This came in the email day before yesterday. Harish, as you can see, has mega-tons more experience than I do. And also runs a big company. So you should probably listen to him.

***

Further advice to the MBA Class of 2011

Dear Mr. Vadukut, and MBA students navigating placement season -

Your “Cubiclenama” of last week, containing advice for the graduating MBA class passing through the madness of placement season, made for inspiring reading. There is a strong case for making it compulsory reading at all business schools. I must clarify that I am from a very ancient MBA Class of 1987, but some of your sage advice is relevant to all MBA students and alumni, however young or bald they may be. I have indeed begun balding, but am yet to finally conclude whether this is on account of a quarter century spent in corporate cubicles, or a sign of true wisdom that comes from reading various pieces of excellent advice such as yours.

I agree with all the advice you have proferred to the new MBA batch, except your recommendation that they should forget Pink Floyd. This is simply because it is never possible to forget Pink Floyd, despite the fact that we first heard many of their songs in the midst of alcohol fuelled stupor or even worse. Hence, you are asking for the impossible. In any case I must point out that it is quite appropriate to sing their signature number “We don’t need no education” when we finally leave the portals of business school, which is possibly the last educational portal most of us will ever pass through. Many of us will say a very loud Hallelujah to that.

Now, there is further sound advice I would like to share with the MBA class of 2011 as they step into placement season, which builds on what you have told them. To begin with, you must not merely answer questions from the august panel of interviewers. Many of us who are part of interview panels these days also like to be questioned, since we get questioned all the time in our offices anyway. A day without questions is like a dancefloor without music, or Elizabeth Taylor without a husband. So ask your interviewers a few simple questions, such as :

“Are you really happy at your job, Sir ? And what makes you so ecstatic at work, if I may ask ?”

“Do you have really beautiful women in your Organisation ? I mean, even rough approximations of Katrina or Angelina ? Do you encourage dates, Sir, either blind or visually vivid ones, with colleagues ? And a last question, Sir, given the high costs of dining out, do you fund these dates ?”

“What is the best and worst thing that has happened to habitual latecomers in your fine Organisation ?”

You can gradually progress to more complex and interesting questions, such as –

“Sir, can you tell me how you segment consumers in your industry ?” (rest assured, questions on consumer segmentation can never be answered correctly)

“Sir, how can smokers light up in your Company, without breaking the law ?” (from my years of experience, atleast one member of the interview panel will be a smoker, and hence likely to be an implicit breaker of the law. You will therefore never get a honest reply.)

“Sir, do you permit the wearing of bermudas in your office ?”

Now, this last question may appear unusual, but it is a very important investigation to make. Reliable dipstick research has shown that offices which permit Bermudas are generally happy-go-lucky places which you will enjoy forever. If they permit quick tots of Jamaican rum, a delightful liquid close enough in origin to Bermuda, they will be even better. But if an Organisation says No to a Bermuda or a Jamaica, be doubly cautious about accepting an offer from them, because you may end up in a stuffy office which has never ever heard of Dilbert or Vadukut. Sadly, such places exist.

You must also enquire from the interview panel whether the Company parties often, and if so where do they go to let their hair (or what is left of it, in some of our cases) down. If the initial response to this question is positive, go ahead and offer to organize a party that same evening in your dorm. Here is a valuable insight. Most interviewers crave to get back to their campus lives, and there is nothing like a rocking party to soften them up completely. You can play Pink Floyd, mix drinks liberally, and provide colourful bermudas to the interviewers as well. The Chairman of your Placement Committee should be kept away from these happy events, and use good masks all around since these days photographs and leaks appear liberally on the internet, even if Julian Assange is in some sort of custody.

Masks are good advice, actually. Use masks during the interview. Mask everything interesting or illegal you have done on campus. Mask your mathematics scores, if you can, or attribute the dismal performances to the flu you repeatedly suffered during exams. Falling ill is the most natural thing that can happen in business schools, and is sound preparation for your later life in an Organisation.

But let me cut to the only serious point I really want to make, which is the direct opposite of masks. Unmask your passion at the interview, and say what you really want from your career. Tell the interviewers what excites you, what you want to really do in your life. Speak spontaneously. Stand up and speak, if you wish. Loosen your tie, and roll up your sleeves, even if this is considered heresy. Nothing will show you in better light than speaking about what really moves you, and how. Show them that there is fire in your belly, and that it burns brightly. All good interview panels look for the spark within you, but you have to unmask it first.

