What Are You Doing Next Year?

Right, so I'm updating my blog at eleven p.m. on New Year's Eve instead of being at whichever is the coolest party going, getting happily and obliviously drunk. But then I-Bankers are supposed to have depressing excuses for lives. The markets run on January 1 as they do on December 31 and January 2.

It is, however, a valid question. It isn't New Year's resolutions I mean - everyone makes them, nobody keeps them; it's at the point where even making jokes about unkept resolutions is old.

I mean things that you know, or at least are reasonably confident, that you will do. I, for instance, can say that I am going to become a tidy and organized individual, always be fully informed and aware of what is happening, and memorize Gone With The Wind. Those are my resolutions. I can also say that I will go to work every Monday morning and sit at my desk all week, making excel sheets and piling on adipose. That is what I am doing.

There are, no doubt, people for whom the opposite is true - people who will resolve to buckle down to honest labour but will spend the year taking cruises down the Nile or following the Indian cricket team from stadium to stadium. I suppose it's all part of maintaining the balance of the world.

What are you doing next year?

Greek and War-Making in Six Easy Lessons

I remember reading once in the preface to a book that the author, when in school, had been drilled so thoroughly in Latin grammar that he could have held an intelligent conversation with an ancient Roman. Recently I have been dipping into books on classical Greek; I'm not very far past the stage of being able to identify the letters but already I can tell that any conversation that is to be had can only be with Alexander, Leonidas or Agamemnon.

Normally, when learning a new language, you start by learning how to state your name and profession. Then you learn some nouns ("apple", "water", "sky" and "book", for instance), some verbs ("to talk", "to have", "to eat" or "to go") and some adjectives (like "red", "nice" and "big"). Finally you learn the rules of grammar and are able to say, "I want to eat a red apple."

The broad structure of the Greek lessons is the same, but the words are different; I cannot go to a cafe and ask for hot rolls with butter and honey, but I can - with the aid of the conjugation and declension tables - say, "I am leading the Greek army to the city."

When I had got through several pages and learnt little other than the verbs "to lead", "to plunder", "to plan" and "to send", the nouns "army", "garrison", "gate" and "city" and the adjectives "frightful" and "Greek", I couldn't resist flipping to the back. Where, in a book of Telugu, for instance, there might have been illustrations of children flying kites or elephants at a fair, there was a diagram involving many small boxes and a picture of a chariot, and bearing the label, "The Battle Formation of the Army of Cyrus".

This can only mean one of two things: either - as is more likely - the writers of these books are aware that most people learn classical Greek with a view to being able to read the Iliad or Anabasis and are unlikely ever to have to enquire after the price of a drachma of apples in Thebes, or the ancient Greeks really did teach children to lead armies and plan the defences of cities with the same enthusiasm with which we instruct kindergarten students that A is for Apple and B is for Ball.

If the second is the case, then perhaps it will eventually be possible to conduct an intelligent conversation with the average Johnny of ancient Greece - or at least to make comments like, "Brilliant use of the light cavalry," and, "I would have deployed the Thracian infantry instead," when he describes the glorious outcome of a hard-fought battle.

Jabberwocky: The True Story

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, and in the hope that if he is perched on a cloud reading this, he is doing so with a tolerant and indulgent smile.

’Twas brillig; and the toves, they gyred,
The wabe, by this not uninspired,
Gimbled them most slithily.
The sun shone on the Tumtum tree.

That Tumtum tree of uffish thought
To which the Jabberwock, much sought,
At last did come with eyes of flame
And burbled madly as it came.

The beamish boy alone did stand,
The bravest knight in all the land.
Around the boy were doctors ten,
The wisest and most stern of men.

“Too much,” quoth one, “this Jabberwock!
They all recite it ’round the clock.
Each day they wake the manxome foe,
And to defeat it he must go.”

“So many times the beast to find –
No wonder it’s unhinged his mind.”
“He cuts and thrusts at empty air
While all around him stand and stare.”

E’en as they spoke, a voice was heard,
A shadow of the beast appeared.
He cut; the Jabberwock he slew,
And yet another head it grew.

Before “Callooh! Callay!” was cried,
Before the Jabberwock had died,
Another voice, another blade,
The vorpal sword anew was made.

“I know,” cried one, “what we must do!
We’ll change the words, and swiftly too.
A different ending we shall write,
A closure to this ceaseless fight.”

