Africa trip update …..

I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas! It's a bit late in the posting owing to the fact that I was literally in the wilderness and thereafter in transit from Africa to India, encountering delays and a lost luggage situation which took ages to resolve.

The Kili climb over 6 days was great fun - damp, wet, cold, dusty, tiring fun accompanied by large doses of banter and yuk-it-up! I didn't make it to the summit which was a slight bummer. Summit night (starting midnight) was stymied by a high fever and chills which in addition to Altitude Mountain Sickness (pounding headaches, nosebleeds, projectile vomit) made it a fool's errand to attempt a slope which at many places is a vertical climb with opportunities to go right off the cliff. At that point, its not physical endurance but mental fortitude that counts, and with a fever – this would have been a definite disaster. Like a good B-schooler, I would not have recognized when to call it quits and turn back, and would have kept pushing myself until I made a mistake and at the very least came home in a cast, if not in a casket. So I happily camped out at 4660 meters with others, while a few of my more able LBS colleagues successfully attempted the summit (both Stella Point and Uhuru Peak @ circa 5900 meters). I feel reassured that I could have made the summit (roughly 1300 meters more), the climb being about the same as Ben Nevis which I had successfully climbed in earlier this year.

I won't bore you with the usual story regarding the different terrains one experiences – rainforest, alpine desert etc. and the climes – cold, v. cold, raining, hot, v. hot etc. There are many blogs that tell that story. The only advice I would give potential climbers is a) 10-15% of the route is actually quite dangerous and b) attempt the summit over seven days using the Machame Route. Six days is a killer and the other routes do not allow for acclimatization.

Kili was followed by a safari in Ngorongoro Crater and then in the Seregenti. We stayed in tents, with the local fauna prowling outside, within meters of where we slept. The entire Africa trip was incredible – being so close to nature, being elemental. I've never seen a night sky so filled with stars. And the people we encountered were simply fantastic. Having read Guns, Germs and Steel and then having experienced the continent was a happy serendipity! I have great hope for where Africa is headed.

In the meanwhile, I finished reading "Bad Science" and "Predictably Irrational". I would not recommend the former. Now, I'm on "What got you here won't get you there" (see below, comments left by the author Marshall Goldsmith on my blog post). Its an amazing reckoning of the hard-to-self-diagnose interpersonal behavioural flaws that hold us back in our personal and professional lives. I needed this long-overdue nudge, and am using it to structure my resolutions for 2010. All in all, I'm pretty psyched about 2010, finishing up B-school by mid April and travelling more before starting work full-time in July. I'm looking forward to strengthening new friendships and renewing old ones. And I hope to catch up on a few lingering hobbies – brush up on French, play the two guitars which I bought off my flatmate and of course, hitting the links.

With that I wish you a prosperous 2010! More adventures to come!

Kilimanjaro, Serengeti and onwards

Apologies for the tardiness in postings from the great beyond. Life has been a bit busier than usual, although I took just one Advanced Finance elective this Fall trimester in addition to a block week on Corporate Turnarounds. The courses had both highs and lows, but all in all I like the block week format – one week, one elective, done! In the meanwhile, I interviewed with Morgan Stanley and had an invite to speak with Credit Suisse, but they way things were going, I decided to sign with Nomura. Additionally, a fellow LBS'er and I will be doing our 2^nd year project with PE firm Warburg Pincus.

On the life front, I spent a few rejuvenating days in Boston for Thanksgiving, met up with old friends, walked my two favorite dogs, had roast duck instead of turkey for T'day dinner and went to a Celtics game. I'm almost through every past season of the Simpsons. On the books front, I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel (which I should have read eons ago) – it's a fantastic treatise on why history evolved in the way it has. Most people point to the Renaissance and subsequent colonialization as being the root-causes for the way the world has turned out today, development-wise. They flippantly ascribe the ascendancy of the west to a suite of reasons that are easy to rationalize. But the truth is more complex than this.

Tomorrow, I leave for Tanzania with eight other LBS'ers – we're climbing Kilimanjaro – a 7-day semi-ordeal along the Machame Trail and then going on Safari in the Serengeti for a few days. Then onwards to Mumbai for me, where I'll see the extended fam. I will blog more about the climb on return. In the meanwhile, here is what's on my reading list (courtesy of James Montier). I doubt I'll get through all the books on the list by July.