Here’s hoping you land a job of your dreams !

Harish Bhat

(Harish Bhat is Chief Operating Officer – Watches, Titan Industries Limited. These are strictly personal views, and are quite likely to be disowned by both his Organisation and Alma Mater.)

Unfortunately the version you read in the paper was the bastard child of two versions of the piece: the first one I had written before the missus had a chance to quality control, and the final one after. But something got lost in email transmission. So not everything is in the right place. For instance there shouldn’t be two references to shaving. And there are some lines missing, which jar.

This is what the final version should have read like.

P.S. Now I know you’re thinking that this is a complete cop-out and I am merely doing this to update the blog without actually putting in any effort into writing an original post. You are thinking very correctly.

P.P.S. I might start an email newsletter.

P.P.P.S. I want to drop everything and write a crime novel.

***

Ladies and gentleman of the MBA class of 2011,

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, a good USB memory stick would be it. The long term benefits of a USB stick has been proved by the number of times people lose laptops, or are suddenly asked to submit resumes on a plane or at a conference. The rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering work experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy your last few days in business school. Chances are that you’ve already cynically dismissed the whole bloody place. But trust me, in 5 years you’ll attend an alumni reunion and realize that business school was perhaps the last place you were both truly intellectually challenged and emotionally excited. Both those things will happen again. But rarely together.

You are not as smart, or stupid, as you think.

Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to make investments based on research reports that will, one day, be written by that same clueless idiot sitting next to you in the canteen right now. The real troubles in your life will never be solved by a presentation or spreadsheet, and will always involve other people. And people are unpredictable sons of bitches.

Spend a little time everyday doing nothing.

Listen.

Don’t expect organizations to be as committed to you as you are to them. Organizations don’t work that way. If you do find one that is as committed, never leave.

Jog. (Or walk briskly, or cycle, or do yoga.)

Don’t judge yourself by how much money you make. Someone you know is always making more than you. (And no good comes from knowing who this is.)

Record all the feedback you ever get in your career. Especially the inaccurate, pointless, biased and vague bits that drove you nuts. This will help you when you eventually give feedback to somebody yourself.

Keep a copy of all your old resumes. When you are struck by bouts of existential crisis, flip through them in chronological order. Do the same with resignation letters.

Decide.

Not a lot of people are ‘meant’ to do something or the other. They just say that to sell bad books. Salman Rushdie might make an excellent, and content, supply chain management consultant. Who knows? You will find various amounts of meaning and satisfaction in various things. Choose your compromises wisely.

You’ll like the job a little better if you like the dress code.

Take chances when you’re young, single and don’t have loans to repay. You’ll take larger chances. Large chances are more fun than small ones.

Be nice to people for the heck of it.

Maybe you’ll retire when you’re 45, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll get an Awesome Alumnus Award, maybe you won’t, maybe you will marry your school sweetheart, maybe you won’t. Whatever happens, do not forget those probability lessons they taught you in school. Things tend to even out.

Dance. But keep it classy.

Avoid reading business books. However feel free to write them.

Travel light.

You will most certainly face difficult choices. In most cases it helps to think of what choice maximizes gain, instead of agonizing over what minimizes loss.

Invest in a good suit, pair of shoes and get a shave. Thanks to society’s shallowness, your return on investment will be considerable.

Calm down.

Let people give you advice. Develop the art of looking interested even if you are not. Pay attention to advice from people who have a stake in your happiness, and not a stake in your success.

Please stop listening to Pink Floyd.

But forget everything else. Quickly go buy that USB stick.

Best of luck.

***

If you have questions, thoughts, musings and such like leave a comment. Discussing things might further help a lot more people.

But there is more value-add in this blog post. So don’t go.

When I first started writing the column, in December 2008, the idea was to poke a little fun at the workplace. Or, to paraphrase the column’s boilerplate, to look at the pleasures and perils of the workplace.

Since April the column has gone from being fortnightly to weekly, but my mandate hasn’t changed. I still need to file, every Thursday even though they really like it by Wednesday night, around 850 words of somewhat amusing prose.