He said anon, “With claws that catch,
With Jubjub Bird and Bandersnatch,
The Jabberwock – a peaceful beast,
And not aggressive in the least,

“With eyes that held no trace of flame,
In willing friendship gladly came.
The vorpal blade was thrown away
And beast and man made peace that day.

“Away they went, and made a pact
That never more by heedless act
Of schoolboy would they thus be called
And in unwilling joust installed.”

They look, as one, into the wood
Where lately the combatants stood –
And see, with unbefitting shock,
No beamish boy, no Jabberwock.

Aut Insanit Homo, aut Versus Facit

Someone asked me today why I like poetry. Answering that question can either be the easiest thing in the world, or the hardest.

Poetry is the food of the soul. Giving yourself to it is like being in love, only a hundred thousand times more so. It can make you feel more alive, more vital, as though you are seeing the world through a refracting glass that makes it at once grander and more terrible, heightening the joys and intensifying the woes.

A certain wonderful symmetry this world attains; if the moment is right the words on the page gain a life of their own, an improbable perfection that seems to have come from the golden lyre of Apollo himself.

The world the verses build around you is ephemeral, perhaps, but however swiftly it is gone it has enriched your life by its touch. Teresa Macri wanders through it, forever young, forever beautiful, forever the Maid of Athens. The heroes created by a hundred generations of poets are frozen in that moment of divine glory that can come to any human being only once. Even those whose tales end in tragedy are endowed with an exquisite gravity that raises them far higher than the proudest of monarchs or warriors.

It is in these immortal verses that we know what has come before, that we can read, if we are wise, what will come after. Bone fragments and pottery shards tell you how the people of the past lived, what they ate and whether or not they had domesticated the carthorse. Their poetry speaks to you of their souls, their dearest hopes and worst fears.

Archaeologists might tell you, with a certain degree of accuracy, when the Trojan War was fought. Only Homer can tell you how Achilles felt when, having chosen eternal glory over long life, he stood on the sands of Asia Minor looking at Priam's impregnable fortress. Only Homer can make you feel it yourself.

In that he is sublime, for it is to him we turn when we want to know, not the physical substance of the ancient world, but its proud, beautiful, terrible heart. He who is blind makes us see with eyes that are something more than mortal.

This, too, is how they will remember us three thousand years from now. They will not ask what kind of clothes we wore or concern themselves unduly with whether or not phytoplankton was considered a delicacy. They will turn to the works our poets, writers and artists have left behind, and read in those our innermost souls.

On the Endless Quest

It's a somewhat depressing time for fans of fantasy at the moment. Harry Potter has ended, the Dragon has left us, and now that Children of Hurin is done with there's not much coming from Middle-Earth other than the possibility of another movie at some point in the nebulous future.

It is, in other words, a perfect time to indulge your own fantasies by setting off on an epic quest of your creation. If you're not particular about the merchandise rights actually being worth something, it isn't that hard.

You start by picking a location; for simplicity's sake I'll assume it's an earthbound location and we needn't go into the physics of faster-than-light travel. That done, you have to produce, like Mr Stevenson before you, a map. A black calligraphic pen works best. There must be a tiny village where the quest will begin, and the landscape must thereafter be covered with marshes, fens, barrows, rivers and mountains with direful names. There must also be a suggestion that if the map were to extend so much as a centimetre further in any direction it would necessitate red marks, danger signs and inscriptions such as, "Here be Hippogriffs".

Then comes the cast. As protagonist you have a young man employed as a farmer/shepherd/knives-and-boots boy and blissfully oblivious of the fact that he is about to be plunged into myriad dangers to reclaim a legacy he could probably have done without. In order to tell him all about who he really is and recount the story of the rise of the Dark Lord there has to be a mentor; elderly for choice, with robes and a cloak and abundant quantities of long white beard (pipe optional). There should also be a best friend, whose chief qualities must be courage, loyalty and willingness to come off as second-best all the time. Ideally he should be slightly obtuse as well, but this is negotiable.

There may or may not be a girl, but if there is one she must have blood of the purest cerulean and it must be understood that when she marries the hero gossips will shake their heads and talk about how she's come down in the world.

