Dollar Parity to a Pound (of Flesh)

 August 13th, 2011, the first day of Bees Saal Baad, our batch reunion. 

An expectant silence as Prof Prakash Apte began to speak. “As you guys know,” he intoned in his dry expressionless voice, “when I set a question paper for the senior batch, I hope it will dissuade the junior batch from taking my course in the following year……” 

Some laughter around the room as the finance majors in my batch from IIM Bangalore relived, in that instant, the moments we had spent in the examination room in the monsoon of 1990 (I am sweating now, so you get the gist).

Apte was a genius.  He taught International Finance (‘IntFin’), stuff like foreign exchange, derivatives and quanti gobbledygook, all super exciting to those who are those Brainy-Competitive-Therefore-its-logical types and have a 24th pair of chromosomes named Masochism.  I have – when reports last came in – 23 disarrayed pairs and none of them displayed so much as a DNA strand of financial intelligence, so I should have given this course a wide berth, but idiocy prevailed over an inner voice that asked loudly and repeatedly, ‘Are you Nuts?’

Apte was an innocuous looking fellow of medium height. He would stride into class, the veritable academic, his body stooped and leaning forward as if delicately balancing the inordinate weight of his brain, hands behind his back, hair combed in a schoolboy manner, whistling a low tune. Working on the assumption that we had read all that he had asked us to (an insanely far-fetched assumption), he would turn to the blackboard and begin a series of arcane mathematical calculations, speaking with passion to the piece of chalk in his hand. 

Our response was either to

a) Stare with our mouths open; or
b) Copy things down furiously in the hope that one day Enlightenment would descend from above; or
c) Curse that hangover from yesterday’s get-together; or
d) Combo of (a) and (c); or
e) Combo of (b) and (c). Notes made under this condition broadly resembled Morse Code. 

In a few days, I gave up hope and contemplated selling toothpaste as my Life Calling.  

Final Exam cometh and Apte was there, of course, with that low whistle. As he handed out the question paper, I looked at it disbelievingly. There was nothing in the whole paper that I could understand, nothing resembling English.  Even American English. I closed my eyes, tried to calm myself and believe that lack of sleep had something to do with it. A second reading and a couple of lines - out of a hundred – made some sense.  The rest was written in some obscure dialect of Swahili.  And I wished he would stop that bloody low whistle.  

In twenty minutes, I answered all that I had ever known, currently knew and would ever know about IntFin on two pages of the answer sheet and then spent an hour and a half in utter misery thinking about toothpaste.  

The big comfort (because our grading is relative, please note the joy in my sadistic tone) was that most others seemed hit by six-sixty volts of pure thermal power directly from the step-down transformer to their cervical spine, because everyone was sitting upright and staring unblinkingly ahead.  

And He was low-whistling.  

Well, in the end, I had got 23%.  As I was cursing everyone – a passing buffalo included – a friend fetched up. “The pass mark,” he said, “is 18%.” That day, I did not just pass, I passed out.

Over the last three decades, there have been occasions when the IntFin paper appeared as a horrible nightmare, with that bloodstained low whistle in tow.  As Prof Apte has now ascended to meet the One Above, all he will ask for is a blackboard and chalk to talk with.  And permission to whistle.

And, of course, he might do a surprise quiz on the Arbitrage Theorem.  God save the Maker.