The Curious Case of Missing La Bella !

To me, one of the enigmas of air-travel has always remained the curious case of missing la bella...are you baffled?...lemme explain...there have been quite a few recent instances of people from my firm having had the good fortune of travelling with some of the beauty queens...however as one of the (un)lucky ones put it..."yaar, Murphy forgot to write this law that when a beauty enters the aircraft and looks as if she is heading straight for the seat next to yours...dont raise your hopes too high for she will always sit anywhere but there..."

My kingfisher platinum and jet gold cards (flash flash!) would testify to the fact that I have been a frequent traveller and yet the statistical impossibility (on an average i do a 2 round trips a week and have been an active traveller for last 3 years which means more than 1,000 adjacent travellers) of not having even once the pleasure of a PYT on the adjacent seat just hits me in the face...its not as if PYTs refuse to travel...there are always a few around on the airport as well as the aircraft that I am on...but by some design of His, the airlines have never deemed it appropriate to make me sit next to a good looking female in all my travel history...its not even that the airlines have blacklisted me from sitting next to good looking women because I have tried to be funny with a fellow traveller or something (not that I have had a chance anyway..Chastity is a Virtue Forced Upon the Ungainly or so someone has said)

Think Vijay Mallya was well aware of this curious case as for consoling the disgruntled souls he instituted the perfectly lovely kingfisher policy of a PYT escorting one to the aircraft (that is if the one is a gold card or above and is traveling kingfisher first...this class discrimination never goes away..does it?)...

So the next time you are traveling by air and have a good fellow traveller please spare a thought for all those unprivileged who have never had the Opportunity!

Some Funny Plane Announcements

• “There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane…”
• “We do feature a smoking section on this flight; if you must smoke, contact a member of the flight crew and we will escort you to the wing of the airplane."
• Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but they’ll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Southwest Airlines.”
• “As you exit the plane, please make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses.”
• And from the pilot during his welcome message: “We are pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry…Unfortunately none of them are on this flight!"
• Another flight Attendant’s comment on a less than perfect landing:
  “We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal.”
• Part of a Flight Attendant’s arrival announcement: “We’d like to thank you folks for flying with us today. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you’ll think of us here at US Airways.”

So Pink Slips Aren't Really Pink...(the paper ones, U Pervert!)

One of the major discoveries in the past fortnight has been the realization that pink slips aren't really pink...no, my firm hasn't decided to "let me go", at least not as yet (though i find the term "let you go" very funny...it conjures the image of a bull-dog with bloodshot eyes straining at the leash and try as i might, its impossible to find any parallels with your boss walking in with downcast eyes and a pained expression and telling you the "news"). The way I got to know was when a very dear friend got the bad news and when she 'broke the news" (again, another expression that i find funny as I always thought that its news when you break a record or something so how does one break the news itself) to her family members, a particularly curious sibling's first reaction was "Didi, Are Pink Slips really Pink?"

An ode to my political correctness later, have decided to evaluate lay-offs...know that its a painful experience and know that I might be at the receiving end anytime but think its a subject, on which discussion (and more so in India) is as taboo as sex (which again is ironic as the latter is a pleasurable experience while the former is not unless one is into sadism & masochism, in which case both can be pleasurable ...or painful...or both..sorry, haven't figured out what!).

It has got a lot to do with people's reactions (which ranges from extreme despair, sometimes more than that of the person who got fired"Oh Sh*t! Now what are you going to do.." to those of extreme sympathy and a load of philosophical cr*p "Its all His wish, sweetie...he will open other doors for you blah blah and some more blah!") and also a bit about a person's own sense of self-worth, which arguably does take a beating for obvious reasons.

Think we need to grow up a lot in terms of our perception of what role our jobs play in our life as well as they way people define us. I, for one, would be hugely disappointed if my friends, acquaintances and colleagues recall me as "that banker from that firm", irrespective of how blue-blooded that firm is. Our jobs are a part of our identity, not the identity itself.

How would I want people to react when they get to know that I am laid off? (another expression widely used for getting fired is just so tantalizingly close to getting laid...a quip that i just can't resist is 'when you are laid (off) you are really screwed :)'... ? First, let me know, what would be a good place to chill for a couple of months and second, help me find a job...really that's worth more than all the commiseration in the world!!!

