Because Shit Happened Page 7

  2.

  ‘The best way to hate a song is to set it as your morning alarm.’—Mohit Kumar

  3.

  ‘To err is human, to Twitter divine.’—Dhruv Jain

  4.

  ‘Ass does not mean your butt, it means you.’—Harsh Snehanshu

  5.

  ‘Yes, you can read. Now get lost.’—Shweta Pundit

  Armaan and Shikha came up with designs that, frankly speaking, didn’t suit my taste. They were ordinary, after all both of them were amateurs. Nevertheless, the satisfaction of having something over nothing motivated us to give the website a green signal. By 1 am, after a series of attempts to get the right font and right aesthetics, our mental faculties failed us to conceptualize anything else. And so we decided to retire to our respective rooms. Rishabh, however, decided to carry on with Shikha, adding to my anxiety.

  I stayed awake till 6 in the morning before Rishabh arrived. On seeing the lights still on in my room, Rishabh dashed in. He sat on my bed and rested his back against the wall, which implied that he was tired and had a long story to tell. Like a young girl who comes across a secret adult magazine in her parents’ almirah, he anxiously spilled the beans without needing any initiation from my side.

  ‘Brother, it was amazing.’

  ‘What? What happened?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Shikha and I kissed last night,’ Rishabh said.

  I stared at him in silence.

  ‘But she moved away after the brief kiss, saying she felt guilty of cheating on her boyfriend. She said that it didn’t feel right,’ he continued with faint sarcasm in his tone. ‘As you know the kind of scoundrel I am, I kissed her again. Logic, in such situations, is always damaging,’

  We chuckled.

  ‘Didn’t you go ahead?’

  ‘No, she said that she would need some more time. We talked for an hour after that. She broke into tears, sharing with me stories about how her boyfriend used to ridicule her in front of her friends, how he wanted her to become a housewife when they would get married, and how he threw the birthday cake that she made for him because she didn’t comply to make out in the loo the night before.’

  ‘Really? What a desperate guy,’ I said.

  ‘One thing—please don’t tell anyone about it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The reputation of our start-up is at stake here and I won’t say a word to anybody. It’ll be known the day you will announce it.’

  ‘I announce what?’

  ‘Your relationship.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s going to work out. It’s just a fling.’

  I had promised him that I wouldn’t tell anyone. And the first thing I did was send a message to Priya. ‘Call me. Some chatpat news.’

  Chatpat was our code word for gossip. Both of us hailed from small towns, we hadn’t been witness to any scandals, flings, or chatpati stories back in our respective homes and that made both of us big gossip-mongers. The word ‘chatpat’ was second in priority to the word ‘urgent’. The prior provoked interest while the latter provoked fear. No wonder, before I could sleep, I got a call. She was again calling stealthily from the loo without her parents’ knowledge

  ‘Jerk. Tell me the news. Now, now, now,’ she yelled.

  I shared the scandalous story with her. She said Oh My God thrice in the process. At first, I thought she couldn’t believe what had happened, but like any righteous girl, her disbelief stemmed more from the fact that Rishabh had been an asshole to share his personal stuff with me as he didn’t respect Shikha’s personal life or interest.

  It was not that Rishabh wasn’t ethical enough to keep his sudden fling a secret, but the recent turn of events had brought him closer to me in the sense of sharing things, rather than with Anjali or Shikha. To us, we were not discussing a prospective relationship, but a fling with a nymphomaniac employee of ours.

  I argued saying that Shikha had been pretty blatant in her approach. I even called her a slut. Priya reprimanded me for using that word. She said that Rishabh was a man-whore instead, for he initiated it. I couldn’t agree more.

  Sedated by an eventful night, I hung up and dropped off to sleep.

  Rishabh had stopped sharing secrets about his most recent love interest with me anymore, which meant that something serious had started brewing between the two. Meanwhile, there was something terrible happening between Anjali and Rishabh. On two occasions, I observed them fighting loudly at night near the isolated coffee shop. I chose not to intrude.

  However, during this time I could see Animesh, our web developer and a batchmate of Anjali’s, spending a lot of time with her. Hurrying through our first version launch, I pressurized Animesh to perform, but he would prefer spending the entire night listening to Anjali’s emotional sagas instead.

  There is nothing worse for an entrepreneur than to see his prime coder falling in love. Coding, though slightly creative, is an utterly analytical process that requires your full concentration. Love, on the other hand, makes you poetic, expressive. What happens when a coder falls in love? He prefers writing love comments in codes more than codes themselves. And this is exactly what happened.

  Animesh, a brilliant CS student, had been unacquainted with the fairer sex till then. But suddenly, he found someone who liked spending time with him, sharing stuff about her life, even at the middle of the night. Despite being brilliant at his work, Animesh was stupid when it came to such matters. He failed to realize that he was being used as a dustbin because Anjali’s love interest was elsewhere. When his progress in the ongoing project stalled, I knew the reason behind it. I went and talked to Animesh.

  When I touched upon the subject of Anjali, he started blushing like a girl. I chose not to go into too much detail and just asked him to focus on work for the time being. I told him that he had all the time in this world to date whoever he wished to later. He was assured. Three days later, he delivered to us the website. It took significant time and motivation from my side to make him come back to normal and to allow his bright mind to stop being emotional and become analytical instead.

