My Essay for Rhodes

My Essay for Rhodes now available at
http://eureka-wow.blogspot.in/2013/07/my-rhodes-essay.html

-Jal

RHODES - LESSONS, EXPERIENCES, SECRETS

“So what is it you have in you that got you Rhodes?” a junior interviewing me for DU Beat casually asks.

“Hmmm…I don’t know.”

She stares at me blankly, not expecting the bluntness of the answer.

My mind runs into the multiple regression classes of econometrics and I wonder if I can make a list of factors and run a regression. The coefficients of the regressors could better decide the weight of each individual factor and give a precise answer.

She presses me again for reasons and I tax my mind and heart to spew out some, uncomfortable with the lack of rigor and precision in my answer.

As I sit down to write this blog, my mind races back and forth the events that transpired last year, around this time in June. My inbox is full of queries regarding the Rhodes application. Actually I have lots to tell and I figure out that it is becoming highly inefficient writing separate mails to different people. Moreover, I am a big proponent of knowledge sharing – information and anecdotal experience from a senior is also included in that ‘knowledge’ coz I think sometimes it can give you that edge that others might be deprived of.

And so, without bias I write this post – for you, dear junior.

I know you are inquisitive and ambitious. I know you have googled for Rhodes and histories of past scholars, just to land on that ‘perfect recipe’ that goes into winning it. I have some little experiences and advice to share, they may not all be connected, so I am writing out points.


1. A first year once asked me, “I am planning to write a paper on ABC subject in my break because I work for XYZ society in college which promotes the ABC subject. Do you think it will help me in my CV for Rhodes?”

I thought the question had such a Delhi-hue to it (sorry, Delhi-ites :p) Somehow, the idea of doing things just for the sake of bolstering one’s CV was a shock to me when I had first encountered it in college. I generalize it at my own risk, but I think ‘most’ people (there are exceptions) in colleges in Delhi (and may be elsewhere too) join a society not because they are passionate about it, but they are passionate about it because they want to join a society! So, the net result is that the passion is a feigned one, it dies down very soon and takes a shameless backseat as soon as CV and power considerations start dominating.


I hope you get the clue. If you think one can succeed in life with this sense of fake passion, you should really give yourself a second thought. I think I made it till the end because I never followed that idea and my enthusiasm for things I was passionate about, showed in every round till the final. It was genuine, so it came naturally. (Btw, I was hardly an active member of any society in college.)

In the final round, Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla had asked me quite tersely – “You have done quite a bit of social work. How do you think it distinguishes you from the social work done by other candidates?”

I was taken aback at the shallowness of the question, but probably they were testing me. I starkly told the panel what I had in my heart that I never did any social work so that it would give me an edge ‘over others’. I just taught kids because I would shrink within myself everytime I would see a bunch of street kids romping around my house. I had just asked out of genuine concern one day, ‘Parhoge kya’? And they had nodded and expressed so much enthusiasm that a little class had started under the shade of a tree. And then, I never had any intentions of making it grow, somehow my friends had heard about it and had started volunteering. Slowly, Éclair had scaled in size and made quite a big impact in the lives of the kids. But I told them that I hardly knew if things like these were even comparable across individuals. Probably other candidates had done something even better and that I could even learn from them, but my knowledge was limited to my work in an absolute sense, not a relative sense.


2.  Honesty is the best policy
Now this is something my friend Aleesha would be the best person to advise you. If you ever get a chance to meet her, you would be surprised and probably flabbergasted to discover that such people do exist. Every breath, every step, every word she utters is true, as simple as that. Be it the question of stating her score, getting a letter signed – she would rather take the long way and retain her honesty than shun it for the sake of short-term convenience.

When I first came to college and attended my first class in St. Stephen’s, I discovered that the professor was barely audible, the writing on the board barely legible and that I could understand virtually nothing. After the class, when I enquired around, I noticed a strange thing. Though people didn’t understand, they never admitted that they didn’t; there was always a ‘yes’ to the question ‘did you get that thing?’ but on further inquiry, I would conclude that even they were in the same boat as me. In other words, there was a false cover of cognizance of everyone’s lips but inside they were blank. But Aleesha was different. ‘I don’t know’, ‘I didn’t get it’, she would admit boldly without any sense of embarrassment in her voice, in that classful of smart people.

