Fun continues..

So, a lot of people gave me flak over my previous post. "You mean insensitive Grinch! You mongoose, bandicoot and rat! All you care about is money! Che you horrible person! Che che che! You animal of a man! Go talk to him and make the fellow feel better! " I attested that it was a bad idea for me to do so. Now in this episode I shall defend myself vigorously yet humorously. Endlessly.

In my very high opinion (not that high because I am not drunk), getting fired is something similar to getting dumped. While the woman (i.e. the dumper, assuming you are the guy) was the tap that filled all your emotional needs, the job is the hose that fills all your financial needs. Actually, it is a far more dramatic life change than just getting dumped. Love cannot buy you a plane ticket home for the winter. Love cannot pay the rent on a nice apartment. Love cannot buy that Nikon Digital Rebel that you so bady wanted. You get my point. However, on the other hand, if you have enough money you can buy the woman you love (your mom basically), a plane ticket, and in essence buy yourself more love and admiration and some most wonderful vendekkai curry. So, in essence getting fired can make you lose a whole bunch of the funky things in life, and thus can cause much stress and anguish.

Me having been the unwitting witness to multiple dumpings, have come to decide that the problem with dumpings is not the actual event but the crying and moaning and whining and complaining and ranting that comes after it. Though the actual interaction with the woman would have lasted for all of 32 seconds, the melodrama after it just goes on and on and on. Much of the trauma is due to blatant overdramatization of events that probably would never have occured in the first place ; sunset walks by the beach, hand in hand (she was 2 feet shorter than you, oops) , soft evenings on the couch watching tv (yeah right, and fighting over the remote), long drives through lush, undulating hills and valleys (and she bitching endlessly about everyone under the sun). There is this totally pointless mis-representation of reality in your head that leads to all kinds of problems. Thus, a true master keeps this trash out of his cranium, and focuses on what needs to be done next.

Which comes to getting fired. No point crying about something that has already happened. Just move on, and make sure you do not repeat your previous mistakes. Getting all self-piteous is a recipe for disaster.

Fun

I came into work on Monday and noticed that my friend why sits a couple of desks in front of me was away. His desk remained empty into the afternoon. That was way too long for a meeting. He couldn't possibly be on vacation. The 2nd week of January! Duh! After all the carnage of the holiday season, you should be insane to take days off now. I wondered for a bit and left it at that. Later on, someone told me he had been fired the previous Wednesday. Apparently, he had been called into a meeting with HR on Wednesday morning. Soon after, he took his jacket and left, never to return. So much for heart rending melodrama.

He was towards the end of trading, and had to find a desk to work in permamently, and no desk wanted to take him. He had done pretty badly in the tests. He was super enthusiastic about whatever he did, but had no idea what he was doing. Its one of those cases where too much energy and enthusiasm actually work against you as you go from one blunder to another. There really wasn't too much of a choice.

Frankly, I don't feel the least bit sympathetic or sorry for him. He had joined the programme that would eventually make him a trader. If you want to make the shit, you better be the shit! Don't expect mama to kiss you on the cheek each time you get into a bit of hot water! He had better been prepared for the reality of the business he had chosen to enter. Also, I am sure he would get a job elsewhere in a week or two. He has a fairly funky looking resume as well, so getting into grad school would be a breeze. And his brother took out the bank with a private equity firm. Its not like the poor guy with a family to support who got thrown out on the road after 20 years worth of blood and sweat.

I should probably speak to him though. Maybe sometime near the weekend.

India Etc.

In the London subway, there are more escalators going up than down. Why?

Its because people trickle into a train station in one's and two's but exit all at once. The distributions are different. Cool no (yeah right!).

India has changed a lot over the last few years - it is finally competing in the global marketplace, international firms are taking opportunities within India seriously, creating jobs and pushing money into the country, and the standard of living has improved substantially for the middle class. (It can be argued that all this development has done little for the poor, the people who most urgently need upliftment. I agree to a good extent.)

