That Feeling!

You look at the clock. It's 5 minutes to 10. You know you have five minutes to gather yourself, draw the legs of your pressed pair of trousers upon yourself, wrap the trouser waist around your hanging striped shirt with buttons yet to find their respective holes, plug that fattening (from credit card slips, forgotten invoices, occasional self-photos and a motley of obscure visiting cards) wallet into your back pocket, toss the car keys into left side pocket and mobile into right, guess out belt hoops and weave the snaking leather into it, grab a stale sandwich from the covered plate on the dining table, run the fingery comb through the still-wet hair, glance for a second at your reflection passing behind the mirror, secure your feet and rush out, half closing the door. You know all that. And you have done that, year after year after year. With practiced ease and nonchalance.

Today, however, it's a bit different. You still look at the ticking clock. Yes, five minutes to 10.

Just as you pull the trouser on yourself, pull blood to your leg muscles in an attempt to sprint, you see a pair of little legs on your bed kick air. You see little hands clenching and unclenching and cutting the cake of air at random angles. You hear faint cough sounds, exaggerated breath sounds. You hear this beside your pale sleepless wife, who has just closed her eyes, swollen with unspent nights. You have faint memory of that previous night; lights being turned on, cry-sounds, someone sitting up on the bed with bleary drowsy eyes till the next time you woke up again. To find her still sitting on the bed, with a bundle in hand, hushing it, shaking it to silence. You had gone back to sleep, partly concerned, partly unconcerned. But when you have taken your bath and have freshened up, the faint images of last night pin you to the wall and spills guilt from your perforated skins.

So you decide, while still looking at the clock. Unsure. For sure. You take the bundle in your hand before it explodes and wakes up everyone in its wake. You don't want that to happen. You feel responsible. Embarrassed. Guilty. Loved. Rather possessed by love. A salad of emotions.

Little legs kick your gut. They rumple the pressed shirt. They enter the gaps between button holes. A warm softness presses against your chest. Tiny nails scratch your face-wash dried cheeks. Ooops! hurts. You bring your face closer. Milky air hangs loosely around. And the clock ticks away. It shatters your thresholds, limits, estimations, calculations. No, you can't reach in time. You know that by now. But you are fettered. By the looks from large eyeballs in small sockets. A tiny mound of a nose with flared nostrils. Two lines of lips that curve like a beak.

The expression on the face of the bundle changes. Thousands lines of white appear on the skin of pink. You know that explosion is not far away. In a Hollywoodian effort, you throw all your tricks in diffusing the bomb. In silence. With each tick of the ignored clock, you see your efforts failing. What if he starts a full-scale weep? You sweat from concern. From anticipation. But you still keep at it.

Your hands ache from patting. Your waist feel numb. But there isn't much scope to correct the position and restart the diffusion process. So you hang on. With an aching body, you shake that soft puddle of moving flesh and soak up every moment of it. You are now playing against yourself. Those large eyes are still looking from behind the wide-open lids. You feel tired. Spent.

You look around. Your wife's sleepy face. The ceiling with a fan hanging from it. The trespassing rays of the morning sun through curtain gaps. And then back to your undulating lap. And you notice tiny lids closing down. An elation runs through your anatomy like an electric spark. You feel the moment of "Yes, I can" as you keep working at it till the tiny lump falls silent, motionless.

What you feel is a strange feeling. Of course mixed with warmth from warm water running down your trousers. As if nothing else matters. Your 35-hours work-days fade into trivialities, tight deadlines lose their significance, boardroom presentations seem like water cooler talks. That rush of blood tells you that NOW you have really arrived. The sense of achievement and even more, the contentment dwarfs every bit of success that you have ever felt in your life.

You look at the loveliest thing you have ever created and smile into the thinning air at that defining moment of success. What a feeling! The clock stops. It runs out of ticks.

Slamina

They saw Heaven get emptied. They knew timing was everything. Because who doesn't want a piece of the Heaven? So they both came running. From opposite sides. The thin fast. The thinner a little slow. While they ran for the Heaven, the Gods watched. But how did they watch? Amused or Confused?

The climb was steep. But who thinks the Heaven is in easy reach, anyway? They both clambered, fell, retried. Oh, a game had started. Between two luckiest beings of the earth. Because you don't get around to have this everyday. A chance to rip open the oh-so-beautiful Heaven and drown yourself in it. What a feeling!

Yes, that is what they did. When they finally climbed into where it lay, the rummaged through it, desperate, expectant, delighted and...and disppointed at the other's presence. They snatched it from each other. The dog and the girl. In the municipality garbage bin, they put their faces into the now-torn polyethylene bags from which the stinky yellowy stale Heaven flowed out. The Gods after watching for a while, moved back into the restaurant kitchen.

I tried to stay away from the Heaven, like all human being would for as long as they could. Behind the dark glasses of my vehicle. I pulled the button to lift the glass shut, but it was too late. The stink had entered. And had invaded my insides. I was dead.

A tinted-glassed four-wheeler with a dead human being inside kicked off dirt on the heaven, inside which the struggle for life (not death mind you, as you would usually expect) raged between two four-leggeds.

Oh..., if you are still wondering about the title, read it backwards. Does it matter what sequence I write it? For some, does it matter if they were alive or dead? Or in The Heaven, does it matter if you a human or an...?

Did someone say Trucker?