I was always touched, greatly.

I had once attended an international conference on the concept of death in different faiths. I remember eagerly listening to Dr Jaswant Singh Neki (eminent Sikh scholar and retired psychiatrist from PGI, Chandigarh). Somebody from the audience had put him a question to which he didn’t know the answer. It was a new and different field for him and he had never thought about the topic. I remember his words so distinctly

“Mai iss vishay te aapni aggyaanta iqbaal karda haan” (I admit my lack of knowledge on the subject).
(I’m not sure if I have translated that justly, hope you get the power of those strong words said in Punjabi).

It was an international conference and he was such a renowned academician. The message was that he had no hesitations saying, “ I DON’T KNOW ”

Je ne sais pas.

As simple as that.

I myself have never been that much of a perfectionist as Aleesha but I did pick up vital lessons from my experienced and had internalized them to quite an extent.

In the first round of Rhodes interview I was asked a couple of technical questions – I didn’t know the answer to a few of them. Instead of feeling ashamed or just to camouflage my ignorance I had not maundered – I had told the experts, ‘I don’t know’

They had switched the topic and asked me other questions. I had left the room feeling sheepish about my ignorance and lost all hopes. But then the call for the final interview had come…



3. Stochastic factors and Glucose
So junior, you have been making a list of factors right? – Sincerity, passion, honesty,…

But I’ll tell you the ultimate secret?

Even if you enlist all the factors possible – SOP, references, cv, confidence, lessons learnt from a conference… you would not be able to enlist them all. You will end but the list won’t because there are so many of them, because some of them aren’t even thinkable – they might be remotely related to one’s success.

In other words, in life as in econometrics, there are loads of stochastic factors apart from the deterministic ones captured so elegantly in what economists call the ‘error term’. It is a random disturbance, it may move up or down and alter the results. You have no control over it, how much ever you try. It is random.

I think there’s something really divine about the random disturbances. Some things are just unexplainable, unknowable – we club them under the error term. And faith in a Higher Power is just a belief that human abilities are insufficient to explain everything and that a random component exists!

I ended up saying a lot of that theory in my interview, you know :p and yes, my interview got steered to questions of religion, spirituality and faith.

On a lighter note, I’ll tell you another story about one stochastic factor in my Rhodes experience – Glucose.

If you’ve read Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ – you would know about the theory. The point is that human mind becomes lazy at times when glucose levels fall down. Restoring the sugar levels in the brain however brings back alertness. An experiment was once conducted on eight parole judges in Israel who spent entire days reviewing applications for parole. The default decision was denial of parole, only 35% of requests were approved.

A group of psychologists did a funny thing. They recorded the exact time of each decision and plotted it against the decision taken. The times of the judges’ food breaks were also recorded.

Guess what they found?

Maximum approvals were granted at times right after meals, the graph showed spikes after food breaks! The point was that tired and hungry judges tended to fall back on the easier and convenient default option of denying requests for parole. Fatigue and hunger had a role to play.

In my final interview, as I was pacing up and down the corridor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai. My turn was next and I was trying to ease all the nervousness and pressure. Four candidates had already gone in before me and each interview was about half an hour long. So two hours had slipped by and I thought, the jury (like the parole judges) might be tired. The Kahneman story flashed in my mind repeatedly and I thought (quite dramatically) that depleted glucose levels would be the deciding factor in the result that evening.

The giant door of the interview room opens. Mr Vir Chauhan comes out to escort the next candidate inside.

‘Miss Jalnidh Kaur’, he calls out.

I am already mid-way and I rush to him.

‘Miss Kaur, would you mind waiting for another ten minutes, the judges want to have a tea break’

I almost jump!

...digressions from econometrics

Sometimes he comes in my dreams
With those big inquisitive eyes
He opens his mouth and thoughtfully says
‘Didi, will I also don
That elegant graduation gown
Someday, sometime?
And get to fling those hats in the air
The way you did in the lush green lawns?’


Sometimes he peeps from my econometrics book
From within those mysterious greek symbols
With the same old smile looking up the sky
Gazing at the plane passing by
He quips.
‘Didi, will I get to fly that plane
Someday sometime
And shout a big Namaste down here
To you from above the skies and clouds?’


