Buzz Kills

Being an ardent fan of Scott Adams, I was disowned by some of my close friends when I chose to get into the dirty business of management – these fellows even labeled me as a hypocrite. Well, I believe that I have paid my dues to them – and to myself too – by being utterly unhappy and generally moping around in life since I entered the apparently hallowed portals of a highly-regarded institute.

The cynicism and depression notwithstanding, I cannot deny the fact that I actually did get to learn a lot (sometimes, at the cost of healthy doses of common sense) during the two years that I drifted naked through the masquerade. And over the past few years, as I have grown progressively immature and balder, one thing I have come to notice is that the people who have really, honestly and passionately wanted to go to a good B-school, but have never been able to fulfill this desire (mainly due to huge possibility of them being retarded), invariably end up using all the bleddy amazing managerial buzz-words which are such a buzz-kill that one is forced to one’s knees, begging such creatures to just buzz-the-eff-off, or to use a buzz-saw to good effect!

I have been in the wonderful company of such blessed items over the past few months. It has been a single-most excruciatingly irritating experience at times – more so during meetings, where I get to hear some pearls of wisdom that drop with the sweet sound of the echo that resonates in my head every time I imagine blowing my own head off with a sawed-off shotgun. It gets even more painful when they insist on speaking in the same holier-than-thou tone, disbursing their sense of shallow, pitiful idea of knowledge to one and all.

It so happened that one such critter happened to cross me on a day when it would have been better off hiding in the muck. It asked me for something while I was in the thick of something else (I don’t care if this sounds vague – this is my bloody rant and I’ll be as vague as I bloody want to be), and when I asked what the former something was about, it said that it wanted to “derive tangents”. This got me interested, as I honestly wanted to know if deriving tangents would lead to anything other than a straight line that “just touches” this aforementioned something. But I was told that I was out of my place in seeking this clarification. Hmmm…so, I utilized my hypothetical managerial knowledge to the full extent (meaning that I used this) to draft the following reply:

Dear Xxxxxx,

I have briefly aggregated a high-level view of the initiatives that I have been driving, and some of the initiatives that I wanted to get involved in. Some of the points have to be recontextualized and reengineered to ensure that they can be transformed into impactful schemas that can add strategic value for Xxxxx as an organization. I hope this complies with what you were looking for.

I also hope that, with your vision and understanding of the organization, you can help disintermediate the dynamics of the infrastructure and enable me to target paradigms of the ever-changing industry as a more effective marketing manager, and to help me enhance myself to utilize the entire bandwidth of my skills to be more impactful in the challenging environment that Xxxxx presents.

Ah! It felt good to have written that. It took effort to draft that, and I was pleased. But only till the realization that it actually made sense struck me! Damn! I’m trying to be one of them - using incomprehensible language to create a false sense of superiority! Aaaaaarggggghhhhh!

Reflections in a Puddle of Vodka

When I was going through all the junk I brought back from the campus where I got a diploma in the abstract globe that is called management, I came across a sheet of paper on which I had scribbled some gibberish that I realized was written in a drunken fit on one of the many days I was lost to the spirits. I have reproduced the same in near-verbatim (“near” because I have chosen to leave out the more colourful adjectives, and have replaced some of the nouns with “relevant people”). One of the happiest moments I had on campus was when one of the professors noted that I wasn’t the “IIM type”…I forget the context. I also realized that the exclusion I felt from the general junta is manifest in the third person narrative I had written in.
 

Smiles plastered on their faces. Firm handshakes. Flat hi-fi’s. Hugs for the ladies. Furtive glances, with tinges of lust, at the more beautiful ones. Constellations of friends revolving in the space of life. But are they friends, or just friendly people? These are the people who speak of “RG” as if it is a joke, but practice it religiously. These are the people who take an oath of ethics and don’t flinch when they see their friends and “leaders” happily transgress them. Everybody is a fucking hypocrite. They know what visage to wear with whom and they always carry their wardrobe of masks wherever they go. And everybody is supposed to trust these poltus and look up to them as leaders and pay them tons of money to take care of everything.
 

The biggest lesson anyone learns here is how to recognize the relevant toes in the crowded bus that is this life, and how not to step on them, while trampling on the not-so-relevant ones. What a shame it is that the same people who are supposed to uphold everything ethical and good are the bane of it. One can’t help but wonder if this is a reflection of the real society. Is the human sentiment hurtling towards a black hole of practiced ignorance? Is what is transpiring in this institution, which is supposed to be the “factory of future leaders”, an indication of what is to come?
 

Everybody changes here. It is not the system or the place. It is the people. Even the not-so-bad characters automatically transform into spineless, ass-licking automatons posing as someone who can tell an expert that they know the stuff better than them. And these experts keep buying the lies of the hypocrites. It is always about your CGPA, which is about how well lubricated you keep the relevant peoples’ behinds, while trampling on the others you smile at and dance with.
 

Can one make a leader? Can character be taught? Can’t the corp-kanths see that they are only adding fire to this inferno by paying obscene salaries that the sly-kanths don’t deserve, thus hurtling the whole system into a vicious cycle? Is this blindness contagious? We go from one framework to another, one stereotype to another. Why can’t one hear anyone shouting out about this pakeshed ajjjjuuuufffffff-ness?
 

And in all this confusion, those who come here continue to become what they shouldn’t be. They are told that nothing is black and white, and they are told to be gray. It is understood that they should lead many lives. It is understood that none of these lives would be like anything in the Panchatantras. Yet, children who loved the Panchatantra stories become idiots who detest them because they are so removed from the reality. They hate themselves for loving to be idealists who wanted to transform the world into a better place for everyone they loved. Instead, they become realists who create the image that they can transform the world for the idealist who still dream, or for the corp fat-cats who want more jingle in the pockets. So, these children begin to live many lives that end in cul-de-sacs.
 

What if we live only once and our ancestors were more prophets than mystics? So, when they were talking of the janumas, were they predicting that all of us will go through many roles and live as many people in one lifetime? Doesn’t that make death nirvana? I am afraid that I will end up on the spaceship that left in the Hitchhikers. I don’t fit in here. I’m not panicking. I can live with that. The problem is that others can’t…they are trying to turn me into their reflections, when they themselves are reflections. I yearn for my nirvana.

PS: Second year was much better :)

PPS: I have included some pics of the campus because other than a select few people, that was the best thing about the place, and I had to show something positive, right?