(Little did I know that my hopes of grabbing some biscuits and tea at the JHA opening meeting would be foiled by the LCD projector.)

The JHA factory, it turns out, is in the middle of NOWHERE.

Somewhere even farther away than Hosur. With terrible traffic and seriously bad roads. At some places there was no tar on the road! What country is this? Addis Ababa?

I am not complaining or anything but I doubt the guys at McKinsey & Co. or BCG work for such clients.

It took us an hour and a half to reach and then the biscuits and tea only came another twenty minutes into the meeting. The biscuits were excellent: Parle Hide n Seek. But the stupid tea boy placed the platter on the other side of the LCD projector. The only way I could reach it was to stand up, reach across and make a spectacle of my hunger, or reach around cutting off the LCD projector beam.

Eventually sheer hunger made me completely zone out of the meeting. Prasad the lead partner, meanwhile, was taking JHA through the forty-three-slide introduction to Dufresne.

Suddenly, I realized that everyone was looking at me.

Prasad was telling them how I was the member of the team with extensive automotive experience and that Dufresne had specifically brought me down because they wanted the best people on the JHA project. The JHA CEO nodded at me with a huge smile and I nodded back very confidently.

I was quite surprised. I had no idea that I had extensive automotive experience. But cleverly I let none of this consternation show on my face.

After forty minutes or so we went into an informal questions session and I was relieved. This meant I could grab a few biscuits as everyone got up to leave. And then, just as I had an entire game plan worked out to reach for the platter around the back of the projector casually, while shaking hands with the JHA team, that stupid office boy came and cleared everything.

After the meeting we stayed back in the conference room, which would henceforth be our operations centre. We unpacked our laptops, notebooks, calculators and stationery. While waiting for my laptop to start I asked Prasad about the comment he had made during the presentation. I said that perhaps he had his facts wrong: I had no experience at all in automotive engineering except for the instinctive knowledge I had from my engineering college courses, some of which I topped, and some reading I had done out of keen self-interest in many varied subjects not part of my syllabus.

He then revealed why I had been picked for the project. Dufresne had tried to allocate a few people with auto experience to JHA. But they were all busy with other projects and finally Staffing had told him that I had some automotive experience on my CV. So he had asked me to be assigned.

I told him that Staffing must have made a mistake. He then pulled up my profile on his laptop and we both went through it. Immediately Prasad showed me the point regarding a one-day industrial visit I had made to Mata Amritanandamayi Bus-Body Builders in Teynampet in Chennai in my second year of engineering college.