Finally there is the Dark Lord himself. Through magic too dark and evil to describe he will have rendered himself practically immortal. He will be the reason the hero was mending shoes or chasing pigs instead of lounging around being handsome and powerful. In order to destroy him, save the world and claim the girl the hero will have to wade through said marshes, ford said rivers and climb said mountains, battling monsters of ferocity and cunning and dodging guards of ferocity and stupidity. Along the way he will lose his companions to death or to an understandable unwillingness to lead such a miserable life, until at the final confrontation he stands alone.

He will receive hints from mysterious people and hear ancient prophecies that are as obscure as they can possibly be without actually being in a different language. If the mentor has not abandoned the hero by this point, he will understand everything but explain nothing. If, however, the hero stumbles upon the answer by chance or works it out somehow, the mentor will confirm that he already knew and have a very good reason for not having said anything.

At last, having performed feats of physical endurance and mental acrobatics, the hero will be face-to-face with his nemesis. He will at some time have thrown away his sword (or whatever happens to be his weapon of choice). He will realize that despite his strength he is not one-fourth as powerful as the Dark Lord, who has had decades more to learn new skills and has no compunctions about using unpleasant forms of magic. He will be, for all practical purposes, defenceless.

And, of course, he will win.

Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part II

Had Sparkie been anything other than herself she could have lived quite happily with the Vertically Different Brothers. But since she was herself, and physically incapable of leaving well enough alone, a few weeks later her stepmother opened her back door in the morning to see a brightly-coloured flyer lying on the mat. She picked it up.

“Equal Representation for All Vertical Communities in Parliament,” the flyer proclaimed. Scarcely believing her eyes, the good lady examined it in greater detail, and read, “Join the Movement for Vertical Equality,” and “We Want Heights of MPs on a Normal Curve.”

Forcing herself not to seize a green bottle that lay nearby and start chewing it, she picked up the phone, asked the operator to scramble, and called the High Consul of a little-known country whose chief export was undetectable poisons. When she was done with him she called the National Academy of Theatre.

The next day, when the Vertically Different Brothers had left the chapter house on their various pursuits, and Sparkie was in her room drafting a petition for the inclusion of a nominee of the Brotherhood in every government committee, the doorbell rang.

Answering it, Sparkie saw a wrinkled woman, bent with age, with a basket of apples on her arm and another balanced precariously on her head. Had she looked closely she might have seen the true face beneath the makeup, but nobody had ever accused Sparkie of being observant.

“Yes?” she said helpfully.

“Be you the young woman who helps the underrepresented obtain their rights?” asked the old woman.

Sparkie beamed. “Yes, of course. Are you underrepresented?”

“I’m an apple seller, miss,” the old woman said. “Know you how many of us there be in Parliament? I will tell you. There be none. There be none of us in Parliament, none in a high position in any government office, none in any Parliamentary committee or sub-committee… We are woefully underrepresented, miss. Will you have an apple?”

If the sudden change of subject startled Sparkie, she gave no sign of it. But instead of taking the proffered apple she took another one from the basket.

“What's the matter?" she asked the apple seller between bites.

“Only that you took the wrong apple,” said the old woman. “And therefore it is time for Plan B.”

Sparkie never saw the man who emerged from the bushes to her left, put a pipe to his mouth and blew.

Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part I

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a young woman of unspecified ethnicity and racial origin. Her mother, in a wrongheaded and prejudiced moment, had christened her Snow White, but she preferred to call herself Sparkie. Her father was the democratically-elected ruler of the country, where they had polls every three years and all sentient creatures had the right to vote.

Sparkie’s father, on the death of his first wife, had married again. The girl’s new mother was a victim of the unfavourable circumstances surrounding her upbringing and for that reason was in the habit of resorting to unorthodox and even illegal means to get what she wanted. However, as the psychologists pointed out, this was entirely due to factors beyond her control and was not her fault at all.

Sparkie was a political activist and spent her time championing the cause of the less privileged. This made things somewhat uncomfortable for her family. One day her stepmother, in a fit of madness for which she could in no way be held responsible, decided that enough was enough and the living room could no longer be treated as a storehouse for pamphlets saying, “Alfalfa is sentient too!” or, “Votes for budgerigars!”

She called her chauffer, and asked him politely if he could see his way to taking the girl to a country house the family owned and leaving her there. The chauffer knew that this was a violation of the girl’s fundamental right to ruin her parents’ peace by calling press conferences in the garden in the middle of the night, but his devotion to his employer was so strong that he consented.

