THE DEVELOPER
1 A term in the native tongue that means ‘HAIRian woman’.
2 The first ‘Su’ was from ‘susu’, a native word meaning ‘pee’, and the second ‘Su’ was the first two letters of the name of the developer’s company.
3 It goes up to 70,000 litres on holidays and on hot summer days when people tend to drink more and therefore urinate more.
4 Because it rhymed with urine, according to one disgruntled British film critic who wasn’t invited that year.
A TRAUMATIC INCIDENT FROM THE EARLY CHILDHOOD OF THE CMD
1 It was little more than an alcove really, the toddler’s room, and intended by the evidently pious builder to serve as a religious ritual room, meant to be adorned to full capacity with portraits and figurines of the gods and goddesses and their various animal-transports (along with separate parking for the animal transports) – as well as the various prayer-worship-ritual-related paraphernalia such as bell, oil lamp, incense sticks and incense-stick holder, sacred ash, etc. – that both the parents had grown up addressing their fears to and celebrating festivals about and fearing and being in awe of, if not actively worshipping. But since neither of the parents could afford the mind space (or the residential space) for religious activities in an exclusive big way, they had converted it into a cosy sleeping nook for their offspring.
2 At this point of his narrative, there would be a welcome interjection from the CMD’s interlocutors, extolling, in a tone and attitude that was a carefully calibrated admixture of awe, fear and indulgence, the CMD’s legendry tantrums, and the CMD would come off all surprised and apologetic and half-embarrassed about it and make it sound like a personal failing that his loyal subordinates have been so supportive about by putting up with, but what could he do, he was tantrum-ish even as a toddler, as they can see now from this story, and the female members of the Leadership Team quickly took the opening to affirm that he still was an adorable toddler at heart, and was it any wonder they all loved working for him and he was so good with people, etc. When all this was going on, the Senior Vice President (Leadership Development and Talent Management), who had been listening to everyone silently, wanted to point out a distinction that nobody else seemed to have noticed, viz., the toddler-CMD’s tantrums were strictly meal-related and sleep-related and bodily discomfort-related and did not have anything to do with dipping sales numbers or market shares or rising costs or unhappy clients. But by the time the SVP (LD&TM) had made up his mind to speak, the CMD had resumed his narrative, and he was not quite sure about interrupting the CMD with a potentially controversial point – the last thing he wanted was to spark a tantrum about his tantrum – and so he let it go.
3 The toddler-CMD’s paternal grandmother was the only one he knew growing up.
4 The adult-CMD himself did not seem to have any memory of the incident. Rather, whatever ‘memory’ one might say he had of it was not really a memory so much as a post-facto, reverse-engineered, mentally imaged narrative based on the story he had heard several times over the years from his female parent. And it was understandable too, if he had no memory of an incident that had happened at a stage of childhood when the child (him) was, generally speaking, not yet old enough to form memories that would be easily retrievable in the distant future.
5 Editor’s Note: Readers are hereby advised that this particular narrative is the Authorial Narrative, not to be confused with the narrative narrated by the CMD’s own vocal chords to his Leadership Team from time to time at The Club or The Lounge. Though, of course, there are bound to be factual overlaps between the two, and though the story versions are identical, the narratives themselves are not – in the sense that the points of view of each, the context of dissemination and the motives/objectives behind the dissemination are distinct and separate.
6 This again elicited exchanges of knowing looks and suppressed smiles among members of the Leadership Team – with the exception of the SVP (LD&TM) – which the adult-CMD pretended to be too engrossed in his recounting to notice, though he did make a mental note of the reaction (or the lack thereof) of the SVP (LD&TM).
7 At this point of his life’s journey, the toddler-CMD had only been partially toilet-trained, a matter that had begun to cause much anxiety and consume excessive mindspace in the minds of both the parents, also leading them to introspect frequently on this and other (as it seemed to them) mutually reinforcing lacunae in their parenting strategies.
8 This was also why the female parent had agreed to have her offspring’s female grandparent, with whom she did not enjoy above-average temperamental compatibility, cohabit with them, for the latter, being far more experienced in offspring management across age categories, was expected to lend a helping hand to the female parent precisely in crisis situations such as the unfolding present.
