On being quoted in BusinessWeek….

I was quoted in BusinessWeek. Its sort of a rite of passage, methinks! Long ago, I used to read the B-school blogs and articles on BusinessWeek which got me interested in the B-school concept. Funny, that life should come full-circle this way!

Here is the link to the article. Summer Reading List: The B-School Edition: Looking for a little light reading to while away the hours? These books might be just the ticket, by Francesca Di Meglio

……Business lessons can continue long after the classroom doors are closed for the summer. That's why BusinessWeek asked professors and students at top business schools to share the five books they'd put at the top of their personal summer reading lists. Titles ranged from the classic novel to contemporary nonfiction, but when read together create an encyclopedia of leadership, just the thing to productively while away a summer as the financial crisis continues. A rundown of the most popular picks follows. For the complete list, visit "Summer 2009 Books: MBA Reading List" on the Getting In blog……….

It is 12:01 AM and I just returned home from the bank. I have to admit that even though taking the customary black Mercedes or BMW back home after late nights on the job sounds sexy, often the Jubilee Line is much faster than London traffic. This city never sleeps and its streets are not the grid that MannyHanny is - so it takes way longer driving through the London maze than the quick zip up to the Upper East/West side from mid-town or Wall Street.

IBD has been everything they promised and then some – the 14-15 hour days, the modeling, the powerpoint jockeying (although much less jockeying than I was used to in consulting), and the intern 15 (a la the freshman 15 – I need to get to the gym on the 7^th floor). I'm working in Lev Fin, rumors of whose death, as it turns out, were highly exaggerated. I finished a week of training and Deal Maven exercises, while preparing a pitch for a Private Equity firm trying to acquire a French company. And I discovered debt! Equity i.e. stock occupies a much more outsize space in the public psyche than it warrants, thanks to IPOs of yore – so much so that debt, and the beauty of its intricacies are lost in the white noise. Simply said, debt, especially high yield, mezz and leveraged debt is fantastic! And sitting on a call with a PE sponsor makes one feel small, so small. Its beautiful watching how this gargantuan belching pump called Lev Fin, sucks in debt at one end and spits out equity at the other end with a gurgling chuga-chuga-chuga! And covenants – ah covenants, so Biblical and evocative of Aaronic burnt-offerings of heifers and turtle-doves – covenants are so dynamic, and with so many moving parts. The entire picture is an exercise in pointillism, you focus on the details, but then you have to step back to enjoy the whole picture. I could go on and on!

My favorite (and arguably the most famous) pointillist painting)

Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte". See the original at the Art Institute of Chicago

A micro-blogpost:first day on my IBD internship

I'm super-psyched about Day 1 which was mainly orientation. Amazing how the ADD does not kick in when one in NOT attending 3 hour B-school lectures!

I've been assigned to the Corporate and Acquisition Finance Team within Global Finance. Translation – a little bit of Restructuring, a dollop of Acquisition Finance and a whole load of Leveraged Finance, and I likely get to dabble in all three over the summer. I love the entrepreneurial spirit in the company and am very bullish on it. Another reason why I'm psyched - based on information that is already public, this year's biggest European purchase by a private equity firm, was handled by Nomura. Troubled Candover agreed to sell energy research firm Wood Mackenzie to rival Charterhouse for an enterprise value of 553 million pounds ($905 million).

Off to bed now, its an early start and a late finish tomorrow.

My new digs. 25 Bank Street,

the Old Lehman Building in Canary Wharf

I discovered School of Seven Bells in the midst of finals….

I tend to blog a lot around mid-terms and finals. It has now become another form of cyber-procrastination a la Facebooking, Tweeting and Flickr'ing.

I'm almost done with four in-a-row finals. Financial Statement Analysis and Management Accounting weren't bad at all. Tomorrow is a double-header of Operations and Technology Management and Capital Markets and Financing. The key to MBA exams is a good cheat sheet. It's hard remembering what the Black-Scholes formula for Warrants and Convertibles looks like after an all-nighter. And here at LBS, one gets rewarded for logical and analytical application of theory, like most other B-schools I presume.

I am looking forward to "cultural sensitivity training" for my Accenture Development Partnership internship on Monday and Tuesday next week. Topics include "A Buddhist model to development". "Neoliberalism perspective", "World Cycle of Disadvantage", and "World Development Balance Sheet". Certainly different from the Balance Sheets that I've been analyzing lately.

