IIFT 2012 VARC | Previous Year IIFT Paper

Read the following passages carefully and answer the questions at the end of each passage

Asked what a business is, the typical businessman is likely to answer, “An organisation to make a profit.” The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. This answer is not only false, it is irrelevant.

The prevailing economic theory of the mission of business enterprise and behaviour, the maximization of profit which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear — may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, or how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is. in fact, meaningless. The danger in the concept of profit maximization is that it makes profitability appear a myth.

Profit and profitability are, however, crucial for society even more than for the individual business. Yet profitability is not the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity. Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behaviour and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen sat in directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their total lack of personal interest in making profits.

The root of the confusion is the mistaken belief that the motive of a person — the so called profit motive of the businessman is an explanation of his behaviour or his guide to right action. Whether there is such a thing as a profit motive at all is highly doubtful. The idea was invented by the classical economists to explain the economic reality that their theory of static equilibrium could not explain. There has never been any evidence for the existence of the profit motive, and we have é long since found the true explanation of the phenomena of economic change and fig growth which the profit motive was first put forth to explain.

It is irrelevant for an understanding of business behaviour, profit, and profitability, whether there is a profit motive or not. That Jim Smith is in business to make a profit concerns only him and the Recording Angel. It does not tell us what Jim 5 Smith does and how he performs. We do not learn anything about the work of a prospector hunting for uranium in the Nevada desert by being told that he is trying to make his fortune. We do not learn anything about the work of a heart specialist by being told that he is trying to make a livelihood, or even that he is trying to benefit humanity. The profit motive and its offspring maximisation of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business.

In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm. It is a major cause of the misunderstanding of the nature of profit in our society and of the deep —seated hostility to profit, which are among the most dangerous diseases of an industrial society. It is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy — in this country as well as in Western Europe — which are squarely based on the failure to understand the nature, function, and purpose of business enterprise. And it is in large part responsible for the prevailing belief that there is an inherent contradiction between profit and a company’s ability to make a social contribution. Actually, a company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable.

To know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

Markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but by businesspeople. The want a business satisfies may have been felt by the customer before he or she was offered the means of satisfying it. Like food in a famine, it may have dominated the customer’s life and filled all his waking moments, but it remained a potential want until the action of business people converted it into effective demand. Only then is there a customer and a market. The want may have been unfelt by the potential customer; no one knew that he wanted a Xerox machine or a computer until these became available. There may have been no want at all until business action created it — by innovation, by credit. by advertising, or by salesmanship. In every case, it is business action that creates the customer.

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. I was still too young to grasp that people of breeding were meant to affect innocence of this fundamental distinction. and that the same courtesy applied to any disparity that might rise out of religious. racial, sexual class, financial and (latterly) cultural difference. So in my innocence I would raise my hand every time the teacher asked a question, just to make it clear I knew the answer.

After some months of this, the teacher and my classmates must have been vaguely aware I was a good student, but still I felt the compulsion to raise my hand. By now the teacher seldom called on me, preferring to give other children a chance to speak, too. Still my hand shot up without my even willing it, whether or not l knew the answer. If I was putting on airs, like someone who even in ordinary clothes, adds a gaudy piece of jewellery, it’s also true that I admired my teacher and was desperate to cooperate.

Another thing I was happy to discover at school was the teacher’s ‘authority’. At home, in the crowded and disordered Pamuk Apartments, things were never so clear; at our crowded table, everyone talked at the same time. Our domestic routines, our love for one another, our conversations, meals and radio hours; these 'were never debated — they just happened. My father held little obvious authority at home, and he was often absent. He never scolded my brother or me, never even raised his eyebrows in disapproval. In later years, he would introduce us to his friends as ‘my two younger brothers’, and we felt he had earned the right to say so. My mother was the only authority I recognised at home. But she was hardly a distant or alien tyrant: her power came from my desire to be loved by her. And so - I was fascinated by the power my teacher wielded over her twenty-five pupils.

