A Day in my life

Its difficult to comprehend that whether monotony is following me or I'm struck with it. Sometimes I get this feeling that I don't want to step out of its shadow. I've become so used to this established routine/norm in my life life that i have started believing that doing different things would be like stepping out of this comfort zone. I cannot imagine a life beyond it and I cannot live with it. It sucks, it but it lingers. An euphemism for monotony.
After all whose life can be so steady. Consider this-
1. Wake up at 6
2. Brush,shit and have a bath
3. Have breakfast. (Its slot can be filled between journey from VT to Colaba)
4. Take the auto. In 90% of the cases the auto fellow with spring into some activity with a total
nonchalance and start driving not before he throws a damning look at me trying to indicate
that I was very mean in asking him to drive.
5. Make myself comfortable in a train seat. Dos and Don't while travelling in the train have been
already dealt with in the last blog.
6. Maneuver through baskets of prawns,lobsters and fishes at VT which encroach upon most of the
fag end of the platform. I would have been very happy if there was some mechanism by which
fishes would turn up into the buckets and from there after committing suicide would end up in
a fish market directly without humans escorting their corpses because I cannot see the pain in
the eyes of these koli mulgis so reluctant to relinquish their favourite place on the platform.
7. Take a taxi to Colaba. Now there are 3 monetary incentives for taxidrivers to queue up at
VT Station. They can have shared passengers to Nariman point - Rs 10x4, Shared passengers
to Cuffe Parade- Rs 10x4 or go to Lion Gate in a jiffy and return in a greater jiffy with four
passengers on- Rs 5x4 only ....so he has reasons to hurry.
Now if a passenger like me tells him - 'Radio Club' Colaba, a fourth destination ...a scorn and
contempt instantly appears on his face for I would pay him only Rs 25 against larger deals.
But distance,mileage are obliviuos terms to him. To him Top line is the only line and cost
considerations( less distance-less fuel expense) are a non issue.
So getting a taxi to carry me to my office becomes my destiny and I have to fight with it on most
occasions with curses to win against it.
8. Now I am in my office by around 8.45 and its a rarity that I see anyone around at that time.
9. Now it has also become a routine and I hate it. Go through Business Standard, Ny times,
Bloomberg etc...The financial world has gone into a trough and struck there. It has withered
all attempts by dedicated enthusiasts from fed, to treasury and to banks to jostle it out of its
location....I think Einstein will have to play his part now - If we cannot change the coordinates of a
body from trough to crest, shift the reference(time) axis itself.
I now open my local mail box. 1,2,3...20 new mails pop in a flash. 'Viagra at stealing price',
' new exotic therapy for an enhanced and a long lasting libido' and other such 'performance
enhancing ' and anatomy enhancing tricks which I cannot discuss in public forum. I don't know
where from such mails keep on coming with unfailing regularity but for sure they consider me to be the most sexually deprived character on earth. I confirmed from couple of friends of mine who also get such spams and junk mails so, a succor. I keep on blocking and filtering them but in vain....So I live with them...Just delete them.
10. Then I get lost in the grind of work. I cannot say whether Microsoft Pays me, by obliging me to
have my workings manifested in the form of Excel sheets or PPTs or I pay MS to help me
manifest myself as office worthy. In any case I am no one without .xls or .ppt and I thank
Mr. Gates for making me employable and employed.
11. A part of my work - a) Investment analysis - Since the day I've joined, I have been given
a hurdle rate which any project has to pass before it gains favor with the promotors. I did a small exercise - calculated Ke,kd the WACC and the results were far less and no where near to what promoters desire. No wonder they end up investing in nothing and I end up juggling with excel sheet assumptions.b) Debt/Equity Syndication - Again there is a hurdle - the promoters want majority stake in all equity syndications and hence very few projects manage to squeeze through this filter. For debt - they want non recourse, non corporate guarantee funding. So many banks are very happy to run away.
So in a great permutation wherein all the aforesaid criterias are satisfied takes the deal through
and on most occasions I can be seen struggling with workings to make both the ends meet.
There are other players like lawers, consultants whose expertise I'll describe sometime later.
12. When I am done for the day, other beautiful working girls have been already done for the day a couple of hours back so I encounter none on my way back. I retract exactly the same route I took in the morning.
13. I am grateful to the bai who keeps the dinner ready at home. While eating, I watch TV
sometimes,CNBC but now a days it shows markets going only one way - South, so not much of
an interest.
14. Sleep and hope the next day to be different for a change but its only a hope against a hope...

