Speed Breakers

"India is the land of diversity", is what I grew up hearing. During my painfully slow progression through first standard to all the way to high school, every single social studies book also tried to instill in me (read ram down my throat) this as the most fundamental and important tenet of Indianness. These books and the leaders of my great country enumerated our religious, language, cultural diversity and other such abstract and useless ideas to illustrate this tenet. My journey beyond high school made me realize the gross mis-direction that we as a country have taken to characterize our diversity. Our characterization of diversity is much more tangible and real than those abstruse, abstract and philosophical ideas. Just take a tour of your city and count the different types of speed breakers you encounter and you would understand what I am talking about. No two speed breakers will look alike and one would be very tempted to conclude that they display the highest degree of individualism to be found on this planet. Let me take you through some of my inadvertent observations about this beautiful thing called speed breaker.


First of all let's talk about their presence. They are to be found everywhere even at places where they are not supposed to be found. Their ubiquitousness stems from the fact that we Indians have devised a common solution to all our poor traffic planning problems and that solution, as my intelligent readers might have guessed, is to create a speed breaker. When you see one speed breaker every 500 meter, you start wondering if there is a coup d'etat being planned by these speed breakers to overthrow all the roads and take complete control so that there is more surface area of speed breakers than roads. I am tempted to write more about their presence as to how they just appear all of sudden after a sharp turn, how every single building of any or no importance has these as its first line of defense and so on and so forth but this blog is about their diversity. So I'll turn my focus back to the topic. ( Do expect a whole book on this subject to hit the stands soon )

Since the concept of diversity is so deeply inveterate in every Indian, we make sure that no two speed breakers ever crafted by the vanguards of our retarded society look or behave alike. Every speed breaker carries a different DNA of its own. Each one can be studied as a different species and all of them share some common distant ancestor. I am sure if we were to carry out a census of these speed breakers, we would find more variety of them than all the different species in the world put together. If not, just wait a few more years. I am sure with extinction of a few endangered species and unabated proliferation of speed breakers at the current rate, they would achieve the distinction of being the most diverse family. Now allow me to talk about some prominent families of speed breakers.

The first one, and my personal favorite, family of speed breakers is the one which is designed to give the most discomfort to the unsuspecting travelers. In form and shape they resemble the steep hills of Uttarakhand. They rise about a foot in the sky at an angle of anywhere between 60 to 70 degrees then form a sharp peak before tapering down on the other side at the same or a different angle. When your vehicle stumbles upon, figuratively, one of these you actually feel like stumbling, literally, on a rock. Your vehicle bangs against it, muscles for a wee bit, mounts over and then crashes on the other side with a thud.

Then there is that pack of small little evil speed breakers. The pack can have anywhere between 2 to 6 members. On its own each one seems harmless but as they say it there is great strength in unity. The strength of these little rascals is experienced by the spines of the poor travelers. They make you feel that it's better to be beheaded by one sharp clean sword sweep than be stabbed multiple times with a small dagger.

The third category that I think deserves a paragraph in this blog is what I call the mountain category. They are not as detrimental to your body as to the body of your vehicle. Every time your vehicle sees one, it heaves a long sigh of grief and prepares its underbelly (Oooooh.. I know it hurts!!) for a long scrape against the rough surface and then muses internally in the whirring and revving of its various parts - 'And people thought Titanic was hit hard by an iceberg'.

One more interesting family is the invisible speed breakers. In the dark of the night they wear a cloak of invisibility and become totally undetectable even in the 100 watts of headlamp light. You come to know of their existence only when your car is sent flying in the air for a few meters and then crash lands on the ground with such a loud thud that your heart sinks and your maintenance bill rises.

There are many more such interesting families of speed breakers waiting to be explored and recognized but we need dedicated and skilled people to study them and document their behaviors. I am sure one day you will find a course listed even in international universities for those who are interested in studying these majestic and varied structures of India. Maybe, they will become a bigger tourist attraction and hence revenue generators than Taj Mahal. There are lots of such May Bes which I'll leave to the better imagination of the readers. So next time you hit a speed breaker, do take some time to appreciate its beauty and how it can contribute to the growth of your country.

Nawabs of IPMX

Nawabs of Lucknow and Nizams of Hyderabad are long gone but they have left behind a legacy which still throbs in many parts of India. One living and soaring example of this legacy is ‘Kite flying’. Historians believe that Kite-Flying was brought in India by Chinese and was popularized by the Nawabs and the Nizams (thanks to exponentially more idle time than they knew what to do with J).

Now, why I am talking about Kite-Flying and Nawabs is because it seems that students of IPMX batch have also got some traces of this hobby of Nawabs, lurking somewhere deep down in their hearts.

On the eve of Independence Day, the idea of kite-flying fidgeted, wriggled and kicked inside some of us and manifested itself in the decision that we would celebrate Independence Day by flying kites.

No sooner was the decision taken than helter-skelter kites, spools and maanjha were arranged and at 10 am a battalion of pseudo Nawabs, equipped with shades and cameras, marched towards basketball court. Those who were adept in the art of kite flying took to the strings and those who have tried everything from applying Bernoullie’s theorem to aerodynamic analysis in order to fly a kite but still cannot fathom the secret formula to get it up in the air contented themselves with just holding spools.

Those of you who have tried their hands at kite-flying would know that the real fun is in penchbaazi. My personal theory regarding penchbaazi is that it is an amicable transaction between two parties which follows the double entry system – at the end of the transaction the frustration on one side is exactly matched by the satisfaction on the other side. Oh boy, is it too much Corporate Finance doing some chemical locha in my brain?

