Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  ‘Even I have wanted to make love to an Indian ever since I came here, but have been scared off by everyone… except now,’ she replied, smiling.

  I felt another momentary pang at the fact that I wasn’t really Indian but not enough to pull away from the moment.

  We slowly undressed each other and I paused to admire her narrow waist, wide hips and tight, well-toned calves. She pulled me close to her and we made intense, silent, unhurried love. Perhaps it was the several months of celibacy or perhaps it was me distorting Goenka’s ‘Live in the moment’ philosophy, but I had arguably the best sex of my life in that room with its dirty pink bedsheets and bare hardwood floor. Satiated and spent, we lay naked and smoked a cigarette as we joked about breaking every holy tenet that we had learnt in our ten days of Vipaasana meditation. Since we met, we had shared alcohol, hash, cigarettes and now sex, with the knowledge that there never would be a next time. I hoped she wouldn’t conduct the charade of exchanging e-mail addresses and promising to keep in touch—our brief interlude was perfect just the way it was. She didn’t.

  ‘Should we start making a move back?’ she said. ‘I hope the party in my house is still under control.’ I hadn’t realized it was dawn already.

  We walked back, enjoying the splendid mountain sunrise, and came home to Sarkar lecturing the hippies on the importance of leaving the cultural depravation of the West for (the cultural depravation of) the East. Trance music, heavy fumes and couples cosied up in corners formed the background to this scene, which seemed zillions of miles away from the life to which we were about to return. I wanted to follow Roxanne to Tibet and Nepal and make love to her every night in the Himalayas. Sarkar wanted to stay on in Dharamsala and continue with the Vipaasana meditation course for a lifetime. Neither of us had the balls to make those choices, so we made our way back to Bangalore, profoundly unhappy at having to return.

  The next semester had better be worth all the spiritual and sexual sacrifices we were making for it, I thought during the miserable ticketless journey from Pathankot to Bangalore. And physical too, I reminded myself, as I sat on the floor outside the dirty bathroom in the inhumanly crowded general compartment of the train. Sarkar, the bastard, had lost his touch and couldn’t persuade the ticket collector to give us a seat. It was because I had spent all our remaining money on the hash and the hotel room, he reminded me.

  The next semester had better be worth it, I thought again.

  9

  The Next Semester Had Better Be Worth It

  The next two semesters were marginally better than the first. This had less to do with the pace of the coursework—which remained consistently brutal—and more to do with us slowly getting comfortable in our own skins. Like Bud Fox in Wall Street (‘As much as I wanted to be Gordon Gekko, I will always be Bud Fox’) I slowly started accepting my strengths, of which there weren’t many, and ‘improvement areas’ —managers never use terms like weakness and failures, of course, no matter how screwed you are—which proved abundant.

  Thanks to our exertions in Dharamsala, we missed the announcement of the grade point averages from the first term. But Sarkar’s 3.8 GPA, just marginally behind the top ranker, had already made news. I shook my head in awe when I recalled the nights he had spent stoned while the rest of us had continued to slog in quiet desperation. Life just isn’t meant to be fair, I thought for the millionth time since I’d met him. I had scored a 2.9, ranking ninetieth in the class of 200, slightly better than halfway, which pleasantly surprised me. (How the mighty have fallen! From Yale valedictorian to finding it ‘pleasantly surprising’ to be in the top 50 per cent of the class, I thought.)

  Vinod had managed a 3.20, ranked sixtieth—a very formidable position (by our standards). Chetan was third, after Sarkar. He was no doubt displeased by his performance, especially because his rock-playing pothead of a neighbour had pipped him to the post with no apparent effort whatsoever.

  Don’t worry, I wanted to tell him, it is so much easier to slip into mediocrity. There is no longer the pressure to monitor every test score and worry about someone usurping your lonely position at the top. Ask me, the resident expert on slipping down that slope. In fact, I actually felt liberated now from the monotony of chasing grades, keeping score and pining for medals. I looked forward to the pure joy of learning once again, whatever that meant.

