He then said that Lederman had no intention of cancelling the contract with Dufresne. Indeed, they hoped that the team from Dufresne would act with the same honesty as the guy on the voicemail and he requested the media to not blow this out of proportion.

After he spoke there was deathly silence in the CNBC studio and in the conference room. No one knew what to say. Even I didn’t know what to say. Finally Prasad began to speak about how I had destroyed Dufresne’s reputation all over the world when one of the other partners told him to shut up and ‘leave the boy alone’.

I immediately left the office and came back home. I was very, very confused. On the one hand I was embarrassed about the voicemail. But on the other hand I was pleased that Pastrami thought my obscene screaming actually made any sense.

I was still sure, however, that Dufresne would fire me. It was just a matter of time.

So I came back, switched on CNBC and decided to stop worrying.

Sometime around 8 p.m. the channel said that they had been informed by a source that the voice belonged to a Robin Varghese who worked with the Mumbai branch of Dufresne Partners. The channel said that they would soon try to arrange an interview with Mr Varghese and get his opinion on the incident. I got a call from Prasad just then. He told me that some of the partners were convening an emergency meeting and they were all coming to my house right away.

Meanwhile on TV, V.K. Jamvaal, the world-famous management guru and author, said, ‘Mr Varghese’s frank and unbiased assessment of Lederman’s problems was the sort of sharp insight that management consulting companies had ceased to provide many decades ago. It comes as a breath of fresh, albeit mildly profane, air into the business of advising companies. I do hope that Dufresne will react to this appropriately and give the boy projects to handle instead of putting a muzzle on that no-holds-barred intellect. Yes, he has said some harsh things about the partners. But who else would dare tell partners what to do?’

The channel, by then, had changed its tone entirely and was proclaiming the voicemail as a business mantra. One CEO called it the ‘real voice of business strategy’. They then said that the audio file had so far been downloaded 4.5 lakh times from their site. There was already a remix of the audio on YouTube. Someone had taken my recording and inserted it into the scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson makes the speech. It was quite awesome.

Around 10 p.m. last night Prasad and four other partners came over and said that the situation had been discussed at the Dufresne head office in Chicago. While an individual consultant was never allowed to air his views in public, as per company procedures, in this case they said that Dufresne was willing to make an exception.