ybrid hunger solutions

Dominos India introduced a 'cheeseburger pizza'. It's kind of ironic because a couple of years ago the burger people - McDonald's - introduced the 'Pizza McPuff'.

Well, I had a taste of the new hybrid pizza and must say it was surprisingly good. I use the word surprise because I'm not a satisfied Dominos customer.

Originally we ordered Dominos because it was the only home delivery pizza available where we lived. Now there's a Smoking Joes (which is infinitely better) but I can never recall the number. And so, Dominos wins every time.

Besides, Dominos keeps dropping coupons by your house with this or that offer. And one fine day when you're tired of the cooking but too tired to go out and eat either, you see their flyer with the cheese doing a nach balliye with the toppings and say, 'let's order!'

However 8 times out of 10 I have been unhappy with the pizza when it actually arrived. The base is too thick and elasticky in your mouth. The pizza too bland. Or, exotic sounding but ordinary.

In fact the non-pizza items on the menu have always been more satisfying. The twisty bread, garlic breadstick and most of all the Cinna Stix with Apple Dip.

Mmm ..accha hai
Well, this time was different. The 'cheeseburger pizza' was good. The good thing was I didn't know what I was biting into or I may have had a less objective opinion. A cheeseburger pizza, after all, sounds pretty 'cheesy'.

This pizza had a filling and a topping. The filling reminded me more of pav bhaji than a 'burger' but the overall effect was good. The concept seemed to be inspired by our desi stuffed parathas than a burger if you ask me. But 'paratha pizza' may not have sounded that cool.

Of course, I am sure the extra layers of cheese + the burger filling = many, many more calories than regular pizzas. So, plan to have two slices instead of three.

And yeah, do check out their new 'India' website. The steam rising from the pizza featured on the home page is a great idea. Makes you actually want to order now.

But no, I'm trying to shed some weight and so will firmly resist!

One day they'll figure out how to add smell to the cyber equation and then.. well it won't be that easy.

Shoots, eats and leaves

Nope, I didn't get the book title all mixed up. This is the exact sequence of events at the average I-know-you-barely-but-must-attend-your-wedding scenario.

The invitation came from a known friend of my father's whom we have dealt with closely over the last 14 years. So had he not invited us for his son's wedding thoda bura bhi lagta. And having been invited we had to turn up. Knowing fully well we will know not a single soul at the event.

So what do you do? Land up, stand in line, wish the happy couple, hand over the bouquet and get the mandatory picture clicked. Then, you head straight for the food and boy - was it great!

This was one of those classy Gujju weddings held in an open air ground. So while there was opulence in the air, unlike the similar weddings I've seen in Delhi, everything was pleasantly understated.

Yes, there were some 25 different food counters - including pasta, stir fry, chaat, salad, crostini, north Indian, south Indian, Gujarati and what have you. Plus a separate 'without onion/ garlic' counter. But the best part was the portions - everything had been made in mini-size servings so you could try 10 different things but end up wasting very little.

As for the dessert counter - it had a 'chocolate fountain'! OK, not as grand as the kind you'd see in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. This was basically a variation of the fondue pot. Dipping bits of fruit or bread or whatever into the chocolate was fun though it didn't taste all that great.

But all put together... Mmm, it was good.

Shaadi ke prakaar

Weddings are like sentences - they come in three forms:

* 'First person' : When you are the one getting married
I am sure many people have memorable, perfect weddings. Mine - crammed with relatives and rituals - passed by in a blur. Years later you look at your ghastly pics in a photo album with a ghastlier red rose on it and vaguely recall "this happened"

* 'Second person': When someone close to you gets married
This is the best kind of wedding. You get an excuse to shop for sequinned outfits and matching purse/ footwear without worrying about in laws, joint accounts and 'shall I change my surname or not?'

Of course, if the one getting married is too close to you - like a brother, favourite cousin or best friend - you may have to volunteer for some of the 'work' as well. Such as ferrying people from railway stations and airports, keeping track of gifts and envelopes or minding the bride's suitcase filled with jewelery... Grin and bear it!

