Cheap tales

Engineering and management education imparts three facets in human beings.
1. Ability to sleep off on any kind of ‘platform’ (in strict buccaneered sense of the term)
2. Survival based on caffeine and nicotine (it’s a slow promotion up the value chain, from counters and cheap versions to the eclectic ones)
3. Ability to find entertainment during pressure hours at the behest of others or where there is none.

And true to the spirit of the above, while banging one’s head over loads of shit pellets, collectively called an Information Memorandum in Investment Banking circles, a colleague of mine came up with his weird sense of humor and cuppa of coffee (for axiom see above).

“Do you want a change of job?” he asked. “Difficult question. Only if it pays twice as much for half the work.” I wondered. “Why else should I ask you. Its ten times the remuneration for less than one tenth the work.” Time to sit up and take notice, but the safer bet is to redirect such stuff to people who will take the bait. But he insisted (I hate these sales people, they can convince you to bit anything. Last year he had asked a promoter of auto plastics to get into contraceptives manufacture with his crap on forward integration, but don’t even bother to get into that). And then he showed me this.

For the better part of the night, we got serious. For bettering the scene of Indian cricket we had to sacrifice this much. Come to think of it, the richest cricket board of cricket in the world had to resort to the ICC website for a job posting. It was like an investment banking job vacancy on the SEBI website, would surely elicit pity from people like us who love the game. And to think of it further, we have been deserted like orphans on the street by people who found their broadcasting jobs more lucrative, much like the foreign firm appointed consultants who would not look at a domestic merchant banking profession.

So what exactly does the job entail. Quagmired by the lack of an accounting system, BCCI is grappling to make the East and West meet. With two of its foremost pillars shaken under embezzlement of funds and on top of that appointing consultants to enquire into matters, was really the right way to go about it.

We decided that we would not be the only one to be employed. We would bring along with us a top class support team, who would deal with thinking hats (I have a colour code of eight, including ones for drunken revelry, impressing fairer citizens of other countries), create healthy rivalry among players (which would include maligning captains, instigating media and strategizing newer ways of defeat from the verges of victory), and obviously rigorously keeping accounts of all such travesties only to tamper with evidential diaries in full glare of the media.

Although I agree that we do not have a level III coaching accreditation from Cricket Australia or England, but how much time does it take to get one. Experience in coaching elite cricketers is obtained by starting to coach them. Its always a start for everything. We win hands down as far as our candidature stands in terms of basic IT skills to operate match analysis (I can sing lullabys with an excel sheet), basic knowledge of Indian cricket (Would even know the names of people who got Dada hit wicket on the streets of Behala) and Indian culture (I know for sure that dance bars are out, they are cheap and sleazy and have been substituted by better and bigger things), sports science and medicine (I know by experience that you could do well to sneeze when caught with a Kookaburra without an ab-guard), capability of handling team under high pressure (have already prepared a complex iterative program to charge which benefactor at what odds when the situation of the game changes. People often call them bookies, but they are a net contributor of our GDP in the strict economic sense of the term. Speaks of my IT skills as well.). I have always been lauded for my keen understanding of video technology since my college days when I could create anatomical magic out of archived videos of college mates and I can vouch that I would mug out each punctuation marks that Mike Brearley writes out of his coaching manuals.

As I dialed out the number figured out on the website I had a numbing feeling as I read the following headlines (BCCI on back foot as MRTPC bowls bouncers). Actually it is not bad to have a comparative benefits-efforts analysis before taking a plunge. “Dude, do you have the Zee board numbers?” I asked.