Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part I

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a young woman of unspecified ethnicity and racial origin. Her mother, in a wrongheaded and prejudiced moment, had christened her Snow White, but she preferred to call herself Sparkie. Her father was the democratically-elected ruler of the country, where they had polls every three years and all sentient creatures had the right to vote.

Sparkie’s father, on the death of his first wife, had married again. The girl’s new mother was a victim of the unfavourable circumstances surrounding her upbringing and for that reason was in the habit of resorting to unorthodox and even illegal means to get what she wanted. However, as the psychologists pointed out, this was entirely due to factors beyond her control and was not her fault at all.

Sparkie was a political activist and spent her time championing the cause of the less privileged. This made things somewhat uncomfortable for her family. One day her stepmother, in a fit of madness for which she could in no way be held responsible, decided that enough was enough and the living room could no longer be treated as a storehouse for pamphlets saying, “Alfalfa is sentient too!” or, “Votes for budgerigars!”

She called her chauffer, and asked him politely if he could see his way to taking the girl to a country house the family owned and leaving her there. The chauffer knew that this was a violation of the girl’s fundamental right to ruin her parents’ peace by calling press conferences in the garden in the middle of the night, but his devotion to his employer was so strong that he consented.

He took Sparkie out of the city, but he had not the heart to leave even the person responsible for the fact that curly-haired spaniels had the right to stand for public office in a place where she would have only those curly-haired spaniels for company. Happening to be aware of a small rural branch of the Vertically Different Brotherhood in the vicinity, he took her there and returned to the city.

The Vertically Different Brothers, of whom there were seven in this particular establishment, had heard of the girl and her activities on behalf of the downtrodden, and they welcomed her warmly.

The Idiot's Guide to Surviving the Corporate World

It’s called the real world. It’s the name people give to long hours tapping away at a keyboard with benumbed fingers and staring at a computer screen as though it is about to reveal the deepest mysteries of life.

A friend of mine, on condition of anonymity – he assures me that his boss has a well-developed sense of humour, but feels it would be better not to put it to the test – gave me some advice from his own experience.

The first step, he told me, is to develop a rapid walk and cultivate a permanently harried expression. This will serve to give the impression that whenever you leave your desk, even if it’s for a coffee break or to buy tickets to the Friday night movie, you are on an assignment whose success is vital to the continued profitability of your company.

The cell phone must be your best friend. Commit to memory every technical phrase and bit of jargon that is used by people in your office, and as soon as you sense the attention of a superior on you, start reciting them at random while talking into your phone and nodding vigourously.

Excel must be your second-best friend. Contrary to popular myth, the simplest formulae and spreadsheets are seldom the best. An ideal spreadsheet to send your boss has formulae that sprawl across three lines and references to at least eight different workbooks. The more he has to flip from sheet to sheet tracing your logical acrobatics, the more likely he is to feel that you have put serious thought into your work.

If you are relatively free, the safest way to spend your time is to sink into a pleasant daydream. But before that, ensure that you adopt the classical thinker’s posture and lean towards your screen. If possible, furrow your brow as well. Shake your head and mutter under your breath from time to time. (It is best to practise this in front of the mirror first, so that you look like a hardworking employee grappling with a fundamental problem in the way the company’s IT systems are run, and not like a deranged lunatic with a neck tic.)

Find an excuse to do as much work as possible outside the office. Sure, it might be an hour’s commute in the baking afternoon heat to make a ten-minute presentation to somebody who isn’t even listening and has already made up their mind anyway, but is anyone really going to notice if you take a half-hour longer than necessary to get back?

These five simple measures, I am assured, will make the corporate jungle seem like a children’s amusement park.

And if they don’t work? Well, there’s always Dilbert.

With a Hey, Ho

The wind and the rain have begun in Bombay, and the city being what it is, one will be able to say, "The rain it raineth everyday," without pausing to draw breath, for the next three months, and not put a dent in the truth.

That the monsoon is always an occasion for cheer would probably be a source of surprise, if not astonishment, to people who live in more temperate climes; one can understand their point of view. In places where "Summer" implies beachball and sunshine that is warm without being oppressive, the thought of the skies opening to ruin the beachball and put paid to the sunshine is hardly a happy one.

