No Gas, Three Bullet Points

One of the things that a MBA course conditions you for is to gas in life. All those presentations, facts, statistics and figures etc. just won’t sound appealing if you didn’t know how to gas around them. It is fairly accurate that ‘gas makes the world go round’. Really.

However, this learning of ‘gassing’ is best utilised only outside the boundaries of one’s B-School. If you use it inside the campus, it could have dangerous and embarrassing consequences. In the world outside, you can show off in front of the ‘lesser mortals’ by coming across as someone really smart and knowledgeable while knowing very well at the core of your heart that you aren’t talking anything substantial (Trivia: The size of the global consulting industry is around $150 billion and is growing at the CAGR of 15.2%). But, why is it not advisable to gas inside a B-School?



Well, the reason is simple. When you are inside the B-School, everyone is getting endowed with the same ‘skill-set’. So it doesn’t even take a second for the person in front to realise when you’ve run out of genuine content and when you’ve just started err…gassing. In FMS, people sound the ‘gas-alert’ on the speakers with the phrase ‘No Gas, Three Bullet Points’ (inspired from the bullet points in MS-PowerPoint) which is a direct indication (read: strong instruction) to the latter to stop talking arbitly and to speak concretely and concisely. In our class, this message has even got a sign language representation in which you stretch out 3 fingers horizontally and show them to the person giving the presentation to convey the message to him. The other implicit meaning of this gesture is the classical ‘read between the lines’, which in turn isn’t too far away from the other message in spirit.

Recently, during a group presentation in the HR class, a friend (Gaurav ‘Cut-Sleeves’ Puri) sitting in the audience showed me the ‘no gas, three bullet points’ gesture just as I was about to speak. I instantly burst out into laughter because I had only seen the presentation a few minutes earlier for the first time and was actually going to rely on gas to carry me through. While he got away by ducking his laughing face between the audience, I struggled through my part in the presentation in front of the whole class trying to conceal my laughter and trying to sound like I am not gassing at the same time.

Its also funny that this phenomenon of gassing is pretty well-understood by the faculty who are used to students coming up in front year after year and trying to get lucky with ‘global’ (another term meaning the same as gas). This weekend some of us from college were on an NDTV show whose telecast our Dean saw in the hostel with the students. At the end of the telecast, during his speech he mentioned that he was happy with the content of the show and the inputs given by the students, as it didn’t sound like it was all gas! The entire hall burst into laughter upon hearing the usage of the phrase from him for the ‘personal chord’ it struck in everyone’s heart.

Well, love it or hate it, you can’t really ignore gas. And I too should cut the global here and get back to doing something more 'constructive'. Ya right.