om shanti om

Mayhem. Utter mayhem. Is what happens when four subcontinent born graduate students decide to see a 10pm show of Om Shanti Om in Times Square New York. One of these people should have been safely back in Boston a long time ago instead of hanging out in New York inviting disaster. More mayhem when the only people in the theatre are these self-same four people and hooliganism begins by shouting: TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF SHAH RUKH!!!! to see his six pack and dancing in the aisles to the songs and the women come onscreen and the boys faint. An utter nonsensical farce which had us falling off our chairs laughing at Quick Gun Murugan and Shah Rukh Khan going "Yenna!!!" at every possible random moment in time. Mayhem exacerbated by going out drinking at the end of the movie from 2am to 6am at a college undergraduate bar where the main song of the night is Sweet Child of Mine (my ex ringtone) and the lingua franca a bizarre mix of Bengali-Tamil-Hindi-English. Nail in the coffin is when Boston-bound subcontinental individual goes from bar to train with no sleep and from train to class where quite promptly her body shuts down. Utter mayhem. And now I have work coming out of every orifice.

enchanted

just came back from watching Enchanted and couldn't help but make an enthusiastic plug for it! It's an absurd confection, which bizarrely reminded me of Bollywood (especially a song and dance routine in Central Park with ensemble choreographed dances and all), and the manichean view of good and evil and love and happily ever after and surprisingly, or not so surprisingly for one who is a Bollywood fan, it worked rather well, with James Marsden, Patrick Dempsey (who does rather well) and Susan Sarandon. It was one of a few movies, where the mainly adult audience clapped, enchanted, at the end.

a day in the life of

The day started off with a negotiations case on the Good Friday Agreements in Northern Ireland between the Ulster unionists, the Taoiseach Prime Minister, Blair and of course the republicans and Sinn Fein. The important thing I learned from that, as I look towards my own country so fractured and bloodied, was that the negotiated agreement/settlement is only the beginning and that negotiations can never produce social justice and that 99% of an agreement in its implementation. At best, it can be a functioning machinery, an explication of a commitment to a Road Map, a la Camp David. Finally, one cannot include every party, but marginalizing the smaller parties radicalizes their responses- in Northern Ireland it led to more bombings, but one that was surprisingly condemned and not condoned by Sinn Fein. I think I finally understand the bare bones of the Irish Peace Process, though I am still unclear as to why Britain wants to be unified with Northern Ireland. It makes me wonder what I am doing with my life when all these battles are yet to be fought and won, in our generation.

Next I talked to C, who has the flu, before he flies out to DC for final round interviews. C is a prime example of one who crossed the aisle, working with both the Carter Institute and IRI and now viewed with suspicion by all myopic Dcites.

Next I changed my flight to come back home early and had a meeting to craft our negotiation exercise on two “stan” countries that have a water conflict and are bombing the hell out of each other.

Then I had a meeting about the conference and our 22 panels and shaping them into tracks of giving, institutions, governance, services and innovation. (I know how innovative). We might bring in jazz musicians from New Orleans to play some compositions about the storm.

Next I had class on valuing a Brazilian state owned power distribution company and how the bankers (as usual) wanted to value it as low as possible (as they were representing international bidders) and the crazy assumptions on the discounted cash flow models they were using. Thank god I am no longer doing that every day of my life.

Next I had a meeting with my thesis advisor. We are writing a group thesis with ACCION, the largest microfinance provider in terms of asset valuation, about formulating a new code of conduct for equity investments in international MFIs. We think we might be able to travel to Paris in January for “research”. AHAHHAHAA.

Next I had office hours and tutored students on foreign exchange and forward contracts. I didn’t realize I actually knew something about this until I realized everyone else knew less than me.

Then I went to trade class, looking at free trade agreements and the cotton case brought by Brazil against the US to the WTO dispute settlement system. Suffice it to say that as usual I did none of the reading and was at sea, so finished reading about Northern Ireland.

Next I met with my co chair on our conference in our weekly meeting. We talked about creating a blog on our site for incubating future enterprises as well as further tired ideas.

After that with my team from MIT, two doctoral students in mechanical engineering and I are involved in a business plan to provide advertising/media access to rural villages for our developmental entrepreneurship class.

Then a brief pitstop at the gym while dwelling on how four days of food at New Orleans can seem like heaven with hell to pay for. Watched a James Bond movie onscreen. Bumped into a whole lot of people and found that one friend was dating another friend. OMG!