The romantic associations of the monsoon aside, it certainly is one of the most pleasant times of the year. Finally at an end is the summer's dilemma of choosing between sleeping in relative comfort and doing your bit to preserve the habitat of the polar bear. And then there's the fact that nothing brings out the finer points of a murder mystery better than reading it during a thunderstorm. Even the squelchiness and dampness that can result from a July commute is bearable, when taken as a part of a happy whole.

Besides, is there anyone who really doesn't like the occasional walk in the rain? If such there be, go mark him well - in him no monsoon raptures swell. (With apologies to the poet Scott.)

NSE's Certification in Financial Markets

I took the NCFM last week. The exam itself was easy enough; it seems to have been set keeping in mind the fact that traders have very little leisure to devote to the perusal of the NCFM study material (and even less to decode its legalese). One of the questions asked was:

Regarding which of the following is the NSE not flexible when candidates take the NCFM exam?

a) Place of the exam
b) Candidate’s presence
c) Time of the exam
d) Date of the exam

Since we had all selected Mumbai, June 6 and 9:30 am on the NSE website, but none of us had found an option to take the exam by proxy, it was fairly straightforward.

Any euphoria we felt at our success in the exam was swiftly driven out of our minds by hunger; we had several hours to wait until our second exam in the afternoon, and the NSE seemed not to want us to eat.

We had brought our lunch with us, and on asking the guard at the door where we could eat it, we were told to go to the canteen on the first floor. Thither we went, and as soon as we stepped out of the elevator we were accosted by another guard who demanded what our business was.

We explained, in as few words as possible since we were ravening by then, that we were between exams and wanted to eat lunch. He shook his head ruefully and told us that the NSE was always sending people up here to eat; it was, however, the ONGC office and he was very sorry but he could not permit us to enter without legitimate cause.

We went back downstairs thinking dark thoughts of the man who had sent us there. “I think,” said one of my friends, “that they make bets on how long people will argue with the ONGC guard before returning. Ten-to-one on two minutes, fourteen-to-three on five minutes, that kind of thing.”

After the second exam we were positively starving. We went and asked the guard if we could, at least, eat in the atrium.

“No,” he said conspiratorially, “but why don’t you go back to ONGC and sneak in while the guard’s back is turned?”

In the end I ate one sandwich standing on the sidewalk outside the NSE and the other when I got back home. But it was, without exception, the hungriest I have ever been while writing an exam.

Felis Domesticus, or the Habits of the Cat

One of the few failures of the Oxford English Dictionary is its inability to define a cat. It tries, certainly, but descriptions of mammalian characteristics, short snouts and retractile claws, which might be scientifically accurate, fall woefully short in other respects.

Every time I watch the clock with the firm conviction that some mad scientist has been fiddling with the space-time continuum and then been unable to make time go at its proper speed again, I find myself wishing I had the temperament of a cat. Not even the meanest alley-cat will consent to do something you want unless that coincides with what it wants.

Nor will a cat, if you are attempting to bribe it with food or drink, ever settle for anything other than precisely what it wants. If it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water, it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water; if you are thick enough not to comprehend this immediately, it will wait with growing impatience, rejecting bread, three different kinds of biscuits, and cake, until you finally hit on what it wants. Even then, and no matter how hungry it is because of your ineptitude, it will not accept a 55.5% solution.

And having taken the bribe, it will go back to doing what it was doing before you interrupted it, without doing what you wanted it to do in exchange for the milk.

Reproach it, though, point out its base perfidy, and it will regard you with an expression of injured innocence. Not even a newborn lamb can look as blameless as a cat that is guilty of enough sins for twenty cats.

The cat will then go on its way, no doubt feeling that it has done enough towards the maintenance of its relationship with you simply by consenting to be a part of it, and you will be left sweeping up the biscuit crumbs.

Home?

I've been unpacking today. Sometimes things like that cause nostalgia; in my case it caused plain homesickness.

It's odd, the kind of things you remember when you're unpacking. I don't mean memories of strolls from the dorm to the back gate on moonless nights, or of struggling from the Case Unit to your room with an armload of books and unsuccessfully attempting to unlock the door without dropping any. Things like that one would expect to remember.

There was an afternoon when I was playing Scrabble with a friend. It was one of those particularly frustrating games when you seem to have only vowels on your rack, get rid of them by making euoi, and then find yourself in possession of a rack full of consonants and nowhere to put them. My friend, in this position, placed ZQXG on a triple-word score. Quite naturally, I objected.

