God Save the Dork

Sidin Vadukut

Description

Maestro management consultant and strategy guru Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese has been dispatched to London to the Lederman account. Things in the mother country are not all tally-ho as Einstein must make do with convoluted remuneration, temperamental digestion and a bizarre conspiracy by museums all over the city to frustrate his every attempt to imbibe in high culture. Just when things look like they can’t get any worse, Lederman threatens to shut down the project. Once again Dufresne Partners turns to their most resourceful, inventive, original, strategic, out-of-the-box-thinking employee.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184754124
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sidin Vadukut

GOD SAVE THE DORK
Contents
About the Author
Also by the Same Author
Book One: Per Diem
11 March 2007
17 March 2007
18 March 2007
19 March 2007
20 March 2007
21 March 2007
22 March 2007
23 March 2007
24 March 2007
25 March 2007
26 March 2007
27 March 2007
28 March 2007
29 March 2007
30 March 2007
31 March 2007
1 April 2007
2 April 2007
4 April 2007
5 April 2007
6 April 2007
7 April 2007
8 April 2007
9 April 2007
12 April 2007
14 April 2007
15 April 2007
16 April 2007
Book Two: Downfall
7 May 2007
8 May 2007
14 May 2007
15 May 2007
18 May 2007
19 May 2007
22 May 2007
23 May 2007
24 May 2007
25 May 2007
02 June 2007
05 June 2007
07 June 2007
10 June 2007
11 June 2007
12 May 2007
17 May 2007
21 June 2007
24 June 2007
27 June 2007
28 June 2007
29 June 2007
2 July 2007
5 July 2007
6 July 2007
7 July 2007
9 July 2007
10 July 2007
11 July 2007
12 July 2007
13 July 2007
14 July 2007
15 July 2007
16 July 2007
17 July 2007
18 July 2007
19 July 2007
20 July 2007
21 July 2007
22 July 2007
Author s Note
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
GOD SAVE THE DORK
Sidin Vadukut was born in a small town near Irinjalakuda in Kerala, and spent most of his growing years in Abu Dhabi eating falafals. Once even with sambar. He is an engineer from NIT Trichy and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. Over the last decade he has made auto parts, developed online trading platforms, worked as a consultant and once had a sizeable portion of a tree fall on him. Sidin is currently the managing editor of Livemint.com . He is also a cricket columnist for ESPNCricinfo and a full-time freelance Twitterer.
He lives in London with his remarkably patient wife, a plethora of Apple products and a growing collection of Buddha statues. He blogs at http://www.whatay.com and tweets with the handle @sidin .
Also by the Same Author
Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robert Einstein Varghese Who Let the Dork Out?
Book One