A Really Funny One
The Layoff
The vice-president of a local company had quite a problem. He was told by his boss to lay off one of his employees, either Mary or Jack. His choice was a tough one because Mary had been a devoted employee for 10 years and Jack was a fine worker who had a family to support. At night, the VP tossed and turned in his sleep trying to decide which of his employees he would lay off. Finally he decided, the first one to come to work tomorrow would be the one. Morning finally comes and the VP waits at the office for one of the two employees to arrive. At 8:55 Mary walks into the office. "I've got a difficult decision" the VP says, "I either have to Lay You or Jack off." "Oh? jack-off," Mary says, "I've got a headache."

JOHN GALT IS SMILING

So I am back....

Its been a while since I wrote on/in cyberspace (haven't figured out the right preposition to use for this) and it wasn't until I read that Budhau has started blogging that I got 'inspired' enuf to start typing...quite strange actually as most people wouldn't utter budhau and inspiration in the same breath :) (Sorry Budhau...it is quite mean to demean some helpless old bugger but that's the fun of blogging)

As usual, have strong views on everything under the Sun..from poet-politician Varun Gandhi's hate speech (just don't understand why is he called a poet as i have read/tried to read his so called poetry and it wasn't something i would write home about) to Team India's phenomenal-yet-clinical win (there was something Australia-ish about it..no swagger, no flash just putting the ball in the right areas and putting the bad balls away) and the unbelievable lyrics of Gulaal (Piyush Mishra has scored a home run with Aarambh and Sheher) to Nawaz Sharif becoming a champion of Iftikar Chaudhury's cause to train the gun on Zardari (and unthinkably naive of Pakis not to realize it..think it was Pakis when Einstein said “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe.”) but then being a terribly reserved person and politically correct to a fault, I will say nothing of the sort...

Lemme vent my frustration on the so called "90% bonus tax" that Obama Administration has come up with to "take back what is rightfully theirs" in the case of the US$ 165 MM which has been paid to some officials of Financial Instruments Group at AIG as it was in their contract, yes this is the very same group that wrote the CDSs and CDOs that got us into the mess we find ourselves in. As an aside am terribly disappointed by the way Obama has managed this whole process. To me its as bad as giving in to Taliban in the Swat Valley or giving in to the views of majority even when you know that they are not right. When men and women "of mind" are not assured that they will be able to get the fruits of their toil, it will lead us further down and not out of this mess).

The issues here are two fold and while one brings the basic essence of capitalism into question (honouring a contract), the second strikes at the very foundation of the economy (financial services industry)...

We can carry on with our lives because there is an implicit assumption that counter-party risk is minimized and that firms, people and above all Governments would honour the contracts that they get into...when we write a cheque, there is faith that your bank would honour it, when you use currency of a country, there is comfort that the central bank would make good on the promissory note if called upon to do so, there is an implicit agreement to provide a fair trial to even murderers and criminals. Once that faith, that comfort and that implicit agreement is violated and you have a government who is trying to subvert the constitution to appease the majority, you are asking for trouble. This leaves the room open for the Government of USA to repudiate all debt (this can solve all the problems of the fiscal deficit) or to even snatch the property of the rich to distribute to the poor ala Robin Hood...after all why stop at measly $20bn Wall St. bonus kitty when you have decided to go all out and violate the inviolate...

For appreciating the second point, we need to understand the very basic fibre of the business model of a financial services firm. Like a manufacturing firm, which uses land, labour, capital and organization as its factors of production and for which you pay rent, wages, interest and profit as payment, a financial services firm uses Capital and Talent as its factors of production (have a look at any bank's balance sheet and you will see 97% of assets/liabilities are financial products and then they have people which they cannot put a value to) and that the firm needs to use what it earns to pay these factors of production be it in form of interest/dividend for its capital and compensation or the so called "bonus" to its talent and roughly the ratio between the two has been 50-50 over the years (and has come down to 40-45% for talent for most firms this year)...the manufacturing firms cannot not pay rent or wages or interest...and thus why should the financial firms be asked to hold back they payment to theirs... If the government decides that a factor of production should not be paid in case of one specific industry, it just beats all logical explanations...

Just cant help but notice the similarities with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and desperately hope that "the motors of the world" don't stop....