"You can't even pronounce it," I said.

"It's the name of the alien species that Calvin thinks Miss Wormwood comes from," quoth he.

"That," I pointed out, "is a Zogwarg."

"Well, this is the plural."

At this point I began to giggle helplessly.

Several weeks later, I was with another friend at the British Library sale of withdrawn books. I had bought a few of them; he, on the other hand, had fallen only slightly short of buying enough books to set up a library of his own. We were standing outside the library in the blazing afternoon sun - and when the afternoon sun blazes in Ahmedabad, it really pulls out all the stops and lets you have it - and attempting to get an auto to take us back to campus.

As usual, at the time when you most need an auto - for instance, when you're standing on a street corner with your arms full of books - all those that pass will, perversely, be full. But we found our way back in the end.

As we were getting out, the string holding one of the bundles snapped and forty-one magazines spilled onto the ground. After picking them up, I went to my room and proceeded, once more, to giggle helplessly at the memory of those cascading glossies.

Thomas Haynes Bayly said it much better than I can:

This the hour when happy faces
Smile around the taper's light,
Who will fill our vacant places?
Who will sing our songs to-night?

But, as one of my professors told me, between IIMA and the PGPs it's never really farewell.

Counting the Days

Back in first term, when I was being driven like a mule whose master knows it is insomniac and therefore feels it can work through the night as well as not, I never thought I would be sorry about having to leave IIMA. The departure, when I imagined it, was accompanied by a gleeful whoop and one of the joyous jigs that can only be executed when you are too drunk with happiness to care what the world thinks.
First year is one of those things that you can laugh over only in hindsight. When you're being cold called on a Monday morning by a Finance professor who is under the misapprehension that you know eight different methods to calculated Weighted Average Cost of Capital, it is very difficult to keep your sense of humour. It was at moments like that that my classmates and I, knowing that admission interviews were in progress on campus and feeling that it would be a violation of Human Rights not to tell the unfortunate people attending them exactly what they were letting themselves in for, were overcome by the strong urge to stand by the gate brandishing banners with messages like, "Run, if you value your life," or, "If you come here, you will never sleep again."
Then along came second year. The sheer bliss of a well structured second year at IIMA can only be experienced, never described. Suffice it to say that people who, only a few months ago, could function on a cumulative total of ten hours' sleep in four days and knew holidays as things that only happened to other people now feel hard done by if they have classes more than three days a week and feel peevish and irritable if they are woken up before they have had their full ten hours. The spirit of second year is best epitomized by the tricolour cat watching me type even now, and demanding why I am occupying myself with such trivialities when I could be usefully engaged refilling her bowl.
And since there is no better way to end this without sounding depressed, this is where I shall stop.

A Student's Lament

Oh, hear this tale so pure and true,
And let its wisdom speak to you –
For wisest is the one who knows
How far a little knowledge goes.
A week ago, I read a case.
The Saviour of the Human Race
If I could solve it, I would be.
No ill or want or poverty
Would ever strike this nation more;
But happiness from shore to shore
Would mark the land. Though scholars bent
The greatest part of their intent
To helping cure each scurvy ill,
Though statesmen gave it all their will,
Though they were learned, clever men,
And years spent on it five times ten,
Still, where they failed, we shall succeed –
A single night is all we need.
And we need neither work nor strive,
But trust in Porter’s forces five –
The secret weapon we possess
In lieu of toil and earnestness.
An hour think we, and we say,
“To wish the country’s ills away
We only need to educate
The masses. Let us meditate
On how to do this, for, if done,
The nation by itself shall run;
No poverty, no foeticide,
But joyful mirth on every side.”
How strange that this efficient plan
Occurred to not a single man!
Ah! If the PM only knew
Our wisdom, then as true as true
He could dismiss his Cabinet
With little worry or regret,
And act upon our sage advice:
It would be simple and concise.
“Come, educate!” “Ban foeticide!”
“Bar poverty!” “Abolish pride!”
“Propose a bill in Parliament
To make all criminals repent.”
“Make peace, for war is but a waste
Of time, and one in poor taste.”
“Make all pollution go away.”
“Command the crops to grow today.”
And so we wisely solved the case,
But saw on our Professor’s face
No silent smile of happy pride;
Instead, he did his students chide.
Alas, he did not recognize
That we were clever, bright and wise.
And so, our simple answer spurned,
We to our empty rooms returned;
Alas! For none appreciate
Our words, so few and true and great.

