S Anand

I had the courage to walk into Harrod’s today. Rather silly of me, really, since I had about 250 pounds in my pocket, and was wearing an IIM-B jacket with my backpack.

As soon as I walked in, a guard came up to me and said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to carry your backpack in your hand in this store, sir.” Struck me as slightly crazy. What, is it a measure against shoplifting? Or is it like you’re supposed to wear suits in some shops? Or did he just want me to feel uncomfortable? If so, he succeeded extremely well. It’s painful to carry a backpack in your hand, even if it’s got next to nothing.

The entrance led to the perfumes section with lots of French names. I sensibly walked out, and into the men’s accessories section. The only thing in my budget was a teddy bear on display for 19.95 pounds, and I’ve promised myself not to buy any more teddy bears. Went on to the frosted foods section. Looked really nice. For the first time, I walked past meat without a revolted look on my face. I mean, pork was actually packed like a pig, but it looked so elegant. Then to the coffee and tea section. There were some coffee jugs that looked like they needed buying. But not now…

Uptil now, I had consciously avoided looking at the prices. I was window shopping, after all. But the designer jewellery section forced me. There were, of course, tiny diamond rings for 1,000 pounds. I looked around, for the first time, at the people around — who could probably afford these rings. Sure, all of them were wearing suits. The ladies were wearing some kind of sophisticated casual dress (can’t describe it — too sophisticated for me), while there I was, in Allen Solly trousers (luckily), unbranded T-shirt, IIM-B sweatshirt, torn backpack, and IIM-B hip-pack. Unshaven. It speaks volumes of my courage that I decided to explore the section rather than run away.

I began hunting for the most expensive item. Thought it would put life in perspective. I found a necklace for 45,000 pounds. That’s over Rs. 30 lakhs. Being courageous, I didn’t faint. A few rows down, there was a ring (had to be gold) with something big and red in the middle. 135,000 pounds(over Rs. 91 lakhs). Should do well as a wedding gift, I guess. But the pick of the lot was a watch. The tag said 189,000 pounds (almost Rs. 1.3 crores). It was a diamond watch. Let me explain what that means. Watches usually have a strap, right? Sometimes they’re made of steel, right? This one had one that was made of diamonds — with steel between the diamonds. You could barely see the steel. Watches also have a dial, right? That was made of diamond too. I could see it because it was cut. The hands were probably studded with diamonds too, but I couldn’t see clearly. That’s because the glass cover on the watch wasn’t glass, but diamond.

Feeling decidedly sophisticated at this point, I walked up to the Food & Wine section. Again, with the objective of determining the costliest item around. It wasn’t an exhaustive search, mine, but I figure there aren’t many wines that sell at 45 pounds for 0.375l. That was Schilfwein Halves, Wills Optiz 1994. (Don’t ask.) Of the Champagnes, Brut 1985, Savlon, Blanc de Blancs, Le Mesmil was 115 pounds for 0.75l. But the costliest piece on the floor was Montranchet Grand Cru, at 435 pounds for 0.75l. No, I have no idea what kind of beverage it was.

And this is just one floor of Harrod’s. I decided to come back to explore the other floors when I had a suit on, and did not have a backpack. So I walked down to Hyde Park, where hundreds of birds insisted that I feed them my lunch, failing which they would take it by themselves. After having escaped with a few cake crumbs, I made my way back to LBS.

A rather tiring day.

• 09:00 am: Wake up, and still feel sleepy.
• 10:00 am: Leave for LBS
• 11:00 am: Reach LBS. Check mails. These days, it takes a couple of hours.
• 12:30 pm: Attend India Club meeting for Diwali celebrations. Very well organized.
• 01:15 pm: Presentation by Booz-Allen & Hamilton. Pretty good. Manage to stay awake.
• 02:15 pm: Eat lunch. Stupidly eat prawns without seeing the labels. Almost vomit.
• 03:00 pm: Group meeting. Discuss Dell.
• 04:15 pm: Fall asleep in AT Kearney’s presentation.
• 05:15 pm: Stay away from anything that looks non-veg during tea.
• 06:00 pm: World economy class. Excellent professor. Terribly funny. Everything makes sense.
• 07:00 pm: Guest lecturer. Fall asleep.
• 08:00 pm: Back to Prof. Scott. Wake up and listen.
• 09:00 pm: Answer more mails.
• 10:00 pm: Chucked out of computer center. Go home.
• 11:15 pm: Have dinner.
• midnight: Crash.