Sometimes he just sits and stares
Without a smile, that mysterious face
His eyes searching for answers as if
To the endless doubts and questions he buries
Deep within his generous heart.
He just stares and stares and stares at me
Little Keshu.

*Keshu was an Eclair kid, exceptionally intelligent and a gem - like most other children of migrant labourers, he migrated back from Delhi to his village with his parents to some place in Madhya Pradesh. We had got him enrolled in school and taught him among other kids at Roop Nagar, Delhi and then by sheer luck, his parents were employed by our college contractor next year to build the wall in the Science block, he would tread the corridoors of the country's best institution with his bare feet and keep up his quest for knowledge --- I don't know if I get to meet him anytime in future... thats an abysmally low probability...hmmm but who cares about probabilities, miracles do happen! I keep my fingers crossed, probably one day he will google his name and somehow land on this blog and discover his didi again....fingers crossed. God bless Keshu!

Truth and Pretense

Okay, I have to write this. I am overflowing with a protest feeling. It’s strange how everything* just comes together at same time sometimes and one is forced to make generalizations.

I have discovered a new psychological trait in people now-a-days. Those who cannot lie on one side of a lie-scale. Their strategy is a very strange medium strategy – that of pretense and fake words. So if you don’t care for a person, why the pretense? I am okay with people not caring about others, but I get real disutility from people who feign to care. I am just trying to put the issue in perspective. Please don’t mistake the box below for a game box. I have used it to lend some clarity to my thoughts. There is only one player – your friend who can have different feelings. ‘Inside’ refers to what she has in her heart, and ‘outside’ refers to what she portrays to you. And those are not payoffs, just convenient labels for the grids. I describe the payoffs in words below.

OUTSIDE

INSIDE	CARE	DON’T CARE
CARE	1	3
DON’T CARE	2	4

People in the grids 1 and 4 are honest people – you see on their faces what is there in the heart.

However it is grid 2 and 3 which is the pretense sort of people. These people are alluded to in Sri Guru Granth Sahib as ‘Jin man hor, mukh hor’ – (Those who are somebody at their face and somebody else inside)

3 can occur very rarely, may be as a momentary emotional blackmail wherein an individual pretends that he hardly cares while in reality he cares a lot, this deceitful façade may be to teach the other person a lesson. I can’t think why this can be a permanent strategy for somebody.

My problem however stems from people in grid 2. I have been reading a bit of psychology and about lying behavior recently. So, the theory goes that there are some perceptible indicators which can be detected in the facial expressions/body language of a person – for instance, shallow smiles not reaching the eyes using only the muscles around the mouth, propensity to lean backward as if trying to run away or talking in an unusually exaggerated manner.

Pretense comes in varying degrees. I used to have a silly landlady at my PG in the first year – she would lie wildly, you could tell at her face and worse, she would have flawless justifications for all the castles in the air she would build up. However her pretense would soothe me sometimes, probably she could lie so flawlessly sometimes that it would appear as if she really cared. Haha!

And then there are people who are bad in their pretense. You don’t have to be exceptionally clairvoyant to decipher the pretense. So sometimes, logically contradictory statements or incomplete arguments might spew out from their mouths. Their eyes would be busy watching someone or somebody at a distance, while a standard compliment or word of concern would come out of their mouths, as if after a lot of hesitation. Sometimes, lying can occur even when the person is maintaining eye contact – unusual blinking or excessive shaking /nodding of head can occur. The worse thing is when you know this fact already and are able to make out. The realization is even worse that of (Don’t care, Don’t care). When suddenly you get up one morning and find out that your apparent well-wisher is using a (Don’t care, Care) strategy, the result can be heart- breaking.

It’s a little thing really, but that surely teaches me something. Assuming my friend and I are alike in our feelings, meaning that we get similar payoffs, then reasoning symmetrically, I should always refrain from 2 if I really consider her as a friend and would not like to cause her grief. Its okay, if she doesn’t adopt the same strategy out of common knowledge assumptions – but at least I get exonerated from the guilt causing hurt to someone.

Ah! I feel nice now – probably Waheguru did this to bring me to the above conclusion, channelizing my gripe to a logical lesson. :)

*Subhashish's insightful blog post, Aleesha's recent theory (both found here: http://dyspepsia-now.blogspot.in/2013/02/skeletons-in-cupboard.html ) and most importantly, a casual remark by someone this afternoon were the triggers.