Checkmate

I can't play chess. I'm not bad at the game. I'm appalling. People who are bad at the game have their men taken systematically off the board and their King surrounded by five of the opposing pieces for a checkmate. I, on the other hand, seldom lose pieces. I face a checkmate in the first two moves with all my men still in play and not one of them of any use.

Chess seems to require faculties which I simply do not have. I get along all right when it comes to things like addition sums and learning nursery rhymes, and even an occasional game of checkers, but chess has always been to me one of those deep and incomprehensible works of art that you admire deeply, but whose meaning you know will always elude you.

For one thing, chess requires that you think about several things at once. I have never succeeded at that for more than five seconds. Usually, I concentrate on not losing my King, sacrificing Rook after Pawn after Bishop until the inevitable happens. Sometimes I decide to vary my strategy. Then I launch a full-fledged attack with both Knights and the Queen, completely oblivious to the advances the opposing Bishops are making on my King.

On a few happy occasions I have managed to think about both attack and defence for fully three moves. Then I manage to get in a check, but in the euphoria following that I lose all sense of proportion and send my men on reckless sorties that lead to a rapid change in my fortunes.

In the end, though, it all boils down to one thing: the moment when the other person says, "Check," and I, searching for a means of escape and finding none, think that it is simply impossible that I should lose more spectacularly than this - only to be proven wrong with the very next game I play.

One Down. Fourteen to Go.

Tonight France plays Italy in the World Cup Final.

Not that I knew that before I checked, just now, the Times of India. Nor that I will know, tomorrow morning, anything about where the spoils went. It is safe to assume that they will go to the victor; the consideration of fairness and equity and natural justice - excuse the LAB hangover - being met, it is the concern of the French, the Italians, and millions of football fans the world over, but none of mine.

Next week shall bring with it new dawns, monsoon rain, great learning experiences, and the Midterms. Odd that they do not evoke in one the nameless dread that they did in first year. Odd, too, to have only one exam.

The Managing Negotiations course is over. I am compelled, however, to wonder whether MN has made of me a negotiator any more than SFI is making a strategist or LAB a keen legal mind. A single swallow, and a few case facts, and that kind of thing. Although I dare say summers are more complicated things to make than managers.

Somehow, it doesn't feel like I've been back nearly a month. It feels like a few days, or like a few days longer than forever, but it doesn't feel like four weeks.

What does?

Banned Books

Once upon a time there was a man called Girolamo Savonarola, who restored morality and righteousness to the city of Florence. He thought the way to go about it was by destroying the masterworks of centuries; whether Florence had gone from civilization to decadence is debatable, but returning to barbarism in the hope of eventually finding civilization again seems an unnecessarily complicated way to solve the problem in any case.

Consigning Botticelli's paintings and the plays of Sophocles to fire ended with Savonarola's excommunication; Pope Alexander VI had realized that his restraining orders were being thoroughly and decisively ignored.

It's amazing, though, how many books have been banned or challenged since then. It seldom does much good unless, like Savonarola, you destroy every existing copy of the book - something much harder today than it was in Renaissance Florence. It simply means that people who would have read the book casually in public read it with far greater attention in secret.

The Right to Freedom of Expression is universally applicable, although it might be better for the environment if people exercised it without building bonfires on the streets; if one wishes to express oneself by banning Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it is "trash", one should have little objection to other people expressing themselves by reading it nonetheless.

At least Huckleberry Finn excited such controversy only at the time of its publication. When books written centuries ago are challenged and even banned because they reflect the attitude and customs of the times in which they were written, the logic seems a little skewed.

It is somewhat understandable, even if not ideal, when people want to judge their contemporaries by the standards of the present; to expect people who lived in the time of the old empires and military navies to see freedom and equality the way we do is distinctly unfair. There were days and ages when only the most enlightened philosphers and social reformers spoke of egalitarianism; you can't fault a playwright for not being an enlightened social reformer any more than you can for not being Albert Einstein.