Me, Myself and Mumbai

Why at all I am in this city? That’s the question I ask to myself when I’m alone, now a days such occasions are not rare. After all I ran away from this city two years back for MBA deciding never to come back again. Life was so good at AIM with good friends around – 135, Shorkar, dost, dada…Manila was a beautiful city. …But thanks to some great structuring by Wall Street Wizards (actually I should not be so critical of them, in my cherished dream they would have been a fraternity some day) I had to revise my career path or more accurately, it got revised. I would not work for IT, Consulting, Marketing, Strategy or HR and would not become an entrepreneur (the last option though appealing didn’t appeal in the existing scenario, thanks to some good amount of education loan)… To be true, it was like to say – “I would prefer any color provided its blue”. I had taken nothing but finance electives quite confidently thinking that, that was the area I was made for. But post Late Lehman, sticking to such conviction proved to be a tall order and a rather idiosyncratic desire. But ‘Being Bullish’ in my pursuit helped. Infrastructure Finance was not in my scheme of things but that’s the nearest bet I had. Six months down the line, I feel, it’s not a bad deal at all. It’s only that I sometimes start cursing myself of being no more than a mere excel sheet jockey and start thanking Mr. Gates for giving me tools which would help me in earning my bread…and that my MBA and Engineering cannot give me enough analytical skills to match Microsoft’s smartness which can do lightning fast analysis and can make such ppts seeing which my bosses would throw a strange look at me as if questioning why was I so dumb and why not even fractionally as smart as them.
Coming back to why I ran away from Mumbai. No qualms with my job, my boss also took good care my increments. No social life and no girlfriends, no girlfriends because in Mumbai you can have girlfriends in only three ways – You get one in school, you get one in college or you get one in office or rather there is a fourth way as well. You can get them as serendipity. I entered Mumbai after the first two stages. Preetam Chandra’s luck and Preetam Chandra stay in different planets that never cross each other and all girls in my work place were married or engaged or feigned engagement to keep me at bay. So I was there alone and lived with this fact…But one pain…I had to travel 35 kilometers in train for work and that travel done for days, months and years had enough of me. In Mumbai you don’t just travel in a train, the train doubles up for your gym, body massage and gives you exotics like a sauna free of cost. But such freebies didn’t keep me going for long. I could not afford to stay in South Mumbai, because a couple of years of work experience and an engineering degree would not elevate me to a VP’s post to enjoy such a luxury. Travelling in my own vehicle would have landed me in my office four hours after I embarked on that adventure and in order to avoid reprimands for late arrival I would have to wake at four to keep my job intact. So I carried on with this Hobson’s choice of train journeys but not for long and when I left, I thought…Now for ever I was a free bird.
I am back in Mumbai since the last six months. Things have not changed much, apart from my new job profile and the train. The Train is still there but albeit with a lesser pain. Travelling time is lesser. People and I can be seen sitting quite often, very different from the previous travelling where people were always travelling in kissing distance. But such luxuries come with a cost. Between Kurla and GTB Nagar Station you have to be careful not to feel that you are inhaling because when you inhale with sensory neurons on, you get an unpleasant sensation and secondly you should not venture to look out while travelling. Squatting figures all along the railway line are ubiquitous and may give you a queasy feeling for the day. But life does not give you everything in a platter…That’s the way it works.
Anyway 135 is in Mumbai Tomorrow. The guy is trotting places giving others his bachelor’s party…Last weekend he was in Delhi, Machaan, and had such a terrible ‘Hangover’ that he discovered himself in Chennai the next day…