PER DIEM
11 March 2007
8 p.m.
Bloody nonsense.
I just wasted an entire day of my life. Completely. I will never get this day back. If one night I die suddenly and painlessly in my sleep, just the night before I can finish some important thing like accept an award for a book, a film script or excellence in management consulting, then I will blame this day for not giving me enough time.
24 hours of my life gone
For weeks Gouri has been asking me to use my weekends here in London to see some museums, art galleries or other famous local places.
It is not that I don t like art, Diary. I love art and history and philosophy and all. But there should be something interesting about it, no? Otherwise it is so boring. It will become like that stupid book Atlas Shrugged . Oh my god. Since engineering college I have been trying to finish it. But it just goes and on and on and on and on and then somehow I finish 150 pages. And then there is some exam or something.
Two months later I have to start from the beginning again because I have forgotten everything. It has been like this with Atlas Shrugged since bloody 1998.
But Gouri loves the author and knows the whole book by heart. We will be sitting at Lilavathi Barista on Saturday making weekend entertainment plans when suddenly she will say some dialogue from Atlas Shrugged .
When I say some super Mohanlal line from His Highness Abdullah or Kilukkam she will ignore. But if she says some stupid nonsense like But in fact there is NO spoon and fork Robin I am supposed to appreciate and participate.
So now I carry a small printout of the Atlas Shrugged Wikipedia entry in my pocket. Whenever she has that literature look on her face I go to the toilet and do reference.
Anyway. At least here in London nobody asks me about stupid bloody Atlas fucking Shrugged.
So this morning I made my weekly call and immediately, without even waiting for me to speak, she insisted that I go to London Eye or the British Museum.
London Eye has unbelievably expensive tickets Diary. 30 pounds or something. Deivame. For the price of one ticket I can have two dozen beers at Bogdan s, an authentic Bulgarian pub near my apartment.
The British Museum is free, but I have to take a bus or an underground train and go. Why waste ticket money to see dead bodies of Egyptians? In any case I have made plans to go to the British Museum whenever I have to go to the Russell Square Lederman branch. Then I can put the taxi charge in expenses.
So I decided to solve the problem using what I know best: the considerable database analysis skills that I have developed over the last few years of MBA and management consulting.
I went on the Internet and downloaded a list of all the museums in London. After sanitizing the data-Diary this means clean and remove spelling mistakes in consulting-I inputted the list into a spreadsheet and then used a sorting algorithm on the Post Code to arrange them in increasing order of distance from my apartment s location. Then I used colour coding to highlight the museums that were fully or partially free. After this I was able to generate a list of the nearest free museums, divided by category, opening times and online user ratings. This took three and a half hours of hard but very satisfying work in Visual Basic.
Unfortunately, I suddenly realized that it was by now 10.15 a.m. The buffet breakfast downstairs closes at 10.30 a.m. By the time I ran into the breakfast room the scrambled eggs were already over (these serviced apartments have no concept of supply-demand matching, kanban, kaizen or any other Japanese logistics methodologies) and only 6 or 7 sausages were left. This was a disapointment. As usual there was no shortage of porridge.
I was fed up of the breakfast fiasco when I went back to the room and lost all enthusiasm for the spreadsheet. Diary, once you lose your mood for Visual Basic, it takes a long time to get it back. So I just looked at the list and mentally calculated the three nearest museums: Durmondson s Memorial, the Wellingtonian Museum and the Royal Museum of Environmental Engineering and Science. Of course I did some background checks on the Internet. All the museums had good websites with excellent photographs.
My plan was to first go to Durmondson s Memorial where I would spend between twenty and thirty minutes. After this I would quickly proceed to the Wellingtonian in time to catch a guided tour (free, donations welcome, as if) at 11.00 a.m. The website said that there was a limit of 15 people per tour group. After this I would leisurely spend the rest of the evening at the Royal Museum enjoying environmental engineering and science.
As I left the apartment on my walking trip, Diary, I was feeling excited and motivated. Even though I was going because of Gouri s emotional blackmail, I was fully expecting to enjoy myself. Also, as you may be aware, one of my personal mottoes is: To never focus only on professional and personal interests but also to develop a well-rounded personality through exposure to history, culture and art forms such as film, song, sculpture and dance but not theatre, which is a useless art form for arrogant people who get upset just because you forgot your lines during the Christmas play and said I come to honour the instant Jesus, the son of the surgeon Mary by mistake.
After walking for one hour I reached a big stone rectangular block on a small piece of grass by the Thames, near Tower Bridge. There was a security guard there. (Very rude fellow. Perhaps illegal immigrant.) I asked him the way to Durmondson s Memorial. He pointed at the block and told me that this was Durmondson s Memorial. I was confused. I told him that the website showed a painting of a great battle. Durmondson sat on a huge brown horse and around him there were big cannons and several dead and live soldiers. Where are all those things?
He told me very rudely that all those things were probably in Afghanistan where Durmondson fought during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Here at the memorial there was only this tomb. Durmondson s body was inside this stupid stone block. He said there was a small copper plate outside with his brief life history.
BLOODY FOOL DURMONDSON. THIS IS CALLED A MEMORIAL? PANDAARAM ADANGAAN! THEY SHOULD CALL IT DURMONDSON S STUPID STONE BOX. No wonder the Afghans killed him. Anyway, since I had wasted time walking all the way here I went to read the copper plate. Half of it was covered by some dirty fungus. I was going to clean it when the security fellow stopped me. Apparently visitors were not allowed to touch the stone block.
Diary, you can imagine how upset I was. As a sign of protest, just before leaving, I opened the visitors feedback book for the memorial and drew sex organs on it.
Already I was very very late for the Wellingtonian Museum guided tour. Five minutes before 11.00 I reached, covered in sweat, and gasping for air. I had to run through a park and then across a railway bridge.
When I reached, there was me and one other person. It was an old woman who looked like every other old woman in London. (Short hair, long skirt, smell of pillowcases. Like Kanjany ammamma but with modern fashion.)
I asked her if she was also there for the tour. She told me she was the guide and that she was waiting for more people. And then we just stood there smiling at each other. By 11.15 there was still nobody else. So Karen decided to start the tour anyway and not wait for the others to come.
AYYO DIARY!!! AYYO!!!!
When you hear the name you think that the Wellingtonian Museum is some five-star hotel type place with Roman statues and Mughal swords and World War gas chambers. The website, of course, looked very high class and gave some long history of the Wellington family of explorers and travellers.
Mother fuckers all of them. The whole family should have been sent to Afghanis