* 'Third person': When someone barely known to you is getting married
This can be the most boring of all events. Or extremely interesting. I have to admit that I have attended very few marriages ... specially when I was at school and we were dragged by parents to alien marriage parties. Protocol followed - wish, eat and come back)

Marriages have more or less become important venues to flaunt the wealth one has... Here in the South, The Chettiyars are supposed to exhibit whatever they pass on to the marrying couples. They stack hundreds of big vessels, old cauldrons etc (of all sizes, numbers, types :)) ) in a separate room. Their food is also too good. The next nitty gritty is about the gift :) How big someone brings a gift has been made into a rib-tickling comedy into one of the Tamil movies.

The fact that you know very few people there means you don't have pressure to dress up too much and look your best. But you have every right to check out what the others are wearing and pass judgement without feeling guilty.

But like I said, the real deciding factor is the food... A great wedding feast has a charm of all its own.

Enjoy the next one that comes your way!

Ethics and Education are not the same

Fallacy:
The axiom that the education at Ivy league schools like IITs,IIMs ensure ethical behaviour by the students. Anybody who fails to meet this high-bar in personal life is a "blot" on his/her alma mater.

The unsaid corollary being, if you are not from a top-notch school, ethical behaviour is not such a hard requirement. Anyway, the papers print the colourful resume of fraudsters only if it is from a well known institute which very few can boast as alma mater.

To me, ethics and education - at any institute - are two different things. The terms corporate governance and ethics in business gaining currency in B-schools is a very recent phenomenon. The blue blooded US B-schools started to focus on corporate governance only after their alumni at Enron, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, etc were caught red handed in world's biggest corporate scams.

Back home, there are quite a few cases where the super-educated were arrested in illegal acts. And, do keep in mind that only "illegal" activities make it to the papers. Save columnist like Sucheta Dalal, the media is too busy covering lives of celebrities to look into "unethical" activities or white-collar crimes. So, Ivy league education and ethics are different things.

The entire idea of ethics being taught in classrooms sounds laughable. The upbringing of 20+ years ensures that a decision to classify an activity as unethical is taken almost instantaneously. Rest of the time is spent building the argument supporting for the decision. Also, schools like Stanford Business School hesitate to express truth like saying Mukesh Ambani did not complete his MBA from school. Instead, they choose to use an utterly deceptive "pursued" to describe his stint at Stanford. When the schools themselves are not clear about what is true and ethical, how can one expect them to impart the value system to students?

Continuing with the IIM-Samsung case, this doesn't look like first.

• Sridhar Vagal, IG of Police, was the first police officer to go behind bar in the high-profile Telgi scam. He "allegedly accepted Rs 72 lakh from Telgi over a period of time and had amassed wealth and property amounting to Rs 50 crores". He is an alumnus of IIT-B and IIM-A.
• Sanjay Kumar, CEO, Computer Associates had to quit amidst charges of financial fraud. He is an alumnus of an IIM. (I couldn't find a more concrete link.)
• Another potentially unethical behaviour by IIM alumnus - Sushmita Sen made sexual harassment charges against a Coke executive, an IIM alumnus. In the out-of-court settlement, Coke paid 1.5 Crores.

Thousands of young people look at IIMs as their ultimate destination and toil to gain entry. To that extent IIM grads do have a 'role model' effect.

Listen, all those India Shining campaigners. India has reached such a stage that the role models for the younger generation are the graduates of Ivy League schools. And these "role models" should behave truthfully only because they are the leaders of the society. Pity.

Vagal could have been a great role model. After having an enviable resume, he resisted the temptation to join corporate world, thereby denying himself a financially comfortable life. Instead, he chose to "serve" the nation. Had he not been nabbed, his "sacrifice" would have been glorified to no end.

"We, who condemn corruption at large should highlight the need for ethical practices in business."

OK, here is my prescription. To begin with the IIMs should stop bragging about the placement offers with $$$ salaries at large financial corporations for the reason that most (I am just being conservative by not using "all") have been found indulging in illegal and unethical business practices at some point in time. A more drastic step would be to ban all these companies from campus recruitment process. The steps would be to denounce the association with any alumnus working with such "unethical" corporations. Sounds ridiculous, right?

