Quiz days :) Valare!

Now that it is time for another Inflore and National Quiz I am suddenly left behind thinking of those days. I would say one of the few terrifying days in my life... When I think about it I am glad it all went well after all the sleepless nights and tiresome days. The NSE sponsored National Quiz happened... A corporate team won a Lakh of prize money and a student team won half a lakh and it all ended in style. The file was closed! But a new chapter began with a new set of friends who made my life happier! I remember the day one of them asking if I could join the Quiz committee and help in the logistics part J Delighted I was!!! Bina, Megha, Jesse and Krishnan, it was supper scary working with you guys!!! Especially when you were all on top my head at 4am testing my excel competency!!! God!!! This bunch made sure that I get out of the committee tougher than I got in! Hanish was certainly a consolation. Nithya was terribly sweet by walking with me and making me practice my scariest public speech (ha ha it was only 5 lines but scary enough for me!). Thanks to Paul for vanishing in between so I could go replace him in escorting one of our guest and hence miss the public speech! My experience working with this truly talented bunch of seniors was exemplary. Saw a lot of management, talents, capabilities, frustrations, crisis handling and so on and so forth. During the quiz days we all shared a very professional relationship with only discussions about work and how we could do our best to make the event a success but now we have all crossed the boundaries and gotten into each other’s lives. Jess has become my mentor in taking rational decisions, Meg understands me to an extend where she doesn’t complain even if I don’t spend time with her especially when she is next door after a long period of time! Beeeen, hugs me and makes me feel great every time I meet her. Ha ha and Krishnan continues to eat my head! Whatever said and done I am their marriage counsellor!!! Waiting for the day we can all meet up once again and bitch about all the men around (Not you Krishnan!) but also talk about the positive side of getting married!

With all the memories from last year’s National Quiz (the 1^st of its kind in Rajagiri) I am looking forward to working with the new quiz committee. Hanish and I still remain as if we are taking forward a legacy.

Will B Schools have to take off Business Ethics from their course structure?

If Jan Lokpal bill comes into existence, certainly yes!!! I say this because unethical behaviour in business will be history and a new course on marketing will have to be included! 

After going through a course in Business ethics I realised how business is all about cheating... the only difference is that the level of cheating sounds insignificant. This reminds me of confessions that Christians make before taking the Holy Communion. I shouldn’t be generalising but I personally don’t include sins like lying, fighting with parents, going to bed without praying etc in my confessions. I have gotten so used to all this that I feel like I am questioning the sanctity of the significance of confessions if I include these sins.

Likewise if you look at the business World there are n numbers of examples on how marketers have masked facts to sell their products; has there been a living example of a person who has become fair using ‘fair and lovely’? Koutons advertises in all its stores across India saying that they provide “50%+40% discount on all products”. Are the customers really getting 90% discount as they are made to believe? Lifebuoy soap says "Wash away swine flu germs" when the scientist across the globe are sitting in their labs to come up with a medicine!  If reputed companies like Unilever can come up with such false promises what is the case with other companies who don’t even have to worry about protecting their reputation. Clearly these are examples of dishonesty...

The Oxford dictionary defines corruption as ‘dishonest or illegal behaviour’. Does the Lokpal bill have a different definition for corruption? Or will companies like Unilever be on the pin point of Lokpal bill?

We can’t even say that the level of corruption is in a different scale in these cases because if we consider the kind of money large FMCG companies are making by selling their products through tactics is significant enough and considerable. We overlook such marketing practices because a lot of us believe what H.G Wells, a well known English Author once said “Advertising is legalized lying”.