1.

PROFESSIONAL:
a) Zero Learning:
i. The firm has a very high attrition rate. This ensures there arent many experienced people
around to help, train or guide you in any way. If you happen to be an IIM Grad or with
some experience, youll be made to lead a team in less than 3 months without any support,
hand holding or help. This by no means is a quick step to growth or promotion. Youll both
make big blunders in front of the client and get severe kickbacks at the start of your career
or in order to play safe, youll start following and doing what the client asks you to, without
using much of your own brains or innovation. Either way, its a hopeless choice.
ii. Most of your time will be spent on training young, absolutely inexperienced undergraduate
students when you yourself need to be doing a lot of learning
iii. The company has no training or development policy whatsoever. The only training sessions
we had were for basic excel or powerpoint functions, something we picked up in 1st year
btech itself.
iv. 100% of the companys projects are of PMO (Project Management Office) in nature. That
the firm is an offshoot of Mckinsey and that they do strategy consulting is all bullshit. PMO
is the cheapest and the lowest form of consulting that any firm can do. Even that is not
done professionally here. Not one of their consultants is either PMP or PRINCE 2 certified.
Youll realise how worthless you have been here once you go out in the job market and try
your luck again
b) Compensation issues:
i. The firm is highly stingy when it comes to making any cash payments. The pay is inflated
in several manners as described below
ii. There will be a variable component which you get if you stick around for 2 years.
Considering that the highest that an employee has stayed here is 20 months and avg
being 6 months, given the immense torture they give, you can assume that portion is
never going to be paid to you
iii. A portion of your salary will be gratuity. You get that if you stick around for 4 years.
Needless to say, you never get it too.
iv. The firm charges a fee of 2000 rs each month for using the company laptop for official
purposes. You are not allowed to bring your personal laptop and you have to use and pay
for the company laptop
v. There is a mandatory deduction from your salary each month and it goes as a
contribution towards one Takshashila School in Ghaziabad. This school is a private
business of Manish Aggarwal and everyone contributes towards it
vi. Therell be reimbursable components of Medical bills and Telephone allowance which
you get if you submit bills. There is absolutely no process for getting these things cleared
(the firm does not have a finance person BTW) and theyll never be cleared. Mine got
cleared when I finally resigned from the firm and asked for these bills to be cleared in my
final payout.
vii. The firms cash flow situation keeps getting precarious from time to time. When that
happens, the newer and unstable employees or the ones on notice period get no salaries
for several months. Many have resigned during such periods and foregone the entire
amount.

viii. There are absolutely no flybacks or allowances if you are working late in the night. People
pay for their dinner and cabs out of their pockets when they work over night at client
sites without any reimbursements. Once deputed on a project, you come back only when
the project is completed, which could be anywhere between 4 to 6 months. Any travel in
between to your hometown is at your own expense.
ix. Given lack of experienced consultants and low quality of work, the only way TKC can
compete with other firms and keep getting contracts is through extremely low price bids,
ridiculously long work hours promise, favours to senior client officials in the form of
booze parties where young girls are brought for them and agreeing to long accounts
receivable cycles.
All these will ensure that you never do quality work and progress professionally. Also the
firm never gets cash rich enough to give you pay hikes and promotions. Infact high
attrition rate suits the firm. People leave and they hire fresh at lower salaries.
c) Personal issues:
i. The firm shall sign a work contract where they promise to provide manpower at 90
hrs/week rate. You will literally burn yourself out here. A typical schedule is where you
wake up at 6:30, leave home by 7 or 7:30, grab a paratha or sandvich and stuff it while
you yourself are stuffed in a cab (at times 5 in a hatchback + driver) and be back by 11 or
11:30 in night. Youll come back home, have a mid-night dinner daily and sleep.
ii. Considering the harrowing schedule, most people request for a company guesthouse.
This is basically a flat rented out in some god forsaken locality where you need to walk a
mile to get an auto, furnished with basic stuff and given out on twin sharing basis. They
charged 15000/month/person in my time for that facility. Theyll have servants there for
cooking, cleaning and driving you to work, so that you work like machines 15x6
iii. There is a very sad degree of micromanagement and interference in ones personal life in
the guesthouses. The cooks, cleaners and drivers are given clean instructions to report
every word of your conversation to Manish Agrawal. Any instance of you cribbing,
complaining, joking, or making a satirical remark on the firm or its culture or your own
miserable life shall be promptly reported to Manish. You shall then be taken to task and
given a stern warning, accusing of spreading a negative environment in the firm while all
others are positive. Except when you are in the bathroom or sleeping in bed at night, you
are monitored everywhere (dining table, common rooms, cab while travelling). Therell
be other spies who do less consulting but are paid for being informers. They keep a watch
on you while you are at work. One such spy shall be deputed in each project team.
iv. Therell be every attempt to break you off from any support system you have. Your
attempts to travel and meet your family, friends, girlfriends/boyfriends or relatives shall
be sabotaged at some or the other excuse. Spying will create a highly suspicious
atmosphere inside the firm. The end objective is to make you so weak that you never
protest against the injustices and remain in Manishs firm control.
d) Support System:
i. There is absolutely no IT, Admin or Finance department in the firm. HR was brought in 15
days before I moved out.

