Tony, however, said that Santanam was a total asshole with a huge attitude problem, but he was great at making presentations even when they had nothing to do with the project Santanam was working on. Apparently customers always liked his work and Dufresne always got more assignments because of Santanam.

Tony said that the only nice thing about Santanam was that he was very chill about clearing bills and reimbursements.

Later, Santanam called us on the conference room speakerphone and informed us he was with a client on a briefing and would meet us directly at Out of the Blue for lunch around one. Meanwhile, he wanted me to ‘draw up a sec deck with some peripherals, numbers and miscellaneous’.

Of course I had no idea what a sec deck was but agreed immediately with enthusiasm on the phone. Tony smiled while Yetch and Rajni looked absolutely sombre.

After the call Tony told me what Santanam meant. Basically I had to draw up a presentation on the higher education sector with profiles of the sector, trends, data, backing sources and a few extra slides with in-depth info on project-relevant topics.

I reminded Tony that I had no idea whatsoever what Panchatantra was about. He told me that that was irrelevant.

Basically, he said, I had to get as much data as I could on higher education in the next two hours using Google and then dump it all in the form of charts and graphs in PowerPoint.

At first I actually thought Tony was being cheeky with me. You know, screw around with the new guy. Ragging. I laughed and told him that it was a smart attempt to fool me, but I used to be co-vice-chairperson of the Industry Interaction Club, not some clueless engineer-MBA who knew nothing about the real world!

And then Yetch gave me a copy of the sec deck they had made on their last project. Something about iron ore exports.

It was TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX slides long with an extra eighteen-slide brief overview of other metal ores. He told me that they made it in an hour and a half with an old laptop and a dial-up Internet connection in a hotel room in Ratlam.

I immediately went to work.

After an hour I showed Tony my work which I thought was pretty sharp. There were sixty slides divided into three sections: Types of Higher Education, Market Size of Higher Education in India, and then a short section on the Future Developments in Higher Education in India.

To be honest I was pretty impressed with myself. I had made the sec deck at the rate of one slide every minute. In fact, I actually thought it was an awesome effort for someone on their first project.

Tony scrolled through it for ten minutes and then sighed to himself. He told me that the first few days were going to be really tough for me and that I had to be realistic about what was expected of me. He told me that sixty slides was simply not enough for Santanam.