Perhaps I identified my teacher with my mother, for I had an insatiable desire for her approval. ‘Join your arms together like this and sit down quietly,’ she would say, and I would press my arms against my chest and sit patiently all through the lesson. But gradually the novelty wore off; soon it was no longer exciting to have every answer or solve an arithmetic problem ahead of everyone else or earn the highest mark; time began to flow with painful slowness, or stop flowing altogether.

Turning away from the fat, half-witted girl who was writing on the blackboard, who gave everyone — teachers, school caretakers and her classmates — the same vapid, trusting smile, my eyes would float to the window, to the upper branches of the chestnut tree that I could just see rising up between the apartment buildings. A crow would land on a branch. Because I was viewing it from below, I could see the little cloud floating behind it — as it moved, it kept changing shape: first a fox’s nose, then a head, then a dog. I didn’t want it to stop looking like a dog, but as it continued its journey it changed into one of the four-legged silver sugar bowls from my grandmother’s always—locked display case, and I’d long to be at home. Once I’d conjured up the reassuring silence of the shadows of home, my father would step out from them, as if from a dream, and off we’d go on a family outing to the Bosphorus. Just then, a window in the apartment building opposite would , open, a maid would shake her duster and gaze absentmindedly at the street that I could not see from where I was sitting. What was going down there? I’d wonder. I’d hear a horse cart rolling over the cobblestones, and a rasping voice would cry out ‘Eskiciiiiiii! The maid would watch the junk dealer make his way down the street before pulling her head back inside and shutting the window behind her, but then, right next to that window, moving as fast as the first cloud but going in the opposite direction, I’d see a second cloud. But now my attention was called back to the classroom, and seeing all the other raised hands, I would eagerly raise my hand too: long before I worked out from my classmates’ responses what the teacher had asked us, I was foggily confident I had the answer. 

It was exciting, though sometimes painful, to get to know my classmates as individuals, and to find out how different they were from me. There was that sad boy who, whenever he was asked to read out loud in Turkish class, would skip every other line; the poor boy’s mistake was as involuntary as the laughter it would elicit from the class. In first grade, there was a girl who kept her red hair in a ponytail, who sat next to me for a time. Although her bag was a slovenly jumble of half-eaten apples, simits, sesame seeds, pencils and hair bands, it always smelled of dried lavender around her, and that attracted me; I was also drawn to her for speaking so openly about the little taboos of daily life, and if I didn’t see her at the weekend, I missed her, though there was another girl so tiny and delicate that I was utterly entranced by her as well. Why did that boy keep on telling lies even knowing no one was going to believe him‘? How could that girl be so indiscreet about the goings-on in her house? And could this other girl be shedding real tears as she read that poem about Ataturk?'

Just as I was in the habit of looking at the fronts of cars and seeing noses, so too did I like to scrutinise my classmates, looking for the creatures they resembled. The boy with the pointed nose was a fox and the big one next to him was, as everyone said, a bear, and the one with the thick hair was a hedgehog... I remember a Jewish girl called Mari telling us all about Passover — there were days when no one in her grandmother’s house was allowed to touch the light switches. Another girl reported that one evening, when she was in her room, she turned around so fast she glimpsed the shadow of an angel — a fearsome story that stayed with me. There was a girl with very long legs who wore very long socks and always looked as if she was about to cry; her father was a government minister and when he died in a plane crash from which Prime Minister Menederes emerged without a scratch, I was sure she’d been crying because she had known in advance what was going to happen. Lots of children had problems with their teeth; a few wore braces. On the top floor of the building that housed the lycée dormitory and the sports hall, just next to the infirmary, there was rumoured to be a dentist, and when teachers got angry they would often threaten to send naughty children there. For lesser infractions pupils were made to stand in the corner between the blackboard and the door with their backs to the class, sometimes one leg, but because we were all so curious to see how long someone could stand on one leg, the lessons suffered, so this particular punishment was rare.

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Not many people saw it coming. It had seemed that the time for Kaun Banega Crorepati had come and gone. This column argued as much a few years ago, when Shah Rukh Khan took over the reigns of the show. He did well enough, but it still seemed that the time for the genteel game of knowledge had passed. There was too much blood in reality television, and KBC simply did not have enough platelets for it. It had no backbiting intrigue, it lacked a cast of almost-losers and missed the low-life loquaciousness of other reality shows, and nothing ever needed to be beeped out on it, a sure touch that it was out of touch with the times.