The muddy amber light in a shape of a round-edged square flashed through my windscreen as I waited at the signal. The rusted wood-metal body of the weathered truck stood in front of me, its tattered tires still on the tar of the drain-water polished road, blocking my view of the signal lights. Slightly irriatated, I turned my car a little to the left and could see the hanging digital clock counting down to green. The blazing red of the signal glowed hopelessly as the santros marutis optras civics of the civilized world nochalantly turned right and moved on, on the lawless road.

I couldn't see what stood ahead of the truck. I was almost certain that there was some sensible head inside a car that blocked that truck's way, which otherwise would most certainly have jumped the alternating sequence of indifferent colours.

And then the truck moved. As it turned right, I looked ahead and realized that nothing was blocking its way. All this while, the truck judiciously had followed the traffic rule at signal that many of my colleagues gleefully jumped. And then, a naked black body rotating a black wheel while sitting high above the optras and civics faded into the the black of the night, away from civilized headlights as the truck took another turn, onto a path less travelled.

Yes, he could. But many of us couldn't. Because civilization is not about what you sit inside. It's about what sits inside you!

The Business of Tragedy

As most of us seated on their drawing room sofas watched with horror the terrible turn of events unfold on the tv screen and read from the internet real-life terror accounts of survivors - for whom clock had stopped inside the two ill-fated luxury hotels Taj and Oberoi-Trident in Mumbai - I couldn't stop looking at the business angle to all this. You can call me perverse, but let me tell you, I wouldn't be writing this if it were not for one particular utterly money-worshipping news channel that tried to mint money even at this hour of national tragedy.

But first, the innocuous business connections. This was probabaly unintended, but I couldn't help but notice the number of times the word "Blackberry" appeared in all the news articles. Many people held hostage inside the hotels got continuous feed of the developments through their Blackberry devices. Others sent out SOS emails to officials and their relatives. Couple of foreign journalists provided minute-by-minute update of the NSG operation to their respective international news sites through their Blackberrys. Given that this was an event watched closely by the international community, Blackberry couldn't be happier. The attention it drew to its handheld device was tremendous and worth hundreds of million of advertisement dollars. All for absolutely free. Another obvious beneficiary is Kuoni Travels, whose board neatly placed at the Taj entrace was aired for several hundred minutes on all news channels without the company spending even a penny for such huge airtime.

Now the true champions of tradegy-business - the news channel I was talking about. On the channel, I was looking at the screen that played images of the last journey of martyrs who died fighting for the country. Suddenly, the screen started showing names of each of the serving officers who laid down his life and urged viewers to start SMSing! I can understand if the SMS is to provide an opinion on the terror strickes or vote for a sensitive question on national security. To my utter disgust, the screen showed a glowing "digital" candle with a text below urging viewers to "keep sending SMSes by typing 'SALAAM' and sending it to some goddamn number so that the candle keeps burning in the honour of the martyrs"! Basically it wanted us to believe that as long as we kept sending SMSes, the candle would keep burning. As if it costs the channel a bomb to keep the digital candle "burning" on the screen. What the hell, I thought. How would it help if all of us were to send 'SALAAM' messages to the channel's number?

Of course, it won't help anybody except the channel which would make a lot of money out of all the SMSes. Each SMS is a premium SMS and while you end up paying Rs. 3 or 6 or whatever for each message, the money that you pay is comfortably distributed by the Telecom company and the Channel. What a perverted way to make money!

Life or Religion?

Every time I go into a discussion with someone on the kind of things (read blasts) happening in our country, I come out frustrated. People talk about how the members of a community should be out of this country, how they are better off in Pakistan and how they are meant to do things like that, because their religion is like that only. How true! And what about us? We hindus? We are a great bunch of people, peace loving, unharming. Isn’t it? What about Babri Masjid and Godhra carnage, where either with full state support or with state turning a blind eye, thousands of innocent people were murdered in broad daylight? I know we have a torn and painful history, but leaving aside the incidents during the partition of India, how many blasts took place in independent India carried out by the members of the other community before the Babri Masjid and Mumbai riots?

If with state support we kill people who are already marginalized, have less access to education and are fewer in number, what do you think the reaction would be? It is there for all of us to see. While terrorism can never be justified, what needs to be understood is its causes and reasons. I have no doubt that Hindus are primarily responsible. And now it seems that some of our spiritual leaders have left pursuing the spirit and started collecting RDX instead. Does the path to God lead via RDX?

Now let’s talk about Hinduism a bit. You see Hinduism is, without a speck of doubt, the greatest religion the world has ever produced. We are a bunch of peace-loving, unharming people who grew up on Bhagawat Gita and the valiant deeds of Ram and Krishna. Valiant they were, because they represented the prevail of good over evil. And how? Since our childhoods, We have been fed on the minutest details of how the good vanquished the evil…the gorier it is, the better is the prevalence of good, probably. The blood dripping arm of Dushasan - severed by the brute force of Bhima - wetting the untied hair of Draupadi, Krishna splitting the body of Jarasandha into two, ripping him from his groin to head by pulling apart his legs, A lion-faced Narsimha laying flat Hiranyakashipu on his laps and tearing apart his heart in his lion-nails…the victory of Good marches on. And I am not even talking about the extremely trivial instances of beheading the evil incarnations or killing them in some other way that doesn’t involve too much of their evil blood.