Humour writing is exhausting. Especially so when my product, in this case Cubiclenama, appears on a page which has pretty high standards. For instance every Thursday the same space is occupied by the wonderful, curious and endlessly informed Salil Tripathi. How do you follow a top act like that?

Which means besides poking fun at HR and IT and Consulting and Banking and BlackBerrys and things like that, I also need to make the reader think a little bit. Somehow. At least by some form of free association.

Compounding this problem further is the fact that many people read excellent workplace columnists like Lucy Kellaway, and all people read Scott Adams. Kellaway is one of those rare writers who make you laugh and think at the same time. Her column for the FT is an institution.

Adams is God.

So most weeks I start worrying about the column around lunch time on Monday.

First I start to Google for offbeat news stories about murders or electrocutions or amputations in the office space. Many of them are not usable directly or indirectly. But they sometimes point at themes. They point at some aspect of the office space or office culture that I might resonate with. The trick usually is to find something that is obscure enough to be fresh, but not so obscure that few people connect with it.

So I can’t do anything with the IT or jargon used in a newsroom. Few people would be bothered. But Lotus Notes jokes are good. Bloomberg terminals can be touched upon briefly. Spam email is old news. HR is an unending fountain of delight.

Eventually I end up reading or discussing something with somebody that generates a small seed of an idea. And then I semi-think about it till Wednesday morning. At which point I think about thinking about writing about it. (I don’t know about you, but often the hardest part about writing a column is the writing of the column. The brain sometimes does anything to delay the typing. That and Twitter.)

And then around noon on Thursday I panic and begin to type. (For weeks now I’ve been using the excellent Q10 app on the office laptop to write. If there is a lot of noise in the office or in my head, I listen to Rainy Mood on my headphones. It makes me drink a lot of water and pee a lot. But it is most soothing. Too soothing and its difficult to keep the language funny. Too frenetic and I feel rushed by the music. Boring podcasts are very good.)

This week I didn’t have to Google at all. As soon as I heard about the whole BlackBerry-government imbroglio I knew I had to write about it.

Eventually I wondered what the government would do once it had access to BlackBerry messages.

Sometimes, when the idea forms perfectly, the columns write themselves.

I rarely link to columns or articles on the blog. But quite a few people seemed to have liked this one. So here it is:

Note: There is a small Cubiclenama group on Facebook. It has been dormant for a while. But I hope to ignite the existing community and attract new members by amplifying the experience with relevant and engaging content.

—

The BlackBerry Spies

Originally published in Mint and on Livemint.com.

Sometime in the near future.

Deputy director Kumar of the National BlackBerry Monitoring Agency of India (NBMAI) briskly walks into his shiny new office. The floor creaks under the weight of his shoes. The maple wood must be replaced, Kumar thinks.

The offices of NBMAI are located in the netball stadium custom-built for the Commonwealth Games. After the Games, the facility was handed over to a developer for maintenance. Who converted it into a commercial centre. Now NBMAI shared a floor with a KFC and the top floor of a Big Bazaar. Thankfully, the netball field itself remained untouched, and netballers from all over India were allowed to use the facility, whenever they wanted, between 6am and 8am on all Sundays.

Kumar marches through a vast warren of cubicles. Employees peer at computer monitors.

Every piece of data exchanged between two BlackBerrys in the country is routed through NBMAI’s servers. As per government regulations, NBMAI employees are allowed to randomly pick any voice call, text message, instant message, email or MMS from this flood of communication.

The first few weeks of NBMAI were turbulent. Kumar and his superiors slowly realized that depending purely on human agents to randomly pick messages would lead to chaos.

For instance, on one evening, in the early days of the agency, Kumar discovered that 23 of the 34 monitoring experts were all looking for threats to state security, especially photos, on Deepika Padukone’s BlackBerry.

A few weeks after that the home minister suddenly visited NBMAI’s office for a surprise check. However, an employee had already read an email Kumar sent to the home secretary, from his BlackBerry, about the trip.

When the ministry team arrived they saw a banner: “NBMAI welcome the home minister. We wish you a successful surprise inspection visit.”

In yet another case of blatant misuse, a Lok Sabha member convinced one of NBMAI’s employees to tap into an arch-rival’s Berry. A debate was afoot, and the MP asked this spy among spies to rush any dodgy messages to Parliament.

