Like Father, Like Son

Hi readers,

In this post, I’m gonna share 2 anecdotes from my past. The similarity in both of them — street smartness. Both of them are acts of some real on the spot thinking and quick talking, to bear fruits, which were far fetched and to an extend not possible to bear, with conventional means of conversing.

One by a father, another by an inspired son.

Part 1 — Tour to a 5-star hotel

As a child, my father used to take me to a lot of different places on Sunday mornings, some of them natural beauties while some of them architectural marvels — I was born and brought up in a very beautiful and historic town in India. Naturally, the list of such places was finite and I did get bored after a certain number of visits.

To keep my motivation going about our Sunday tradition, my dad decided to take me on a tour of a newly established humongous, 5-star hotel by the lake. As expensive as it was for us to spend a day in there, my father decided this little excursion of ours needed to be soft of his pockets, if possible free-of-cost.

So, there we were at gates of this beautiful man-made masterpiece on a bright sunny Sunday morning. It was around 11-ish. Little did I know how my dad had planned this whole thing and little did he. I was looking at every minute detail of this place. The hefty excavations on stones, the beautiful ventilations, oh that place was a treat to my eyes.

We reached the reception. The receptionist asked, “Sir, how may I help you?”. My dad replied: “Well…”. He stood there silent, acting as if he was in deep thought and said, “I am visiting on behalf of Mr. XYZ(replace this with a famous movie director for your locale) and we need to book this hotel for a movie we want to shoot, between the nth date of next month to the mth date of the month later.” The confidence with which he spoke made the eyes of the receptionist glare with the optimism of catching a big fish, and my eyes were wide open, almost ready to pop out due to the shock — from that big fat lie. A long 30-minute conversation followed which covered logistics, star cast and what not and every detail delivered by my dad was fake still all the more believable. Oh, what confidence, what panache. The receptionist was in his bottle and you know what followed. He gave us the tour of the entire hotel, all types of suites, recreation areas, conference rooms, added amenities like pool, gym, spa, jacuzzis, everything. And again, I noted every minute detail about a plethora of eye catching views around that beauty of a resort by the lake.

It was a really enjoyable, and a very inspiring day for me. That free-of-cost luxury and hospitality that we received was near unforgettable. My dad is a very learned man — a chemical engineer and a master of the English language. By his sheer conversational skills and unbreakable belief in himself, we managed to make this hotel hopping another one of our Sunday traditions — a new hotel every time though. Fin.

Part 2 — Reshape of a campus’ placement scenario

This is the part where the part-1 of this post inspired the son(me) to carry forward his father’s legacy.

Like father, like son — I too enrolled into an engineering college for my undergrad in Computer Sciences. My campus was a mediocre one with respect to placements — not because of the students but due to its obscure remoteness. It was situated at one of the hilly border regions of India with an army airport being its best bet of attracting large scale companies for campus placements. We did have rail and road connectivity but they were as risky as my dad’s claims sounded to me in our hotel-hopping adventures.

I was an average student but (to me) a decent communicator and as such decided to contest for the placement coordinator’s post for my batch. And as you must have guessed, I succeeded. But that wasn’t the tough part at all. Our placement cell was a misery, people had near zero optimism of landing any big fish, leave alone a school of such fishes. But I had different plans. Well, for once in my life, I wanted to stay put on my claims to my mates of achieving 100% placements that year.

But reality hit me soon. I had no solid contacts from the HR departments of those companies (problem no.1), neither solid reasons to give to them to choose our campus over other more-accessible mediocre ones (problem no.2). I thought and thought and realised I need to put my father’s thinking cap to see some light on the other side of this treacherous road. And baam! I had a two-fold solution to the above mentioned problems.

For problem no.1, I contacted placement coordinators across every single campus in India to ask for contacts of HR personnel in return of the perfect bait — ‘the contact of the company who offered a really big, fake number to students in our campus last year’. Little did I believed in this trickery, I got flooded with contacts of big-big fishes which I wanted to catch in my hook so eagerly. Problem no.1 is sorted.

For problem no.2, I started calling these fishes and on being asked why should they visit our campus, I offered one fixed gambit to them all — ‘your competitor company is also visiting the same week we are asking you to visit and their number is pretty appetising’ — by the way, fake story. People are competitive. The industry is competitive. That’s how they push to be better day in and day out. This cheeky little idea that I used to put in their head not only compelled them to visit (earlier than their competitors) but to also hire in good quantity so that their competitors were left with the junk(I loved and still love each and every one of my batchmates equally) to interview from. Another home run. Another Fin.

Closing notes

The common thing in these anecdotes which I want to highlight — the intention of the verbal trickery was good, if not noble, and it did not hurt anybody.

How did they not hurt anybody? My dad used to drop subtle hints by the ends of our tours to receptionists indicating he’s been played on but with no harm. And the companies who visited our campus got some of the most hard working as well as smart task force for their technology departments.

There were so many of these small little trickeries my dad mastered in that have always helped me understand that you can convince anybody about stuff only if you yourself believe in it with 100% integrity.

Like father, like son…