Anyway, now we just have one lady, Anandakumari, in the Mumbai office to take care of human resources, corporate communications, office administration, campus recruitment, training, expenses, manpower allocation management and employee satisfaction tracking.

Anandakumari hates her job. Today I was casually, absent-mindedly, flipping through her things, while pacing around the office reading a project proposal after everyone else had left, when I noticed several copies of her résumé with covering letters in her desk drawer.

I also, by mistake, glanced at Vineet’s HR file and saw Jerry’s recommendation letter for his promotion sent to the Bangkok office. Had more fiction in it than a Harry Potter novel!

Anandakumari told me yesterday that they were going to take whatever film Preeti already had and then splice it with old photos from Dufresne picnics and parties and make a montage. Since the quality of the final product would be rather poor, they were only going to use it for campus recruitment presentations.

This is of course a huge step down from our initial plans: we wanted to post it up on the Dufresne India website and perhaps make it part of the global Dufresne recruitment portal. Preeti had even wanted to send it to clients as part of the standard Dufresne Profile kit.

But I guess something is better than nothing. The only bits Preeti had on tape were the parts of the old office boy’s auditions, around six minutes of my auditions as ‘the cheerful office boy who believes that even the lowest rung of the Dufresne family is made to feel important and wanted’ and then a long sweeping shot of the office ending in Jerry’s room as he turns to look at the camera from his computer monitor and flashes a thumbs-up sign with a creepy smile.

Anandakumari is going to throw away the footage of the old office boy, open with my little monologue about the Dufresne family, and then cut to a series of pictures with music in the background and end with the shot of the office with Jerry that would fade away as the Dufresne logo would fill up the screen.

I told her that since we were saving so much money by not shooting anything we should give it to a good production house in Mumbai to edit and finish. She has promised to ask Jerry tomorrow.

Work-wise it looks like things have slowed down a bit. We had a Mumbai office meeting the day before yesterday and Jerry said that he expects next year to be quite challenging. The other consulting firms are all scaling up in terms of staff and we aren’t winning as many projects as we used to.

But he said that business should start picking up in early 2008 and reach full steam by the first half of 2009. He says that 2008–09 might even be the strongest years in Dufresne history. But till those days of economic prosperity, he said, all of us had to be patient and work hard … for the sheer joy of working rather than for promotions or bonuses.