Times of Indra - Indradoot, bloggish....

Tell me if this sets off something in your head. 'Office of Financial Stability' sounds like the sort of euphemism for a sinister ministry that would be used in a big brother state. e.g. I would imagine the 'Office of Financial Stability' in Soviet Russia being responsible for shooting all speculators in Tsarist currency. Or it being the ministry in Venezuela responsible for nationalising anything that turns a profit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Financial_Stability

Well I know that I have not been blogging for a while now, but that's because nothing out of the normal routine has been happening in my life for a while. There was finally a break in the monotony 2 weeks back when I went to Barcelona for a meeting on Friday. I have been going for a few meetings to continental Europe, but they have always been on tue, wed or thur meaning I have taken the first flight out of London and taken the last one back each time. This time I decided to use the opportunity (and the business class ticket) and got the return delayed from Friday evening to Sunday evening and spend the weekend in Spain. Coincidentally I had bought the Spain rough guide just the day before hoping to make a trip there some time, so I was quite pleased. I skimmed through the rough guide to find a place near Barcelona where I could get a room on a day's notice and finally decided on Vinaros (Prounounced Bee-na-roes), a small beach resort town halfway between Barca and Valencia on the Costa Azahar, completely devoid of English and German tourists. Since the tourists (and there are many) in Vinaros are all Spaniards, it is also remarkably cheap (my air-conditioned single room cost 30 EUR a night!!) and lively in a non-Enlish-football-hooligan way.

Those who have been with me during exchange would know that I love trains, specially those in continental Europe and train or a train system has to be really bad for me to dislike it, but the spanish train system RENFE achieved that difficult goal. Here is my short rant on Spanish trains:

Complaint 1. You have to have a reservation to get on to a train in Spain, like in an aircraft. In Germany you can get on to any day train without a seat number and may reserve a seat if you wish to. What this means is that if you want to get from, say, Hamburg to Munich, a 6 hour train ride by the high-speed ICE, all you have to do is get on to the train in the station in Hamburg, find a place to sit, buy the ticket from the conductor on the train and get off at Munich. You can wake up in the morning and decide to go to Munich and be there in time for Lunch. The same works on most trains in Italy, except I think on ESIs. In France, you can do the same for most day trains except for TGVs, for which you need to have a seat number before you get on to the train. In Spain, on the other hand, you have to have a seat number for any train trip except on the Roadalies, which serve the immediate vicinity of a city. This meant that I had to wait four hours to take a 2 hour train ride to Vinaros from Barca because all the trains before that were full. Luckily it was Barca, so i just sat on the beach from 3pm to 7 pm on Friday waiting for my train. Finally got to my hotel in Vinaros at 10 in the night. The good thing is that I didnt really miss anything. Having gotten used to London, which shuts pretty early, I warily asked the landlord of the pension if the restaurants were open at 10 pm. He looked at me as if I was strage and informed me that most of the restaurants would have only just opened. Spain is quite remarkable that way, people usually have dinner around 10-11 pm and often decide at 11 o clock to go outside for dinner. So I managed to get myself a good dinner and a few drinks at a time when I would have been walking empty streets in London.

Complaint 2. Large Spanish railway stations are run like airports in terms of security. This means that you cannot get anywhere near the platform unless you have a ticket, so you cannot receive anyone on the platform. You have security check and baggage screening before you get onto the train, which slows down things dramatically at large stations which means many trains leave late. They also separate incoming and outgoing passengers like in airports, which I have to imagine creates further logistical bittlenecks (as in many airports including Heathrow) since airports and stations built before 9/11 and 7/7 etc were simply not built to function that way. And the funny thing is that they do this only in the large stations like Barca and not in small places like Vinaros. So anyone with bad intent could simply get onto the train in Vinaros and all the (pointless) security in Barcelona would have been of no help whatsoever. I understand that the Spanish are concerned over security following the Madrid train bombings in 2004, but having pointless security procedures which create bottlenecks and can easily be circumvented does not help anyone.

The trains were also late on both my to and fro journeys, but there was a spanish railway employees strike at the time so i shall be magnanimous enough not to crucify RENFE for that.

Overall the holiday was pretty good. Vinaros was quite nice, had a nice time just lounging about on the beach and having chilled beer. It was also nice flying back from a holiday business class and being picked up by a car (both postponed from Fri evening), specially since i got onto business class looking very scruffy in frayed jeans and chappals. I am hoping i can get some more Friday or Monday meetings in stay-worthy places before the summer gets over.

When thinking of going to different countries, I have always thought of myself as a traveller rather than a tourist, in that more than visiting touristy locations, I prefer to go to a country and get a feel of the way of life there. However, after having spent 15 hours in the unbelievably cramped economy cabin of the Air France flight back from Hong Kong, I have decided to narrow my description down further, from being a traveller to being a beer. i.e. I like to be in different places in the world, but do not enjoy the process of getting there and back.

I guess that is true for most people when it comes to travel by air, but I do not particularly like road trips either. What I like best is travelling on high-speed trains like the ICE and TGV but even then do not care too much for looking out the window and enjoying the scenery (which on the TGV is often a blur anyway).

Thankfully I am in London, which means that most of Europe is within 2-3 hours flight in an economy cabin/no-frills flight, which is fairly tolerable. Also, Paris and Brussels are less than a couple of hours away by the Eurostar, which makes my life as a beer (and traveller) more comfortable in the near future.

About Hong Kong, life as a beer there was very good and quite relaxing. The weather there was excellent, with the temperature around 18C, while the temperature in London was about 3C. Hong Kong is a nice place to live in ridiculously cheap compared to London, specially when it comes to eating out and riding on Taxis. On the other hand there wasn't much to see for a 2 week beer, which I didn't mind too much either.