He took Sparkie out of the city, but he had not the heart to leave even the person responsible for the fact that curly-haired spaniels had the right to stand for public office in a place where she would have only those curly-haired spaniels for company. Happening to be aware of a small rural branch of the Vertically Different Brotherhood in the vicinity, he took her there and returned to the city.

The Vertically Different Brothers, of whom there were seven in this particular establishment, had heard of the girl and her activities on behalf of the downtrodden, and they welcomed her warmly.

The Idiot's Guide to Surviving the Corporate World

It’s called the real world. It’s the name people give to long hours tapping away at a keyboard with benumbed fingers and staring at a computer screen as though it is about to reveal the deepest mysteries of life.

A friend of mine, on condition of anonymity – he assures me that his boss has a well-developed sense of humour, but feels it would be better not to put it to the test – gave me some advice from his own experience.

The first step, he told me, is to develop a rapid walk and cultivate a permanently harried expression. This will serve to give the impression that whenever you leave your desk, even if it’s for a coffee break or to buy tickets to the Friday night movie, you are on an assignment whose success is vital to the continued profitability of your company.

The cell phone must be your best friend. Commit to memory every technical phrase and bit of jargon that is used by people in your office, and as soon as you sense the attention of a superior on you, start reciting them at random while talking into your phone and nodding vigourously.

Excel must be your second-best friend. Contrary to popular myth, the simplest formulae and spreadsheets are seldom the best. An ideal spreadsheet to send your boss has formulae that sprawl across three lines and references to at least eight different workbooks. The more he has to flip from sheet to sheet tracing your logical acrobatics, the more likely he is to feel that you have put serious thought into your work.

If you are relatively free, the safest way to spend your time is to sink into a pleasant daydream. But before that, ensure that you adopt the classical thinker’s posture and lean towards your screen. If possible, furrow your brow as well. Shake your head and mutter under your breath from time to time. (It is best to practise this in front of the mirror first, so that you look like a hardworking employee grappling with a fundamental problem in the way the company’s IT systems are run, and not like a deranged lunatic with a neck tic.)

Find an excuse to do as much work as possible outside the office. Sure, it might be an hour’s commute in the baking afternoon heat to make a ten-minute presentation to somebody who isn’t even listening and has already made up their mind anyway, but is anyone really going to notice if you take a half-hour longer than necessary to get back?

These five simple measures, I am assured, will make the corporate jungle seem like a children’s amusement park.

And if they don’t work? Well, there’s always Dilbert.

With a Hey, Ho

The wind and the rain have begun in Bombay, and the city being what it is, one will be able to say, "The rain it raineth everyday," without pausing to draw breath, for the next three months, and not put a dent in the truth.

That the monsoon is always an occasion for cheer would probably be a source of surprise, if not astonishment, to people who live in more temperate climes; one can understand their point of view. In places where "Summer" implies beachball and sunshine that is warm without being oppressive, the thought of the skies opening to ruin the beachball and put paid to the sunshine is hardly a happy one.

The romantic associations of the monsoon aside, it certainly is one of the most pleasant times of the year. Finally at an end is the summer's dilemma of choosing between sleeping in relative comfort and doing your bit to preserve the habitat of the polar bear. And then there's the fact that nothing brings out the finer points of a murder mystery better than reading it during a thunderstorm. Even the squelchiness and dampness that can result from a July commute is bearable, when taken as a part of a happy whole.

Besides, is there anyone who really doesn't like the occasional walk in the rain? If such there be, go mark him well - in him no monsoon raptures swell. (With apologies to the poet Scott.)

NSE's Certification in Financial Markets

I took the NCFM last week. The exam itself was easy enough; it seems to have been set keeping in mind the fact that traders have very little leisure to devote to the perusal of the NCFM study material (and even less to decode its legalese). One of the questions asked was:

Regarding which of the following is the NSE not flexible when candidates take the NCFM exam?

a) Place of the exam
b) Candidate’s presence
c) Time of the exam
d) Date of the exam

Since we had all selected Mumbai, June 6 and 9:30 am on the NSE website, but none of us had found an option to take the exam by proxy, it was fairly straightforward.

Any euphoria we felt at our success in the exam was swiftly driven out of our minds by hunger; we had several hours to wait until our second exam in the afternoon, and the NSE seemed not to want us to eat.