Damage, however, was averted at the last minute. The MP stood up and said: “Speaker sir, I wish to bring to your notice this message sent by the honourable member last week. In it the member says, and I quote: ‘Lolz u cnt hz 3G yt. Eeeheehee reg: MNP. C u at Nth Blck @ 8.’ My question to the House is this: What does this mean for the country? In fact, what does this mean in general? Anyone?”

Since then Kumar had made several changes. First of all, a computer program was installed that could automatically check messages and flag problematic ones. Second, Kumar made it illegal to target checks on any individuals. Yet, NBMAI still faced crises on a daily basis.

Kumar settles into his office chair and switches on his computer. Instantly he notices a series of emails. One is an emergency message. The letters glow red. He summons his CTO.

“Sir,” the CTO gasps, “our terror-attack module flagged over 7,000 terror messages last night. We need to do something about this.”

“My God! 7,000 messages! We must alert Home immediately!”

“But it was a misunderstanding…”

“What do you mean?”

“Sir, there was a national conference of management consultants in Mumbai last night. It appears that their BlackBerry messages are throwing up many false positives.”

“I don’t understand…”

“First of all, in the morning there were several messages that mentioned airports, drops, flights, transfers and even one that said someone was going to ‘crash on the plane’. Our algorithm went mad.”

“Assuming a plane attack no doubt. We must fix this. Then?”

“During the day they had presentations. So we detected messages about ‘blowing up charts’, ‘exploding the process flow’, ‘boiling the ocean’, ‘deep dive’, ‘drill down’, ‘critical path’, ‘go live’ and more than one ‘helicopter view’. The system decided that some form of airborne attack was imminent at Marine Drive.”

“Understandably so. And then?”

“During the evening we got bombarded with ‘mission critical’, ‘chain reaction’, ‘collaborate’ and ‘cross platform’.”

“Oho. This must have set off our rail terror alert logic.”

“Correct. But things got completely out of hand in the evening. When the conference got over.”

“Oh God…”

“Yes…”

“The military site attack sensor…”

“Correct. We fended off all the ‘ice breaker’, ‘break out’ and ‘north bound’ alerts. But when three thousand ‘touch base’ messages flooded the system, it immediately alerted Siachen.”

Kumar shakes his head in frustration. He stands up in order to say something. When suddenly the wooden floor, built by the lowest bidder, gives way, and he disappears into the ground.

Cubiclenama takes a weekly look at the pleasures and perils of corporate life.

This, of course, is nonsense. And I have the PowerPoint slides to prove it.

Hah.

But, to be honest, at least one veteran consultant has written to me about how much Dork has touched one of his/her raw nerves.

So imagine how much pain a spectacular new blog post on the  the New Yorker’s website will inflict on them. Titled Christopher Nolan’s “Implementation”, blogger Gideon Lewis-Kraus mashes up management consulting and Inception to produce brilliance:

“If you fail,” says Watanabe, “you will stay in ‘limbo,’ which means spending the rest of your life developing dynamic solutions for leveraged market-driven global enterprise frameworks across downstream cross-platform industry. If you succeed, I will help you return to your former career as an independent boutique retailer of imported artisanal tapenade.”

Read the whole thing here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/goingson/2010/07/christopher-nolan-implementation.html#ixzz0vXk3Ai46

Ayyo. Too much comedy.

Clipping 2: Then yesterday plans were revealed about the huge, awesome stand-up comedy venue coming up in Mumbai. The famed Comedy Store from London is coming! Whatay heart-breaking thing to hear just months after one resettles in Delhi. Damn. I foresee much low-cost flying from November.

Clipping 3: And finally, I was cleaning out the house yesterday morning when I came across this week old copy of the Hindustan Times lying behind the sink. Flipping through languidly I noticed a most bizarre Calvin and Hobbes strip. This time I truly did not “get” the C&H joke. The following is a clip from the e-paper.

Aai caramba!

p.s. As usual please maximize the Scribd thingies to read legibly.

Paper work

Couple of things to point out:

1. Yes my name is still causing trouble. Sigh. I might change it to something else so that it looks better in book stores. Like “Dan Brown Vadukut”.

2. Will update on expected dates, title, excerpts and so on as soon as I get inputs and go-aheads from the Penguin people. Currently I am thinking of calling it “A short history of nearly every five point someone slumdog white tiger’s letters to Penthouse”.