  Vinod seemed to have applied this principle with some success as well. According to him, he ‘aced’ the end-term examinations (again, our definition) after middling through most of the term because, ‘Big game, boss. I think I’ve hit upon a formula for success. I try to think of myself as the protagonist of every case study. In statistics, for instance, I thought of myself as Chubby Charlie, the hero of Prof. Dasgupta’s case studies, and somehow this helped me construct that decision-tree to divide pizza slices. It helped in managerial accounting the most actually. I really started to think of Sears Co. as my own company and treated every entry in the balance sheet as if it would impact my personal profit and loss statement. It just provides a different dimension to the course and makes it come alive instead of being just numbers on a page. Believe me, boss, you should try it too. We don’t have much to lose anyway.’

  He had a point. Given a chance, B-school curriculum can be remarkably interesting since it is so immediately relatable to practical, everyday life. Unlike, say, disciplines like physics or philosophy where you deconstruct nature’s laws in retrospect, B-school studies are based on the man-made world and the impact of individual actions and choices. If I could place myself in the position of the individual making the choice, I could understand the analyses that went into the decision much better, I thought. With this radical insight, I approached classes with a new sense of purpose in the second term.

  The first thing that my new approach taught me was to completely discredit all conclusions arrived at from market-research surveys. This burnt me badly. Every time I read an article like ‘A study by the American Heart Research Institute proves that people who exercise live 50 per cent longer’, I didn’t take it at face value. As a result, I became fat, lazy and miserable, and blamed it on the IIM. After all, it was highly likely that stoned researchers, too lazy to exert themselves to collect real data, filled those data sheets themselves with a joint in one hand and a pen in the other. At least, that’s what Sarkar and I did.

  Our intentions were always pure, though. In selecting our project for the research in marketing methods, for example, we agonized long and hard over the topic to pick.

  Sarkar said, ‘Let’s research cigarettes and what triggers smoking in college—peer pressure, chicks, stress relief, or something else. It will be fun to have a quantitative model to predict the likelihood of a college kid starting to smoke, based on his environment.’

  Vinod had a different perspective. ‘Bugger off, I’m not doing any smoking research. That will give you another reason to smoke your gaanja in the name of research. I want to do something that affects me more directly, and doesn’t involve alcohol or drugs.’

  We let a few more months pass in indecision until one day Vinod informed us that the project was due the next day. We had to come up with something, and Sarkar naturally assumed leadership.

  ‘Samrat boy, remember what Goenka said in Dharamsala about how the self-centred pursuit of material ambition leads to restlessness and unhappiness? Well, IIM is all about that—better grades, foreign jobs, higher salaries, positions of power, etc. So why don’t we measure whether the quest for these causes unhappiness? It could be profound. Everyone comes here chasing happiness but ends up getting further and further away from it.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘We could create a survey asking questions about the degree of happiness and contentment in people’s lives. Measure the difference between B-school students and the population outside. And validate the hypothesis that business school screws you over.’

  Vinod concurred. ‘So you guys did learn something there. All I’ve heard are stories about hash and hi
ppies.’

  ‘So we have a plan,’ Sarkar said. He proceeded to give out instructions. ‘Vinod, why don’t you type the report, assuming that our hypothesis is true? Let Samrat boy and me prepare the questionnaire and collect the data from students here and regular people in Bangalore. If the data doesn’t validate the hypothesis, we will quickly change the conclusions.’ Vinod left for the computer lab while we went to get the bike keys from Sarkar’s room.

  Once there, he rolled a joint at top speed and held it up asking, ‘One for the road?’ One became two, and then some more. He brought out a bottle of rum and some chilled Coke and we had a drink each of that as well.

  ‘It is kind of humid and sticky outside today,’ Sarkar said. I laughed. I knew where this was going and didn’t mind.