So what? You may ask. Those were mythical instances of driving the message home…that after all good pervades. Perfect, only except the fact that for us mere mortals, differentiating between the Good and Evil may not be such an easy answer after all. And the moment you think someone (or rather some community) to be the Evil, then there is no one stopping you. Because from our Mythology, we know of all the nice, justified and apt methods to finish off the bloody evil (human beings in our case)

You see, we are a religion that believes in Karma and again..may I ask…how? Oh, by dividing the human race (read Hindu race) is so many castes and sub-castes (based on their Karma, right?), super and sub-sub-castes that those who are out there to find the constituent of an atom by breaking it up in an automatic hedron collider would be put to absolute shame. What a belief in Karma!

The intention of my article is not to bash my own community. It’s meant for some introspection. Just because we are a majority, we needn’t always be right. Just because we ourselves belong to a religion, it need not be the best thing the world has ever produced.

Memories of a Man

Exactly one year ago, after my dinner at night, my mom had called me to say that my grandfather is probably no more. She used probably to lessen the shock it would have on me, because last time I had seen him, he showed no signs of the plans he had in his mind. Plans to leave us, me, unexpectedly, for a place from where painful memories stream into you for as long as you live. He was perfectly fit, an athletic that he was, walked upright and enquired about me, from my job to bringing home his grand grand kid. How would he have loved to see the four generations of us sitting in the lap of one another smiling smiles from different ages! From different worlds separated by times of a lifetime.

I remember the days when I used to walk holding his hand. He was the tallest at home and hence, I loved most to climb onto his shoulders, as it afforded me the maximun view of the world around me. And also the thrill of maximum height from ground. When about to fall, I held on to his hair, not realizing then how it must have hurt him. He would smile and say, "Don't make me like your father". He hadn't lost his hair till he lost his life. Before his aftennoon siestas I used to sit hear him with a grain of paddy to pick and pull his grey hairs. And massage his enormous body to sleep.

He was my greatest saviour. I hid behind him to save myself from my parent's fury when I messed up with my homework or hit my younger sister. Or ventured into the kitchen and ate something I shouldn't have eaten. No one dared pull me from his clutches. It was a place where I got supreme protection from the vagaries of the world. In the loving cocoon of his arms I saw myself grow into an unfaithful someone who hardly now remembers him, unless he is called up and made to remember his grandfather's death anniversary.

There have been innumerable wintry nights when I had escaped from my bed and slipped under his blanket into the warm comforting feeling of his chest. I would put my legs on top of him and dig my face into his neck. He would curl his hands around me and I would sleep stiller than death. He slept only after I did and when I ran a temperature and couldn't sleep, he would pat me and run his fingers through my hair. I would love the coolness of his body then. He would caress his hot and ill grandson till the the smaller of the two fell asleep.

I wouldn't let him go when he left me for a couple of days for work. I would hold onto his fingers, legs, shirt hem, hair - anything I could lay my hands on - to plead my mom not to separate me from him so ruthlessly. I would scream and roll to the floor crying, tears making of mud of the floor-dust. He was my life, then. And I was his life, all through his life.

I called him all kinds of names. Some male, some female. He had come to accept all the naming I did for him and answered when I called him with his weird names. I watched with rapturous attention when he shaved or - even more interestingly - took out his test tube to check his blood sugar. I have ran several times trying to fetch like mad his medicines when he felt pain in his chest. His heart was so heavy with all the love he had for me that it faltered. But, then, I too had loved him as much as one can love someone. I had learnt from him lessons to last a lifetime. Under starry nights, sitting in his lap amind wafting fragrance of mogra flower, I have been lifted off to different worlds, from magic cities in the sky to unknown depth of the ocean. His stories have spun my imagination. They have given wings to my thoughts.

We all go through the grinds of our days. Running, competing, travelling, worrying, trying to keep pace with a world that mostly seem to run faster than us. To hold our head above the rising waters of competition. I do, too. And in all these, we sometimes tend to forget or at least forget to acknowledge adequately people (such as our parents) who shaped our lives and made it what it is today. It was their sweat, their pains, their unslept nights that had kept fueling our lives. At the risk of sounding silly, I wonder, why so beautiful loving human beings ever have have to leave us.

I don't know if my kids would love their grandparents as much. They wouldn't grow up with my parents. They will only get to see their grandparents in summer vacations. They are the children of a nuclear world. They would miss the love from many who could love them probably more than I ever could. Like my grandfather did to me. More than my parents.

When I think deeply in solitude, I can feel a hole inside me. A hole from the realization that I would never be able to see my grandfather again. I will never have his comforting hug. As I write this with welling eyes, I see my grandfather sitting in his usual place - on the verandah in the morning sun - holding the newspaper, tea cup sitting beside him. I turn into a little kid, run to him, lift the flaps of the newspaper, part his legs a little and escape from the world. Into his lap. My face dug into his wrinkled stomach.

You are a matchstick!

All human beings are like matchsticks.

Lined up in the womb you wait for the day, when you slither through the anatomy of your mom into the world. To get a name. And to take up your role in the crowd. Much like a stick lined up inside the box waiting for its turn. Looks apart, fundamentally there isn't much difference between an unborn baby and an idle stick. It's when you come out, your worth is proved. Agreed, some foetuses have congential malformation, but so do matchsticks. Some don't have a head and others are too thin to be striked against. But keeping these exceptions aside, I think most of them would be indinguishable.

All of us come to this world with a purpose. But you may ask, what purpose? Who decides why we came to the world? There is a purpose, but it doesn't always have to be predetermined. The purpose comes blank along with our life, like a tag in a new piece of cloth. We fill it up with our deeds and give a meaning to our existence in the world.