For reading more about lies and how to detect them : read http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Lies

Eclair - The Milestone

Tuesday comes just once a week. Isn't it such a sad thing? I get to meet my darlings only once in seven days!

But I must share a milestone. Its a little story that has stayed with me for long. I am touched, overjoyed and so shaken.

My perception of the beggar kids outside Hanuman temple has been static over time - they are violent, they are hungry and they love snatching things.

The first time my friend Priyanka and I had distributed ice creams, it had been a mess. We did a rough headcount of the kids and then ordered 25 ice creams. A mad crowd of kids had gathered around the ice cream seller who was previously standing alone on the road. We introduced some order, made them form a queue for the ice cream. One by one, the ice creams started getting distributed, but then we discovered that suddenly from nowhere more kids had come in the queue and those who had taken one ice cream had hidden theirs somewhere and joined the queue again. Some complained, others resorted to violence, there were numerous little fights in the course of it. By the end of it, Priyanka and I were more exhausted preventing the duels than satiated with our little philanthropy experiment. We ended up paying for 40 ice creams instead of 25!

Another similar episode had occured later, this time over pencils than ice creams.

And so I had concluded that it wasn't their fault after all. Poverty and hunger were the causan cause. They had so little, that they craved for a little more which was still not enough to fill their tummies. And so the tendency to snatch and fight were the direct manifestations of the inherent competitive tendencies that scarcity often gives rise to.

Over time, I internalised the conclusion. I would go and play and teach, but I took a vow never to distribute anything.

This tuesday, things changed. They challenged my conclusion.

My friend Sarda had called me excitedly on Tuesday morning expressing her desire to come to Eclair. In all her enthusiasm, she told me, 'I want to give biscuits to all of them'.

I hesitated. I told her the entire story of previous experiments and left the decision to her.

The class turned out to be really fun - we made paper boats and painted. And they laughed a lot at Sarda's jokes. We clicked pictures by the roadside. There were numerous curious onlookers, eager to help.

And then, the biscuit time came. Sarda had done an approximate count probably and had gone and got a whole bag of biscuits.

We were cautious this time.

'Let's form a circle', she suggested. Indeed, its less difficult to cheat when things are distributed to circular recipients than linear ones - I guess :p - they can't get out of the circle and join it again, and are under constant gaze of each other, you see! No fights occurred. I was surprised to find them behaving like well mannered children.

Anyways, it turned out that we fell short of 6 biscuits. Six cute faces looked up to the empty bag with disappointment and resentment rather.

'Hume nahi mila' - that tall girl Sonam looked into my eyes and asserted her right to a biscuit.

"Okay, I will get 6 more biscuits" - Sarda announced and went to buy more biscuits.

To our shock, somehow scarcity cropped again. There were 6 biscuits and 7 kids. One of them had probably been playing on the side and we had missed her on the count. Or she might have pocketed her biscuit and might have come back for a second one, I thought.

I tried to convince one of the little girls - Roshni about the value of 'sharing' and how sharing doubles up the joy of having biscuits. So, I proposed, 'Why don't we open the pack of biscuits and share half with Sonam?' Her face drooped and she was hesitant to concede. 

In another moment, magic occurs. 

Deepa - the cute girl watching the little fight with her innocent but mature eyes comes forward, advances her pack of biscuits and says, "Sonam ko mera packet de do" (Sonam can take my pack my biscuits)

Generosity! Those little kids! Aww...I was so touched.
I could have never imagined those little, half clad kids practising generosity. I saw it before my eyes.

And yes, one more thing. I had taken three boxes of colours for the kids, which they used and replaced in the colour box, some shove the little crayons into my bag. I had axiomatically believed that anyways some colours would be lost - they were little kids....

Guess what? I came back to my room and counted all the colours - 36! ALL of them were there. Somehow from somewhere, as if honesty had crept into our classroom. I had never sermonised to them about honesty or the value of truth, not even any of the volunteers. 

It was a suo moto change...yeah, its a BIG milestone. I am great hopes about the future!