ii. This means that if you face any IT related issue with your laptop, you contact the
customer care or service centre, go and get your company laptop repaired. Any bills
generated are to be reimbursed.
iii. Lack of finance department means all bill reimbursements go for a toss. Like I mentioned
before, mine were reimbursed when I was leaving the firm. The firm refused to transfer
my PF from my previous firm to TKC. They cited lack of bandwidth and knowhow for the
same. Finally I had to apply for PF withdrawal with my previous firm.
e) Legal Issues:
i. There is absolutely no firm legally registered as Takshashila Consulting anywhere. The
original business is basically an education business, the school in Ghaziabad, registered in
the name of Takshashila Edupunk Private Limited. An educational venture is to save on
taxes and in its guise, he runs a consulting firm.
ii. To avoid giving you any legal tool to fight against the firm, you never get any document
from the firm in hard copy. There are no letter heads. All your joining and relieving letters
are soft copies emailed to you. Those letters also sport the name of takshashila edupunk
pvt ltd in the footer for each page.
iii. You never get any salary slips. Every month, you get a breakup of your salary in the form
of a table, pasted in email body, emailed to you. Not even a downloadable word or PDF
file. In case you need pay slips when you apply for a new job, you need to inform Manish
in advance, and request him to make a few pay slips and give them to you.
iv. The firm deducts a portion from your salary for accident and medical insurance. But in
reality it never buys the same. No one ever gets any mediclaim card or other document. I
was hospitalised twice during my stay at TKC and each time I paid out of my own pocket.
On being questioned about my medical insurance, the amount stopped being deducted
from next month. There was no insurance.
v. The only legal proof of your employment is that the firm deposits tax on your behalf with
income tax department. At the end of the year you get a form 16 from income tax
department which too mentions you as an employee of Takshashila Edupunk Private
Limited.
vi. As the name suggests, the firm is a private limited firm. There is no partnership model as
with consulting firms. Manishll project a few other people as partners in the firm. But
basically those are merely high level employees. You are low level employees. And he
runs the firm with a dictatorial authority as the single owner.
f) Moral Issues:
i. Both Manish and his Father are big time womanisers. They need women for themselves
and to woo clients. And this he does by getting young, gullible, 20 yrs old undergraduates
from Delhi University. Most of the time hell throw them lavish booze parties, get them
drunk and then try and molest them.
ii. Having broken their support system, they mostly wont have anyone to turn to and then
will either be crying alone or come and seek help from helpless you. If you can tolerate
this kind of cheapness going on day in and day out, you may ignore point number (f) and
proceed. This however will not affect you adversely in anyway if you are a male
candidate.

FINAL WORD:
TKC primarily hires 3 kinds of people for following reasons
Type
Undergraduates
(Delhi University)

Mid tier MBAs

(MDI,IMT,New IIMs),
IITians, MBAs from
obscure foreign univs
Top Tier MBAs (A,B,C)

Key Feature
Female,
Extremely
beautiful,
Inexperienced
Good
Academics

Pathetic
Academics

Resultant Mindset
Inexperienced and no idea
of job market. So
desperate to retain their
first job at any cost
Dont get consulting
companies in campus. So
want to stick around in
consulting at any cost
Too pathetic acads to get a
consulting job. So want to
retain the one they got,
desperately

Key Role
Satisfy Manish, his father
and clients. Get molested
regularly
Slog and execute most
projects. Key beast of
labour
Their degrees used to pitch
fancy team profiles in front
of client to win projects.
Then they too slog like
animals on project

Finally, the only reason why anyone should join TKC is if he cannot get consulting in any other way,
and he is desperate to get consulting only, then TKC will help him write Consultant in his profile.
He may then go ahead and find a better job from market after an year.