There are people who probably live just because they can't die. I mean there is nothing their sane selves can do to die. Of course, there will always be some who kill themselves. The insane lot. But that isn't easy. It takes extreme motivation to kill oneself. Leaving the suicidal souls, many live because dying is not an option.

Some matchsticks don't light. Even after repeated strikes. They refuse to entertain their pupose. They come out of their womb. But their birth is futile. They live an unlived life. Because a matchstick truly lives when it burns. Only when fire eats it away does it have a meaningful existence.

Some others burn, but they don't light up anything. You hold them to a candle, but they go out before even starting a speck of flame. They die before doing anything of worth. They leave their entire length with you, but that entire body is useless. And there is no second chance here, as there is no second life. Once a stick burns and goes out, it doesn't get to burn again. It doesn't serve any purpose again.

Finally, matchsticks that last and light others, such as a candle or an incense stick, live with a purpose. Some light just one, and others light several before putting out. The later ones live a life of contentment, of supreme purpose. They serve that purpose until their entire body is withered away by fire. They live life to the fullest.

We all have been striked upon. And we are burning. How much can we light up before we put out? How many good deeds? What can we do that stands out of the crowd? Have we thought about our purpose? How do we live our purpose till our entire length burns out?

Can we think of a life beyond (even a little beyond) earning enough to sustain a family, get married, have kids, save for retirement, get the kids to study and get them married and live off pension and die off pension?

A passing thought at the middle of the night. But I am sure this will pass multiple times.

The Three Mistakes of My Life: Another review, a bit different

I had decided not to buy the book. I had read quite a few reviews on the net and more importantly, the maturity I was hoping to see with his successive writings was missing in the excerpts. Assuming that the excerpts of a book are some of its best texts, I was disappointed. I was disppointed even with the first few pages. The starting pages, where Chetan receives an email from an Ahmedabad based businessman - who is quite dramatically popping a sleeping pill after writing each sentence - seemed to me more as a bait to create artificial interest rather than a genuine start to a good story.

However, I almost bought the book (you can't avoid looking at the book at a Crossword store given the sheer volume of the stacks and how it occupies every conceivable corner in the store, sometimes balanced like a house of cards and sometimes like a DNA spiral. Sometimes like the now-stabilized Tower of Pisa and sometimes like Shanghai financial buildings. Wherever you look, the yellow-black book unmistakably stares at you). But as fate would have it, one of the trainees reporting to me got so happy with my paternal mentoring that he decided to gift me this title. So he innocently asked me one day whether I have read the book and I just said "No" (I didn't say "I don't plan to either"). The next day, he was there with this book, neatly wrapped in Crossword gift-wrap paper. I had to read it. It's someone's gift and the feelings of someone ought to be respected.

You can get an idea of the story in many of the reviews splattered across the internet (I plan to do different things) - it's about three poor small town ("Small Town" Ahmedabad, one of India's biggest cities) friends (okay, one was probably not so poor) who won't stop talking the hippiest language ever invented, the language even college going students in some Mumbai suburbs hardly speak (at least in my experience, I have not found many in those places talking like that), who start a business of a sports store that was destined to doom because of the unfortunate turn of events in Gujarat and the "Mistakes" of the protagonist. Don't bother if the "Mistakes" aren't really mistakes. They are made to look like mistakes because they needed to lend their support to the catchy title "The Three Mistakes of My Life".

So what are the "Real" mistakes in "The Three Mistakes of My Life"? Here they are:
- A bit of complacency on Chetan's part that anything he writes sells. I am okay with his language; that's his style. But what an author needs is more thought going into his/her work. That was missing. Why do I say that? There is a three page description of something terribly unlikely happening atop a terrace. But there is absolutely no description when these three "small town" friends landed up for the first time in the dazzling "Australia" (and How?). No description of their feelings, the place, the "wow" factor they must have felt. Nothing.

- Unaccustomed Earth (borrowed from Jhumpa Lahiri's title) and No research. What it means it, when you write about environs that surround you, you may need little or no research. But when you write an entire book about some place you might have only visited once or probably seen through the car window, you need to do a bit of homework. Chetan with his limited bandwidth of time couldn't have known much about how people live in the old town of Ahmedabad. Sadly, that clearly shows.

- Misfit between storyline and the lines of thought of the author. The story is serious. It's about the hopes and aspirations of young people. Of loss. Desperation. It's the feeling of getting caged when you really wanted to fly. Chetan, in all likelihood, may not have felt a lot of these feelings in his life. It's fine if you haven't felt. But somehow, you need to assimilate that longing even though its vicarious, probably by observing the real-life counterparts of the protagonists from close quarters. Chetan can pretty well write about the longings and desperations of IIM grads, or IIM wannabes even though he may not have felt those feelings himself. Because that is his familiar territory. Actually this book is a misfit in my expected Trilogy - "IIT - Call Centre - IIM". When you don't share the feelings of your lead characters, it shows. There is a strange detachment in the narrator's voice.

Having said all that (Puh, it's way too long than I expected!), the book is not entirely without its moments of pride. Few witty lines from Chetan pop up like fire moths in a dark tunnel. But those are too few and far between to make any substantial damage to this review. :)

Who wants to burn money?

The other day, I was reading an article on how to cut down on expenses, in one of the weekend issues of Time of India. The author talked at length about how you should shop fewer times in a month, how you should track and payoff credit card bills regularly, how you should make a note of where most of your money is getting burnt etc. All that is fine. I think most of us know that paying credit cards bills in time saves us the interest cost. But if that was so easy, wouldn't the credit card companies have shut shop buy now? Obviously, no one enjoys paying the interest and only when you can not make the entire payment, do you pay the exorbitant interest charges.

