Author: SK

has been an extremely jobless week in office. today was especially jobless (mainly because i didn’t receive too many emails). one associate in my team is out for the week meeting clients so i have to stay ‘just in case i’m needed’ and postpone my tour of other departments. but there’s no work for me here. so i’m forced to sit at the desk and do nothing (not too much business for our desk this week). today i got so bored that after reading a few dozen blogs, i even went to the extent of reading my own old blogs! all i’ve done this week is to attend 2 meetings, model 2 swaps, one google search and fetching one round of coffee!

feeling too bored to write now… this is already my third post today… have a lot of things to write about… will do so when i’m jobless and not bored. about cricket… about the investment banking myth (this will be written upon my return to India)… about the association of descendents of my grandfather’s grandfather… about the importance of marketing (yeah, no mistake there)… about life, the universe and all that… about emails… phone calls… long conversations… the loos here… another look at IIMB… how i think i’ve made all the right career decisions till now… my mom’s gyaan (sometimes extremely insightful, sometimes weird)…

remind me from time to time to write about these things… else i’ll forget and a lot of things will remain unsaid…

investment banking is truly a volatile industry. i was talking the other day about the guy who recruited us leaving. today a fellow-intern (from IIML) lost his entire team. in other words, EVERYONE he was working with left the company today and moved elsewhere. poor guy now has nowhere to go… similar case with the other guy from IIML also! his MD has quit and his team is being disbanded. he doesn’t know if he’ll be asked to come back next year…

i was asking an MD today at a meeting regarding exodus of people from our company. he said, “our retention rates among junior and middle levels are the highest in the industry. i’m very happy about that. yeah, quite a few senior guys left but they weren’t doing much work anyway!” fundoo… this guy apparently left the banking industry in 1999 to start his own dot com company but after it went bust 2 years later, joined JP Morgan!

staying on the topic, i suddenly started wondering what would happen if a team suddenly quit en masse, like the L guy’s team left today. the team in question was a marketing team covering the middle east. which means that by tomorrow morning, there should be someone who should be there at the desk handling the phone (after all it’s a marketing desk and important ‘orders’ can’t be missed). they can’t leave an intern alone on the desk (mostly they’ll find a new desk for him), so someone else from some other position has to be moved in. marketing to the middle east requires knowledge of arabic and persian, since few clients know english. and marketing derivatives means that the person should know derivatives well and should be fluent with the modeling techniques!

i was just asking my VP what one does in such a situation. he simply said that he hasn’t thought about it but it WOULD be a tough problem for top management. and he added that though such events are common in the investment banking industry, there is no set practice as to what one would do. in all probability all the business that desk had would be gone forever!

(reminds me of the IT heydays when Infy and Wipro used to maintain a ‘bench’ – just in case there was an exodus or business picked up too rapidly)

made upma once again yesterday. came out damn good. approximately as good as the best upma my mom makes… ate it slowly with curd…. was simply awesome… feeling hajaar proud of myself…

my degree in Computer Science hasn’t gone waste. i’m still pretty good at debugging! as i keep realizing in office when people at my desk ask me to find out why two ‘identical’ models aren’t tallying…

if i like something, then i’m definitely good at it.
but if i’m good at something, it doesn’t necessarily mean i like it.

comments please…

for some strange reason i couldn’t get sleep until well past 5 am this morning (i went to bed at 10:30 pm). got just about an hour of sleep (or a little more than that). have zombied through most of the day… lucky that i haven’t had too much to do actually…. waiting for this last bit of work to be done so that i can go…. and sleep…

many a time, i’ve attended a full day of class after a complete night out without at all sleeping in class! but somehow the same thing doesn’t carry on to work…

wonder how the IBD guys manage (lucky i’m in markets… )

conversation i had with my parents yesterday evening…

Me: Dad, do you know that paddy is in town? (laughing) It seems his parents have started looking for a bride for him.
Dad (laughing really loudly): You think YOUR situation is any better? ask mom..
Mom: Yeah… well i had been to XXX uncle’s daughter’s wedding today. there you got a proposal (!!!???!!!)… from XXX uncle’s cousin’s nephew’s daughter…
Me: What the ?$”^?
Mom: Don’t worry… i didn’t like her… decided you also won’t like her… told them to “?%^ off (she didn’t say it to me or to them in that many words )
Me: Peace, mom… well left…

weird stuff…

just got my mid-term review. looks like chances of PPO are really good. unless i really really screw up in the remaining time. kinda bargaining for desk now.