Apologies if this stinks too much of MBA bashing. I don't intend it to be. But, to me, such self-righteous argument built on fragile ground by a really admirable person is unbearable.

Ethics of MBA's

Felt rather disgusted when I read this.

In a shocking case of corporate misgovernance, a senior executive of Samsung India Electronics, the Indian arm of the South Korean electronic giant, misappropriated funds worth several crores of rupees from his firm, using ingenious methods to achieve his task.

Vivek Prakash, vice-president, sales and marketing (IT division), had everything going for him. He was only 34 years old and, in the firm’s hierarchy, he was next only to the director, drawing a handsome salary. His total package amounted to Rs 40 lakhs per annum.

Yet, he put in his papers abruptly one fine morning. When he did so, his bosses in India and in South Korea were not surprised. From the past year, they could detect irregularities in his functioning. On scrutiny, they stumbled upon something to give them sleepless nights for many days.
 
Using R S Sahu, manager, accounts (receivables), an officer who was reporting directly to him, as an accomplice, Prakash had duped the company of Rs 18 crore. While the Delhi Police’s economic offences wing (EOW) had already laid its hands upon evidence on the embezzlement of this amount, there was a feeling that the magnitude of the fraud could be bigger.

Was even more disgusted when I learnt that this guy was an IIM grad (Bangalore - '95 batch).

Yes, on one hand there was Manjunath who sacrificed his life, unwilling to be bought out and on the other hand there was this Vivek Prakash who sacrificed his honour, who so willingly sold out.

And for what? Why would someone who had everything going for him take such a risk? I guess he thought he was just too smart to get caught.

But he did and the future looked pretty bleak. The Delhi high court refused his application for anticipatory bail.

Smarts vs Ethics
There was a hectic debate going on in some of the IIM e-groups and mailing lists. One alum wrote:

I suggest IIMs and alumni collectively should have taken the lead in denouncing this guy (and any other alumnus caught doing such things or worse)... take back the degree, etc. To send the message that while even IIMs may have black sheep, we strongly condemn such behaviour, and will take the lead in punishing him, in whatever ways we can.

Another adds: I just finished reading a book about the Enron collapse ("Smartest Guys In The Room"), where most of the fraudsters were very highly educated. Education is no guarantee for ethics... But still, it is a shock - coming so soon after Manju.


Of course in the case of Enron it wasn't one individual but an entire organisation built on a culture where the bottomline came first and nothing else mattered.

Oh, they did have an 'Official Code of Ethics'. As Michael Miller described it: The July 2000 booklet is nearly 65 pages of take-the-high-road legalese that must have made employees feel they were working for the Vatican or some other equally pure and clean organization...

As they say it's all about what you do and not about what you say or preach. And a conscience is something that ought to prick you when no one is looking. This is the very pride which destroys the image of IIM grads in the eyes of so many corporates and people who believe that they are snobbish and have an attitude many times rightly so.

IIMs are a great brand value and it fails us when it makes you think that its the place where characters can be moulded and ethics driven in. The students of IIMs are typically of the age 22-24 and a lot depends on their upbringing and the circumstances of their further work life that might make them get into the booby trap.

If you still believe that those 2yrs in an IIM are the reformatory period of an individual, then well God save all those grads.

We have made the IIM brand a tad different by choosing a different career line but by making ourselves stand out as belonging to a "privileged" community will only make all think of the IIM grads as snobbish.

One's level of education is only mildly correlated with one's ethics. One's ethics are a function of one's nature plus upbringing plus opportunity/context. When opportunities present themselves in the context of power that one possesses, the path down the slippery slope begins to beckon. It doesn't look slippery at first. The stakes are small, the temptation is small, the first transgression is small. This serves then to inoculate you against the next, bigger transgression. That's what happened to the folks at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco etc.

