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Twice every year, we have the meeting of the minds where half a dozen or so people come together and decide the lives, fates and careers of the rest of the people who unfortunately through the hand of fate have been in their respective teams.

The bonhomie at the start is in no way an indication of things to come. Things start slowly. People have rated each of their own team members at the very top. And then they start reading out the respective accomplishments. Listen to one of them and you would think without these people around, the company would have closed down. Each one has his or her unique style.

Shrek has an amazing ability to talk round and round and about nothing in particular. If he had his way, he would have probably started during the time dinosaurs roamed the world and then come down to present day. Maybe he would have also said his team member can bring about world peace if given an opportunity.

The One Who is Destined to Wait (TOWiDtW) and The Jr Small B often have open fights about their own team members. They never let go of an opportunity of running down the other's team member often getting personal and adding no value to the discussion.

The Only Sane One (TOSO) in the group actually manages to make sense but I do get the feeling she loses out because she refuses to pander to the surrounding ability to make a local chinese food stall sound like gourmet cuisine.

That leaves Small B, who lives up to his name and has it all figured out in his head and achieves I have no clue what by getting grown ups to fight over something as trivial as who has the greater/better/bigger accomplishment. At the end of day, he is going to move the pawns around the chess board irrespective of what is achieved in that room.

If you do distance yourself from the melee, you can have fun, though when you sober up and quit laughing,  you do realize these are people's careers you are playing with and someone does similar stuff to you.

People have hedging strategies so you 'sacrifice' someone and place him/her strategically so that the person cannot go anywhere below in the grid. Some biases are so apparent, you wonder if people are daft not to see through elaborate and completely nonsensical explanations.

Then when you almost feel that everything has been put in place, Small B comes up with a question, which starts the debate all over again. Debate, ofcourse, being an euphemism since most conversations make the B-School GD sessions seem like a graveyard at night.

I tend to leave the room mentally when most of the discussions are on, coming back to earth only when I suddenly hear my name asking for my opinion or when people make a mistake and my mind inadvertently latches on.

I remember, TOSO once (year before last I think) had a slip of tongue and said something about someone not having many escalations and I (in that zoned out stage) suddenly come back to earth and ask "many or any". Everyone caught on and suddenly that person had dropped right through the grid. Till date I regret it since TOSO is the only one in that room that I think is genuine. TOSO, you will never read this, but I am sorry, I was not listening and my ears tend to pick up strange things even when I am on Planet of the Dreams.

More later!