Quarterly Menses

The setting was one of those voluntary struggles that I put myself through at regular and unforgiving 3-month intervals. The saga started just as the weekend was threatening to end. Late Saturday evening I felt the adrenaline rush which led me to scavenge through the tons of study material. Luckily enough, I had a 4-point task list worked out before embarking on that depressing effort

Task 1. Figure out where the study material was
That didn’t take very long.. I could locate what I have fondly christened as the “Foundation Stones” of my academic pursuit in management in less than 20 minutes. That included a brief ponderous state, where I toyed with the idea of being able to use these foundation stones in any real time construction (you got to see them to believe this). I thought that would be utmost justice keeping in mind how they are physically manifested
Task 2. Figure out what I am supposed to pore over
I was one up on myself on this one. Although I had forgotten to take a printout of the timetable or the admit card, I had committed this vital piece of information to memory. I could quickly sort the stuff into two piles.. one which I did not care for and the other which I couldn’t care for
Task 3. Try and anesthetize
Refinements and shortcuts were necessary.. quick thinking and judgment reduced the pile I had mentally labeled as “couldn’t care for” to just two books. They were of decent thickness. At least enough to get the reaction from mom that they were bonafide MBA study material. My criteria had cleverly baked in a feature where the act of studying them would be relatively painless
Task 4. Study!!!!
The questions were insufferable. The phonetically and alphabetically different multiple choice answers had a dubious knack of presenting themselves as quintuplets to the untrained mind. They were virtually indistinguishable from each other as responses when I attempted to choose one over the other as the suitor for the hitherto banal questions

I attempted to continue my quest for the right choice. I found myself tempted to choose watching “Gabbeh” (Iranian for Colorful Rug) on the World Movies channel versus trying to seduce my virgin mind to bed management concepts like organizational behavior and human resource management that night. My eyes wandered to the television, and I saw Shiloh fall to her death from a cliff. She was holding the baby lamb that lead her up that treacherous trail. My mind automatically raced back to N.. who had led me on this treacherous trail. I hadn’t fallen yet like poor Shiloh.. but was tempted enough to jump off a cliff to avoid the perfectly mundane and predictable day that was yet to dawn.

Here it was.. Sunday morning, I had already committed the near blasphemous act of waking up at 7 AM. Going through the needless-to-detail chores of the morning, I finally found myself at the gates of one of north Bangalore’s prestigious ladies college. The only welcoming sign, I found on the notice board. The university folks actually anticipated my arrival, and to substantiate that, they had my name on a list with a few other numbers coded in there. After a quick restroom break, I eventually found my seat. I could not help but wonder if someone went through an elaborate plan effort like Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathway) and Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) did in the Devil Wears Prada, or was it simply an unsophisticated but trained peons job??

After fifteen minutes perfectly legible, grammatically correct, and seemingly logical, but totally incomprehensible questions later I chanced upon a bright plan. I stopped at each question, and if my mind failed comprehending it in the first reading I conditioned my mind to an auto response to replay the childhood rhyme
“Eena.. Meena.. Mynah…Moe..
Catch the bad boy by his toe
If he cries let him go
Eena Meena Mynah Moe”
The multi-tasker that I am, I allowed my hands that held the sharpened-to-a-needlepoint HB pencil to randomly touch all the available choices of responses…. The one where the graphite tip rested once the rhyme ran a full length and stopped was my answer!!! I thought it was simply brilliant because it seemed better than trying to think, and as a bonus, it also kept me from dozing off. For all the life in me, I couldn’t think of why the Hawthorne Relay Assembly Room or Illumination studies were conducted, and if they did at all, how they benefited mankind, womankind or any kind anyways. Answering correctly the pointed, and obnoxiously detailed questions about the experiments was definitely not the first thing on my mind.

I could feel a few envious and several snobbish ‘he is dunking this one’ looks almost sear me as I stood facing the invigilator with my back to the classroom. This overly detail oriented and queerish guy ran his pen through the instructions and rules manual. He quickly underlined one rule, which said that no one is allowed to leave the examination hall until one hour after the exam commences. I flashed my Guess to him.. they were there dazzling on the pure white dial the little hand on 11, and the big hand on 12. I had endured the mandated exact 60 minutes to get out and enjoy the three-and-half hours of freedom that lay ahead. It was an anticlimax, but I was thinking of N in a nice way when I did this. He was the cause that I was enduring this one way trip to be a management professional. Nevertheless, I couldn’t bypass the fact that he had lovingly gifted me the Guess that was instrumental in getting me out of this muck for now.

For cosmetic reasons and to boost the competitive environment around, I whipped the second book out of my messenger bag, and pretended to be deeply engrossed in studies. The signature Bangalore weather was just not helping that effort.. very soon I chose to put the book to rest and took a leisurely stroll down one of the very few remaining boulevards. That sojourn ended at Adigas’s where the haughty cashier refused to let me have food if I did not tender him exact change. After digging through my wallet and carefully examining to see that I hadn’t pulled out the momentous Cambodian currency or the hard earned per diem US Dollars, I managed to find two crisp Rs. 10 notes. A few toe stamps and several intense salivating moments later, I finally laid my hand on the open butter dosa. I gorged into it while looking out on the street below.. nothing eventful there either. As I walked back to the examination center, I promised to treat myself to some fresh cane juice (a few forgotten pleasures that come back to you when you are by yourself and more so when ones sense of right and wrong is uninhibited by judgmental people)

The second part of the day was slightly more engaging. I settled onto the concrete wall that also served as the seating arrangement for the playground opposite the examination center. There was a brief spell of time that lay between the cane juice treat, and when it would be time to get back and undergo examination about stuff like cognitive dissonance, cognitive resonance or such several other things which I cannot even remember. As I sat there and watched, it seemed like I was in a magic show. There were a multitude of teams, all playing cricket with the felt covered ‘tennis ball’. One influential group was running a tournament and took up more than half the ground. There were easily about 10 different groups that by some rule or order had wedged between one another and were enjoying their game. It was never apparent to me about who was from which group because it seemed like everyone was batting, everyone was bowling and everyone was fielding. At any point there were at least 4 balls in different trajectories about 10 to 15 feet off the ground. It was amazing how this was all working seamlessly and conflict free.

I could not help but recall the amazement and incredulity a few US-based colleagues had expressed about India when they had visited. Until now, I haven’t been able to put my finger on whether it is the chaos here that drives a system.. or if it is the system here that drives the chaos. Whatever it is, I think it surely is more worthwhile studying and realizing, simply because it works!!! And for all the other students like me that are slogging it off to figure out how to manage large corporations make it more interesting and relevant. It would also be a bonus if we could purge them out of our syllabi, and leave the long departed Hawthorne experiment subjects and several such to rest in peace at least now!!! Amen!!