Starting or even encouraging people to start cultural revolutions is not remotely a job for me, though; this was inspired by reading a list of challenged books that included some I could not imagine anyone having any conceivable reason for wanting off the shelves.

On a Shoestring Budget

That's what you are as an intern. Somewhere towards the bottom of the food chain is the fachcha. Below that may be found the phytoplankton, the amoeba, and the chlamydomonas. Then there are rocks and sand. Then you have bits of lint, and then you have the summer intern.

The easiest way to get by on an intern's stipend is to keep in mind that coming from Ahmedabad and its monastic architecture, you should be a firm believer in simple living and high thinking. But that sort of thing is easier said than done, especially when you have the ready excuse that company HRs would not be enthused by employees who come to work looking like they've stepped out of a picture of life at Nalanda.

So you don't have pockets bursting at the seams with hundred-rupee notes, and you do have a desire not to spend your summer subsisting on spinach and steamed cabbage. Even without complicating the issue with conservative ambitions of supping on fondue and Irish Cream (we'll get to that later), you have a poser on your hands.

Here, then, are some helpful and not-so-helpful suggestions for penniless interns in the big city.

1. Everything that the city guide says may not be applicable to you. If it is something related to the price of a meal for two, it is definitely not applicable to you. Providing dinner at half-price to the compilers of restaurant information probably goes down in the books as "Sales & Admin. Expenses". If you are not a card-carrying member of the Press, you are not a Sales & Admin. Expense. You are Revenue.

2. Be sure you're at work on occasions when there is a possibility of lunch being on the house. These include inductions, seminars, presentations and training programmes. It doesn't matter if the training programme is on another floor; judicious timing and a sudden and urgent need to speak to a colleague in the other department will enable you be a member of the luncheon.

3. There is such a thing as a free lunch, and it can be obtained by never doing anything else for free. Even so simple an act as looking up the address and telephone number of a restaurant can be traded for a meal at that restaurant if the other party is sufficiently desperate.

4. If you are at the receiving end of the above strategy, don't be dimwitted enough to concede to the first demand no matter how dire your need is. A bargainer who starts with a sponsored dinner at Mocha will almost certainly settle for a Popsicle.

For those whose list of needs includes abundant quantities of the blushful Hipppocrene, full credit for suggestions 6 through 10 (suggestion 5 is "Don't get sued if you can't afford the legal charges"; this is a practical illustration of how to go about it) goes to a friend who wishes, for the sake of his reputation, to remain nameless. My apologies in advance for any mutilation of his sentiments that has occurred at the editing table; please don't litigate.

6. Save all beer bottles, newspapers and mineral water bottles. They can fetch you money. For instance, our old beer bottles financed two bottles of beer at the fag end of the month, when money was hard to come by.

7. Make sure you exhaust all supplies of free snacks and coffee available in your office. Some offices (like mine) also supply neat stationery that you can use to doodle when you are jobless. (I am all set to release a graphic novel right now.)

8. Always check if your office phone has STD; if it does, stay late in the evenings and avail yourself of the facility to talk to family and friends or abuse annoying people. (Never use your own extension for that last, especially if the invective is aimed at a person in power; do it over the extension of someone who particularly annoys you.)

9. Never miss alumni bashes. Lots of booze is ordered and nobody boozes. You can get to be in charge of the bar and drink a lot of premium whiskey that you would otherwise not have been allowed to touch with a twenty-foot pole. The more enterprising can also siphon off four bottles of whiskey to be enjoyed at home in the company of friends.

10. Start playing poker with people who bet like mad despite having the worst hands imaginable, so you can make money despite lacking the ability to keep a deadpan face.
P.S. It helps if they are drunk and half-asleep.
P.P.S. Be careful; you could be at the receiving end.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any adverse consequences of following this advice. Please don't ask me to cover poker losses, negotiate with enraged employers or come to the police station with the bail money.

Through the Inferno

There are those who could, at this point, quote with justifiable pride the words from the banner borne through Caesar's triumph. But, as a friend commented to me, "we conquered" can be, for some people, a rather inappropriate description of IIMA's first year. A better one - although he was politer about it - would be "we cowered on the sidelines until Vercingetorix had his hands full with Julius, and then snuck quietly past while his back was turned".