How do you then cut down on your expenses? One thing is certain: Cutting down on expenses always doesn't necessarily mean living a lesser life. "Spending Money" and "Blowing Money" are different things. Spending money can buy you a better lifestyle, Blowing money wouldn't. It would keep on cutting larger holes into your wallet, something I will write about in this article.

1. Understand Differential Pricing

I have made it a point to visit Multiplexes only on Saturday mornings. On weekend prime shows, the ticket rates shoot upto Rs. 150 each, while the morning show price is a mere Rs. 50. Why? Does it cost more to handle the prime time crowd? Absolutely not.

Business owners know that different people have different paying capacity. Their intention is simple: To make you pay the maximum you are willing to pay for a particular product or service. Each one of us have a threshold. For example, you can say, "Boss, I can pay a maximum 130 bucks for a movie at Inox, not beyond that". Now, if for some reason, Inox ticket price is 100 bucks, it's losing 30 bucks from you, given that you are willing to pay 130. If it charges 150 for a ticket, it will lose you entirely, of course.

Hence the catch is in charging different prices to different consumers, carefully studying their behaviour pattern to figure out how much they would be willing to pay. Rich guys (unlike me!) who would like to enjoy their evenings in the weekends would have to shell out thrice the amount I pay for watching a movie.

2. Early adopters pay through their nose

It's pure economics. I remember what my grandfather used to tell me; "When a new product comes to the market, there are not many buyers. So the cost of producing each item is more. Hence the price is higher". He probably was hinting at "Economies of Scale" that we keep harping on at B-school case discussions. However, that is partly correct. When Nokia N70 came out, it cost almost 30 thousand rupees in India. Do you think people went such mad over N70 and gobbled it in such huge quantities that now it's price is a mere Rs. 7800, because the average cost of producing an N70 dropped drastically? Impossible.

Nokia always had "Economies of Scale". It produces hudreds of thousands of phones everyday. The cost of producing an N70, I am sure, wouldn't have changed much in these years. Even when the price of N70 was thirty thousand, Nokia must be producing it for a couple of thousand rupees, raking in a profit of more than twenty thousand per phone! Boy, someone looted you terribly.

Why would Nokia charge such exorbitant price then? It is again quite related to my point above; Nokia knows that people who love to flaunt a gadget before anyone else does would pay anything for it. A very well known fact on consumer behaviour. Now you know that If you buy a "lifestyle" product right after launch, you are being obsenely charged for a product that doesn't deserve that price tag from a pure quality and feature perspective.

3. What Brand?

Branding is not free. If you pay Rs. 2300 for that pair of Reebok shoes, my guess is about Rs. 1000 is spent on branding (read paying the models, sponsoring cricket and baseball matches, buying TV spots etc.). The cost of producing a Reebok shouldn't be more than a couple hundred bucks (ignore those air suspension and all that non-sense features, they don't cost much to the company and don't help you much anyway).

Brand of course guarantees quality because a lot rides on the consumer (and media) goodwill. But, the price charged is disproportionate to its quality because of the branding overhead. Fine, it gives you an aura (really?) and a standing in the society as many would swear, but is it always wise to stick to brands? Let me give you some examples:

The Rs. 180 T-shirt I purchased from a local shop in my home town is still as new and as usable as it was 7 years back. In these seven years, I have used and thrown (or used as dusting cloth) several Adidas', Reeboks and Louis Phillippes.

Second example: A shaving cream (Nivea, Gillete and the like) costs under Rs. 50. Still, it almost lasts the same as a Gillette Foam Can and provides similar lather and soothing effect. The foam can costs about Rs. 300. Why? Because it's upmarket. Same for Gillete Mach III razor (Rs. 300) versus Gillete Presto (Rs. 45 perhaps).

Functionality wise, I see almost no difference. Yet there is a huge difference in price. Who sees what razor I use or what foam I smear on my face?

So here is the bottomline

Go ahead and buy the latest gadgets. But be ready to pay much more than what it's really worth. Be ready to pay for features that you would never use your entire life (like printing image directly from my Nokia mobile). Secondly understand differential pricing. Change your behaviour (if possible, like my saturday morning movie trips) so that you take advantage of the differential pricing (and not taken advantage of). Splurge on brands only when it makes a significant difference to your status, standing, ego etc. etc. Don't spend for the sake of spending on a brand.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are entirely personal. Brand names mentioned are only for illustrative purposes and not intended to reveal any opinion about any brand. These brands belong to their respective owners.

My second note on CAT after "CATme If You Can"

Repost from my blog catmeifyoucan.blogspot.com . I will cease to update the "catme..." blog as it's too difficult for me to maintain so many channels for CAT related discussion. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Foreword
Welcome back to my second note on CAT. I think CAT is a game. It is not exactly a test of intelligence. Neither is it a test of your memory. It just a tricky two hour game where you need to be alert, agile and cool. Believe me, a large part of CAT is a test of your personality - how quickly you make decisions, how poised you are under extreme tension, how you allocate and manage time and how you seek out easy questions.This note is rather comprehensive in coverage, including groundwork for CAT, preparation strategies, learning from mock CATs, sailing through the D-day and tips for GD/Interview. Hope it helps you in your endeavor.Good Luck!

