Gita and the Art of Selling

Gita and the Art of Selling, Memoirs of a Sales Yogi may be non-fiction, but the retro storyline and the blazing narration make it more like a roman-a-clerf that tickles your imagination. The story is woven around a protagonist, Mahesh Kumar, whos engulfed in the inscrutable ennui of a dull n dreary gig at a fuddy-duddy outfit in the 1970s. The machismo in him craves for the adrenalin rush of a parkour-like sleigh ride, albeit in his career. So, with a Laozi-esque jaunt-of-joy-starts-with-a-job-jump hunch as alibi, he joins an upstart, BCL- a cauldron wherein assiduity and absurdity; profanity and profundity coexist in blissful solitude. Highballing-express-train-like BCLs elan vital is its flamboyant founder-CEO, Shiv Nair. Everything about Shiv is big dreams, desiresship-like cars, tennis-court sized offices even Patiala pegs of whiskey he pours! Acutely obsessed with market dominance, he lets gladiator-like reps loose in the coliseum called marketplace, to ride roughshod over competitors. Put into a boot-camp-like grind, Mahesh finds himself at the forefront of a groundbreaking mission. Jumbo quotas, a turbo-charged culture; mucho toil; but nada sales overwhelm him! Does BCLs ecosystem, an epitome of esprit de corps, help the rookie pull his socks up, and climb the corporate food-chain? Filled with anecdotal flotsam and jetsam, this languishing-laggard to shooting-star story thrills n teases even as it teaches the nuanced craft of selling. An antipodal attempt to step away from the ivory tower of academe, it offers from-the-trenches insights on the Jerry Maguire and Willy Lo-mans of this world-smiling heroes who stride out on a shoeshine, shed loads of sweat and schlep in orders. Finally, if this book gets Drucker to rephrase his pedantic credo as, marketing makes selling plain-sailing(instead of superfluous), thats a bonus!