Eclair - new lessons :)

"Even the interaction has a value in itself, the fact that somebody came to them and thought them to be worthy to talk to, will be a memory in their lives. Even if nothing concrete comes out of it, it is a humbling experience for you and a joy forever for them". I keep on looking at her - my professor, lost in the profundity of her words, reveling in every inch of truth in them. I had gone to her with all my worries, how my efforts were not bearing fruit, how things were back to square one, how I could never get a bunch of kids enrolled in a hobby class. And there, she tells me the crux of it.

I had started Eclair with exactly same intentions but had eventually started measuring it by the result of it than the journey throughout. So if the kids were enrolled, I thought 'that' was the achievement, now I know what the achievement was - the joy of laughing together and playing together.

This Tuesday was a memorable one - its a mela outside the temple always, hordes of kids throng the footpath seeking food and alms from the devotees.

And then their didi comes - 'jal didi"! They had laughed at the strange name. Now they wait for the next Tuesday, for another round of fun and frolic and the joy of aiming darts at the dart board and playing with the huge hoola-hoo ring. Suddenly, the world becomes lighter for them and they are kids again, away from the burden of collecting coins which the devotees throw at them from a distance.

"okay - agle mangalwar ko khelenge - bye" - I bid goodbye to the energetic little class, trying hard to convince them that it was time and that I had to return. After a lot of pestering, and playing the game 'one last time', they finally heeded to my call.

"Bye" - I wave at them, "Go back to your homes now" ... I wait for them to depart.

They just stand and look at me, smiling ear to ear and conveying me a world of thoughts through their innocent eyes. Probably, they are amused. Delighted, may be. People by the roadside hardly smile at them, do they?. They've seen people moving past in a hurry all the time, failing to even acknowledge their existence by the side. They had to get themselves noticed always, by shouting, by running wildly in the middle of the road or by just coming in the way of some passers-by. And now, its a new world.

Begging has become a side vocation now, they are here to play and learn.

One of the little girls - Roshni looks at me and says, 'chankyoo'

She somehow remembered the lesson from many Tuesdays back.

"Par kyun?" - I quip.

"Aapne humare saath khela" - she says blushing. And then the rest also shout, "Chaankyoo"

I am all smiles. Its a different feeling :)

The McKinsey Moment

Like most other third years, I have been vacillating this year. The future is uncertain and my preferences are incomplete.  I have been mostly clueless about what I really want to do after this year. Not that I don’t have choices, but that I have a plethora of choices – in short, I am spoiled by choices. I can go for a Masters in Economics – in D-school or ISI or abroad at LSE, I can go for a job – there are plenty of recruiters coming through the Campus Placement Cell or I could make long term plans and plan to sit for civils or still, I could go for a PhD in an area of interest and choose to teach (I would love to do that!). To decide what I want to do next, I need to be clear about the long term plan. I wish I had constraints of some kind – that would help me eliminate choices and zero down to one or two. Well, I ought to be happy about that, you would say. Anyways, read on.

The pre placement talk made me feel as if McKinsey was looking for me. I had all the qualities they were looking for (I thought) – and better still, I liked the job profile. I have been recently entranced by the world of psychology and counseling. A little bit of practical exposure to counseling (and success at it!) made me feel as if I really liked solving problems. So, McKinsey I thought would be the same. Just the way I counsel a friend who is all forlorn and gloomy and make her see her own strengths and weaknesses, I would be here, consulting big companies who would approach McK with all their financial, organizational blues. Relationship problems would have similarities with financial problems, I presumed and the approach adopted to counsel the client would have some resemblance. Also, the profile of a Business Analyst would give me both – hands on experience in practical economics as well as that in practical psychology, since they mentioned in the talk how ‘inter-personal skills’ were crucial to the life of a BA.

The initial process was smooth, I got through the CV shortlisting round and was called for interview. I also got a taste of luxury through one trip to the McK office in Gurgaon for the case interview workshop. It was a different world – a secret world where crack teams were assigned sealed cabins to brainstorm and reach solutions to real life cases. (I was more wonderstruck by the slew of jhuggis in the plot adjoining the gargantuan building, where construction work was in progress and dark, nude kids roamed around in piles of sand in the morning sunlight – construction sites never fail to evade me…anyways) A walk inside the huge, green office with the spacious gym and soothing lawns made me fall in love with it.

