70 Angry Men, 2 of them knocked down!!!

If you are one of those guys who have always tried to get out of jury duty by giving the weirdest of excuses, you ought to watch this movie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_angry_men

It will instantly make you realize the kind of smart decisions that you have always made and you will immediately want to pat yourself on the back, how much ever inflexible you may be.

But for us, the conscientious PGPX citizens, there was no backing out of this movie duty, which formed a mandatory part of our Organizational Behavior (OB) course module. The fact that the screening was scheduled in the afternoon, after we had taken our first official quiz - on accounting and one which had such toe crushing yorkers, that almost 10% of the class failed to open their accounts - made matters even worse.

A quick word on how the movie was positioned by its marketers. The following were the tag lines displayed on the movie poster in Wikipedia – “Life is in their hands, death is in their minds”, “It explodes like 12 sticks of dynamite”. Talk about creating customer value out of thin air. Dude, this stuff is gonna rock….

And rock it did. From our chairs that is. The first one to hit the floor was our ‘pregnant Shaayar’ Nitin, who appeared to have fallen asleep on the wheel. It is only ironic that inspite of him being our cultural rep, and an ardent movie buff, he was found wanting in his endurance to soak in the jury deliberations and stay awake at the same time. The whole class was very eager to make sure that he was OK, and once he stood up from the floor and looked around in a half-sleepy, confused manner not knowing where he was or what exactly was happening, we were more than happy to give him a grand round of applause to express our solidarity behind his decision to get back in the ring and continue the fight.

On a side note, he thoroughly deserves the applause and the support he got as he also happens to be our OB (Official Birthday) guy, who sacrifices his sleep and goes around in the middle of the night with a cake in hand to wake people up and lead them in a procession to attack fellow PGPX-ians on their birthdays, so as to give them a friendly dose of Birthday bums and amateur Shaayari. This I have to say, is a bitter sweet experience indeed, as known to more than half a dozen people who have already experienced this firsthand and to scores of others loosing sleep over the impending OB treatment they are going to get from Nitin on their birthdays. Me, I am already seeing Nitin in my nightmares and have postponed my birthday indefinitely and am currently undergoing SD (Shaayar-Detoxification) therapy. But in case, there are guys out there who can’t wait to kick me in the a#$, for all the stuff that I write up, please feel free to see me in person and I will try to honor your request.

Back to the movie which dragged on and on and one could easily see the emotional turmoil that my dear classmates were undergoing, not knowing, whether the verdict will be guilty or not guilty - if the teaching assistants caught them dozing off. Some people did nod off here and there, but somehow they were all successful in hanging onto their chairs and avoiding more untoward incidents.

But once the movie drew to a happy ending with the teaching-assistant-jury getting ready to pronounce a unanimous not-guilty verdict, things took another ugly turn. This time it was one of our key international participants and International Immersion rep Dhiraj, who had assumed a precarious balancing position with both feet off the ground to watch 'angry men', lost it and went down with a huge thud. What to say? He learnt the valuable OB lesson of taking a balanced position while watching such emotionally charged movies. But thank goodness, he also survived the fall, and recovered in time to submit the Joint Learning Paper about his ordeal.

Based on this movie experience, I am working on a new OB game which will be rolled out to PGPX-3, under the brand name – Desert Survival- Part II. This game will ask its participants to list their order of preference of things that they would like to take in order to survive the twin onslaught of somnolence and academic rigor that is in store for them as part of their curriculum. Here is a sample discussion that I have in mind:

Participant 1: "I am taking helmet as my first item as I don’t want to bang my head on the floor like Dhiraj Bhai."

Participant 2: "That is why I want you to pick the seat belt first, so that we can survive such edge-of-the-seat thrillers without falling off. "

Participant 3: "I agree. And I think we need that sun glasses too, so that we that we don’t get caught and loose out on our class participation grades. "

Participant 4: "And I will pack in that parachute so that I can jump off the building, just in case Nitin comes looking for me on my birthday… "

And they all slept happily ever after…..