Yes. Yes, it is all a little fraud. Yes, it is based on a thin membrane of lies and misunderstandings. Yes, it will probably end in tears and abuse.

BUT NOW GOURI IS MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE.

My joy knows no human bounds. I feel ecstatic. We’re going for a movie this evening in fact. And when I say ‘we’ I mean as a couple. Holding hands in the theatre and all! WOO HOO!

She has asked me to keep it quiet for a while. For a couple of months. Otherwise people will think she is a slut who moved on too quickly. That is fine by me.

So that’s one awesome personal goal down.

Dufresne associateship! You are NEXT!

Imagine the hilarity that will ensue when I will actually lose my ‘including other person’ virginity for the first time with Gouri. Imagine the look on her face when I tell her!

Priceless!

30 September 2006

10.30 p.m.

First the bad news: Panchatantra is over. The project is a complete washout. We MIGHT get paid for whatever we’ve done so far. But they have no appetite to give us any more work.

Mishra is now in serious legal trouble across the entire European Union after they discovered that one of his plants in Uzbekistan was employing illegal immigrants from India. The company is preparing to shut down operations in several places and doesn’t want to hire management consultants for anything. Santanam, in desperation, tried selling them an HR and manpower management project with special focus on ‘optimal expatriate resource utilization’. Yetch even made an emergency thirty-slide HR deck for him sitting in a bathroom in Mishra’s office, browsing Wikipedia over GPRS.

But they would have none of it. They said that we were better off just billing for what we’d done and getting it cleared before Mishra’s India offices were raided as well and the company’s bank accounts were frozen.

Santanam looked devastated and Yetch and Rajni were inconsolable. We called off our post-project celebration dinner and I spent all day at the office browsing through Orkut photos of Tony’s welcome dinner at KKRR. Their entire Mumbai office had booked a cottage at Alibagh for the weekend to welcome him.

I felt terrible.

But there was also good news today. Preeti from corp. comm. informed me that the budget for the movie has been cleared by Jerry. We will start shooting it in another two weeks or so. She said that she wants to use the time to finalize the scripts and the roles. Apparently Jerry saw my sample office boy scenes and loved them.

But the best news was waiting for me when I reached back home. Sachin said that he had found a new job and that he would be getting company accommodation. I was quite thrilled, understandably, till he told me that he would be joining KKRR. (What the fuck!) When did private equity guys start picking up the phaltu marketing types?

This pissed me off a little. But at least it was getting rid of Sachin.