We had brought our lunch with us, and on asking the guard at the door where we could eat it, we were told to go to the canteen on the first floor. Thither we went, and as soon as we stepped out of the elevator we were accosted by another guard who demanded what our business was.

We explained, in as few words as possible since we were ravening by then, that we were between exams and wanted to eat lunch. He shook his head ruefully and told us that the NSE was always sending people up here to eat; it was, however, the ONGC office and he was very sorry but he could not permit us to enter without legitimate cause.

We went back downstairs thinking dark thoughts of the man who had sent us there. “I think,” said one of my friends, “that they make bets on how long people will argue with the ONGC guard before returning. Ten-to-one on two minutes, fourteen-to-three on five minutes, that kind of thing.”

After the second exam we were positively starving. We went and asked the guard if we could, at least, eat in the atrium.

“No,” he said conspiratorially, “but why don’t you go back to ONGC and sneak in while the guard’s back is turned?”

In the end I ate one sandwich standing on the sidewalk outside the NSE and the other when I got back home. But it was, without exception, the hungriest I have ever been while writing an exam.

Felis Domesticus, or the Habits of the Cat

One of the few failures of the Oxford English Dictionary is its inability to define a cat. It tries, certainly, but descriptions of mammalian characteristics, short snouts and retractile claws, which might be scientifically accurate, fall woefully short in other respects.

Every time I watch the clock with the firm conviction that some mad scientist has been fiddling with the space-time continuum and then been unable to make time go at its proper speed again, I find myself wishing I had the temperament of a cat. Not even the meanest alley-cat will consent to do something you want unless that coincides with what it wants.

Nor will a cat, if you are attempting to bribe it with food or drink, ever settle for anything other than precisely what it wants. If it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water, it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water; if you are thick enough not to comprehend this immediately, it will wait with growing impatience, rejecting bread, three different kinds of biscuits, and cake, until you finally hit on what it wants. Even then, and no matter how hungry it is because of your ineptitude, it will not accept a 55.5% solution.

And having taken the bribe, it will go back to doing what it was doing before you interrupted it, without doing what you wanted it to do in exchange for the milk.

Reproach it, though, point out its base perfidy, and it will regard you with an expression of injured innocence. Not even a newborn lamb can look as blameless as a cat that is guilty of enough sins for twenty cats.

The cat will then go on its way, no doubt feeling that it has done enough towards the maintenance of its relationship with you simply by consenting to be a part of it, and you will be left sweeping up the biscuit crumbs.

Home?

I've been unpacking today. Sometimes things like that cause nostalgia; in my case it caused plain homesickness.

It's odd, the kind of things you remember when you're unpacking. I don't mean memories of strolls from the dorm to the back gate on moonless nights, or of struggling from the Case Unit to your room with an armload of books and unsuccessfully attempting to unlock the door without dropping any. Things like that one would expect to remember.

There was an afternoon when I was playing Scrabble with a friend. It was one of those particularly frustrating games when you seem to have only vowels on your rack, get rid of them by making euoi, and then find yourself in possession of a rack full of consonants and nowhere to put them. My friend, in this position, placed ZQXG on a triple-word score. Quite naturally, I objected.

"You can't even pronounce it," I said.

"It's the name of the alien species that Calvin thinks Miss Wormwood comes from," quoth he.

"That," I pointed out, "is a Zogwarg."

"Well, this is the plural."

At this point I began to giggle helplessly.

Several weeks later, I was with another friend at the British Library sale of withdrawn books. I had bought a few of them; he, on the other hand, had fallen only slightly short of buying enough books to set up a library of his own. We were standing outside the library in the blazing afternoon sun - and when the afternoon sun blazes in Ahmedabad, it really pulls out all the stops and lets you have it - and attempting to get an auto to take us back to campus.

As usual, at the time when you most need an auto - for instance, when you're standing on a street corner with your arms full of books - all those that pass will, perversely, be full. But we found our way back in the end.

As we were getting out, the string holding one of the bundles snapped and forty-one magazines spilled onto the ground. After picking them up, I went to my room and proceeded, once more, to giggle helplessly at the memory of those cascading glossies.

Thomas Haynes Bayly said it much better than I can:

This the hour when happy faces
Smile around the taper's light,
Who will fill our vacant places?
Who will sing our songs to-night?

But, as one of my professors told me, between IIMA and the PGPs it's never really farewell.