9 One of the bonding elements between the two – notwithstanding the toddler-CMD’s female parent’s suspicion that her matronly neighbour (whose husband was a perennially sweat-soaked medical rep with dark patches on the armpits of his terrycot shirt) belonged to a status band that fell outside and below the lower extremity of the status band of the social elements she could afford to be seen associating socially with without compromising her own social station in the public eye – apart from the medically mandated energetic circumambulation of the neighbourhood park, was the extreme congruence of their opinions with regard to the nature and utility of mothers-in-law.
10 The pun was unintended by the female grandparent.
11 The exact phrase reported to have been used was ‘screwed his happiness’.
THE BRF
1 The same shade as the one used by the Dutch national soccer team
2 The executive committee (EC) was fully representative despite its number of members being less than the number of identities that make up the LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF because many of the EC members identified with multiple discriminated-against minority identities. The general secretary of the LGBTPOCQQARSTUVWXYZLF, for instance, who was also an EC member, identified as L,R,S,U,V,Y and Z – making it unnecessary to have separate, stand-alone representatives for L,R,S,U,V,Y and Z.
3 The original 9,000-word draft statement that was prepared after incorporating the political concerns and editorial inputs of all the nine EC members was rejected by Q9000++, the queer Artificial Intelligence that happened to be the chairman of the EC and the supreme commander of the LGBTQQARSTUVWXYZLF.
4 Pun unintended.
5 Special Task Force
PARTICIPANT OBSERVERS
1 The unauthorized feeding and its consequent effect upon the canine’s habitat preferences, not the canine itself, as the husband hastened to clarify in order to pre-empt any accusations of cruelty or lack of empathy toward animals.
2 Many apartments in the Society were owned by the same family, but registered in the names of different family members, and in matters of dispute involving any one of the residents of a given family versus non-familial residents, members of the same family who might otherwise be residents of different apartments or even on opposing sides of some long-standing intra-family strife were, nevertheless, all on one side (their family member-Society resident’s side) – generally speaking.
3 It was their mutually agreed upon policy, following a daytime theft that had taken place in their Society in an apartment in the next block a couple of years ago, never to leave the apartment unlocked even if they were stepping out for ten seconds. In the case of the theft that had taken place, the wife had left the apartment to go downstairs to the presswala round the corner – having only bolted the apartment – and come back to find her iPad, iPhone and MacBook, all of which she had left on the dining table in the living room, gone. Her marriage, it was rumoured, never recovered from the tragedy.
4 He was on a one-year sabbatical to finish his second PhD.
A CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED
1 Indian Institute of Leadership Development and Executive Excellence, Sambalpur, Orissa
2 Excluding the dupatta, which she liked crumpled
3 The cabinet, not the living room or shelf
4 Ocean’s Eleven for the fourth time, Ocean’s Twelve for the third time, and Ocean’s Thirteen for the second time
5 Incidentally, a CHRO trained by her hubby, a detail which they discovered only post-facto, in the course of a 360-degree post-mortem that they conducted on the incident, its lead-up, and its repercussions along the multiple axes of both their lives, considered individually and as a two-member unit.
ALL QUESTIONS ARE COMPULSORY
1 Another instance of the petty politics of body parts. Because the muscles of his right eye were weak, his left eye was susceptible to strain on account of taking on the additional responsibility (for coordinated movement so they could achieve their common goal of delivering world-class 20/20 vision with minimum fuss and without drawing attention to themselves) of its weaker partner, which caused him to assume that the problem was with his left eye when it wasn’t – it was his right eye that was the problem but it, by being cleverly mum and all low key, ensured that the left took all the flak for being a whiner and all the blame for being a pain in the head.
2 Lucrative from the perspective of yield determined by the ratio of the quantum of marks a given segment of the examination syllabus is typically allotted in the question paper and the quantum of time-effort needed to prepare for questions from that segment of the syllabus.
3 It never occurred to Roll No. 27 to include in this equation such additional variables as teacher inputs, post-school tuition costing thousands of rupees that his own parents (unlike that of his competitors’) could ill-afford, fitment between student interest/aptitude and subjects studied, a sense of belonging to a community of mutually caring co-learners who would (even as they compete with each other) also empower and aid each other in their quests for knowledge, or, at a broader level, an education system that was obsessed less with student assessment and concerned itself more with student engagement.
4 Even though to you, discerning reader, it might be, to Roll No. 27, it was much more.