To add some credibility to this note, let’s also add that the author Ashutosh Kar is part of IIM Ahmedabad 2007 batch. He received final admission calls from all the six IIMs. Please refer to his earlier note “CATch Me If You Can” for short-cuts and problem solving techniques for the Quantitative section. You can download both these notes from his website http://www.geocities.com/get2reach . He can be reached at get2reach@yahoo.com.

Let’s Play
I sometimes wonder – where would I be and what I would be doing if I didn’t make it to the IIMs. I honestly don’t see myself anywhere, except of course trying to bell the CAT one more time. Before I go on to tell you what to do, what not to do and how to prepare, let me make one thing clear. CAT is not for people who can do without an IIM. I have harped on this point earlier too. If you think IIMs are where you ever wanted to be, there is a good chance that you actually land up there. Stay passionate and top it up with pure unadulterated HARD WORK. There is surely no easy way out to grab the CAT.

Words such as these may sure sound like a dragged on cliché – but let me tell you, Quants, Verbals or LRs come much later in your preparation for CAT. You start with a passion and that passion alone can see you through the exam. Everything else is just a byproduct, be it confidence, expertise, performance.

Having said that let me go straight to how you prepare for the various sections.

A little bit of a disclaimer before you start. The views expressed here are solely my own and the strategies I have employed have worked for me. I don’t claim that they would work for everyone. During the course of your preparation, you would find many experts saying many things about how to prepare. My word of caution to you – don’t ask around a lot of people about how to prepare. Everyone has his/her own opinion and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the opinions run exactly opposite to each other. A lot of suggestions will ultimately get you confused. I asked no one. I did what I thought was right for me.

Preparation
If someone were to ask me – what takes the maximum time to build expertise in - I would say ‘Verbals’. Because a command over English doesn’t get built overnight. But if you already have a good reading habit and if you are good at grammar, there is good news. You just need to refine that skill with fast reading, a vocabulary brush-up and certain not-so-obvious rules of English grammar. GMAT English section is really good in these. You can buy the GMAT official guide and other guide books from Princeton or Kaplan and work the verbal section out.

Let me also tell you the advantages of a good reading habit. Even if you think you aren’t exactly improving your grammar or English language skills, you pickup certain things subconsciously. The sentence syntaxes get stored in your mind and when you see a sentence correction question in CAT, you would automatically know whether the sentence is wrong. Or when you see a word whose meaning you don’t know exactly, you would recall automatically the context the word was used and you would be surprised how accurately you can guess its meaning.

As for vocabulary, there is a word of caution. Don’t get obsessed with it. That won’t help you get anywhere. CAT is moving away from vocabulary testing, though the coaching classes still hang on to pure Vocabulary questions in mock CATs. Don’t mug up the Vocabulary lists. Look through them and find words familiar to you. Try to see if you know their meanings. However, while reading if you see a new word, note it down along with a couple of words that followed and preceded it so that when you later look the word up in the dictionary, you exactly know how it was used in the text.

Regarding reading comprehension, what you need most is concentration with a little bit of technique. When you read a passage that is not engaging (which many of them certainly are), your attention tends to drift away. Though you keep on running your eyes over the text, you actually don’t understand anything of what is written. Relax, that is very common.

You can start by having a positive attitude towards reading comprehension passages. Think in your mind that the passage is interesting and you are going to know what is there inside. ‘It’s sure something new to me and I want to learn what the author is trying to say’. This attitude makes your task easier and you start understanding what is written. Moreover, if you have developed liking in a wide array of subjects, there is a high probability that you would enjoy reading whatever is given in the passage. But I must say that you should learn to concentrate while reading those difficult passages. If you are not able to, work on it – forget everything else while reading a passage and try to get absorbed in the subject.

The eye-span thing worked well for me. I could improve my speed by not going through each word one by one, but by breaking a single line into two parts and reading a single line in just two eye movements. This is called increasing your eye-span. You can try this out. It works! So, you read half a line at a time and not 5 words one at a time. Don’t get too bogged down by a line if you don’t understand it. That line may not be needed at all for answering the questions. However, try to be extra-cautious about the starting and ending lines in a paragraph because in a well written article, the first line explains why the paragraph is written and the last line gives a short summary of the whole paragraph. Even if that is not the case, reading these two lines gives you a fairly good idea about what the paragraph is trying to say. If you don’t understand what is inside the paragraph, you can revisit it if a question is asked from that paragraph. But don’t spend undue time in trying to understand each and every line, unless the line seems to absolutely critical.

Some say it’s a good idea to run an eye through the questions before reading the paragraph. I have found it dangerous. I lose valuable time in reading the questions. Sometimes the questions themselves are so difficult that unless you read the paragraph, you won’t understand what the questions mean. You are in a soup if you end up spending 2 minutes in reading the questions and understand nothing. My suggestion – forget the questions. Start reading the paragraph right away. Underline important names, keywords etc. as you go along.

Now coming to Logical reasoning, I believe it’s a skill you can’t do much about. You need to have the knack to crack the logic behind the question. Your thinking should be clear and systematic. However, I feel there are couple of things which if taken care of could improve your speed further in that section.

First, try to use visual tools to understand the question faster and build a map so that you don’t jumble up thing later. Say if Sita is the sister of Nita and Radha is the mother in law of Nita and Gita is the daughter of Nita, there is a high chance that you end up confusing the names and end up with Sita being the daughter of Gita. You could do well to draw a family chart and keep it in front of your eyes while you solve the question. Develop your own shorthand notation for various things. For example, don’t write ‘Nita’, just write N (provided all the names start with different letters). Similarly for questions in which you are given some clues and you need to fill up all others (Prof A, B, C teach subjects X, Y, Z on days P, Q, R, then some clues and the question asks you who teaches what on which day), draw a grid immediately with one column each for Prof, Subject and Day and try to match them. You can employ various techniques such as writing all possible options in a grid and eliminating them progressively as you keep on reading the clues and apply your logic.

