I was sitting at work today when one of the greatest phenomenons of modern times happened.

It was the 27th of February, the last working day of the month. It is that time of the month when your employer acknowledges your existence, through a directed movement of electrons through the internet and the banking system, transfers stuff to your bank account. And one of the greatest phenomenons of modern times happens.

A hundred phones in the office simultaneously make the “ting-ting … ting-ting” sound of a newly received SMS. Yay! This months’ salary is here! Oh, the joy!

But this joy is coming to an end for me.

As most of you know, I’ve been trying to write CAT for a while to see if I can do an MBA, but it keeps getting jinxed. The first time I wrote it, I did well, but the IIMs cancelled the test ’cause of some paper leak. Then when the re-test came, I forgot to get up on time. Then the next year, when everyone was writing CAT, I was in a nightclub in Shanghai. Then the year after that, the IIMs rejected my application, but didn’t say why. They must have been like ‘Dude. Rethink your life’.

So I rethought, said screw you CAT, and wrote GMAT. I scored 760.

And then, I applied to the Indian School of Business, said ‘Dude, let me in’, and they were like ‘Sure, why not!’. And I was like ‘yay!’.

And so, I’m going to be leaving my cushy and interesting job at Google, and spending the next year at Hyderabad, studying, doing homework, writing assignments, staying up late and mugging one day before the exams. And hopefully, at the end of it all, the economy won’t be much worse, and I’ll have a job.

We’ll see how it goes. I will, of course, keep you all informed through this blog.

• 18 Comments

Let me try some of my own hyper-intelligent and super smart blog posts. I’ll start with my Delhi - 6 review. So I’ve copied the review and pasted it in the box… hit submit and…

WTF?!?!?!?!!!!! The internets think my Delhi - 6 review is stupid?!?!?!??? The tubes must be clogged again!

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Yes. Gmail was down for a while earlier today. Thank you to all those of you that felt the need to ping me and let me know. And special thanks to those that felt the need to explicitly call me and tell me. I was not busy with any crisis at all. Without you, I would never have realized that the product that I’ve been working on over much of the last year was down. The Google alerts system and server logs would not have alerted me to the fact the one of Google’s flagship products is down globally. So thank you very much.

I am also flattered with the confidence some of you have shown in me. Like this chat with a certain unnamed party called “X”

X: “Hey!!!!!!!! Gmail is Down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Me: “I know… Some problem at google’s end”
X: “Did YOU screw it up?”
Me: “No… Why would you think that?”
X: “you know…. disaster is, after all, your middle name…”
Me: “#$@%%@*&!@!@$%^&@”

I mean, come on guys.

I know I’m prone to disasters, but you don’t have to assume that every time something goes wrong, I am responsible. I can assure you that it was not me this particular time.

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WTF??!?

There. That’s my whole review of this movie. WTF?!?

I mean what the hell is going on with this movie? The whole thing sounds like a moral science lecture. Start to finish. This entire movie is a Moral Science revision lesson from 6th standard.

This movie makes no sense at all. At any level. So this Abhisekh Bacchan comes to New Delhi from New York to help his Granny die. Oh yes, that’s not a typo. He brings her to Delhi to die. But what I can’t understand is how the hell does Abhisekh Bacchan get so many days leave from his job? Then again, maybe he’s a banker and just got laid off. Recession and all.

The director of this movie must have been at a party and someone told him about symbolism and metaphors. And an epic sense of realization came over him - “You mean we can show a pigeon that can’t fly and people will think it represents the middle-class girl who can’t fly into the real world? That’s just abso-frinkin-lutely brilliant!”

And so, after getting high on this new gyaan that dawned on him, he’s just created a movie with one metaphor after another, trying desperately to tie them together. And has failed spectacularly.

I mean, there are more metaphors in this movie than item-number-babes in Bollywood  The Kala Bandar as a metaphor for the darkness in our hearts, the Ram Leela as a metaphor for … errr… for the destiny of our lives? Then the dark alleys of Delhi -6 as a metaphor for the total lack of regulation in the electricity sector in India? Ridiculous. The only metaphor that made sense to me was the depiction of the burning tree, which seems to symbolize this frickin movie itself that is going to burn and go up in flames, taking the producers’ money with it.

That’s a metaphor that the producer is going to remember for a long long time. The rest of us should forget this meta-disaster immediately.

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A friend of mine got married recently, and before he jumped into the dark abyss that is euphemistically called “married life”, he came to me to ask for some advice. Seeing that I have some experience at this marriage thing, he thought it would be a good idea. Ha!

For a minute, I experienced an elated feeling of Schadenfreude - The pleasure of happiness derived from the suffering of others. Muahahahaaaa!

Asking me for married life advice is like asking a Tiger for advice on how to escape from predators. Not only is the tiger likely to screw you over, but you will also be staring down two dozen razor sharp teeth when you realize that you’ve been given incorrect advice. You know you are being had by the tiger, when it gives advice like: “The best way to escape predators is to use reverse psychology. Approach the predator with boldness, walk up confidently and say something like ‘I ate your mama for lunch, you big ugly beast’. That should save you from the predator”.

I was thinking I’ll give my friend advice like the tiger from the story above, but I was overcome with feeling of pity for the poor guy. I mean, he’s been already handed a death sentence, and he’s going to suffer it the rest of his life without me needing to make it any worse for him.

And it is for this reason, for the benefit of entire mankind that I have decided to come out and give some honest advice for all those guys out there who are on the fence. What follows is the great wisdom from the holy book of Adityaism. Read it, and you will be set free. (Either you or your soul will achieve Moksha, but there are no guarantees).