Then out for dinner and drinks with the crew who I haven’t seen for a WHOLE week since I’ve been in New Orleans. Besides catching up with the usual gossip, I think we crafted an idea for me to do a reading and research study next semester instead of a class on doing a negotiation analysis of why the Sri Lanka negotiation talks failed (and will fail).

Then back home, thinking that I had a few minutes to throw laundry and whizz around cleaning the room, but instead my room mate had broken up with her boyfriend so 2 hours went into a post-mortem. Suffice it to say that I have become a pro at all of this.

Finally, catching up on email at 1am, researching flights to Asheville, NC for a wedding in january, changing my flight to go back home to Singapore early, calling Singapore and Oz, and waiting to put my laundry into the dryer so I can legitimately fall into a dead faint.

NB. This is just for my records and for posterity, for it to feel like that my day wasn't entirely taken up by pace, but by substance too and that the incessant activity might have actually been productive, and not just a submission to the tyranny of the urgent.

New Orleans

2 years later and still the neighbourhoods of New Orleans are ravaged, prey to the same government paralysis, infrastructure breakdown and inertia that characterized the post-tsunami aftermath. And yet there is an extraordinary resilience and spirit to the people here who lost everything, from the Fats Domino, to Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu who had to get on a boat and rescue people from stranded rooftops when his state system broke down. The great debates of Katrina revolve around racial inequality and extreme poverty, that the storm (as it is referred to around here) flashlighted. (There are t-shirts here with the following headline: FEMA’s Evacuation Warning: Run Bitch, Run).

The rest of the US may have forgotten two years later, exactly how and why the levees broke, and why there is an extraordinary amount of buck-passing aroundabouts here, but the people of New Orleans themselves haven’t forgotten. The jazz is still here, whether at Preservation Hall, or elsewhere and this is of course the home of Buddy Bolden, subject of a novella by Ondaatje called Coming through Slaughter.

We went to a jazz club, owned by the legendary Antoinette Doe (an ex-Ikette with Tina and Ike Turner). Her husband, K-Doe was a one hit wonder way back in the 60s I think, and then turned to drink and died shortly afterwards. She had a life-size wax replica made of K-Doe her husband, clothed him in his trademark red velvet jacket and white crisp cravat, and put him in a wheelchair and takes him everywhere she goes, in a black hearse. They dine together at respectable places and the waiters serve him as though he was real and all of New Orleans knows about it. Can I tell you that this is who I want to be in my old age (and have every likelihood of becoming?!) We also went to Dooky Chase, an old establishment of around 50 years, home to the plotting of the early civil rights movement and the early jazz musicians. Ray Charles was served there!.

I also met John Thompson at a dinner. John spent 18 years on death row, with one capital punishment sentence and 49 years of another life sentence, for two murder counts. After 18 years, DNA found him to be wrongfully convicted on both counts and he was released. He has now founded Resurrection After Exoneration, a transitional home for ex cons and exonerees, to overcome the pull of recidivism and start a new life. A sweet black man, he had spent most of his life to date in jail. 40 days after he got out, he got married to a) over come deprivation!!! (in his own words) and b) lock himself into a life so he wouldn't feel the urge of "institutionalization". He went through seven execution dates, and always got a stay of execution at the last minute. He was led to the chair seven times, and thought he was going to die seven times. How does one come out of that alive? with hope and strength and conviction? How does one overcome the fact that 18 years of one's life are spent in a prison cell? I don't know but John is testament to hope not in institutions, but in human beings. He was convicted at the age of 22, when he was involved in drug dealing and had sold the murder victim coke right before someone killed her. As he said: that judge could have slapped ten life sentences on me and I wasn't going to open my mouth. i was a black man with an all white jury in Louisiana in the 80s. They could have blamed Kennedy's assassination on me. What a travesty of injustice.

Such is New Orleans, this crazy beautiful city of brokenness and abandonment, energy, resilience and spirit. Katrina was a storm that exposed race, poverty, corruption and inequality to America, and the City will never be the same again. As one person put it, this was one of the last strongholds for black power in America and now its gone, to be replaced by Martin Luther King's white power structure.

neruda

Poetry by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age,
Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense
pure wisdom,
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadows perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

indian clerk

After a particularly drunken rout last night, I could not emerge from my bed, as each memory came back with startling, unwelcome clarity. So, I turned to The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. The writing was not good, particularly as it was an American voice trying to write in a British voice about a Tamil man, a century ago. Quite a feat of ventriloquism for anyone to pull off and sadly the writer was not up to the task. It has decent passages though, but rather too much descriptive detail of homosexual acts for my taste, jarring as it is interspersed in a story about an aging Cambridge don. But there is a good tone of sadness which is sustained in parts.