Logical reasoning is unlike any other section in CAT. It is a high risk game. From my personal experience I can tell you – sometimes it’s like a nasty trap. You think the question is simple and you go after it. Say even after spending 5 minutes you are not able to crack it. You think why leave the question when I already have spent 5 minutes on it? Just one more minute of try and I can quickly answer the 3 questions that follow. You are already into a trap where you think that the question can be solved anytime with a little more effort. After 10 crucial minutes are gone, your heart starts racing. You don’t know whether to leave it or not. It’s painful because you have spent so much time on it – Do you then move on? When do you decide to move on?

There is no simple answer to this. If you think CAT is all about having strong fundamentals in Quants and a great deal of knowledge in English language, you are probably not correct. CAT is also about making decisions quickly. Which questions to attempt, when to leave a question and move on, what to attempt first, how to allocate time. These softer things play as much a role as any Quant or verbal skill does. Read a question and see if you have solved anything like that before. Can I crack it in given time? Does the number of questions that follow the LR justify the time I am going to spend on it? Learn to make these decisions.

Logical reasoning questions can’t have a well explainable strategy. I gave some hints; you can develop your own strategy that suits you the most.

Let’s come to my favourite subject. The quantitative section. There is not really any ground work to be done in quants except mugging up the multiplication tables, squares and cubes. You would find information on these and on various short-cut techniques in the ‘CATch Me If You Can’ document that I prepared. Most of what you will need in Quants section would anyway be provided by your coaching class, if you join one. If you are not joining one, you should seriously consider buying the material from someone else and register at least for the mock tests. If you don’t appear All India mock tests, you probably don’t want to appear in CAT.

Quants is one area you can improve upon a lot if you work systematically and intelligently. I remember when I started solving Quants, I used to solve the section tests of IMS. I could solve only about 10 questions in 40 minutes with an average of 3 mistakes per test. This is no doubt a fairly poor performance. Not that I was bad at Quants or something; I was pretty good in Quants having been selected for the National Mathematics Olympiad – just that I didn’t have the kind of agility needed for CAT kind of questions. Weeks before the actual CAT, I could easily solve about 20 questions with an average of 2 mistakes only. This number improved to about 23-24 while my target was 27-28. Though I don’t remember attempting 27 questions ever in any mock test, 22 was a fairly good number given that the cutoffs normally hover in the range of 10-12 (again this is my perception and not a vedic dictum)

If I list down the factors that helped me improve my speed, they would in the order of significance be:
1. Practice, practice and more practice
2. Use of shortcuts, quick calculation etc. (Refer to my guide on shortcuts ‘CATch Me If You Can’)
3. Careful analysis of which questions took more time and why, which questions were omitted, why were some easy questions not attempted, how do I figure out which questions can be solved in a flash etc.
4. Willingness to improve my speed every time I attempted a paper
5. Confidence that if I solve a question, it would be right because I have done similar question many times before.

You see, practice gives you confidence. If you have attempted CAT-like full length papers many times and have scored well, in actual CAT you would not be that nervous. Most of CAT questions would look easy to you and you would know how exactly to solve them. I was surprised to find that the CAT-2004 Quant section seemed like a kid’s job to me and I finished answering 30 marks in just 15 minutes!

How much time per day?
This is a nagging concern. Given that many of you would also be appearing for their finals in your respective degrees, devoting time towards preparing for CAT could be difficult. If you start very early, say in December, you could devote 1 hour a day till say July and still be fine. But if you start in April or May, you might need about 2 hours every day. Don’t increase the number of hours per day drastically as CAT approaches. You will break yourself. 4-5 hours a day is okay couple of weeks before the CAT. You should be preparing at a healthy pace when CAT approaches. Not last moment cramming.

I would any day suggest joining a class-room coaching. I have benefited a lot from it. Not that the professors there are great and you get to learn a lot from them. In most cases, they just solve what is scheduled for the day and then leave immediately as their billed hours get over. Most don’t stay back after the class to answer your personal questions because they are not paid for that. But yeah, some good professors in my coaching class did stay back.

What helps you most when you join a class is that you fall into a routine. Everyday you attend the classes, spend two hours solving questions, work for the next day and appear for tests almost every other day. More importantly, you get to mix with sharper people, learn from them and get motivated by them. Additionally, the handouts given by the coaching class that I joined had some real good questions not given in the material.

The best thing you can do while preparing is be regular. Appear classes regularly, write tests regularly and judge your improvements regularly. That way you maintain a healthy pace and slowly build up confidence. If you stop preparing for say a month, you speed drops significantly and you start worrying.

Mock CAT and the D-day CAT
Mock tests are extremely important. However, don’t enroll for all kinds of tests being conducted out there by all kinds of coaching classes. I think the 8 SIMCATs by IMS is just the right number of tests you need before the D-day. Prepare well before the tests and don’t take them lightly. Every time you appear for a SIMCAT, try to surpass your previous score and percentile.