Good or bad though, it is over. And unless the glory days of Rome return, complete with the slaves on the rowing decks of the triremes, there is very little that could prove more stressful. The greatest "learning" you get from first year is the knowledge that your limits are a lot farther out than you thought they were; when you've sat up till half-past five in the morning to finish an assignment, run into your classroom at five seconds to nine, and stayed up till three the next night - all this two days before your end-of-term exams and in the certain knowledge that you weren't going to get a good grade on the assignment anyway - you're unlikely to be fazed by stress on the job.

All I can feel right now is relief. Forget placements and grades and social pressure, the biggest incentive to study in fachcha year is that if you don't, you'll have to go through it a second time. No more waiting with bated breath in front of the Quiz Notice Board, no more running through the underpass with the brown envelope on Saturday afternoons...

Congratulations to everyone who has slain, tamed or crept stealthily past the dragon. This will be a day to remember.

In the Year of Grace 1564

Maybe, a few months earlier, Mary Arden had seen the shadow of Venus on the snow. Maybe, on that April morning, the sun shone benevolently from a cloudless sky on the sparkling waters of the Avon. Maybe, just maybe, every lark in England alit by a country church in a small village and burst into joyous paean.

And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.

Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.

In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.

By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.

Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Oompa-Loompas in Large Numbers

I have my Strategy Formulation and Implementation exam tomorrow. I have Finance as well, but I’ve given up on getting a respectable grade for Fin, so it’s only SFI I’m going to worry about.

Due no doubt to a regrettable lack of application on my part, I have failed, in the past month and a half, to become a brilliant formulator of strategy for multibillion dollar international firms.

Take, for instance, a company called – to avoid copyright violation and keep myself from getting sued right, left and centre – XYZ. A couple of hundred billion worth of assets, retail outlets in 47 countries across four continents, fifty billion sales in the past quarter… OK, so I tacked on a few zeroes here and there. It makes it all sound so much more impressive.

I start by identifying the problem or potential for improvement or whatever it is. Step One is to go to the Google advanced search option and see if some philanthropic person has posted the solution to the case as an Adobe document on the Internet. If Step One results in success, the job is done there. If – as is more common – it fails, you curse a bit, close the browser, and define a problem.

So XYZ has massive profits, its CEO owns two yachts and an island in the Caribbean, and it had higher earnings last year than several countries. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing. Nope, it’s perfect, nothing to do, just be careful not to rock the boat.

Do not rock the boat, one types. And then one realizes that may be a little too short for a graded submission, and makes liberal use of the backspace key.

There isn’t a problem I can see, so let me assume a problem. An underground party of Oompa-Loompas is planning to take over XYZ because they don’t like the CEO’s twelve-storey island home. It spoils the view of the palm trees.

OK, now I have a problem. To repel the Oompa-Loompa takeover bid and emerge a better, stronger firm. But that is a very nebulous objective; to be scientific and disciplined and logical and deserving of a good grade, I should introduce some quantifiable aims. God demands Numbers.

I could just add another zero to the profit margin and advise the CEO to gun for that, so that earning enough money to buy XYZ would require the entire Oompa-Loompa population to engage in pillaging ancient treasures for the next six decades. But no, five hundred billion is an obscene figure, and I doubt it’s achievable in any case.

I haven’t any other numbers, so let’s find some quantifiable parameter and give it a Number. The state of the CEO’s relations with the Oompa-Loompa chief, that’s one. When all is peace and light and friendship, the Number is one, and when the Oompa-Loompa chief is busily handing out the Violet Beauregarde treatment, the Number is zero. The way things are at the moment, the Number is roughly 0.05.

Objective: The Number should be above 0.95. (An argument about whether daffodils are prettier than lilies is acceptable.) (A full description of how the Number is calculated is provided in footnote 4(a) to Exhibit 25.)

Strategy: Offer the Oompa-Loompa chief $25,000,000,000 to tell the people back home that the twelve-storey house is just a mirage. Back it up with the theory of relativity, and fund research on bending the space-time continuum to solve the problem. There may be some legal issues involved in the bribery though – no, wait, there is no group in the entire universe that has authority over human beings and Oompa-Loompas. No trouble there, then… Now we just fork another hundred million or so out to a mad scientist to come up with the physics of the explanation, and we’re all set.