And yet, not only is KBC back, but it is back in a very real sense not just as a TV show that gets good ratings, but as an idea that connects with something deep and real in our lives. What makes this particularly interesting is that not very much has changed in the show. Its focus has shifted to smaller towns and an ‘aadmi’ more ‘aam’, and the prize money has gone up over the years, but these are minor adjustments, not major departures. The format is pretty much the same and the return of Amitabh Bachchan restores to the show both the gravitas and the empathy that has been its hallmark.

Perhaps KBC works because it reconciles many competing ideas for us. For a show that bestows undreamt of wealth on people who win. and does so with reasonable regularity, KBC manages somehow to rise above the money it throws around. By locating money squarely in the context of small dreams, family and community, KBC shows us a face of money that is ennobling. The money of KBC is treated not as a jackpot but as a ‘vardaan’, a gift from divinity that comes for one’s persistent effort, a prize for the penance called ordinary life. The images that surround the winners are not big cars and fancy brands. but houses made ‘pukka’ and IAS dreams pursued. The winners have been remarkable ambassadors for the show, focusing not what the money buys them but what it enables them to work at in the future. Money speaks in the language of responsibility, not indulgence and steeps a larger collective in its pleasing warmth.

The format of the show ensures that we see people as they are, rather than the usual sight of raw innocents losing their transparent naiveté in a haze of hair dye and exfoliation. On other reality shows, fame and money are insistent in transforming those that they favour and what they tell us is that success must put distance between destination and sources. between who we are and what we must become. On it iw the innocence that is spoken to and as an audience it is this quahty we respond to. When a Sushi] Kumar descnbes hfe and attributes his success to his_wife, who in turn is quick to shyly shrug off the credit, we see, for once, something that smacks of the real on a reality show.

As the reality show evolved, it found reality too boring and vapid. It was so much for fun to manufacture it by making people act in unpleasant ways. and say unsavoury things to each other. Now, no reality show can really bring us reality; any act of representation and framing creates its own version of reality in many different ways I by aestheticizing it. emotionalising moments, dramatising revelations, withholding information selectively, or by imbuing some moments with significance, while ignoring others and even KBC uses these techniques. The difference is that it uses these to drive us towards the central premise of the show rather than see those as individual ‘masala’ elements. In a world where television is racked by anxiety about itself, and where every new season is an exercise in renewed desperation, KBC stands apart by continuing to tell a human story about dreams and their fulfilment and doing so without trying too hard.

There is no question that KBC rests on the persona of Amitabh Bachchan for he reconciles for us the idea of fame and humility, of achievement and empathy in the way he treats the participants. He has a special ability to look into the ordinary and find something special and the humility to be awed by it. He is simultaneously. The Amitabh Bachchan, the wax God who we touch and squeal when we find out that it is real and a fellow sympathizer and co-traveller on the journey called life. As a carrier of life-altering destiny, he underplays his role to perfection, acknowledging the enormity of that winning means for the participant while revealing the wisdom that knows that it is only money. Under his steerage money is no longer cold acquisitive urgency but warm with unfolding possibility

KBC shows us, close-up and in slow motion, the act of a miracle colliding with a dream. In doing so, it tells us that money can change things for the better, when it finds the right home. By applying good fortune to good intention, It keeps the miracle alive, well after the movement of impact. As the winners no doubt find out, one can never have enough money, and that relative scale makes everyone a relative pauper. In the final analysis, Kaun Banega Crorepati reveals both the nobility and the eventual poverty of money, no matter if it comes in eight figures.

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Babur’s head was throbbing with the persistent ache that dogged him during the monsoon. The warm rain had been falling for three days now but the still. heavy air held no promise of relief. The rains would go on for weeks, even months. Lying back against silken bolsters in his bedchamber in the Agra fort, he tried to imagine the chill, thin rains of Ferghana blowing in over the jagged summit of Mount Beshtor and failed. The punkah above his head hardly disturbed the air. It was hard even to remember what it was like not to feel hot. There was little pleasure just now even in visiting his garden the sodden flowers, soggy ground and overflowing water channels only depressed him.