Investment 101 -The classics

‘Security Analysis’ by Ben Graham and David Dodd (The sixth edition)

Chapter 12 of ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ by John Maynard Keynes

‘Theory of Investment Value’ by John Burr Williams

‘Manias, Panics and Crashes’ by Charles Kindelbeger

‘Reminiscences of a Stock Operator’ by Edwin Lefevre

Investment 201

‘Fooling some of the People, All of the Time’ by David Einhorn

‘The Fundamental Index’ by Rob Arnott et al

‘The Investor's Dilemma’ by Louis Lowenstein

‘Financial Shenanigans’ by Howard Schilit

‘Creative Cash Flow Reporting’ by Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey

Modern wonders

‘The Little Book That Beats the Market’ by Joel Greenblatt

‘The Little Book of Value Investing’ by Chris Browne

‘Fooled by Randomness’ by Nassim Taleb

‘Contrarian Investment Strategies’ by David Dreman

‘Speculative Contagion’ by Frank Martin

Psychological

‘Robots Rebellion’ by Keith Stanovich

‘Strangers to Ourselves’ by Tim Wilson

How We Know What Isn't So’ by Tom Gilovich

‘The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis’ by Richard Heuer Jnr

‘Predictably Irrational’ by Dan Ariely

‘Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me’ by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson

‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck

Hidden gems

‘Halo Effect’ by Phil Rosenzweig

‘Mindless Eating’ by Brian Wansink

‘The Inefficient Stock Market’ by Robert Haugen

‘The Margin of Safety’ by Seth Klarman

‘Your Money and Your Brain’ by Jason Zweig

‘Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance’ by Atul Gawande

‘Why Smart Executives Fail’ by Sydney Finkelstein

GSK CEO Andrew Witty and Dr Sanjay Gupta to visit London Business School

Following last year's successful healthcare conference headlining Roche Pharma CEO Bill Burns, McKinsey Healthcare lead partner Nicolaus Henke and Goldman Sachs Healthcare MD Jon Symonds, The London Business School Healthcare Club takes great pleasure in inviting you to the 2nd Annual London Business School Global Healthcare Conference to be held on the evening of 30th November 2009.

"Challenging The Status Quo" brings together some of the most influential figures in healthcare and offers a unique insight into key developments and emerging ideas in this dynamic industry.

Opening Keynote Speech – Andrew Witty CEO, GlaxoSmithKline

Closing Speech – Dr Sanjay Gupta, Chief medical correspondent for CNN & Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine


Healthcare Provision in Emerging Markets
Dr Gunther Faber (CEO, Healthstore Foundation)
Maria Largey (Director of Philanthropy & Strategic Partnerships, Opportunity International)
Adrian Gut (Head of Market Development, Medtronic)
Mathieu Lamiaux (Healthcare Partner, The Boston Consulting Group)

Innovations in Healthcare
Sir William Castell (GE board member, Wellcome Trust Chairman)
Alan MacKay (Global Lead Healthcare Partner, 3i)
Dr Genghis Lloyd-Harris (Partner, Abingworth Life Sciences)

Links to the conference: http://www.londonhealthcareclub.org.uk/

Tickets: http://lbs-healthcare-conference.eventbrite.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=189843708967

The south will rise again….

Sometimes you just need trashy celluloid pulp fiction to get you through the daily grind. My new opiate is this HBO show called True Blood. Having missed out on a great deal of HBO since my move to London I'm just catching up.

True Blood has it all – but most importantly it has vampires. The plot is set in sweltering Bon Temps, LA, three years since vampires came "out of the coffin" and entered mainstream society. So now every podunk diner and baccy-selling Hick-E Mart carries Bud, iced-tea and Tru Blood (available in A+ and O-) to quench the thirsts of their varied customers, including those with retractable cuspids. And every televangelist's diatribe is now directed toward the undead, with the GLBT cause having taken a backseat.

The atmospheric Southern Gothic plot meanders at the pace of an airboat on a languid bayou (as opposed to a duck on a junebug) – and one can see overt shout-outs to several influences – Anne Rice novels, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, Fried Green Tomatoes, Quills and of course Interview With The Vampire.

But what's surprising is how much of a Blue State Louisiana has become since the vampire outings. It's like a Keith Urban video – set south of the Mason-Dixon line, but with clean-cut, well-groomed young-uns who shop from a J.Crew catalog while sipping Double Venti Whatchamacallit Frappucinno's from the local Fourbucks (a place that sells coffee for four bucks). And indeed, the appearance of a Starbucks in a nearby Hicksville gives cause for concern for the owner of the local diner who remarks that maybe its time to "get me one of them there cappuccino machines".