I still have to figure out my 2^nd year electives. I'm specializing in Finance and Private Equity, and would like to take more block weeks and modular courses, instead of term long courses that drag on and on. That way, I can have at least the fall or the summer trimester free, in order to focus on my 2^nd year project, do a month-long PE internship and hopefully, travel a bit.

By now you've figured out that I'm a music nerd. I just discovered School of Seven Bells (SVIIB). They are getting me through finals week. If you like Imogen Heap, PJ Harvey and Sigur Ros, you should check them out. One angle on good bands is having identical twins for vocalists. Think Tegan and Sara. SVIIB delivers on that front. I'm partial to Alejandra, the one with the wild bangs. Other bands like SVIIB – Stereolab, Raveonettes, Bat for Lashes, M83 and Prefuse 73. Very NYC, very cool!

This is "Half Asleep" by SVIIB, give it 45 seconds to warm up and set your equalizer to Electronic.

What Exactly Has Salinger Been Writing for the Last 45 Years?

"Finding Forrester" is one of my all-time favorite films. I'm intrigued by the hermetic Salinger-esque William Forrester played by Sean Connery, from the tweed coats with elbow patches right down to references to stories published in the New Yorker, Pulitzers and prep schools with Hogwarth-like storied tradition. However, what really did it for me was the urban element and for lack of a better descriptor, the hip-hoppization of the movie, through the character of Jamal Wallace, a kid from the projects, who's got game, all kinds of game, know what I'm saying! I wish I were that cool, but 'nuff said! Anyway, what I is saying is that hip-hop did to this movie, what "Save the Last Dance" did to ballet.

But that is not the subject of this post. And, I'm not saying that I find beauty in the misguided youth and mental anguish of Holden Caulfield, I'm just saying that Salinger is an institution. Today's Slate.com posted about what Salinger himself has been up to for the past few years, since last publishing "Hapworth 16, 1924." in The New Yorker.

Save the Salinger Archives! Even if we have to save them from Salinger himself.

By Ron Rosenbaum, Posted Friday, June 5, 2009, at 6:01 PM ET

Do you know about this new J.D. Salinger lawsuit? True: The number of people who lose sleep over Salinger's strange saga may no longer be enormous, but he still has a cult following, and there are also those of us who—without being cultists—think he's an important figure in American literature whose work (and whose subsequent 45-year-long nonpublishing silence) are both worth paying attention to.

And the new suit focuses on the three great Salinger mysteries: 1) Has he been writing? 2) What will become of what he's written after his death? (He doesn't seem inclined to publish anything before then.) And, finally: 3) If it exists, how good is it?

(How do we know he hasn't just been writing "ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY" all this time in his snowbound New Hampshire digs?)

In the suit, the 90-year-old author seeks the "recall and destruction" (subtly oxymoronic?) of a novel that had been set to be published in the United Kingdom this summer and in the U.S. this fall. The book is 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by a pseudonymous writer who calls himself John David California.

Rest of the article here…

Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

A general thank you to family and friends….

I know that many of you read this blog to keep tabs on whether I'm on the straight and narrow, and as the first year at Business School in London draws to a close, I wanted to thank you for your support over the past year. Its been a tough year on many fronts, the economy, moving to the UK, learning the language they speak here, and figuring out "what next" with life. In the plus column, I managed to get the internship that I really wanted (Nomura/Lehman Investment Banking). I will also being working with humanitarian organization for six weeks, at the end of the summer, likely in Africa. This year I can point to having done the following:

• See my Boston friends several times
• See my parents
  
• Travel – Bombay, Agra, Delhi, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Milan, Siena, Bologna, Florence, Kyoto, Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Scotland
  
• Climb Ben Nevis – the tallest peak in the UK - next year, Kilimanjaro
  
• Shake hands with Ian Davis (McKinsey Managing Director) – hopefully next year I can convince Bono to speak on campus about Social Justice
• Was within one foot of Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Blackadder)

• Make 600 new friends (no really!)
• Renew old friendships
  
• Be in one of my best buddies' Indian wedding
  
• Learn a bit of French – next year, Japanese
  
• Finally figure out how I think and how I should act to reach my fullest potential – its liberating
  
• Help MyBnk, a non-profit that teaches personal finance to underprivileged school-kids to grow while maintaining their values and culture
  
• Organize an Art Exhibition, an event that raised funds for an India educational non-profit (Pratham) and the LBS Healthcare Conference
  

All in all, life is good, but its' all thanks to most of you. You help make it better. More later!