After one and half hour of fierce battle among kites for domination of the sky, the Big J (Gaurav Jalote) emerged victorious with team of Santosh Rout and Saurabh close behind him. Batch topper Dushi couldn’t replicate his success story on the front of kite-flying and ended up losing again and again… and again and again …to anybody and everybody. Poor Dushi!

Well, that’s all I have for now.

Ten Identifications & Expansions of MBA

1. A ‘Master of Bugger All’, taking up the moral responsibility of educating the whole world goes around singing the song , ‘ Gyaan Baant Te Chalo… Gyaan Baant Te Chalo’ .

2. A ‘Master Bullshit Artist’ is somebody who can answer any question by uttering just two words- “It Depends”.

3. A ‘Mentally Below Average’ never has enough bandwidth, be it his work load or internet connection.

4. A ‘My Brain is Asleep’ always tries to make sure that everybody in the group is on the same page and therefore nobody in the group ever finishes the book.

5. Mr. ‘Mujhe Bahut Aata hai’ starts seeing the holistic picture of everything when the hole in his brain has grown big enough i.e. when he receives the degree.

6. No matter how local a ‘Mediocre Business Administration’ degree holder thinks, he will use the word global at least once in every sentence.

7. When someone goes to subji mandi and starts asking a vegetable vendor about demand and supply curves… you know you are talking to a ‘Maal Bechke Aa’ graduate.

8. It’s always the ‘Maha Bekar Aadmi’ who keeps whining about productivity when it’s he who doesn’t produce anything.

9. A ‘Most Bakwaas Atyachaar’ graduate spends half his time making new models and setting new paradigms which are not worth a dime.

10. The word value is so widely used by a 'Mega Boring & Aarampasand' that it has now become de-valued.

Ek Chhoti Si Love Story

He looked at his watch. It showed 15 minutes to 8. He had been working for more than twelve hours now and was clearly fatigued. He decided he needed a cup of coffee and headed towards coffee machine. It had been a routine for him to work till 8 everyday.

She turned her head and noticed that it was almost time. It was 7:45. She rubbed her eyes and lumbered towards the kitchen. What she longed for the most at the moment was a cup of coffee.

Through the whirring sound of coffee machine, he started running the list of things he would talk to her about in his mind. This was the time of the day he looked forward to earnestly. At workplace he was known to be endowed with power of speech but when it came to emotional matters, he felt incapacitated to articulate his feelings. Every day he prepared himself to express himself and rehearsed everything in his mind but for some reason always failed to do so. How he wanted to tell her that she was the center of his happiness!

While preparing coffee decoction, a spate of thoughts started crossing her mind. She was angry with herself for always starting a fight with him when more than anything else in the world what she wanted was to comfort him after the hard day’s work. Every day when they talked, she would find herself unable to keep the care and concern she felt for him from first turning into a little peevishness and then into anger. "Today I won't repeat this mistake", she resolved.

He glanced at his watch again. It was 7:55. He sagged into his comfy chair and put on his headset.

She saw the clock strike 7:55 and rushed towards her laptop.

Sitting in the taxi on his way to hotel he noticed that it was 9:15. He left office 15 minutes back. He had only one thought in his mind, "Tomorrow I'll definitely be nice to her and listen to her."

The metro train screeched to a halt. She realized it was 9:15 and she was only a few minutes away from her office. She was still ruminating over the fight they had. "Tomorrow I'll be more reasonable and won't spoil his mood", she thought.

Me on NDTV

Midnight Bakwaas Episode 1

"God is watching us... God is watching us... From a distance", sang Bette Midler.

Sitting in my room at midnight I wonder if she really understood the true meaning of the song. Did she really think that God is watching us from a distance. I don't know about her understanding but I do know, if I may dare claim, how God must be feeling watching us from a distance. How much this 'a distance' is for God I know not but I strongly believe that for somebody like God 'a distance' must be measured in at least a few light years. However, sitting in the last row and watching the whole class from there would evoke the same feeling in anybody.

In any classroom just turn your head to the right or left and you would see a sleep stricken soul, sitting in the front row, tormented by the battery of hogwash jabbering but still courageously holding the frontline (both literally and metaphorically). Words are mightier than swords. Never before would you have realized the true power of words than when you see this soldier fight the losing battle against the oncoming charge of words imbued with such a drab and monotonous tone that even elixir of life (coffee) fails to save him from dozing off...doze off he does!

Not everybody is blessed with the same amount of fortitude. You swivel 60 degrees in your chair and somewhere a few levels below you would see another mighty stalwart brought to the state of drooping-eyelids. This soldier is one level above the previous one (both literally and metaphorically) as it doesn't take even five minutes for him to surrender himself to the surging urge of yawning. Despite his immense size he cedes territory to the enemy almost immediately.

Offense is the best defense. Truly believing in this corny saying would be some semi God who, like you, enjoys the privilege of watching people 'from a distance'. At some point during the ordeal when the level of boredom breaches the critical mark, a kind of nuclear fusion reaction spurts out within him and abundant energy in the form of a question is released in the process. Complex reactions result in complex products. The result of this reaction is also so complex that all eyes, even the ones which had gradually shut their lids down, also light up from this effusion.

We can go on and on talking about all the specimen that one gets to see in a classroom but I have learnt something from God...Actually, God is not watching all of us (at least not all the times). God, like investment bankers, focuses only on a few sectors at a time. These days He is focusing on the sector called Indo-China. Therefore, I also focused on a select few. Maybe in the next edition of this midnight bakwaas I'll shift my focus to lesser mortals...