1. Do everything you can to get out of doing household chores
Back in the day, when guys would get married, they would get a lot of dowry that would make life awesome! These days, you get household chores that make life miserable. There are hundreds of things to do around the house, and if you break down and do EVEN ONE CHORE, then its the gallows for you. Doing just one chore is an admission that you are capable and competent, and that is an image you can’t afford to keep. You must do everything to display your incompetence at the fullest, so you don’t get asked to do any work around the house.

2. #1 doesn’t work. Hire a cook, maid instead.
No matter how hard you try, the one thing you learn in a marriage is that you can’t win. I think it violates some quantum mechanical laws if you win an argument with your wife, so don’t even try. The easiest way to get out of chores is to hire a maid and a cook to do all the household work. You know what they say: “Liberty comes at a price. About 2500 rupees a month.”

3. Never agree to a joint bank account.
I have learned from the wife that some women have a very strange understanding of finance and money. We’ve had many conversations that have raised some philosophical questions about how the world works. For example:

Wife: “I bought two sarees instead of one!”
Me: “What? Why?”
Wife: “Inflation”

Wife: “I was walking by the mall, and I bought a couple of bottles of the perfume ‘Chanel No. 5′ today.”
Me : “Why did you do that?”
Wife: “To improve liquidity.”
Me: “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Wife: “Yes it does. I read it in Femina.”

There are many more tips, but not enough time today. I might write a book about this someday, but for now, I have to go now and put the clothes in the washing machine.

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My dear public,

I was on my first class Singapore Airlines flight to Hong Kong for my bi-weekly vacation when I heard about Satyam’s so-called fraud. This is a big tragedy for all of us, especially me. I’ll have to cut my vacation short and come back to my office to reassure my employees, because the employees are worried that my company may be next. Silly employees.

Every few years, a CEO slips and makes a mistake and  gets himself into trouble, and the rest of us have to bear the consequences. But this drill is well-rehearsed. I will now call an “all-hands-meeting”, just like every CEO in the world, and stand in front of 10,000 employees and hand out the usual drivel : “Our business continues to remain strong, and we are well focused. We will continue to concentrate our synergies on leveraging core resources to develop competencies and deliver the best value added services in the industry setting new benchmarks while constantly innovating our balance sheets”. But Ramalinga Raju’s stupidity is not without consequence. I will now by able to buy only a 21-carat diamond for my wife for our half-yearly anniversary instead of our usual cruise in the Caribbean.

Most people don’t really understand the world of CEOs. What CEOs really do and why they are paid so much is such a big mystery, but I can’t see why it should be. CEOs do a very important job, and they get paid for it. Delivering balance sheet innovation is one of the key responsibilities of a CEO. CEOs spend all day strategizing and synergizing (day dreaming), talking to customers and understanding their core problems (playing golf), managing employees and setting direction and vision (telling fairy tales). What comes out of this process at the end of every quarter is called a “balance sheet” (fictional short story with lots of numbers) that drives the stock price up (Caribbean Cruise!).

Many young and aspiring kids ask me “How can I be like you?” and I tell them only one thing. “Have an idol in front of you. Follow his work!”. Personally, my idol is Andrew Sullivan, who was the big boss of AIG. His resume speaks for itself : Wrecked a $100 billion company, drove it to the ground, threaten to take down the entire global economy down with it, then convinced politicians to give AIG $200 billion dollars of taxpayer money, then spent it on a 5-star resort and hunting trip in Europe, all the while getting paid millions of dollars in salary and bonuses.

Bonus. For wrecking a $100 billion company.  Bow down and worship him, he’s GOD!

So, in conclusion, my dear public, don’t get too worried with all that is happening around you. You just focus on getting up in the morning and going to work, clocking the hours all month for just enough money to pay your EMIs and don’t get your head into the world of big money. Leave that to us CEOs.

I have to go now, the air hostess is bringing the 4th course of my 7 course dinner service. ‘Till next time!
The Anonymous CEO.

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Bollywood never makes the movies that I want to watch. My ideal movie would star Altaf Raja singing his soporific songs, his wife then gets frustrated and kills him. He is then reborn as Himesh Reshamia and comes back and avenges his death in the previous birth by singing to her, and she dies of a ruptured ear drum. Now that’s a movie I’d pay to watch.

Instead, we decided to go to this “Rab Ne Bana Di Joodi” movie. Watching the promos, I thought the story would be something like this: SRK has a daughter who is not getting good marks in her college, so he puts her in a dance class, and she wins consolation prize. The End.

But NOOOOOO! The heroine, who is indeed young enough to play his daughter, is actually HIS WIFE, and the movie is the same story as a 1960’s flop-movie-love-story. The movie theatres should introduce a new feature, where at the security gate, you can leave your intelligence and innate sense of logic, because god forbid if you carry your common sense into the movie theatre, it will try to hang itself watching this movie. The central point of this movie is the assumption that the heroine cannot recognize SRK without his pink glasses. I mean, COME ON!

Instead, it seems, SRK keeps making these same old same old love stories that nobody really understands. His appeal has now dropped below Mithun Chakraborthy’s, as is evident from Rab Ne Bana Di Joodi. This movie is just a remix of his last movie “Om Shanti Om”, with all the remotely interesting parts removed. It features the same endless song featuring a bunch of bollywood celebrities, the same jokes that were used in DDLJ and the same my-monkey-is-constipated “emotional” scenes that have become trademark Shahrukh Khan fare. If you ask me, SRK’s stock is at an all time low, and he should now just liquidate his assets and go into retirement. If he instead keeps making these movies, the government will have to bailout us, since watching this movie will certainly send you into a personal emotional recession.

You have been warned!

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