This is where I’m gonna find it,’ and kept repeating that for the rest of the night. He had omitted to explain what ‘it’ meant. It had been a recurrent theme since then. Whenever banking had become too mind-numbingly dull (which was always), Peter said that Mongolia was beckoning him and he would quit soon. He had done so now. I wished he would find in Mongolia what I hadn’t found so far in India.

  ‘Rocking,’ I said. ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘As soon as the Netflix queue runs out.’ He laughed. ‘You won’t believe what happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As soon as the markets imploded, they began offering golden handshakes. Guess who was first in line to ask for a package? I was about to quit for free, and then I was actually being offered money to quit!’

  Talking to him was therapeutic. There was no inherent conflict in his life; no struggle between his good and his evil side, or his rational and his confused side, or his certainties and his insecurities. He was simple, contented, untormented by demons. Give him a bong, a Netflix movie, a ticket to Mongolia, and he didn’t need a thing more. His contentedness was definitely infectious. By the time I came out of the phone booth, I didn’t really care much about missing the accounting
quiz any more.

  However, my newfound bliss lasted only for a day, until we got our grades. I’d earned the double distinction of getting a D in both the accounting and marketing assignments. I also achieved yet another first in my academic career—being at the very bottom, bar none, in an examination.

  ‘Even lower than Keshto, that stoned rocker dude who spends all his time strumming his guitar, singing Lennon’s Imagine and chasing underage girls on the internet. He gets a D in everything, but even he managed a C. If I’d just come for the quiz, I would have probably managed a C too. Not that I would be awarded a gold medal for getting a C. But, still!’ I complained to Vinod and Sarkar.

  Vinod laughed. ‘You take this stuff way too seriously. You’re a prime candidate for the psychiatrist they’ve got here. Why don’t you pay her a visit?’

  I had visions of a sexy woman in an inviting office, beckoning me to her couch, and was immediately aroused. I felt ashamed—was I sex-starved or what? People needed counselling to stop themselves from committing suicide and all I could think about was getting a quickie.

  ‘Have they got a shrink on campus?’ Sarkar asked.

  Sometimes I could swear that the bastard didn’t live on the same planet as the rest of us. After Kunal’s death, there had been notices all over campus about the appointment of the new guidance counsellor to help students deal with stress.

  ‘We don’t need a psychiatrist,’ Sarkar continued, ‘we all know what the problems are, but they’re so endemic that nobody can fix them.’

  ‘And what are the problems, Doctor Sarkar?’ Vinod asked mockingly.

  Sarkar launched into his usual treatise about the sorry state of the system. ‘Well, the fundamental issue is that most of us are misfits here. None of us actively made a choice to study in business school. Take my roommate there, for example. He wanted to study literature or journalism after school, become a writer one day. Do you know what his father said? “Son, all people in India want to read about is whether Dharmendra lives with Hema Malini or his first wife, and whether Amitabh had an affair with Rekha. Do you really want to study Milton and Shakespeare for three years to write about that?” My friend was so impressed with his father’s knowledge of Bollywood, he listened to him and ended up at IIT instead. And now he writes software code for a company that makes lubricating oil, after dreaming all his life of writing fiction. How do we expect him to be happy here? And what can a psychiatrist do about it?’