3. A very big thank you to all you guys. This blog is quite the community story you know. So collective high-fives all around.

4. Set aside money right now to buy it when it eventually comes out.

Yay!

Foot where?

Transcript of conversation with anonymous public relations professional on newsroom phone a few days ago. Edited for readability.

(Phone rings)

Sidin: Hello… Sidin (It is a miserable habit of mine, that line. So many people respond by saying: “No.”)

Random PR professional: Hello Sidin! This is <mallu name> from <name of PR company>!

S: Hi. Tell me.

RPRP: I have been reading your work for a long time now. And I am impressed.

S: (Sensing a catch somewhere…) Oh thank you very much.

RPRP: Especially the wonderful work you’ve been doing in the area of Law firms and legal services…

S: (What the…) Oh I see. Which stories in particular?

RPRP: Oh the one… err.. you know the story… this particular one… I mean the one on…

S: (Aha! The plot thickens…) Oh you mean the one I wrote last weekend?

RPRP: EXACTLY! That one. It was so, so, so good…

S: On legal services no?

RPRP: Yes yes.

S: Ah but I have NEVER EVER written a single world in my entire career on legal services and law firms…

RPRP: Never?

S: Not once.

RPRP:

S:

RPRP: Maybe I have my information wrong.

S: Maybe you do.

CLICK!

Fungus was there. The author and the missus. Pastrami completed the four-umvirate even though he was only half the man he is normally. Bags under his eyes. Shoulders slumped in exhaustion. Mouth pursed in that weird way of those who have worked 36 or so straight hours on an investment banking deal that will yield rich dividend in time.

(While I sympathized with him, inside I leapt for joy. The more he worked, the more he made bonus and the more he paid for Long Island Iced Teas at the Hard Rock Café. He rounds his credit card bills to the thousands you see.)

Alas money is not everything. Nothing can buy back sleep once lost. Not even a lucrative buy back option. (Got it? Got it?)

But also it was Pastrami’s birthday celebration redux.

Earlier this week he had spent the night of his actual birthday hunched over his laptop at the office doing the things he does on tough deals. Making term sheets, creating spreadsheets, downloading porn, playing Poker on Facebook, hitting on the ladies in HR. They call it ‘the grind’. A party had been out of the question till the deal had been closed and both parties signed on the dotted lines.

Thankfully a couple of days later he emerged from his professional tapasya an exhausted but satisfied man. A quick round of phone calls later we were all at Tamnak Thai. Heinekens were being sipped. Pastrami was awake but looked grim.

Normally, regulars at this blog will know, Pastrami has a tendency to slip into precarious predicaments. There was the infamous time when his family realized he was gay. Also I did poke him in his eye once with my stylus.

But this time we assumed him grimness came from just having worked like a dog all through his birthday.

“Pastrami the usual?”

“Hmm…”

Thai green curry and steamed rice. The missus, another veggie but one bored of Thai green curry all the time, demanded a change. She ordered a refreshingly different Thai red curry.

These veggies I tell you…

Fungus wasted no time in ordering a herd-killing spread of lamb, pork and chicken. All cooked in the Thai fashion with generous helpings of lemon grass. Also much chilli.

We dug into our food with feverish gusto. (Note: The food would reciprocate fiercely the next morning. We are talking Krakatoa here. Lava. Pompeii. It still hurts. Freaking magma.)

Pastrami continued to be silent. He chewed in slow motion. He was completely quiet except for a brief moment, which gave us hope, when he asked for a diet coke. But he went back into his shell again.

“Dude. Something wrong?”

“Hmm…”

“Bad day at work…?”

“Hmm…”

I reached for the Thai Red Curry. The missus dissuaded me with the pointy end of a fork between the third and fourth knuckle.

“Arrey yaar. What is this reticence? Why don’t you talk to us? We are your friends no?” I said fighting back tears bravely.

“No I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

Whoa! Embarrassment and Pastrami? A blog post loomed. If only he would open up. And I could type.

Fungus chirped up: “But tell no? Sometimes it’s good to share things with friends.”

Pastrami took a deep breathe. And then narrated his short but lively tale while we sipped our Heinekens and tried not to think of permanent tendon damage.