I had my first case interview today. Four of us (3 exchange students and one LBS MBA grad) sat together and tried giving each other cases. It’s an excellent learning experience. Had I gone in for a case interview without this preparation, I’d have flunked.

Our class on Financial Analysis was good fun — and an exposure to yet another illustration of internationalism. Prof. Higson (in his perfect British accent) mentioned that he was part of a programme on TV for some society of animals. (Not as a caged animal that looked sorry, he assured us. He was talking about stocks — no idea why.) We were discussing the ‘Body Shop’ company (the one that sells natural cosmetics), and apparantly this company was blacklisted by the programme, for failing to be ‘animal-friendly’. Prof. Higson was mentioning that one of the reasons for Body Shop’s success was the British obsession with being kind to animals. He suggested that, therefore, Body Shop may not have been as successful elsewhere.

That was a leading question, naturally, and someone disagreed. So Prof. Higson quietly murmurs, “Perhaps there’s someone from France in this class?”

Prompt comes the response from the back row. “Yeah. And we don’t give a f*** about animals.”

The reality of international interaction really came through today in the Mergers & MBOs class. Prof. Paulo Volpin commented that ‘So, eefectively, ve see Germany has a pooor accounting seestem.” To which, immediately, a German pounced up and said, “I don’t go with this result,” and proceeded on a defence of why the system was right for Germany. A few other Germans joined in. Poor Prof. Volpin had to make a hasty retreat. Later, when making a similar comment about Belgium, he first clarified: “Are there any Belgians in the class?”

A while later, he gave an example in China. One of his friends, a consultant, told him that the Chinese sometimes picked a well-running company and forced it to go bankrupt, just to show the World Bank that their bankruptcy system was working fine. A Chinese practically shouted out that bankruptcy protection was needed, because otherwise 20,000 labourers would be in the streets, and this stupid consultant obviously was not aware of what really happened, because the Government had lots of bad companies to make bankrupt, so why would they pick a good one?

Today’s case discussion was on a Japanese company called Koito. A Japanese is in our team, and he was often asked to comment on what he felt was the situation. He didn’t speak much in class, really. During the break, he came over to me and said, “You know, I would like to speak much. But I cannot. My English is not very good.” As with most Japanese, his entire education was in Japanese, and while he did have some courses in written English, there were almost none in Japanese.

One of the slides was a comparison of market capitalizations of various countries. India was not found on the list. So the Japanese turned to me, politely, and asked “Where is India?” Naturally, I didn’t feel like telling him that the Bombay Stock Exchange had a market capitalization so small that it wouldn’t have been possible to put it on the table.

Well, so much for globalization!

The standard of class participation is extraordinary, though. For example, when we were discussing the EMI-Warner Music merger that was called of recently, one person commented, “Last week I was talking with a Director of EMI, and he said the reason was such-and-such.” I mean, we have people who’ve actually been involved in some of these deals in class! I feel like a baby when I open my mouth.

But that proved not quite the case, actually. We were discussing the Koito case and I did open my mouth on a couple of occasions. During the break, Prof. Volpin comes up to my desk and says, “So, Anand, you seem to know quite a bit about the Koito case. How come?” I mumbled something about Internet searches. Guess there’s something to be said for IIM-B after all…

I’ve scanned a couple of more pages of Target that have the job profile of the LBS graduating class of 2000 and the summer of MBA 2001. Incidentally, this magazine also publishes a complete list of who’s joined which company. Really neat idea, great for contacts.

Stonehenge is jinxed. To those who don’t know, Stonehenge its a bunch of huge rocks from pre-historic Britain, and no one knows why they’re there. I tried to visit it last week, but had to cancel the trip and lost about 50 pounds. (No, I don’t want to know what that is in Rupees.) So this Sunday, we’d planned to go again. I called up this Magical Tour Company, which offered tours for just 22 pounds, and said, “I want to go to Stonehenge on Sunday.” The guy on the phone took my credit card number and said OK.