next few months, i’ll have to put some real thought into my career. need to consult a lot of people.

stuff like – is this the job i want to do? would i be comfortable living fulltime in London? how long do i have to be here? what all am I giving up if I would take this job? how would people around me (parents, friends, etc.) react? etc.

more later.

the guy who recruited me quit JPM today… and is joining another company whose offer i had rejected during our day0 solely because i didn’t find the interviewers from there as impressive as this guy… news about the resignation came quite suddenly… it was he who conceptualized this whole 10-week internship… it was he who convinced the other people at JPM that it’s worth getting people from IIMs… and he got us here… and in the middle of the internship he’s left… he just came to my desk, shook hands with everyone around, wished us luck and walked away…

there’s no one else in this organization who has a clue as to how this internship program will be run… guess it’ll become even more unstructured….next five weeks i’ll come to office… do whatever the guys next to me are doing… go back…

and good that i had given up on a PPO… though i must add that my manager seems to like me and addresses me as ‘bright young karthik’ (in a kinda cockney accent )…. though i wouldn’t like to read too much into that…

will keep up my original objective of trying to learn as much as possible in my next few weeks here… and my heart goes out to those people who rejected other offers for JPM solely because of its supposedly good PPO policy….

wondering how life will be in the fast lane… you get promoted one day… quit the next… no one has a clue of what you’re upto… you don’t have a clue of what someone else is upto… all decisions come suddenly…. just last week this guy was bitching to me about the company he is going to join (of course, he didn’t tell me then that he’s going there). yesterday he had a long chat with me about JPM…

strange…

five weeks into my internship… four weeks after my moved into my current ‘hole’… i finally opened my mom’s carefully written cookbook (yes, note the words ‘carefully written’. every recipe in that my mom wrote and my dad cooked following what my mom had written to make sure she hadn’t messed up) and made good use of it…

after five weeks of pizza and pasta and sandwiches and toasts and cereals and salads, ah the aroma of hot onion upma, with just the right amount of salt and onion and chillies and everything else… maybe for the first time in my life i feel proud that i’ve created something lovely. only problem was that i’d put in a little too much oil so cleaning the vessels took a couple of hours!!

as for other stuffs, my internship reaches the halfway mark today and i am expecting my ‘mid-term review’ soon. dunno how it’ll come though. anyway, it helps not keeping expectations too high…

and for the first time in my life i’ve seriously started thinking about my career… and this time i’m sure i’m not going to ‘do another general degree and think about my career after that’ like i did the last time this question came up… hope to find an answer to that by year-end, by which time i must decide which companies i want to apply for…

as for the title of this blog, after i wrote ‘cook’ i remembered the first cricket match i saw completely. at my neighbor’s place as they had a ‘color TV’. south africa’s return to international cricket at the eden gardens… cook… hudson… wessels… kirsten… kuiper… rice (poor guy never played a test)… mcmillan… snell… richardson… shaw (a left arm spinner who didn’t play after this)… donald.
shastri… sidhu… manjrekar… tendulkar… azhar… amre… kapil… prabhakar… more… srinath… raju.

south africa scored 176/8 or something like that in their 50 (those were the days when 200 was a good score). india were quickly 4 down with donald taking 3 and shaw having azhar stumped by richardson… then tendulkar scored 62 and amre 55 on debut and india finally won comfortably with 3 wickets and 3 overs to spare… (though donald came back to dismiss tendulkar and amre which resulted in a few missed heartbeats).