Pastrami had been called to attend a meeting with his boss late the previous night. The meeting was at a client’s office and it had something to do with Corporate Finance or Slump Selling or some such topic I remember flunking with aplomb.

The whole team, some seven or eight people, stuffed into a small conference room. Once everyone was settled Pastrami’s boss flipped open the laptop and began the presentation. Pastrami was expected to note down the client’s reactions and questions.

A few moments into the presentation Pastrami notices that the client CEO’s laptop screen has quickly moved into screensaver mode. The way they sat in the room, only Pastrami could see it.

The screensaver was a version of a recent Swimsuit Calendar. The CEO had one of those VAIOs with 19-inch screens and vivid life like images on the LCD screen.

Pastrami is only human. He was distracted. In the beginning he pulled his eyes away to the excel sheets and models and Powerpoint on the large projector screen. But in time he began to anticipate each model on the screensaver. The way her hair blew in the wind. The way the sand stuck to her bum. The way her voluptuous…

“Pastrami! What do you think of the slideshow? You’ve been quite interested in it! Which parts did you like?”

The client CEO boomed with a smile on his face.

“What?” Pastrami frantically clutched at conversational straws.

“What do you think of the slideshow? Anything you liked in particular?”

“Well…”

“Don’t be scared of your boss. Give me your honest opinion…”

Pastrami figured this guy was a real stud. Not harm in playing along if it meant the deal would go through.

“Well I really liked Deepika’s picture. Sheetal was a little too aggressive if you ask me. That little tigress! Sarah Jane would have rocked. But that’s just my opinion. Ha ha ha!”

The room reverberated in deathly silence.

On the drive back Pastrami’s boss spoke to him: “He was referring to my…”

“I know…”

“You thought?”

“Yes…”

“Oh shit…”

“Yeah…”

“Little Tigress… damn…”

“Hmm…”

Just as he ended the story the Tamnak Thai people brought in the cake we had ordered for him. There was a candle on it that had already been lit.

And around the candle our message:

“Happy Birthday Pastrami! May 2008 be your year with the LADIES!”

He flinched.

We winced.

“Happy Birthday Pastrami!”

“Shut it…”

Sigh.

p.s. Do a good deed today. Sign up at GiveIndia and support one of the certified NGOs there. You don’t have an excuse not to.

Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don’t mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It’s as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can’t get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: “How do we give the magazine a new look?”
Regular Sidin answer: “Let’s get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!”
Arty Lady’s answer: “Let’s chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands.”

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn’t even pause to think. It’s as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

“Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet’s face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?”

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion’s share of tongue from the floor.

“Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please…”

“What were you planning Sid?”

“Handbag…”

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.

However expect a blog post about the successful completion of the fabled GM diet last night and the ensuing feeling of hilarity at slightly better fitting jeans and shirts that have more room (not quite flapping around me in the wind yet.)

Over the weekend a few people had the idea that I must select a cross-section of my blogs/columns/whatever and publish them in book form after duly groveling around for a publisher. There was a show of hands in favour of the move. I continue to dilly-dally.

And finally, if the powers wills it and a visa and ticket are forthcoming, a four-day dash and splash to Malaysia (Truly Asia!) is in the offing. KL and Genting to be precise. Do drop hints on how to make maximum use of my time in a way that I can tell all about it to the missus when I return. Is there a desi-blog crowd there by any chance? Will blog from there if all goes well of course. And will keep the Petronas pics to a minimum.

Without further ado on with the column and off I go kicking off work for the next issue of JAM.

—*—

(The version you see in the actual newspaper is different from this for pretty obvious reasons.)

What is common to the words dollar, pound, dirham, rial, peso, gourde, ouguiya and ariary?

If you thought “Hey! These are all funny sounding words that appear right in the beginning of a humour article in a major Indian business daily published out of Chennai!” then, technically, you think right but I sincerely hope you are not involved in a business function other than HR.

In reality these words are all names of currencies of various countries all over the world. And why am I talking about currency today? That is because in today’s column we are going to learn a little bit about the concept of ‘currency’, how it evolved and how currency, in theory, and money supply, in practice, is extremely critical to the functioning of an economy like India’s and even more so in mine.

Let us start with the basics. Currency is as defined as a unit of exchange that facilitates the transfer of goods and services. Or, as us humour columnists put it, “That wonderful thing that all the people with regular jobs seem to have a lot of and which is the primary reason we make friends with people in the banking and investments circles who have expense accounts.”