The interview was scheduled for 8^th October and I was diagnosed positive for dengue. I sent a mail to the Recruitment Officer describing my circumstances.  I got an instant reply and then a personal call from her side. My dad attended the call and I could hear the female voice telling him – ‘Please let her rest and let her know that we would take her interview later, only once she recuperates completely.’ I was even more touched and became more determined. I had once more reason to go for the job – they valued the quality of lives of not only their employees but even prospective employees! So, profile, office, and people. I now had three reasons to seriously consider aiming for it.

Its November now and I have recovered from dengue. I was called for interview with McKinsey and Co. on 8^th of this month. I didn’t really prepare hard for the case interviews, apart from watching some Victor Cheng videos and reading his long email tips. Somehow, the idea of ‘preparing’ for the interview vexes me. All through the Victor Cheng videos, I felt as if he was trying to train people to a certain way of thinking. People who are really desperate about it supposedly go through his LOMS program multiple times just to start thinking like a consultant. It then becomes a drill, you walk through the framework, let the client see the state of things and then synthesise and conclude. Probably it suits them, but I would rather prefer a job where I don’t have to change myself for the job – I would like a job which suits my way of thinking. Not that I have a better way of thinking – in fact, I discovered how chaotic my initial attempts at solving cases were. They got more structured and clear over time with a bit of practice. It helps if you can calculate with clerical accuracy and speed and handle astronomical calculations of client turnovers and profits. Overall, I discovered on the way till 8^th of this month that a considerable chunk of my skills were disjunct from the skills they were looking for and that I would have to institute real changes in my ways of thinking about issues and yes, that I wasn’t that comfortable with exponential number crunching. They look for people who have an appetite to handle ‘ambiguity’ they say – so missing data, ballpark calculations and uncertain results were part of the lives of consultants. I also discovered I would have to overcome my level of ambiguity aversion till the 8^th.

The D-Day and the H-Hour came. And went.

I am a bit less uncertain about future now. Guess what?

I have decided I am not going for it.

The two rounds of interviews with the Engagement Managers made me conclude two things about myself:

One, I don’t really ‘love’ solving cases – they are interesting, I can handle them with ease, I can think about things logically and rationally, but I don’t really enjoy doing them over and over again.

Two, the most interesting part of the interview was the personal part.

I was asked about the ‘self-driven’ study I had done with regard to RSBY (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana) in the summer (as my CV put it) – I could go on and on about it, in the interview. I started with the story – of how the DG Labour Welfare had delivered a talk in college about the construct and design of RSBY and how I was amazed with the whole idea of health insurance for the poor via smart cards and how I had then gone to the office of the DG at Jaisalmer House and got encouraged to conduct an independent assessment. The enumeration team, the interviews with migrant laborers, the travails to the far ends of my city – I described each and every aspect. For a moment, I was transported back to the summer with my peers – Harshpreet, Ganga and Gurbachan veer. I found I gleaned more joy out of those scooter rides to empanelled hospitals than the Innova ride to the McK office.

I had to wait for long at the office on the D-Day after the Problem Solving Test (PST) for my case interviews. One was in person, and another was via video conferencing. I could rant about the waiting time – how I had to spend one and a half hour in a posh steel and wooden chamber with modern art paintings on the wall, but in retrospection, I think it was ‘reflection time’ for me. I didn’t like the silence that hung in the corridors, it was as if all conversation happened behind closed doors, in confidential cabins. I didn’t like the luxury of the world here. Something strangulated me, as I longed to get out and fly in my world. Something told me, we were just not meant for each other.

And there I am. Much tranquil and calm. I have one less choice now. I am nearing my focus. I would probably try considering civil services (something I started abhorring after I spent a day in the office of a District Collector) – if I could design and implement such ambitious schemes like RSBY, the way Anil Swarup did, I would give everything else for it. For now I see, the civil services are also about problem solving – just that the context is different. The paycheque is smaller and the world is a bit more humble and a bit lackluster.

But I am still not sure about the civil thing – please don’t ask me the next time you bump into me, ‘how’s the prep going?’ I just added it in my preference spectrum.

I like this ambiguity of life, I guess. Each day life unfolds itself to you and you discover new things about your own self. I will always remain grateful to McKinsey for providing me some of its silent consultancy services in the waiting room and during the case interviews, about the case of my life’s career and that too for free!