I also watched American Gangster a movie that aspires to greatness but does not quite reach it, let down by the lack of urgency in the narrative, the lack of exploration of right and wrong. Finally, Denzel Washington makes drug trafficking look far too attractive, and that edge of menace which was there in Training Day was missing here. And Russell Crowe, actually looked like a sweet cop, as opposed to a thuggish one. It was worth the watch though.

end

The phone began ringing off the hook yesterday as soon as I got up. Condolences, sharing, grief, worry, uncertainty from the relatives all across the world. Another key leader dead. Just one more to add to the thousands. When will it all end?

ideology

I found this on another blog, but it is acutely so.

“It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, which is not the same as imagination. Imagination is the power to reshape reality, to find hope where there appears to be only despair. Imagination creates signs that speak of the future and bring it closer. Fantasy is in some ways its opposite. It is a form of despair that flees from reality rather than seeking to reshape it.

‘We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare”.- W.B. Yeats

This is true of all ideology.

I don't want to know you because you may destabilize my world.

change

I feel like hiding under my desk again. Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme. (The more things change, the more they stay the same). Why do we pretend it's any different?

more

Looking over this blog recently, it looks like I have been incredibly self-absorbed, which really is not true! I came to a school of politics and think I have blogged less about politics than any other time in my life. Perhaps because I finally realize that it is true, erase all names! erase all nations! Power is the same everywhere and everywhere has the same problems with it, and every side is the same side. The anarchist is the only principled one.

Other than that, I have been watching Sports Night (when in life-related doubt, watch Sorkin) and it is his first work and it is rawer than his other work but it still shows brilliance, sentiment of the best kind and intelligence and I'll take that these days in whatever form I can get!

But the problems of the world do concern me. It just seems, so overwhelming. We flit here from event to event from The Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur to The Role of Government in Capital Markets to Natalie Portman talking about Increasing Access to Microfinance (not kidding) to Celebrate Hillary's (the Clinton I mean) 60th Birthday to Renaming the Surge in Iraq. I know I sound stupid, but I have lost the ability to translate my horror and outrage at tyranny, war, poverty and disease and all I have at that thought is a bone-deep weariness.

The guy sleeping above me (I live on the first floor of a 3 storey house) snores really loud and I can hear it through my ceiling. He doesn't seem to be getting any more action though. Small mercies.

roses

I bought red red roses on sale, because they were dying. Showy large blooms, petals blackened with age, a dozen of them are sitting in a glass of water and they look wonderful, past their youth, one last hurrah. Am debating seriously a doctorate. Oh God.

w bankers

In a Q and A with the Guardian, Douglas Copeland is asked what makes you depressed, and his answer is Boring people who have money.

Here is my theory about bankers and consultants (and of course all my friends are excused here as am I, having been one of these people and contemplating returning to the profession).

These people have too much money and too little time. They are by definition risk-averse, and also less motivated by social causes. They also have few interests outside of work besides purchasing larger homes and more luxurious holidays. (In fact, all that bankers do besides talk about work is to talk about their holidays in which they sleep besides the pool in some exotic location). Finally, and worst of all, their thinking is limited, box-like because that is how they are trained to think. By rejoining these professions, I would be losing everything that is unique about myself, or that forms a self-identity.

Sigh. If only choices were as simple as the above. Went to a reception last night at the Massachussetts State House (yes, the building of the golden dome for those who have watched the Departed) and it was bland and boring, so I got drunk on the free wine. Thrashed out in a drunken state the night prior, a memo on private operators of public infrastructure, which was rather a decent effort.

Am flirting briefly with the idea of doing a doctorate in English. Please someone, hammer some sense into my head before I become TOTALLY un-employable.

choices

On the whole job nightmare, I was talking with H.
" So I want to work for a nonprofit, preferably Teachers without Borders but I can't afford to pay off my loans on a salary of X, and so my plan is to write a best selling novel by May, get a massive advance and do that. After all, B and D spent their summers writing their novels. D's book is a horror story with a moral overtone, and B's book is autobiographical. How hard can it be? Then I can go to Cuba and teach salsa dancing which is what I really want to do".

