Except me.

I simply don’t believe in working on the basis of face time. My job in Dufresne is not to hang around till Santanam goes home. It is to help my client develop the best private university in India. So while Tony, Rajni and Yetch left in a hurry I hung around earning my salary. I refused to give in to temptation and simply kept delivering value to my client. Also, there is a rumour going around that during our annual appraisals they may look at our in and out timings from the card swiping machines. I do not want to take any risks.

I spent an hour working out something that has been bothering me for many days now: Ideally, how many non-teaching staff do you need for every full-time faculty member in the average department in an arts and humanities college? I’d made a very complicated Excel sheet to solve a few equations and calculate this number. But I kept getting a suboptimal result: 0.63 non-teaching staff for each teaching staff member. I was going to rewrite all my equations and start again when I overheard Rosita tell Jerry that the swipe card sensor had been out of service for four days and needed to be repaired. Since I had achieved far more than my personal goals for the day by then, I decided to go home. I waited for Jerry to go to the restroom and then quietly packed and left.

On the way home I began thinking about the race to become associate. And I think it is time I took this challenge seriously. To recap the current gossip: Yetch told me that this year Dufresne will see, at most, one analyst from the Indian operations being promoted to associate. This is because there is already a surplus of associates in the Asian region and ever since campus recruitment was slowed after 2005, Dufresne has a lopsided team structure. There are too few analysts, too many associates, adequate number of managers, a drastic shortage of principals, and just three partners.

Not only that, sales in India and the Middle East have been low this year. So annual pay hikes may not be very high. The best way to get a raise is to get promoted. But according to Rajni it is close to impossible for a fresh analyst to get promoted. He says that there are already eleven people from the previous batch all prepared to kill for an associate call.

Tony thinks that only Vineet has a solid chance of making associate because of his work experience.

Most people would buckle in the face of such overwhelming odds. And most of Dufresne, no doubt, thinks that there is absolutely NO WAY Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese can make associate this year.

But they are utterly mistaken. Poor fools. In fact the complete opposite is true.

So far I have tried to rein in my inherent talent so as to maintain a low profile. Like on campus. When I did badly in economics, marketing and finance in the first term only to crack organizational behaviour—excluding projects and assignments—in the second term to everyone’s astonishment.