  ‘Maybe we can just estimate the data ourselves. It would be quite accurate. After all, we were normal folks before we became abnormal B-school students,’ Sarkar said.

  ‘Not entirely inaccurate,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s not tell Vinod though. He gets hyper about this kind of stuff.’ So, passing around another joint, we completed two questionnaires and calculated the mean scores.

  ‘We are not being dishonest,’ Sarkar reassured me, although I didn’t particularly need reassurance. ‘We won’t claim the base size was a hundred or anything. Maybe we can specify in font size one somewhere in the bibliography, which no one is going to read anyway, that the study was conducted on a base size of two.’ A lazy couple of hours passed. We went to join Vinod in the lab where we ran the analyses on the means on the statistical software together.

  ‘It’s a near-perfect correlation; business school makes you unhappy!’ Vinod exclaimed as the results came out. ‘Wow, I think we have discovered something much bigger than ourselves here. We should ask the professor if these outcomes should be presented to the IIM board of directors. It could shape the way they think of the curriculum. How can they promote unhappiness?’

  Sarkar and I exchanged worried glances. Stoned, we had probably steered too much towards our biases while filling in the questionnaire. Sarkar tried to dissuade Vinod gently. ‘I think we need to validate it with more rigour in the sample collection and broaden the scope a bit.’

  Broaden the scope from the already significant base size of two, that is, I thought.

  Vinod’s enthusiasm didn’t dampen. ‘No problem, we could position this as preliminary findings. No one is claiming this is the definitive answer. But it still merits sharing.’

  It finally took a stroke of genius from me to prevent Vinod from broadcasting the results. ‘You know, I think the basic methodology we used is flawed. We cannot prove conclusively that the IIM makes you unhappy for ever. The effect could be temporary. We should have designed a temporal, longitudinal study that covers people who have graduated from business school as well, if we really want to prove the hypothesis.’ Sarkar looked at me in silent appreciation. Vinod was crushed but he knew I was right. We couldn’t turn that around in a day, so we submitted the project as it was, while Vinod diligently called out this lapse in the executive summary. I was finally a real manager, I realized with pride. I could lie readily and effectively use jargon to stem the enthusiasm of everyone who worked with me.

  I had another series of insights in a course called study of Indian society, generally dismissed by my classmates as a ‘soft subject where you have to fart in the exams to do well’. After all, the coursework required no knowledge of complex mathematical insights or regression formulae—how dare someone waste time talking about worthless concepts like history, society and culture in business school?

  For me though, the Indian society course represented a turning point in my understanding of India and provided one of the most definitive answers to the questions that had brought me here. The lectures covered India’s social and cultural history and its impact in shaping the modern Indian psyche. Through the course, I understood, for example, that collectivism or relying on a network of familial and social connections is a uniquely Indian value, vastly different from the Western ethos of individualism and self-reliance. Being a hybrid of these Indian and Western values, I realized, was part of the reason for my social confusion. While my American colleagues were content to just hang out making small talk in a restaurant or bar on weekends, I had always sought deeper bonds and more meaningful conversation, a result perhaps of the weekend get-togethers with the circle of Indian friends that my parents had in Kentucky. In Manhattan, where these networks were in short supply, I had been besieged by loneliness. Contrarily, in India I screamed for personal space sometimes, just wanting to be left alone, read a book and think. And somehow, I could never convey this politely to Sarkar and Vinod, defaulting several times into becoming an unwilling, morose companion in their well-intentioned plans.

