“Here, take my card.”
I had a wine glass in one hand and my handbag in the other. I didn’t want to take his card. But I forced a smile, wiggled my bag into the crook of my elbow and awkwardly grasped the proffered rectangle. Then I shrugged helplessly when asked for mine and walked away.
I believe in passive resistance when it comes to business networking.
I was in India at the time so I feel my Gandhian stance was particularly poignant.
Which is just as well, as I was forced into a near Zen-like state of satyagraha by the repeated assault of embossed cardboard throughout the three-day conference.
You see, here’s the thing about getting 1 500 high-profile Indians from across the world into one room. They want you to know it. Of all the things we are as a people, self-effacing is not one of them.
United States Indians, New Zealand Indians, Dubai Indians and even Russian Indians — all of them with a stack of the stuff tucked into the breast pocket of their dark suits.
Because somehow the women just didn’t feel the same need to force bits of paper on me. Perhaps it has something to do with just how bloody difficult it is to juggle wearing a sari with, well, anything.
My personal cop-out was to plead that I’d run out of cards just that moment. It was easier than the truth, which was that the motley collection I’d discovered perchance in my laptop bag was weather-beaten and outdated. My job title had since changed.
This is not to say I’m opposed to the business card. I’ve run out of the stuff at parties, in frenzied bouts of making new friends. Because social networking will always come more naturally to me than the business kind, and handing someone interesting your card is far easier than actually saying your number. But the weird world of business networking I find all sound and fury, signifying very little.
Sure, giving out my card at actual business events may garner me all sorts of useful and exciting opportunities. Or it may deliver a stream of hopeful spam to my inbox by those looking for coverage of the launch of their latest death and disability insurance product. That’s at best of course. At worst it ends up in a rubbish dump, fossilised in bird poo and enshrined for future generations to pore over and wonder at the person behind this exercise in futility.
And still it reached farcical proportions. I’d be fobbing off one Dubai businessman’s attempt to extract a card from me while another would reach across a row of delegates to stuff his card into my hand, and beckon me to hand over mine. I started worrying about paper cuts. Men would walk by a group, hand someone a card, take theirs and walk off with barely a word said in exchange. It was like a frenzied exchange of some currency that nobody had pinned to any particularly value beyond their own imaginings. A bit like the stock market.
I felt myself slipping into a feverish nightmare, where streams of cards fell from a darkened sky, obliterating the sun. Turbaned men smiled and white cardboard glistened at the end of their outstretched arms. “Ve must talk, yaar?” played on repeat. Suddenly I jerked into consciousness to find a grinning accountant sitting next to me. He had put his BlackBerry into my hands. “Type,” he instructed, head wobbling ever so slightly.
“Oh I’m sorry, I don’t have any business car …” I began, on autopilot.
“I know — type,” he said, indicating the new contact field he had opened on his cellphone. Dazed, I began entering my details. He leaned over and said conspiratorially: “I know you journalists don’t carry your cards around as a matter of course,” and giggled to himself.
He had cracked the code. I was helpless and handed over the goods. Within minutes there were four emails in my inbox requesting a meeting.
I staggered back to the hotel broken, sobbing quietly on the shoulder of a fellow journalist. In the lobby the delegation of journalists said their goodbyes. Sure I had been playing my cards close to the chest till now, but now was the time to put ’em on the table. I smiled a watery smile, extracted my hidden pack and handed them over to my new friends. Networking made simple. Albeit the wrong kind.
- You can read Verashni’s column every Monday here, and follow her on Twitter here.