What’s new in January…

Earlier in Jan, I was in Amsterdam for the weekend, with a friend who goes to B-school at Wharton. It was fun hanging out with her after what seemed like an eternity since we last did this - while we were still neighbors in Boston. I must recommend the Anne Frank house -- its very surreal and poignant.

I just returned from a fantastic trip to Gothenburg, Sweden, where I visited my dear friends from Boston, and I got to hold their brand spanking new baby, spit-up and all. It was awesome to see them flourish and care for a newborn without breaking stride. We took a day trip to Vargarda in the beautiful snow-covered countryside, to see old friends who also live in Sweden. Watching their kids go downhill with their sleds was way fun. Its a blessing having friends with whom one can slip into a comfortable space – no matter how many months and years have passed since you last met them.

In the meanwhile, I have a few weekend Eurotrips planned until mid-April when I am officially done with graduation requirements. After this I plan on taking a two week trip each month for three months to S. America, China/Hongkong/Singapore, and N. Africa/Turkey/Lebanon.

Besides this, I am psyched that the Lev Fin team at Nomura has been awarded two major mandates by KKR and Permira. Things are looking up for PE. I am looking forward to joining Nomura in the fall. My 2^nd year project with Warburg Pincus is going swimmingly and my extra-curricular education is going great guns. I'm currently reading "The Essential Buffet" which is a great introduction not just to Buffet himself, but a synthesis of the collective wisdom of Benjamin Graham, Charlie Munger and Philip Fisher.

"Cityboy" by Geraint Anderson currently serves the equivalent role of the "National Enquirer" or "Daily Mirror". I have to admit the book is a very very exaggerated take on bankers and is less ably written than either "Liar's Poker" or "Monkey Business". It's more a take on how the author adapted to the banking lifestyle – than a comment on how bankers behave, especially in this day and age.

"'Who is Cityboy? He's every brash, suited, FT-carrying idiot who ever pushed past you on the tube. He's the egotistical buffoon who loudly brags about how much cash he's made on the market at otherwise pleasant dinner parties. He's the greedy, ruthless wanker whose actions are helping turn this world into the shit-hole it's rapidly becoming. For one period in my life, he was me.' In this no-holds-barred, warts-and-all account of life in London's financial heartland, Cityboy breaks the Square Mile's code of silence in his own inimitable style, revealing explosive secrets, tricks of the trade and the corrupt, murky underbelly at the heart of life in the City. Drawing on his experience as a young analyst in a major investment bank, the six-figure bonuses, monstrous egos, and the everyday culture of verbal and substance abuse that fuels the world's money markets is brutally exposed as Cityboy describes his ascent up the hierarchy of this intensely competitive and morally dubious industry, and how it almost cost him his sanity."

Uhhhh …. Spare us the invective! But nevertheless it's a trove of funny anecdotes and British-isms (good Lord! These Brits have slang for every word that exists in the English dictionary including the word 'is'). Here is a link to the blog http://www.cityboy.biz/

On the music front, I'm suddenly into The Cure again with "Just Like Heaven" and have managed to nail-down the guitar chords to my all-time favorite song "Supersonic" by Oasis, amongst others.

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!

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

On being nominated for Best of Blogging @ Clear Admit

A much needed update to my blog. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was nominated for Clear Admit's Best of Blogging. Fantastic! A really busy schedule prevents me from waxing literary, so bullet points will have to suffice. What has life brought my way these days?