Sunday morning, I wake up at 6AM, get ready, and go to Great Portland Street, where the bus is supposed to pick us up. I was with my cousin, Vishnu, and my classmate, Pallavi. The operator says, “Dear me, sorry, there was a mistake, and we had accidentally put you down on YESTERDAY’s tour. Not to worry — there’s place today.” Good.

We get on. The operator says, “Welcome to the tour of Hampton Court Palace and Windsor Castle.” So I walk up to him and say, “Excuse me, aren’t we going to Stonehenge?”

“Oh, I see, so that’s what the confusion is. You see, we go to Stonehenge only on Saturdays. So the guy at the desk must have put you down for yesterday. We were worried when you didn’t turn up…”

“Very nice of you. But I don’t want to go to Hampton whatever, I want to go to Stonehenge. So when’s the next tour? Can I take it?”

“Afraid not, sir.” Classic British accent. “You see, we’d put you down for yesterday, and we’re giving you seats today instead. We had to turn down 20 others yesterday. So if we have extra seats on the next tour, we may be able to accomodate you, but otherwise, it would have to be on the 25th of November.”

Wonderful. So we decide to go to these two places. The journey along the countryside itself was worth it, though. We went past the Thames (pronounced Temz) several times. Lots of boating teams were practising — probably Oxford or Cambridge. Those who read Archer’s “Dougie Mortimer’s Right Arm” in ‘A Quiver Full of Arrows’ would know about the famous Oxford vs Cambridge boat races. Then we went past a place called Richmond Hill, where an apartment typically costs 5 million pounds. Lots of famous people live there apparantly, but I couldn’t recognize a single name.

The best part, however, was the grass. The empty countryside itself was so green that I wonder what grass that is treated would look like. The scenes in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge are no exxageration — the European countryside is really splendid. We also passed some classic English estates — with dogs and geese and all that — and the place where the Magna Carta was signed.

Hampton Court Palace is where Henry VIII lived. He’s the one that had 6 wives, and here’s what happened to them: beheaded, divorced, survived, beheaded, divorced, died. The Palace in itself was beautiful. But even better was the garden behind it. Lovely green, as usual. Had a fountain and a pool. There were geese, swans and ducks all over the place. These animals look extremely well fed. They weren’t the least bit scared of people (though I was fairly apprehensive of touching one). So I happily ended up finishing off a whole role — mostly filled with close-ups of these birds.

The Hampton Court Palace also boasted of a maze. So we went in. It’s just a maze made of bushes, and fairly small. So we went in at 10:55AM. I of course knew that if we kept the opening wall to our right, we’d get back to the starting point. But after all, it’s a small maze. So we explored. It was all fine until about just past 11, so we decided to get back. We turned, and followed what looked like the path we came along. No. Dead end. 11:05AM. OK, other people are lost. So let’s just walk around. Another dead end. Walk a little more. Pallavi’s commenting that the path looks very familiar. So what? Walk on a little more. We ended up in the same place we were about 5 minutes ago. 11:10AM. Turn around, walk on a more promising path. Pallavi again comments that we’ve been here, and it turned out that it was exactly the same spot she’d mentioned earlier. We’d been walking around in circles. Now panic begins to set in. We got to a place that was just one bush away from the entrance, and wanted to scream to be let out. But that would’ve bruised our egos too much. Besides, there were some people who had been with us in the maze who were walking outside. So let’s give it another try. By hit and trial, we kept trying path after path, until we were out at about 11:20AM. Whew!

The crazy part is, the maze was amazingly small from the outside. But inside, it gave ‘labyrinthine’ a whole new meaning.

Then we went to the Royal Tennis Court, where someone was learning something that looked like a cross between tennis and squash. Then to the Royal Kitchen, which at its peak would have empoyed about a 100 people and fed 600. After that, it was on to the Windsor Castle.

The Windsor Castle is the largest inhabited castle. That’s where the Queen stays on weekends (not this one, though). We walked past the roads, which looked exactly as they were in the Georgian times. The grass, as always, was terribly green. We didn’t go inside the castle, though. We chose to eat at a pub and visit the Eton school. Apparantly, that’s where the Royal family sends their children to study, and it’s the poshest school in England — perhaps the world. It was closed to visitors, but I took a snap of some of the boys. Who knows who’s royalty?

A day well spent. But I intend getting to Stonehenge. Someday.