Time Horizon: An hour to call the Oompa-Loompa chief and explain the proposition, another two hours to arrange for the money transfer, thirty seconds to make a trans-Atlantic call and three minutes to tell the Head of Research to stop playing with his toys and expound some reasoning. Totally, 183 minutes 30 seconds. Allowing some cushion for the telephone lines being busy, 184 minutes 14 seconds.

Positive Outcomes: The Oompa-Loompa chief keeps his sceptre, the CEO keeps his yachts and mansion, and XYZ will shortly be able to finance a submarine or so.

Negative Fallouts: Well, it just may happen that the Oompa-Loompas throw their chief in the chocolate river and go at the CEO’s mansion with a truckload of dynamite and a match, but then again it may not. And anyway it’s worth the risk.

As was writing this.

Methods? Or Madness?

You know that dull, sinking feeling you get when you're on a ship that's going down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the nearest dry land and you suddenly realize that the sole lifeboat has sprung a leak? It's a feeling not many people would know first hand, so if you don't know it, imagine it. Then square it and then multiply it by a randomly chosen number greater then twenty. That'll give you some idea of what it felt like to sit in the exam room on Saturday afternoon and skim the QM paper. And that was before one read the instructions at the beginning and saw all the double-whammies.

And then there's the issue of selling ice cream in Moscow. The importance of marketing is all very well, but if I were selling ice cream in a city where it was an occasion if the temperature touched twenty-five on the Centigrade scale at the height of summer, and if people were actually willing to buy enough of it that I was not run out of business in the first week... I would be at least marginally less worried than I would have been had I been vending Popsicles in the Gobi Desert and still not had people out on the streets clamouring for my product.

I have endterms next week too. It's an odd sort of limbo here, where you're perpetually either convalescing from one lot of exams or just getting ready to face the next set. To cap everything, it never seems to make a difference how much you prepare. I spent most of Thursday and Friday either studying in the library or studying in my room, and I will still have to rely on a healthy combination of divine grace and a lenient evaluator to get a passing grade on the exam.

As for what's coming next Monday... all I can do is take a few deep breaths, make sure I have the cyanide capsules handy, and go to the tumbrils.

One a Penny, Two a Penny

A week since course bidding, but somehow I don't feel as though I am much more focused or aware of what I am doing and where I am going as a result of knowing what I will be studying in fourth term. Let me qualify that. What I will allegedly be studying in fourth term. I will not commit the sacrilege of suggesting that second year is actually meant for work.

For the same reason I will not say that there was learning from the bidding process, but it was fun. I did give a small start of horror when I logged in to the bidding server and realized that it was nine minutes ahead of my computer clock - my computer being four minutes ahead of the classroom clock so that there is absolutely no chance of my running into class in time to receive the what-kind-of-manager-do-you-think-you'll-make look from an irate professor. But then I figured it didn't really matter. An hour and forty-five minutes, I mean, honestly, who would take an hour and forty-five minutes to allocate points for courses? Especially when, like me, you're more worried about getting out of the institute unscathed than about getting out of the institute with FORM and IPM and MACR under your belt.

The most agonizing part - and therefore, with the benefit and objectivity of hindsight, the funniest - was the tantalizing random number X.

One hour and forty-five minutes after bidding starts, the timer frame will go blank. Thereafter, bidding will continue for X minutes, X being a randomly generated number between 1 and 15.

It was rather like playing Hot Potato as a six-year-old, when the thought being the one holding the ball at the end of the game inspires such dread you would think it really does burn your fingers. Points on MN, you think. MN is climbing, I have to have - oh my God, IDF is running away. Wait, wait - no, please don't stop now, please don't stop... Reallocate points, one eye on the clock, your finger practically trembling on the mouse. And then try to watch all six courses at once while doing a mental analysis of how much risk is acceptable on each.

For once I was actually happy to see the error message on the screen when X was reached and the server disconnected.

Chaos

It's funny how the word was originally used. I don't mean the version in Genesis; that makes perfect sense, not only etymologically, but also, as Hercule Poirot would say, psychologically. But when Hesiod talks about the primeval emptiness of the Universe, and ends that void with, not Gaia and Uranus, but Erebus and Nyx, you really have to wonder. Even given Boeotia's admittedly difficult weather - at least, difficult weather compared to the Isles - it remains undisputedly Greek; the Mediterranean sun over the Gulf of Corinth should have made up for the cruel winters and hard summers.

