“Who are you?”
To this most existential of questions, you can have a number of answers; from the name that your parents gave you so lovingly and that your friends have dissected and bisected over the years to create unique and sometimes embarrassing nicknames to an equally enigmatic answer of “How does it matter?”
However, when you stand in the well of a classroom at IIM Ahmedabad rubbing your sweaty palms with anticipation of presenting your half-baked analysis of a case, the above question raises a scepter that is far more forbidding than its avatars in other contexts. It throws you at once into this whirlpool of numerous possibilities.
You are of course you. The fact that you are probably thinking that waking up on the right side of bed or seeing Jennifer Lopez latest crassly made video is the cause of your current misfortune, makes it impossible for you to be anyone else. However,you cannot, as the manager in the case cannot (he might have fought with his wife the previous day), allow such trivialities to affect your judgment; in effect while you cannot be you, you cannot also not be you. You are in my favorite catch, Catch 22!
Compounding this is fact that the entire class’s eyes are riveted on you; the sacrificial lamb for the day. Of course, everyone empathizes with you and everyone is your friend but do not ask anyone to take your place. After all, would you have if it was one of them? You have become for sometime both the savior and the sinner,but not one of them.
Now, coming back to your initial quandary, you must have realized by now that you are trapped. Thereis no escape. So all that is left is for you to do is to do your best. You can be silent. It may project either your inability to understand simple English or your deep understanding of the nature of identity that you know that everyone knows about you (given that you are in IIM A this can be slightly difficult to pull off). Alternatively, you can advertise your ignorance by blurting out whatever your name might be.
Your best chance however, might be in falling back on the age-old tradition of story telling in the first person (a euphemism if there was any). You draw the picture before the class; bring out the financial, marketing, production, moral, ethical and marital dilemmas of the manager into the class. Telling his story, you become him, though always being yourself. In tradition of all great storytellers, you take the case to a point, where the threads seem intertwined as snakes biting into each other tails. And then, the denouement – snip. A seemingly brilliant piece of analysis on your part (oops manager’s part) unravels this most complicated of tangles into individual parts whose solutions is mere child’s play.
The class is stunned and the professor impressed. You return to your seat amid the generous thumping of desks like a king after a long string of conquests. Finally, you can be your own self again, wondering whether talking to the pretty girl you wanted to talk for so long, earlier in the morning was a cause for the recent turn of events.
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