India is the fastest growing market for mobile phones in the world. It is expected to have atleast a couple of hundred million handset in a few years. I do not doubt it. A mobile phone costs about 2500Rs over its 3 year lifetime. Thats less than 100Rs a month, or 3 Rs a day. Very affordable.

Median salaries have shot up over the last few years, atleast from what I have got to observe. When I joined college in 2000, just after the technology bubble burst, the best job on campus was with ITC. I think it paid about 6 lakhs. Then came McKinsey the super high-profile consultant job paying about 7. That was around 2004. At that time I thought the scene was good. I had no idea! This year I found out that Deutsch Bank recruited for their NY Office, paying 100k+USD. Lehman Brothers, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs came as well. I know for a fact that this is beyond the range of most of those recruited even from the fancy pancy Ivy League schools in the US. (This heartens me much. Wait till some of the Princeton and Harvard schmuks I work with hear this. Ha ha. To get you to understand my antagonism, 2 of them actually asked me if I had failed my training exams.) Even if it is argued that these are just some numbers out in the tail, the median has gone up to about 5 lakhs as well.

I drove down Old Mahabalipuram Road the other day. The amount of development is simply awesome, inspite of the road being a total wreck.

Though I feel there has been a lot of real growth, there seem to be some signs of a speculative bubble. I am quite the novice, and might be wrong, but do allow me my opinion.

The first thing that comes to my mind is the self-congratulatory rubbish that is filling the media. They make it sound like the only direction prices can go is up. I saw this flash across on NDTV Profit :

40% of Analysts Bullish on the Market.

A little common sense will tell you that if 40% are thinking that the market is going to go up, 60% think that the market is going to stay put or go down. The latter would be the more relevant albeit unpopular piece of information.

Real estate prices have doubled over the last couple of years. A 2 bedroom flat in Kalakshetra costs about 1.5 crores. Thats about 400,000 USD. It used to cost about 70lakhs a year back. In a reaction to this, the Association of Industry(..blah) said something to the effect that this was just the beggining and there is much more to come. I am sure the Seths behind the chamber have quite a few flats to sell.

The whole thing smells suspiciously like the hoopla that surrounded the technology bubble. Though the dot com revolution indeed revolutionaized our lives, it was nowhere near what it was made out to be. It ended up making a handful few absurdly rich (through selling their stock at absurd prices), and very many poorer and much disillusioned. A similar phenomena is going on in India, I feel.

Much of the price increases seem to me to be fueled by speculative buyers - people who buy hoping to sell it for a good profit a few months later. It works like this. Looking at the price go up, many people feel bad on having missed out on the bonanza, and enter the market. This pushes up prices further. This increase attracts more people who want to make a quick buck, and so on, and so forth. Eventually, the prices become so absurd that even the moneylust deranged back off. The bubble bursts. The guy who bought last is the biggest (and poorest) fool. The investment banker from Goldman Sachs and Mr. Behari Singhania, the first to buy, and the last to sell, are left much enriched. (Its called the bigger fool theory. There is some good material on the subject by Robert Shiller, and Charles Kindleberger.)

I heard that Japan had this huge spurt in the stock and real estate in the early 1990's. All kinds of folks started speculating, and when the bubble burst, things got messed up. Japan has still not recovered in 2007. The Nikkei is less than half of what it was in the 1990's. The housing market in the US is also going through a similar blow up right now, after going up absurdly over the last few years. It looked quite invincible before shit hit the fan (atleast by how things were made to sound in the popular press.)

My point is that India is being made to look invincible, and like nothing can ever go wrong. Economic trouble in the US can shake up the IT and BPO industries, and make the money dry up pretty quickly. It is sometimes a little surprising to me how short the collective memory is. It reminds me of the Indian cricket team. All previous performances are promptly forgotten, and we root for victory in the upcoming match with breathless enthusiasm.