The downward spiral that ends in the inevitable Dusk of the Gods is something you can understand in Scandinavian myth; the land of the Norsemen would have told Hesiod a thing or two about the cruelty of winter. When snow covered everything for miles around, falling endlessly through a seemingly endless night, with no sound save the wind in the trees and the wolves in the distance, old women who spun tales for children clustered around them before the fire could have been forgiven for thinking up Ragnarok. The paths of glory must lead somewhere.

Admittedly, the children of Hellas were, as a rule, far more cheerful. Their tragedies spoke of grief, but not of despair. One sympathizes with Niobe, but one is not overtaken by a sense of the hopelessness of life and an overwhelming urge to end it all.

This is the point where I realize I'm rambling and wonder how on earth to end this without it being painfully obvious that I am doing it to put myself out of my misery. Having said it, though, it is obvious... and thus I say Audaces fortuna iuvat. And bid farewell, in the end, to the Latin poet.

UFO

No, seriously. I may be a little nutty, but I'm nowhere near completely mad. I am not suggesting that a flying saucer landed on LKP and offloaded its full complement of little green men armed with laser blasters and poised to take over the world.

I'm just saying it passed overhead on a reconaissance trip.

I saw it on Saturday night, when a friend and I were walking back to our dorm from dinner at Curries. I grant that we were high on chocolate, and possibly not entirely cogent, but both of us saw five orange lights hovering in a straight line, too low to be stars and too high to be street lights. And I mean, come on, how likely is it that two people, however questionable their normalcy, have the same hallucination?

There, in a nutshell, are the facts of the case. Five orange lights.

In our defence, we did consider all possible explanations before we arrived at our conclusion. They could have been weather balloons. They could have been lights strung between two reasonably tall buildings. They could have been a college physics project. They could have been bits of a meteorite. They could have been stealth fighters from Never-Never Land. Or they could have been strobes on an alien spaceship.

As to the first option... Who ever heard of such a simple answer to such a complicated question? It's absurd. It's laughable. Nope. Not weather balloons.

Lights strung between two buildings... We really had to think to figure out why that was impossible. Given wind velocity, drag, and friction due to the earth's rotation, and taking into account the speed of light in air and the relativistic effect of acceleration due to gravity on the space-time continuum, the lights could not exist.

A college physics project? But both of us did physics in college, and neither of us ever considered it necessary to have weird orange lights hovering on the horizon to puzzle, worry and bewilder innocent passers-by. That just about ruled out that idea.

Meteorites we rejected out of hand. Shooting stars do not hover. They shoot.

That left us with Captain Hook's minions and spies from E.T. When you have two options equal in all respects (the chief criterion here being viability) you can trust your fate to the fall of a coin, or you can choose the more interesting explanation. We did the latter.

And thus it became our bounden duty to warn the world that the Martians are coming.

Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

The title is an exaggeration. Let me say that right at the outset. It is true that fever pitch (excuse the truly dreadful pun, but it was too much to resist) has been reached, with all the candidates for the SAC elections campaigning with everyone in sight. It is true that at any time, day or night, you might be pounced on and your vote canvassed in the name of dorm loyalty/section loyalty/forget-loyalty-and-read-my-manifesto-because-I-am-the best. But nobody has yet sworn to storm the Bastille.

Having established that - and a reputation for frivolity along with it - let me move on to other things. Important things. Things that are going to shape human thought in ways beyond our wildest imaginings.

Or, in other words, I simply put in the title and started typing without the faintest idea what I was going to say.

It's rather odd; in the end there isn't that much of a difference between the Bourbon lily and Napoleon's bee. You rather get the feeling that if you took one of them and let the ink run a bit, you'd end up with the other. There should be Orwellian philosophy somewhere in that. Or at the very least a hint that Lear should have kept his head and not put so much faith in the filial devotion of Goneril and Regan.

The question of whether they really were to blame is not something I shall torture myself by attempting to answer. There was fault on both sides; serpent's teeth grow in serpents and serpents come from serpent eggs.

All I need to do now is find an excuse to mention Caligula and equine parliamentarians. There is the excuse, there the mention; now I may put myself out of my misery. What can the rest be but silence?