Other harks to being a blue state include – an openly down low brother who is also the town dealer (except he also sells V - vampire blood which makes men harder than Chinese algebra), a gran who encourages her waitress grand-daughter (a very blonde Anna Paquin) to date a vampire, a vampire who drives said date to a vampire bar punnily called 'Fangtasia' in a Beemer 5 series while playing Mongolian throat singing and Dengue Fever over his Alpine sound system, and vampires who lounge around in Buddha-bar like ambiences, wearing uber-chic stuff that came straight from Interpol's glam wardrobe.

All this makes me wonder why the producers are spinning the tale this way – Is it to make it more palatable to their bi-coastal audiences? Or is it to provide a provocative view of what The Confederacy would have looked like, were everyone cool like folks from Athens, GA.

And true to HBO fashion, there is a shrink in the mix, although in the disguised form of an African American woman - the equivalent of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. HBO is obsessed with shrinks owing to its belief that every show it produces needs a conscience, an overt sounding board, someone who speaks what everyone is thinking and explains the unexplained (Exhibit A – The Sopranos, In Treatment, Mind Of The Married Man, Tell Me You Love Me).

And yes there is gratuitous sex – gritty gratuitous reality-TV sex, human on human and human on vampire – and innocent virginal Mina Parker being seduced in a fugue cast by worldly wise Mr. Fangs sex.

I don't know why humanity is so obsessed by vampire tales. In my case its clear – it probably has roots in some deep seated childhood experience (Dracula was one of the first books I read at age 9) – or it might be this other vampire tale I read at a later stage in life (The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova).

But if I were to take a gander at our obsession with tales like True Blood, I would say its because these tales have it all – the seduction, the romance, the desire to feel vulnerable, the down-home comfort of everything Southern, the desire to truly become one with the fabric on humanity and another person, the timelessness, the dark but sweet gothic element, the creeping vines and overgrow gardens, the starkness of bright light and the real world, the failings of humanity against which sucking a few pints of blood for sustenance seems a somewhat feeble crime, the questioning of absolute good and absolute evil, the languidness, and the giving in to what your mammy told you not to do, only to find out that it is bliss. Vampire tales are just a cover for what most humans, deep inside, yearn for but are afraid to discover – which is why they tend to evolve and live on, like this one. I'll see all of y'all later!

How I didn’t meet your mother and other things……

So I know it's been a while since I've posted. Partly because my eager readers in Kennett Square, PA, Bracknett and LA don't egg me on to keep posting (yes, I do check google analytics to see who's reading my blog!). And thanks for the readership and emails.

But that's besides the point! On a sunny Friday (for London) afternoon as I stand on my balcony and look at traffic whiz by, an existential question crosses my mind – Why are most London taxis black while the rest span the spectrum from white to crimson to blue to silver? And this existentialism is spurred by the two glasses of Cava that I've just quaffed. Funny how life becomes lucid after a few! The best advice I've given my clients during consulting days was at dinner after a couple bottles of Penfolds '06 Bin 389, including such truisms as "It's not how smart you are that matters, but what you can do!" and "Hope is a particularly bad strategy!"

Oh well, silent jubilation is in order today owing to an offer from Nomura to join them full-time next summer!

In the meanwhile, my second internship with UNITAID has left me a bit wanting – mostly because I wonder if I will walk away with the feeling that I could have made a difference, but I didn't – the one chance I had in my life! To put it in perspective – for the losses that one of the big banks suffered during the economic downturn, one could provide anti-retroviral treatments to anyone in the world who needs it! And this coming from a non-commie, non-tree hugger!

The focus of the work I am doing is (succinctly stated) "Incorporating an agency that would serve as a conduit to effect the price-reduction of HIV/AIDS drugs for use in low- and middle- income countries". SNAFU's abound thus far…..nuff said! Here is an interesting article in The Guardian regarding this -- GlaxoSmithKline urged to pool its patents on HIV drugs.

On other fronts, the bright eyed, bushy tailed MBA2011 class just joined London Business School and its members have been downing pints at The Windsor Castle like old pros in their efforts to fit in. Bravo and welcome!

As for the title of this blog post….I neglected this CBS show for a while, but finally got down to watching the pilot…..and I admit, after checking my brains at the door, the show was a laugh!