  Other aspects of Indian society that seemed buried in the past, like the caste system, also became clearer to me. A distorted form of that system is still very much a part of Indian attitudes, and it explained, for example, why Mom and Dad could never embrace the concept of ‘dignity of labour’. They frowned upon every attempt I made to take up a summer job flipping burgers or as a newspaper delivery boy. (‘Beta, these jobs are not for us.’) Then, I had blamed them for not assimilating or allowing me to assimilate, but now I understood Mom and Dad better. They’d had a lifetime of social conditioning that a few years in the US couldn’t change. Every day, I learnt something new in the course that helped me define myself better. It also made me realize that I was touching the tip of the iceberg. There was a deeper truth that I was tantalizingly close to understanding—a truth about my relationships and my identity—but I just wasn’t spending enough time thinking about it. I needed to take a step back and reflect on the many different images of India that stared at me every day.

  There was a lot I needed to change in the next semester, I thought, in the two-day break between the second and third semester, as Dad’s words came back to haunt me: ‘Business school won’t care about plugging the holes in your soul, whatever they are. You will have to slowly, deliberately fill them yourself—don’t expect India to do that for you automatically.’

  I would do just that, I thought. I would follow the Vipaasana regime and meditate every day. I would travel more, and dive into cultural and spiritual India. I would spend time nurturing the budding relationships I had with Sarkar and Vinod. I knew fully well that these were the only memories I would retain—living, breathing images—once my time in India was over. All else would be forgotten—little more than snapshots in a family album meant to fade with the passage of time. I made plans, and then I made even more plans.

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and mine finally translated into little more than more intense revelry. Trying to spend more time getting to know Sarkar invariably meant getting sucked into the wild, frenzied partying at the institute as overwrought, misfit students took a break from the relentless academic pressure to enjoy a night of dancing, drinking and experimenting with more potent stuff. One such night, we decided to take a break from the party circuit and have dinner in Bangalore city instead. One of Sarkar’s engineer friends had left town and loaned him his secondhand Hyundai to drive. Sarkar was immensely proud of it (‘I’m going to score in the backseat, you guys, wait and see!’) and was perpetually offering to drive us to the city. We gave in finally, though Vinod seemed unusually perplexed that night.

  ‘You all right, man?’ Sarkar asked him. ‘You haven’t said a word all evening, and you actually left some chicken for us today. Usually we only get to pick the bones after you are done.’

  Vinod wasn’t amused. ‘I just heard from Gateway Consulting that I will be posted in Singapore for my summer internship. This completely changes things. You know my views about leaving India. I really want to join the company, but am planning to let it go now and find something else.’

  ‘I think you should let it go anyway,’ said Sarkar. ‘Why waste a precious summer doing a useless consultancy internship?’
>
  We ignored him, as usual.

  ‘That’s being pretty close-minded, dude,’ I said to Vinod. ‘You can help with India’s development, pimping in a whorehouse in Singapore, if you want. In fact, you can probably contribute more from there because you will be earning in dollars. What do you hope to achieve by physically being here in India?’

  Sarkar came back into the conversation with a vengeance. ‘Man, if I had a chance, I would get out of India in a flash. I hate this place; the same shit everywhere. I don’t want to work here, with colleagues whose entire lives revolve around their next promotion, and listen to them whine about office politics and how the boss is taking credit for their work. I don’t want to commute to work every day in hours-long traffic jams or have my balls crushed in the Virar fast local train. I don’t want to end up socializing with office perverts who have Playboy in one hand and their dicks in another. It’s just a bunch of crap, man.’

  I was surprised at this unexpected outburst. Just what was wrong with him? When did he develop such strong views about living in India? Or was he just trying to be contrary as usual?

  Vinod seemed to have heard Sarkar’s diatribe before. He just ignored it and answered my question instead. ‘Look, I’m no patriot. If I was a patriot, I would have stuck to the army. I’m just another… small-towner, as Sarkar calls half of the class anyway. My mother is here, my relatives are here, that matters more than anything else. I may make more money in Singapore, even contribute more. But what about the intangibles? What about the thousand uniquely Indian sights and sounds you hear every day—the milkman, the chai-wala, train platforms, traffic jams? Who will compensate for that? It’s just the principle, yaar. I never, ever want to leave.’