  We created a great hullabaloo about our website on social media. A lot of interest was generated and we registered a good number of hits. But you can’t expect much from a first time coder working with a first time designer and a first time entrepreneur working on his first dynamic website, can you? The product lacked scalability. Adding one more feature required tremendous effort on our part, as we had used a custom template which could not be modified easily. Seeing the inability to motivate the followers on our fan page to use our website, we shifted back to our fan page.

  Two days later, Rishabh turned up in my room.

  ‘I have fired Animesh,’ he announced.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t know how to talk,’ he said.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Do you want me to repeat the bad things he said about Anjali and me?’ Rishabh screamed.

  ‘No, not at all. Your decision, my command.’

  He disappeared thereafter. I went to Animesh’s room immediately. He chose to remain silent on the issue as well.

  A few days later, I observed that Rishabh had stopped talking to Shikha altogether and was accompanied by Anjali most of the time. Bemused, I chose not to poke knowing all the while that the matter involved the love triangle of Rishabh, Anjali, and Animesh.

  It was much later that Rishabh told me that Shikha’s boyfriend cried for her on Skype from France, melting her heart. Her guilt for having left him made her pull away from Rishabh.

  One month later, I met Animesh in the Delhi metro and we started talking. It was then that he opened up. He recounted that he had criticized Rishabh for ruining Anjali’s academic life by involving her in the start-up. The argument happened when Animesh told Rishabh that Anjali was a five pointer and until and unless she could focus on her academics, it wouldn’t be possible for her to get a good job out of campus, to which Rishabh had lost his temper.

  R
ishabh had a fraud internship at his father’s office in the irrigation department of UP which meant that he didn’t have to go to work. Since his work could be managed over the phone, he left for home on June 15.

  We were short of a technical guy and we decided that we would run the website as a fan page as long as we didn’t have a technical genius on board, which we hoped to find very soon. During this time, one of Rishabh’s friends, Tanay, a top-Delhi school passout and a programmer by hobby, joined us. He was smarter than both of us, was a smooth talker, and most importantly, had a car. He joined us to do ‘time pass’—as he told us himself—and we listened to him in rapt attention, more because of his suave diction than the content of his talk. Passouts from this particular school are so gifted in influencing with their eloquence that they could sell you your own underwear at a price above the original.

  Though Tanay didn’t offer much technical help, at least he represented us in various business plan contests and helped us in meeting potential investors. Yes. Two small investors had shown interest in us after they observed our Facebook page and wanted to know more about us. Tanay, Rishabh, and I went to meet them only to realize that they offered us a valuation of only around 20 lakh rupees. We instead chose to lead the venture forward by ourselves before meeting other investors. However, we converted one of them into our mentor, an entrepreneur who had seen the world. Being an IIT-D alumni, he readily agreed to give us free consultation over the phone any time we faced doubts.

  Months went by. Other than selling a hundred odd T-shirts, the only other two achievements we had was a stall space in Rendezvous, the annual cultural festival at IIT Delhi, and crossed 10,000 likes on our Facebook page. The very last cultural festival that we would be attending as final year students, was going to be spent not in ogling chics, not in stradlking hand in hand with Priya like I did the last time, but in selling T-shirts instead. Rishabh had estimated around 1000 T-shirts to be sold in the course of four days with a foot fall of around two lakh people. We had a prime location for the stall, thanks to Pratik who was the marketing coordinator.

  We had borrowed 80,000 rupees each from our parents, totalling 1.6 lakh rupees, and decided on a manufacturer who would deliver us 1000 one-liner based tees at 110 rupees each, totalling exactly 1.1 lakh rupees. We still had 50,000 rupees left with which we printed lottery cards, stationery, catalogues, borrowed a music system, a mic, and handed over 2,000 rupees each to our six volunteers in advance. We were looking forward to make a profit of a whopping 90,000 rupees in the process by selling our thousand tees at 250 rupees each.

  The day of the fest arrived. Anjali, with her booming street play voice, conducted several games at the stall. I remained seated at the stall, turning from a suave entrepreneur to an irritable salesman, while Rishabh went from stall to stalls and networked with other sponsors. Priya arrived to meet me on two occasions but I couldn’t give her time, so she went along with Pratik to attend the events. We started with 250 rupees on the first day only to realize that nobody was interested in buying our tees at all. The next day, we slashed down the prices to 200 rupees per tee, so it fetched some takers.

  By the last day of the fest, we had managed to sell only 240 T-shirts at 200 rupees each. KK, one of my favorite singers, had come to perform, but I didn’t dare to leave my stall. The countdown for the fest to come to an end had begun and desperately, we lowered our prices and kept chanting ‘500 ka 3’ to lure the audience, only to find one or two people coming over. The fest ended for us with the ‘500 ka 3’ finding no takers and we carried the remaining T-shirts, 680 in total, back to our hostel room. We had sold 320 T-shirts at around 200 each, making a revenue of around 64,000 rupees.