Currency, or money, in paper and metal form has become such a part of our daily lives that we tend to completely forget about it and take it for granted. Then suddenly, one dark and gloomy night, we are traveling in a cab to our homes and suddenly remember that we haven’t carried our wallet. In fact we don’t even have a wallet. We then tell the cabbie to stop under a tree a few minutes from our home in order to relieve ourselves in peace. We then walk a few steps before breaking into a mad dash for our building. We have managed to escape somehow.

The above was a completely fictional incident made up for the express purpose of this column. But it brings out the huge role that currency plays in our lives.

Now before the advent of the concept of currency man had a terrible time trying to buy and sell stuff. A typical conversation between a shopkeeper and a customer would be as follows:

Customer: “Two apricots please!”

Shopkeeper: “Here you go! That will be four dollars!”

Customer: “But this is before the advent of the concept of currency dude…”

Shopkeeper: “Dammit!”

Of course I am exaggerating here. In reality that period in history saw the widespread adoption of the barter system whereby people just exchanged things with each other. For instance you might get two horses for forty chickens. (Twenty-five chickens if the horses were Chinese.)

But this led to several problems.

First of all you sometimes never found someone who had horses to exchange for your chicken. But you found someone who had pineapples and wanted chickens. So all you needed was a guy who wanted pineapples in return for horses. Alas, then you found someone who loved pineapples but had only, say, primitive table lamps to offer. So a lot of people ended up hanging around for hours at the market. This alone slowed human progress by several thousands of years.

Secondly you could never store your goods for use at a later day. So while the other guy had horses that he could keep for months you had to barter potatoes that, after a week, began developing fungus colonies the size of horses. This led to tremendous amounts of business rivalry and even industrial espionage. Then finally, after years of lost trades and bad produce, tradesmen struck upon the concept that would change business in the world forever, namely credit period.

“Thanks for the bananas man! Your cheque will be here in just three days!” the evil trader would say. “Sure! No problems boss!” his counterpart would reply feeling very confident, “I am sure you are a man of your word!” The trader would then ride away to a safe distance before letting out a loud evil laugh (Muahahaha) because, ironically, banking was still several centuries away.

Thankfully before long the people of ancient Egypt came up with the idea of currency to help in all financial transactions. They used silver ingots to represent an equivalent value of stored grain. This way the value of the silver and the ingot itself was standardized.

Egyptian paymaster: “Here take this silver ingot you builder!”

Builder: “Wait a minute! Is this some sort of pyramid scheme?!”

The rest, as they say, is monetary policy.

Later on the Chinese began to get a little sick of carrying around coins and decided to substitute it with paper money. Before long wallets became an essential part of Men’s fashions and people were circulating banknotes with little poems on them with words that often rhymed with ‘pluck’ or ‘crass mole’.

Today currency plays a less visible but an all the more important role in our daily lives. Sure we have Debit Cards and Credit Cards that no longer necessitate the carrying of coins or paper money. But without a well managed currency system an economy is in shambles.

For instance if the currency is easy to counterfeit then the market could easily be flooded with copies. Suddenly people use this fake money to buy things and this can actually push up prices due to greater demand. The same thing happens if the people in the government indiscriminately prints notes and mints coins, takes this currency into the market, walked past the junction, behind the post office and into their homes where they spend it at leisure.

Exchange rates are another interesting outcome of national currencies all over the world. Because the value of a currency is stable at least for short periods of times the concept of an exchange rate took shape. This kind of stable currency system is essential for World Trade.

And last of all the currency system led to the development of banking. Banking played a vital role in the development of human society. They helped businessmen, traders, consumers like you and me and, most of all, investment bankers like the guy who has just called me out to lunch at a swanky new Five Star here in Mumbai. He is been behind me for weeks now and waxes his eyebrows. But what the heck.

So I must run now. I hope you enjoyed this little recap of currencies and how they help make our lives better. So the next time you pick up a thousand rupee note and spend it on an insignificant thing like dinner, clothes or life-saving drugs, pause for a moment. Think about the many millennia of evolution that has made that particular note reach your hand. Wonder at the ingenuity of the human mind.

And then send the note to my address.

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