Babur got up and tried to concentrate on writing an entry in his diary but the words wouldn’t come and he pushed his jewel-studded inkwell impatiently aside. Maybe he would go to the women’s apartments. He would ask Maham to sing. Sometimes she accompanied herself on the round-bellied, slender-necked lute that had once belonged to Esan Dawlat. Maham lacked her grandmother’s but the lute still made a sweet sound in her hands.

Or he might play a game of chess with Humayun. His son had a shrewd, subtle mind — but so, he prided himself, did he and he could usually beat him. It amused him to see Humayun’s startled look as he claimed victory with the traditional cry shah mat — ‘check-mate’, ‘the king is at a loss’. Later, they would discuss Babur’s plans to launch a campaign when the rains eased against the rulers of Bengal. In their steamy jungles in the Ganges delta, they thought they could defy Moghul authority and deny Babur’s overlordship.

‘Send for my son Humayun and fetch my chessmen,’ Babur ordered a servant. Trying to shake off his lethargy he got up and went to a casement projecting over the riverbank to watch the swollen, muddy waters of the Jumna rushing by. A farmer was leading his bony bullocks along the oozing bank.

Hearing footsteps Babur turned, expecting to see his son, but it was only the white-tunicked servant.

‘Majesty, your son begs your forgiveness but he is unwell and cannot leave his chamber.’

What is the matter with him?’ 

‘I do not know, Majesty.’

Humayun was never ill. Perhaps he, too, was suffering from the torpor that came with the monsoon, sapping the energy and spirit of even the most vigorous. 

‘I will go to him.’ Babur wrapped a yellow silk robe around himself and thrust his feet into pointed kidskin slippers. Then he hurried from his

apartments to Humayun’s on the opposite side of a galleried courtyard, where water was not shooting as it should, in sparkling arcs from the lotus-shaped marble basins of the fountains but pouring over the inundated rims.

Humayun was lying on his bed, arms thrown back, eyes closed, forehead beaded with sweat, shivering. When he heard his father’s voice he opened his eyes but they were bloodshot, the pupils dilated. Babur

could hear his heavy wheezing breathing. Every

scratchy intake of air seemed an effort which hurt 

him.

‘When did this illness begin?’ 

‘Early this morning, Father.’

‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Babur looked angrily at his son’s attendants. ‘Send for my hakim immediately!’ Then he dipped his own silk handkerchief into some water and wiped Humayun’s brow. The sweat returned at once — in fact, it was almost running down his face and he seemed to be shivering even more violently now and his teeth had begun to chatter.

‘Majesty, the hakim is here.’

Abdul-Malik went immediately to Humayun’s bedside, laid a hand on his forehead, pulled back his eyelids and felt his pulse. Then, with increasing concern, he pulled open Humayun’s robe and, bending, turned his neatly turbaned head to listen to Humayun's heart.

‘What is wrong with him?’ 

Abdul-Malik paused. ‘It is hard to say, Majesty. I need to examine him further.’ ‘

Whatever you require you only have to say...’

‘I will send for my assistants. If I may be frank, it would be best if you were to leave the chamber, Majesty. I will report to you when l have examined the prince thoroughly - but it looks serious, perhaps even grave. His pulse and heartbeat are weak and rapid.’ Without waiting for Babur’s reply, Abdul-Malik turned back to his patient. Babur hesitated and, after a glance at his son’s waxen trembling face, the room. As attendants closed the doors behind him he found that he, too, was trembling.

A chill closed round his heart. So many times he had feared for Humayun. At Panipat he could have fallen beneath the feet of one of Sultan Ibrahim’s war elephants. At Khanua he might have been felled by the slash of a Rajput sword. But he had never thought that Humayun — so healthy and strong — might succumb to sickness. How could he face life without his beloved eldest son? Hindustan and all its riches would be worthless if Humayun died. He would never have come to this sweltering, festering land with its endless hot rains and whining, bloodsucking mosquitoes if he had known this would be the price.