  Around 86,000 rupees was our loss. Though T-shirts were nonperishable commodities, transporting those huge sacks to any other college seemed like an impossible task.

  Nevertheless, we did what we were best at. Boasting. We pretended to have rocked the Rendezvous. We actually had rocked the Rendezvous because now everybody in the campus knew about us and we also received numerous offers to sponsor college fests. Besides all of that, we didn’t pay the Rendezvous organizers any money, since we had got the stall through the help of our friend Pratik. Despite incurring a loss of 86,000 rupees, we still proclaimed with pride that we got the stall for free.

  On the brink of the loss, a little joy soothed our wounds. We had made it to the top 50 of Asia’s Biggest Business-plan Competition, Eureka, hosted by IIT Bombay, and we had to go to Mumbai in December to attend the mentor meets.

  In November, without knowing much about the implications, we registered our company as a Private Limited Company under the Company’s Act and robbed our wallets of another 16,000 rupees. A private limited company is a status symbol for entrepreneurs because the existence of a private limited company is eternal. During incorporation, it needs to have at least two Directors and an authorized capital of 1 lakh rupees, which we divided equally between us. Whenever one Director has to leave, one has to appoint another Director in his place and his equity is transferred (‘buyout’ is the correct term). Thus the company never dies even if the Director wishes to leave. One of the major benefits of a private limited company is that its account and cash flows are annually audited, and therefore, all the investors get a clear idea about where and how their funds are being utilized.

  For us, forming a private limited company as students was a way of impressing our investors and showing them that we were ready for a long-term commitment. But the real reason was to polish our resume for campus placements. Yes, we still were quite intent on getting recruited via college as we had realized that it would have become impossible to run a company without money and moreover, after encountering a humongous loss of 86,000 rupees at the fest, we could not convince ourselves of going full time, to say nothing of convincing our parents. Having a secure job assured us of having enough cash to repay our losses and at the same time hire a professional to work for us while we worked for someone else. Stupid thought, as I realize now.

  Our company was registered as YourQuote Marketing Private Limited. We added marketing because we believed we were into marketing and moreover, marketing was a broad domain so if later on we desired to enter areas like retail, the company name would allow us to do that. We hosted a big party in its celebration. The only disadvantage was that it took us three months to get it incorporated and we couldn’t include it in our CVs.

  Did I tell you about my dream to crack the Day 1 of campus placements at IIT Delhi? About Mckinsey & Company?

  The Quantum Leap

  In IITs, boasting about big placements and even bigger pay packages is considered a status symbol. During the placement, the person who had been your best buddy ever since the first year can suddenly become alienated, solely because he might find a job that pays four times of what you might get, changing his fate from yours in a snap. Like when one arrives at IIT, their AIR determines their status—similarly after placements, the big fat pay package determines one’s status. Day 1 of IIT, most often being December 1, is like Judgement Day, a day which everyone, however terrified, looks forward to.

  Months are spent consulting seniors on how to make one’s resume, how to exaggerate so that no one finds out, how to assure a seat even before companies arrive in campus by kissing asses of your favourite seniors, and if there’s no jugaad, then how to ace the interviews by cracking challenging business cases.

  I was a published author of a bestseller, an entrepreneur running an online company with no website but a turnover of around 7 lakhs (Okay, I agree that it was much less and I’d exaggerated the figure in my resume.) and a team of around 15 people, none of whom were working at the moment. And perhaps that became a reason why I really wanted to get into McKinsey & Company. I was so fascinated with the great consulting company that I overconfidently asked all my friends to call me on Day 1 to congratulate me. Being a strong believer in the law of attraction, I had put up a chart paper at the centre of my room stating:

/>   Priorities:

  1.

  McKinsey

  2.

  YourQuote

  3.

  Third Novel

  Ravi, one of my dear friends from IIT, once asked me why I was placing something that was not even mine as my first priority and I defended my stand by making him understand my passion for business and how McKinsey would become my career launch pad. However, the real reason was that it would make my parents proud of me. My mother would be able to flaunt to all her friends, my bank account would be rich enough to enable my Dad to take voluntary retirement and relax at home, and last but not the least, I would be able to hire people for my venture.

  It had a fat pay package of around 12 lakhs per year, which meant that even if I worked twelve hours a day for that company, I could hire three guys at 15,000 rupees per month to build the website. McKinsey is by far the most reputed consulting company ever.

  My parents were more excited than me. They were chanting the McKinsey mantra to every kith and kin that they came across, as though I had already been selected. The reason for their incessant hope was no one but me. My contagious confidence wooed them into thinking that it was made for me.

  When McKinsey had come for a pre-placement talk, I had talked to a couple of McKinsey employees and they seemed really interested in my profile—an entrepreneur cum author. One of them clearly stated that I had two spikes in my resume and the chances of being shortlisted were pretty bright. They said that McKinsey looks for passion and determination in the CV, and I couldn’t stop smiling as I had plenty of examples to substantiate that.

  Almost three months before my placements, I had started preparing for the interviews. Cases, cases, and more cases. My life became a potpourri of mock interviews, guesstimates, puzzles. Priya, YourQuote, and academics became second priority. To my surprise, Priya was quite supportive and understanding.