yes, mr finance minister!

The budget is an event that impacts people across classes and cities. If you take my case, my own personal association with the budget started right when I was 10 years old… I still remember glaring disgustingly at the man with the white beard and white dress talking gibberish, while my dad sat glued to the tv, remote clutched in his hand pretending to take in every word of what he said. That was probably the only time he won a fight over the remote, mostly because I never understood what the budget was all about…. As a matter of fact, I still don’t….

The wheel of time rolled on, and the same routine repeated every year until the eve of my bschool interview. The budget was presented, and as usual I never bothered to listen to the news. My interview was early next day morning!

“So rishi, what do you think of the railway budget?”

Well, readers note that the key here is to appear informed, even if it is not exactly the case. Any bschool student will vouch that someone who lies convincingly with a straight face will make a much better manager than someone who stammers while speaking the truth. So I let myself loose.

“Sir, 42 new express trains have been launched…. A proposal for a capital expenditure outlay toward electrification of certain phases has been submitted and is being seriously evaluated…. The budget toward safety measures has not been adequately addressed….” Readers, note the usage of numbers… you are now acknowledged as the expert!

Read it thrice, and you’ll know it’s all gibberish!!! New trains are introduced all the time, so are new projects… and in the eyes of critics, safety is never adequate… people keep dying in railway accidents even if they spend 80% of their budget on safety measures…. But when you are saying this accompanied by the right articulation, gesture and correct usage of your eyebrows, you tend to send across the right signals… it does help immensely that the bunch of 50 year olds sitting opposite to you have been interviewing candidates for the last three days, bored out of their skin dying to get out of the room and in no mood to read up or watch the news about an even more boring thing as the budget… frankly, they are gonna interview a 100 more applicants before they wind up which would remove any remote possibility of them actually checking up the “facts” I mention in my interview…

Two years of bschool education didn’t improve things either. The ignorance continued unabated… and the interviewers still ask the same old questions to convince themselves that they are hiring the right people. “rishi, what are your views on yesterday’s budget? Do you think it addresses the inflationary concerns that is gripping the country presently?”

Oh! Was there an inflationary concern??? Oh yeah! Dadu has started serving coffee in a smaller cup… that too full of foam!!!! I see what you mean! Little does the interviewer know that the biggest problem you addressed of late was how to insert the table of contents automatically without having to manually type the headings one by one (yes, it can be done… as I found out just before the last submission of term 6)…

“ahem.. sir, I think growth as a factor seeks precedence over the concern of inflation. Let me just illustrate with the example of the metals sector… if you have monitored the LME inventory levels of aluminium or nickel over the last 7 months, you will see a progressive shortfall that is shrinking concentrate supply all over the world.. the budget hasn’t really touched upon these points for example in addressing the concerns of manufacturers….”

Tell me the truth. You slept off halfway through, didn’t you? Trust me, the interviewer would have lost me after the first 2-3 words and would have moved on to wondering why I wore an orange shirt (no, I didn’t.. just giving an example)… but I did not say anything more significant than the fact that a demand shortage was driving prices up!

anyway, the point is that in most business situations, the perception of quality is often much more important than quality itself. You may think that the SLR is the new model of the bike that your girlfriend rides. but if you can camouflage this inherent ignorance with adequate oral chicanery, you can sail through any interview and impress anyone with your in depth knowledge of the intricacies of the incredibly long speech that most MPs sleep through!