I had heard that laugh before. My heart skipped several beats as a vision of Ram Shankar at the party flashed through my mind. I silently hoped I had just passed out quietly the night before and they’d dropped me off at my room. I walked over to him with an entirely fake look of cheer and bonhomie on my face and stood behind him looking at the screen.

A mildly grainy video of one of the partners dancing to a Sukhbir song with an empty shot glass in his hand was playing. It was from last night. He looked pretty smashed. Vikram stood on one side egging him on, clapping away furiously. And then the partner turned to the buffet table behind and plucked a plastic swan off the centrepiece. Sculpted carrots and cucumbers spilled off the table. He began dancing with it.

Shankar laughed, and said that the best bit in the video would happen in a second.

And then it happened. A suit leapt from one side of the screen and flew head first at the partner, screaming the words ‘That swan is mine!’

The flying suit was me.

I watched in horror as I hit the partner full in the belly, folding him neatly into two and then right over the buffet. There was nothing in the screen for a second. And then I stood up triumphantly with the swan in one hand. And screamed: ‘I am THE KING OF THE SWAAAAAAAAAAAAN! ADIPOLI!’

I felt like throwing up. Shankar was still chuckling away. The room began to spin around me.

I peeked at the screen again. The video had already been viewed TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN times. (And had received a four and a half star rating—this was of some minor satisfaction.)

I went to the employee restroom and threw up for five minutes. Then I sat on the bowl with my head in my hands for fifteen.

It is all over, I thought to myself. Dufresne Partners was over. I was fully expecting to get my termination papers by the end of the day. For a brief moment I wondered what the full and final settlement would be for total service period of one day. Would I get my bonus pro-rata?

When I went back to the office there was a large group of new joinees standing around bastard Shankar’s workstation. They were all laughing. Why wouldn’t they? The video was funny. And they had one less contender in the race to make associate in a year, manager in four and partner in six or seven.

Thankfully the crowd was all new joinees. Vikram Singh—IIM-C, Jaipur—who was single-handedly responsible for this catastrophe was laughing the loudest. If only he’d let me sleep in my room. It was particularly humiliating to see Reema Rai—IIM-B, Mumbai—grinning broadly. She is hot. In a Nandita Das sort of way.

But then I remembered what Professor Parikh had said during the ‘Finding the Person Within’ course in sixth term. In our ‘Discovering the Self’ one-to-one session she told me that when I was experiencing one of those moments of intense public humiliation it is always better to laugh along with the humiliators rather than ‘project oneself as a target for further engagement’. At the time I had thought this a reprehensible, cowardly approach. But Professor Parikh does not take to contradiction readily so I let it go.