JUST LET IT SLIDE

There are certain submission weeks in an MBA program where you would have sat through 70 presentations. Most prepared with an increasing dexterity and acquired talent, with certain design elements that can help you gauge where the most interested member spent their summer months. It is tiring, one wishes that the clock would tick faster as one bullet point after other fights for your fleeting attention. The sad reality is that a lifetime of presentations is what awaits us. What’s the point of it all if you can’t summarize?

I have learnt quite a bit about the transcendence of slide templates, in the last five years. There are a few distinguishing ones. The dark blue borders and red font used by finance professors, exuding their lack of respect for anything that doesn’t have a growth rate and valuation multiple attached to it. The pleasant turquoise and light blue dotted borders are the universal ID of the consultant and his kin. The red and pink pictographs, with eye-catching smart art - a practice left to marketing geniuses who claim they can sell at the very least, their creative ability. There are rumors that each of these templates originated from an overworked analyst or professor’s assistant in some big city in some big institution in the US and has made its way to every MBA classroom in the world.

It makes me miss the blackboards (well, green, by the time I was growing up) of my schooldays. Nothing said class leader as having immunity to interrupt any teacher for a piece of chalk or writing the date each morning. A command to approach the blackboard had no cues, no lifesaving slide with speakers’ notes. Either you knew exactly what to write, or you wrote it 50 times at home later on. Sometimes I made a mistake on purpose, just to perfect my handwriting through the punishment of repetition. It didn’t improve honestly, but it was therapeutic as today’s insta-counselors would say. There is a certain security in repetition, in elaboration, in irrelevance.

I can see the impact the age of bullet points has had on me. I could read entire novels at one go and now, I can’t get through a chapter without wanting to read the last few pages so that I can get the plot faster. It’s not just me, is it? Videos are shorter, the creative window is limited to 1 min Shorts or Reels which you can mindlessly scroll through. Government officials are lauded for their cutting one liner, for having strong, short, and “sweet” opinions. I wonder how many in today’s India would have stayed on to listen to Nehru’s speech. Filmmakers are criticized for their movie’s runtimes; journalists are outdated if they do not upgrade their editorials to character-limited tweets. And how do I know? I made a presentation on it once.

Maybe it’s not really a degradation of our attention spans, maybe it’s a means to be able to focus on what is more important. And it’s not all gone, we still have 15-min powerful Ted Talks that have garnered millions of views (although I wonder how many of these views are from the younger generation that will be making the world of tomorrow) It does make one long for lazy winter nights though, with poetry and stories and cardamom tea. For the ability to do absolutely nothing all day without feeling a sense of incompleteness and unproductiveness.

I can’t claim a moral high ground, 24 years of goal setting and seeking has left me confused when I have nothing to chase. It is nice though, to take some time to ponder and write down my thoughts, to sit and watch birds and cats and dogs and langurs walk around without any submissions in mind, to wander through the old buildings of Ahmedabad wondering how many people across history have spent a quiet evening in this very spot. I wish there comes a time in my life and yours, where having nothing to do tomorrow doesn’t look like a suspicious blue moon event. Up until then, serendipity comes to us in the little things that make us smile – like compliments on a well formatted slideshow.