Another question which pops out is what does ethics have to do with the IIM's? Aren't students from other B-schools taught ethics? There are scores of management graduates pouring out into the corporate world every year and every once in a while we hear such instances. Would it have generated so much interest had he been from some other institiute? Agreed that the IIMs are great institutes and all but once you're in the corporate world for a few years it doesn't really matter any more, what counts are your actions. Besides, while two years in a B-school does alter the course of your life, it does not in any way guarantee whether or not a person will be caught with his hand in the cookie jar.


Solution offered : Let the IIM's make a policy of recording each student's PAN number (similar to SSN in the US). Any offence that this student commits should be reported to IIM, and the student given a chance to respond. The record of student offences should be public at the IIM. When any IIM alumni takes up a new job, the employer can look up his record...

But can the two years in a college change the fabric of ethics and values? Do we really believe it will override the 20 years of life before an IIM?


We have been privileged to attend these institutions; ethics and values are part of what we are meant to have imbibed there.

There is this old saying : more money = more problems , err maybe an old equation but now i would like to say more IQ = more problems, because eccentricity is the price you have to pay for being a genius.  

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principals which direct them.--Napoleon Bonaparte 

To that extent IIM grads do have a 'role model' effect. Of course, every individual's acts are based on his own character. But if today people are talking about 'IIM graduate Manjunath' on its front page, tomorrow it may be referring to 'IIM graduate Vivek Prakash'.

There are some things money can't buy. The honour and respect of one's peers is one of them. "Character is what we do when no one is looking." Education doesn't guarantee you a place in the Hall of Integrity.
Corruption is a far big problem in India than what this case displays. All of us give or take money to get the routine work done. Everyday most of our politicians are eating our money by illegitimate means.

The crux of the problem is that most of the people who are not at these posts where corruption is an easily viable option, want to be here to do corruption. This means punishing these guys will not be enough but it requires a larger effort correcting the attitude of people.

The latest KPMG Forensic Integrity Survey says companies are more aware of ethics, but that unethical behavior is continuing unabated. That suggests companies are doing a fair bit of spin when it comes to ethics.
Regardless of his IIM status it should have come across as disgusting. But I find the reaction a bit typical (the one that you talk about on the e-groups) of the insular attitude taken by the A-list colleges.

This chap got caught. God knows how many people on that e-group are lurking around after years of deceit, or evading tax, or making bill-less purchases and killing the VAT. Mob-justice is as disturbing as lynching. It assumes a collective virtue (as opposed to collective intelligence).

IIM or any other college is a reflection of the society that feeds students into it. As a country, we accept bribery and swindle as long as we don't get caught in the act - It's getting caught that appears to be more shameful than the act of commission. It may upset some yes, but hhmm.. nothing extraordinary.

I believe that in India stealing from big organisations is considered cunning and not theft. Why do we think that IIM guys can't do anything wrong at all. Temptation maybe anything and in any form ...why do IAS officers become corrupt after all, even the IAS exam too is tough. In the IAS, honest offiecrs are hard to find. Why do Doctors sell kidneys? The list goes on perhaps why do people become spies and betray the nation? Nothing to do with the degree that they get. It's the values and ethics they nurture. 

Hardly feel that there is any connection between this guy having swindled the money and he being from IIM. That does not mean all the hundreds of IIM graduates who pass out are Mahatma Gandhis. There are Gandhis and Godses every where whether it be the medical field, IIT, IIM, XLRI etc.

This is the case which is to be condemned by one and all of the country. Mere a passout from a good B-schools doesn't ensure that he/she is ethical and is imbibed with good values. The whole system is creating and encouraging such individuals . After all, they are human beings too. There is nothing exceptional in them except for the two years of "extraordinary" education they go through. They too are driven by the whims and fancies of the mundane world and commit gross crimes, including non-payment of loans or fraudulent transactions.


But yes, in some small way his individual decision to embrace the Dark Side does leave a small blot on the collective brand equity of IIM graduates. Just like Manjunath's principled stand added a positive shine to it.

We, who condemn corruption at large should highlight the need for ethical practices in business. And along with Manjunath, include a case study on Vivek Prakash to be taught in B schools as well!