However, don’t get frustrated with the mock CAT percentiles. I never scored great percentiles in mock CATs for various reasons. However, I kept on improving and that is important. It never ceases to surprise me how wildly the mock CAT and actual CAT percentiles vary for many people. I have seen friends do extremely well in mock CATs and yet not get a single call from anyone of the IIMs. I believe what happens on the actual day is a different ball game altogether. And you need to play that ball well. By staying confident and cool.

Tell yourself that you are better than all other guys who have come to the exam hall. The astronomical number of people appearing for CAT is not a true representation of how tough the exam is. About 80% of them don’t have any clue as to what it takes to crack the CAT. I have never heard any of my friends ever securing less than 80 percentile, no matter how under-prepared they were. So, you are not competing with 1.6 lakh people; it’s just 32,000. And you need to be in the top 3000 or so to get a call. That means it’s just about one in 11 and not 1 in 100 as the coaching classes and the media want you to believe. Boy that does something to boost your confidence!

Every time I came out of mock CATs, I found myself not satisfied with the kind of questions asked. I was even more disillusioned with the answers to RC passages. I always thought that in an actual CAT there won’t be any controversial questions and whatever I answer would be right.

Whoa! I just scrolled up and realized how long this note has become. Okay, let me wind up quickly. The final hurdle in your journey towards one of most hallowed places in the country is the GD/Interview.

GD/Interview
I don’t have much to say about interviews because they are like any other interviews where you just go and present yourself. No rocket science involved. Plain vanilla commonsense. Be it having proper dress sense, showing confidence, making eye-contact or greeting the interviewer while going in and coming out. I don’t think I need to harp on these any further.

What really amazes me is the kind of stories that go around about preparing for a GD. They are further fuelled by the coaching classes that try to scare your guts out by asking you to remember scores of strategies you must use to cut into the discussion. Shall I mention those strategies? Those are utter crap!

Let me tell you some of the strategies I was taught in my mock GD session:
Better be the first one to start. You get an added advantage. You lead the discussion.
Try to figure out who is the weakest speaker. It’s easy to cut him/her short.
Try to raise your voice which getting into the discussion and level your voice afterwards.
Try to summarize the discussion when you see no one else is talking much sense.
Try to bring the discussion to track if it goes off-track
You should be coming into the discussion at regular intervals and when you come, try to speak for about 30 seconds for the judges to take note of you.
See if someone is pausing for breath. That is the right time to come in and just grab it!

Utter nonsense! Don’t buy into these terrible strategies that go around year after year. I would probably not speak at all if I try to apply some of these in an actual GD, let alone cutting someone short.Probably these stories go around because there are far fewer people attending GDs than the CAT. Many are not aware of what actually happens in a GD. Moreover, the coaching classes probably want to psyche you out so that you fall back on them for a decent dose of GD tactics.

While it would be far from correct to say that these strategies are never going to help anyone perform well in a GD, I believe it’s senseless trying to apply some foreign knowledge and manipulate your natural self.

I am about to end my note. I would say that before you go to a GD, talk to the people present there. Show a GENUINE interest to be friends with them. Ask them about their calls, place, background, name and everything else. Don’t play tricks. Just be friends. It helps you in two ways. One, your nervousness withers away. Two, when you go the GD, it’s not a GD anymore. It’s just a canteen discussion among friends. Speak your heart out. Speak as if you feel for the topic and feel for your stand.

You would not realize when you cut someone short, when you talked for 30 seconds, when you argued hard, when you supported someone and when you summarized what you understood. Be in the discussion. Forget everything else.

Good Luck!
Gaurav said... hi ashutosh!gr8 work man! i hope i can share ur work elsewhere with credits to u.2:04 AM
Santosh said... Hi AshutoshReally a great work.I have got the untold and real picture of cracking the CAT.Based on your personal and practical experience.The points mentioned about RC is touching to almost every candidate.Hope I'll share this info to my friends.Thanks for tips.Santosh10:40 PM
Bharat Jhurani said... Thnk u so much Ashutosh.. the tips r really useful... Do keep us updated...1:18 AM
kulkarniy2k said... Hi Ashutosh!!That really did a lot of good to my confidnce... Thanks a lot!3:05 AM kulkarniy2k said... Hi Ashutosh!!That really did a lot of good to my confidnce... Thanks a lot!3:05 AM
s said... hi your catch me if u can document requires a password. wt wud it b7:44 AM
Ashutosh Deo said... Great Article! Boosted my confidence!Thanks a lot for your sharing your clear and practical thoughts.5:41 AM
Adwait Deshpande said... hi ashutoshreally nice to hear ur views about the cat exm and gd's tooi am sure they will help all the cat aspirants .so just 15 days for catany last minute tipsPS i too do not support last minute cramming9:09 AM
abcde19282002 said... Hey dude cn v hv a link exchangemba-knowledge.blogspot.comb-school.blogspot.comjust reply me if u wanna go ahead...11:04 AM
shyam said... hi ashutosh thank u so much........the tips are really useful.........but ashutosh i need u cat 1998-2006papers so please help me again.....thank's a lot your bettre idea for methank u9:43 PM
Apsara said... wow! what an awesome article :)....im feeling so positive...the best part is where you say "starting early, like in december...1 hr is okay". actually, i have started preparing for CAT-2008 since last month,and i try to give 2 hrs each day, but i still felt insecure thinking about people who started 2 yrs before, or 1.5 years ahead of the eaxm , but i feel better now!i need to work on my general awareness, bus. economics etc along with basic cat prep. , butthat seemed too tough until now :)...a very inspiring artile, thank you "sir":)8:51 PM