Things Ravi Pratap Is Up To

Hello, gentle reader.

Hmm, this is almost beginning to feel somewhat unfamiliar. Clearly, it’s been a long time since I sat down to organize my thoughts into a blog post. And to think I made a resolution in the general direction of trying to actually write far more often!

One of the challenges of writing after a significant length of time is that of deciding exactly what to write about - a problem prolific posters rarely have (or so I imagine). But, this blog is, after all, about what I’m upto so what could possibly be better than me regale you with stories of my exploits around the world

My last post (in June) was actually composed aboard an Air France flight to Chennai and at that time, I was on a business trip to India (Bangalore, to be precise). On that trip, I also happened to turn 26 - an event that gave me a fair bit to think about.

For one, I’ve begun to realize that for the first time in my career (which, I admit, isn’t really saying much given how long I’ve actually been out of graduate school), I work with people even younger than I am. There was something cool about being the hip dude fresh from school with all the boundless enthusiasm. But wait, all of a sudden, I’m interviewing all these college kids, telling them what to do on my team, and attributing some of their tendencies to being “a little green!” Wow, life really has moved pretty quickly since I last noticed how old I was!

The plus side to being a little older is that I’m probably taken more seriously in business settings (from what I’ve seen). This is not to say that college students are not taken seriously but it’s just more likely that they have had less experience with real-world situations and thus, not the first choice to head a team or be given complete independent charge of something new (this tends to be skewed in startups, though).

If you’re a college student reading this, it’s probably disheartening to find that out but I want to say again that this is just a very general approximation. There are numerous exceptions to this, of course, and a lot depends on you and how quickly you learn and adapt. When you’re fresh out of college, you’re also extremely moldable and so what you do in the first 5 years out of college will very likely have a huge impact on what you do in the next 20.

Speaking of being fresh out of college, I will confess that one of the images that I saw of myself was that of being a laptop-toting globetrotting professional hopping from one continent to the next. To my rather naive self barely out of my teens, it seemed that the definition of success was just that - donning a cool-looking suit, travelling business class, with fingers typing away at something obviously important.

That was then, of course. I’m old enough now to be able to see through all the glamour and actually not be swayed much by tales of all these consultants and investment bankers raking up the frequent flyer miles (and their bank balances) and attending cocktail parties with the CEOs of the biggest corporations.

This reminds me of the time when I was doing my Masters at Wash U and I attended this information session by McKinsey. The chap giving us the presentation was an alumnus and was doing a pretty good job of selling us all on how consultants are above us mortals. At one point, as part of the list of benefits of working for McKinsey, he said something like, “McKinsey works only with Fortune 500 corporations and their senior management so if you come work for us, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with the CEOs of these companies.”

And it works beautifully on college kids, most of whom are not quite sure of what they really want to do and are easily seduced by dangling the carrot of an ultra-cool, highly “bragworthy” lifestyle in front of their eyes (yes, I was one of those people too). I have yet to come across a single person of my general age-group who is not swayed even slightly by such presentations, or for that matter what they hear from their friends in B school. It almost always is the case that they start thinking about why they can’t be consultants or investment bankers themselves

Now, I am not quite the aforementioned laptop-toting, important-looking business professional (and thank God, too, because I surely don’t want to spend most of my life just hopping from one timezone to the next), but I have in the recent past been sent to India on business a few times and needless to say, I love it.

I love the experience of just being in India; of seeing my parents and brother more than just once a year; of working with a dynamic Indian company to build a team of the smartest engineers; of living life in the new India, albeit for a week at a time; of reliving moments of my life growing up in Hyderabad; of noticing things about India and Indians that I never quite saw before. That, and some other perks that come with flying on business - check out the Lufthansa Business Lounge at Frankfurt airport to see what I mean. The bathrooms there are so clean I think I could sleep in them! Until my recent trip I used to think that business class was a ridiculous way to spend too much money but I know now how much more pleasant the whole experience of flying 21 hours non-stop can be!

While it may seem to me that I’m too old for one club (the 18-24 age group), it looks like I’m too young for another - the general age group that people travelling to India on business seem to fall into. At least if you go by my experience at Hyderabad’s airport.

I was making my way to get in line to check-in at the business-class counter when a guy rushed up to me and said,

“Sir, economy check-in is that way.”

“But isn’t this the line for business class?” I asked, somewhat puzzled.

I noticed a look of incredulousness on the guy’s face. But he quickly recovered.

“Oh, please go right ahead, sir.”

I smiled and continued to make my way to the check-in counter.

I don’t know if it was because I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that made the guy stop me but that was the moment that I thought to myself that being 26 was really not as much of a deal as I was making it out to be!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.