• I'm in love with Japan. I almost applied for exchange to Keio but other conflicts prevented me from making it work. I'll likely take a few block weeks during one of the terms at LBS and then spend a month in Japan.
• Leaving for Milan on Thursday for a trip related to my Operations and Technology Management Class. I'm visiting the Agusta Westland Helicopter operations near Milan to do a diagnosis of their assembly plant which should give me an opportunity to apply those Lean Diagnostics skills I used in my previous consulting work. Agusta Westland usually makes the Air Force One helicopters but Obama won't be getting one this year.
• Speaking of Obama, the non-profit I'm consulting for, MyBnk was in the news lately. The Chief paid an impromptu visit to its London office during his G20 visit to meet Lily Lapenna and her crew and to thank them for educating common people on financial principles in these tough economc times. Go Lily!!!
• Event prep for Crossroads, the LBS Art Exhibition, is going great guns. Tomorrow we take over the quad and install an exhibit. It's a clothes line strung across the quad, hung with colorful bras and boxer shorts and equally colorful resumes, rejection letters and candidates' responses to rejection letters.
• I recently visited Saatchi Gallery in London. Their current exhibition "Art from the Middle East" is f@#king awesome, like nothing I've ever seen before.
  
• Several friends from Boston and Sweden visited me in London. That was awesome! Shout out to Keith, Kate and Ariana!
• I love Marketing Strategy – it's the most amazing course I've taken so far, and Dan Goldstein, who teaches it, is the best prof I've had so far.
  
• I highly recommend that every rational young adult read "Stumbling Upon Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert. It's a provocative look at why we as adults may or may not find happiness elusive
• I highly recommend that you watch 50 Dead Men Walking, IRA, moles, great 80's rock, heart-pounding thrills – the movie has it all. It's Brilliant!
  
• I highly recommend that you iTunes download "They Don't Love You" by Juvelen and "Rive" by Electrified Jet Shamisen Okita (Think Kill Bill, fusion traditional Japanese music and rock, except its driven by an electric Shamisen. Awesome!).
  
• And finally, I just got back from a lecture on leadership at LBS by Ian Davis, ex Global Director of McKinsey. He's one of my heroes! Getting a chance to shake his hand and speak with him one-on-one was just incredible.
  

More soon. Sayonara!

Why I'm in love with Japan. Cherry Blossoms in Tokyo Midtown.

Cherry Blossoms in Kyoto

Toyota City, Nagoya

Making a mockery of the tea ceremony. Not sure that one dunks the green tea biscuit in the green tea, but what do I know, I'm gaijin!

The fair ladies of London Business School

And you thought the London Tube/Paris Metro was hard to navigate? Try Tokyo

Back in the Saddle -- Part Deux

This is a do-over of sorts....phoenix rising from the ashes and other such metaphors....

I'm considering having a go at resurrecting my blog........I've cleaned out most of my previous posts.....they were shockingly mediocre......The most important update is that I (re)applied to B-schools this year and had admits from LBS and NYU Stern.... and as The Clash say, its London Calling....I'm leaving behind a great big contingent of friends and family Stateside in moving to London...although it'll be fun to hang out with my cousin and his wife who live there....

I'm superexcited about LBS and doubly so because of the 2008 FT rankings. Other things I am currently superexcited about include -

using this blog to communicate with family and friends
facebook (which is an evolutionary upgrade from myspace)
not waking up and then having to figure out which city I am in (consulting does that to you!)
Simian Mobile Disco
learning a new language (french or chinese?)
tennis weather
new friends
m&a/private equity
emerging markets
secular parties
youtube actually hitting its stride and being a useful app (leave britney alone! wtf was that?)
by the time I'm done with LBS the dollar may actually gain against the pound (faster b-school loan repayment)
europe (the continent, not the band)
the genre of books that includes midnight in the garden of good and evil, city of falling angels, the monster of florence, the mistress of the art of death

I will be experimenting a bit --- I think B-school blogs are old hat and I'm not much for sharing details about my excursions to the cornershop.....so most likely this blog will be about specific events and ideas and the meaning of 'is'.....and about the people I meet......and an opportunity for me to vacillate between being a wiseacre and a smartmouth....and a place to post pics that I don't post to Facebook......once in a while I plan on posting a scintillating story from my adventures......other times I'll try to coax my trenchant wit from under the dry humor that blankets it.....we'll see, shall we!

Cheers!