Blossom Babykutty called up today. He said that they are ninety-nine per cent sure of giving the Lederman contract to Dufresne and that he was going to personally ask that I be assigned to the project. He asked me if I would agree. I told him that it would be a pleasure to work with the Lederman team. And then, even though I had expressed no interest whatsoever, he spent the next hour telling me what he thought was wrong with Lederman.

He said that his bank’s lending profile completely missed out huge opportunities in the consumer business, that they had too much flab in their operations, that they needed to shut down their entire China operations and that the board of directors had to seriously rethink their bonus and compensation strategy. You just don’t get good people for peanuts, he said.

I agreed and mumbled something about how Dufresne would look at all this after administering some of our famed strategy evaluation tools and management effectiveness workshops. And then subject matter experts would do a phased rollout plan.

Or something.

I wasn’t even thinking about what I was talking.

All I can think of right now is that meeting tomorrow. I so hope to God that Dufresne gives me another chance.

Please God, please. Einstein must survive this …

4 January 2007

10.03 p.m.

EINSTEIN HAS SURVIVED THE BATTLE!

But not without some heavy losses.

The whole first half of today is a blur in my mind. I reached office with the most severe feeling of anxiety and nervousness in my stomach. I felt like throwing up all the time. I could have only a cup of coffee for breakfast. Seeing how upset I looked, Vineet walked over and told me that, being a senior member of Dufresne now that he had almost made associate, he would put in a word for me before the meeting later today. I thanked him and secretly hoped he’d die in some horrible way before the end of the day. Maybe a crashing lift or something.

Then at 2 p.m. Prasad asked me to join him in the conference room. There were seven partners in the room around the conference table. I knew some of them. And I’d only heard of a few of the others. Prasad, who sat in the middle, spoke throughout.

He said that what had happened in the JHA meeting was one of the worst cases of ‘loss of corporate reputation’ that had ever happened to the Dufresne India office. It had violated several clauses in my employment contract. He said that it was my responsibility to check on the status of both videos and make sure that they had been removed from the Internet. He also said that as a member of the corporate film initiative, I should have checked every frame of the video before approving it. Prasad went on to make a three-minute speech on how losing a client or creating a bad market image for Dufresne was one of the biggest mistakes that a fresh analyst could do. One of the other partners, who largely spent his time looking at me and digging his nose, then took a break and told me how, of all the possible things a young consultant could do to impress the top management of Dufresne, I had done the very worst.