Ah. Choices.

teaching

Am bleary eyed after marking 113 finance problem sets. Its 2am and of course I left it until the last possible day before it was due. It was an interesting exercise, but if I ever mention that I ever wanted to go into teaching, somebody please do me (and the world) a favour and shoot me and leave me for dead. I NEVER want to repeat this. Having said that, there were a few bright moments. Bearing in mind that this was entirely a quantitative finance problem set, here were some smart (aleck) comments that students made and handed in! (Aside: its amazing how students get excited by tangency points i.e. every time there is a curve and a tangent to the curve, the tangency point must be the answer to every question!).

I tried but I do not understand at all what this question is talking about. Please go through this in class.

I am confused. Hence the question mark instead of an answer.

and my favourite

If only I can understand the English that is being used, I could at least make sense out of it. It sounds gibberish to me and I am not sure that I can begin to make sense of that sort of English. Thanks for your time.

the divine mr. northam

So after reading Possession and recalling that the image of Ash has become inevitably intertwined with the image of a rather ravishing Jeremy Northam playing the same in the film adaptation (particularly the description in the book of a 'feral male') I embarked upon an English period film watching phase, successively blowing through the Austen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (rather good with the very British Emma Thompson executing repressed passion rather well) and then Emma with Paltrow (insipid and boring) and the divine Mr. Northam. (I was in a terrible Northam phase years ago after the release of the incredibly romantic sci-fi thriller Cypher and even hunted down the Golden Bowl which was ghastly. But in Emma, he is simply debonair, sweet, English and rather appealing in all the best senses of the word. If there is a classic cry of why is this actor so underused, then it is for him.

time

I shall snatch this day from the gods and damned be the consequences.

possessed

I went on strike yesterday and simply turned the alarm off and refused to go to school, cancelling at the last minute classes and meetings. It was simply imperative. I unpacked my newest sage green sheets, woven thick and warm, and unravelled my bed accordingly and when it was done, it looked like fields of rice. And I scrubbed the bathroom clean, hands and knees, and washed my hair and drowned myself in lotion and then lay on the bed and finished reading Possession, the American edition (of which must has been written about, but its true, Roland now has an "amused smile" that "arouses"- the character was deemed too unsexy for American readers and subsequently revised in the American edition). The rain pounded away, it was a dark night in Massachussetts all around and perfect for reading. Went to a party, came back drunk and continued reading. I baked brownies and the tray was left in the hall to be ravaged by passing hordes of graduate students. It was glorious (I even cleaned my shoes) though now, I am irrevocably behind.

HermitIsland, Maine

We went camping, the whole crew, C, M, B, H, A and I. S couldn't make it, but we wrote in the sand on the water against a sunset, Bite Me S and sent him the photo via my blackberry. Trekked on a trail along cliffsides and saw the sea, the Atlantic, churning against black rock and silica for two hours. Boiled lobsters on our campfire, wincing as we stuck them live and wriggling in the pot. We stood along the pot and gave them an elegy though. Then took the JD out to the sand, a few metres from our tents (I pitched a tent!) and under the moonlight, talked without agenda or burden. Slept in our tents as the Maine winds howled across the dunes. In the morning we rose to the dawn and made campfire bacon and eggs and potatoes, went shell-picking and prising barnacles off the rocks and watching them wince. Read poetry standing on top of the rocks far into the sea. And everything was right with the world. Then we piled into the car and drove back to Boston with the windows down and the song from the JC Penney Sweater Commercial on high and repeat. A brief moment, snatched from the jaws of time.

unrelated things

"And ever has it been, that love knows not its own depth, until the hour of separation", -Khalil Gibran

I was talking to C today, a person who makes the darkest day glow with laughter.
"I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to apply to all these damn corporate jobs because I feel like I should, and I have loans and debt and when I finally I get my offer letter, after having gone through anal probes and coma-inducing case interviews, I'm going to look at it and then look at my wife and she'll say "Is this what you really want to do?" and I'll die a little bit inside and take the job".

youth?

What happened to our youth? What happened to lugging around dog-eared copies of Catcher in The Rye, quoting Shakespeare, spending hours in couches in Starbucks intellectualizing poverty? What happened to the urgent necessity to enter new worlds, be disruptive forces, change an order, to be giants in a field?