Came back on the 31st morning, so went to Tommy's place for a quiet party. It didn't turn out to be as quiet in the end, as the people below came up to complain to Tommy about the Chappal that I threw on their balcony. I thought they were being rather petty until I found out that prior to that, Tommy had managed to throw an ashtray onto their balcony as well. Since Minime was not in town, Tommy suggested that I sleep over in Minime's bed, but I decided that I did not want such an inauspicious start to the new year and left when the party was over. Thankfully, the London underground was running all night for New Year's, so I managed to stumble back home without incident at 5 in the morning.

And now I'm at work, for the first day of my 4th, and thankfully last, rotation. Waiting for this to end soon so that I can start real work. Of course the moment that starts I shall miss my rotations, but you know what they say about the grass.

So I am writing this entry sitting in office on a Sunday. Now, you may ask what I am doing here on a Sunday, and I can assure you that I am not here only to write this blog entry, as I do finally have net at home. I am on my third rotation right now, which has been fairly uneventful with not much to do. But on friday evening i got handed some stuff that i need to get my head around before Monday. Since I would prefer to spend a few hours on a Sunday afternoon in office than stay here til late on a Friday night, i find myself at work now.

One positive out of this experience is that this is the first time i have been able to come to work after a pint of beer, and i see that i can work fine, perhaps even better now. Theres still a long way to go with rotations, with 1.66 rotations still left and permanent desk hiring not happening til the end of January. Meanwhile, I am a nomad in the office, with no telephone number, no Bloomberg login, constantly changing Mailstop number and all the confusion that comes along with it.

Life among the IIMB junta in London is, as always, in a state of flux. Yet another one of the guys has acquired a girlfriend, bringing with it the unfortunate consequence of having to hang out once in a while with her friends. Don't get me wrong, I do welcome an enlargement in my circle of acquaintance in London, but while she is a nice girl, i draw the line at her friends. Technically they are my colleagues as well, but I usually choose to ignore that minor detail.

And now, I should get back to work and then get back home for dinner and prepare myself for the hard week ahead. Did I say the week ahead? Damnit, the week has already started for me on Sunday.

It's been a little over a week since I started working now, and I am enjoying my work quite a bit. My first rotation is with a team which makes principal investments in Infrastructure companies, usually unlisted. So, most of my work is very similar to M&A work and very different from the rest of Global Markets.

On the up side, in the last few days I have got a lot of interesting work to do and they have given me good work right from the beginning. The team is also really good with really nice and competent people.

The slight downside is that this team works 13-14 hours a day. Given that I have to wake up an hour before i am here, that means I have an hour after leaving work to go to sleep, which is not the great. But anyway, I dont really have anything to do in London on weekdays as everyone else is also busy, so I dont mind it as long as I get 8 hours of sleep.

I have always dreaded this all my life, that a working day will mean waking up, going to work, coming back and going to sleep. But perhaps this is the age when I can do this, so that I can relax later. Or maybe I should live it up now and enjoy myself while I am young, and figure out the rest later.
Too bad, i don't have the choice, option 1 it is.

On a different note, SKimpy is in London on a project now, so Tiwari, RG Reddy, Tuhin, Khare, Bhaskaran and I met up with him on Sunday and had (as usual) Indian food. SKimpy on his part regaled us with all the gossip from campus that he picked up from Aadhisht, Kodhi, Sathya and other sundry whores. When it comes to campus gossip, the quizzers sure seem to consider IIMB happenings (and non-happenings) to be as important as Lit or Politics.

Tomorrow, on the 16th of October, exactly 3 months after officially joining Deutsche Bank, I shall be doing my first day of work. I shall wait for that to sink in....

For the past 3 months in DB, we have had team building exercises, Classroom training, regulatory examinations, Volunteering for NGOs and presentations from various desks. Finally tomorrow I shall be unleashed on the trading floor and get to do some real work, of sorts that is.

For the next 4 months, we shall be having 4 rotations, of 3 weeks each. 3 week rotations are quite short so I probably wont get to do any real work, but at least it shall be work. I do realise that i a few months i might be completely sick of work and dying to have free time, but at the moment it is quite the opposite. And hopefully I shall find a desk where I really like work and look forward to going in on Mondays.. yeah right...

Still havent managed to get myself an internet connection, so am depending on random acts of kindness by friends, or random unsecured wi-fi networks to get on the net. Of course, that fact that to latch on to random unsecured connections means i have to walk around on the streets with an open laptop in my hand getting dirty looks from suspicios police officers means that I don't get online that often.

I realise that I haven't updated my journal in quite a long time, but that's because I am currently sans internet connection. I moved into my new studio flat 10 days ago and haven't been able to get a net connection yet.

Whenever a group of DB grads is talking, one of the most common topics of discussioon is that sad state of affairs in services in the UK. Getting good service is almost impossible here and is very difficult to deal with after being in India, where you can get amazing service as long as you are willing to pay the price. 10 days after I moved in, I still don't have a phone line and a broadband connection because the previous tenant left without closing her line. So they shall first try to track her down, and then get back to me, the whole process could take more than a month. And this is the only way I can get broadband. At least in India i could pay a guy a few hundred bucks to sling a cable across a few rooftops into my house and could get cable/broadband any time I wanted, but that isn't possible here. Similar service related horror stories can be heard about banks, insurance companies and other service providers.

Another related observation, the companies with the most prompt telephone helplines are the ones with call centres based in India. The ones with UK/Ireland based call centres can make you wiat for hours on the line before you can talk to someone.

On the work front, believe it or not, I still haven't started working. Right now, as part of DB's Corporate Social Responsibility effort, I am helping a Non-Profit Organisation come up with a suitable business plan. This ends next week, and from 16th of October we finally start with our rotations. After the last couple of months of sleeping 9-10 hours a day, it might be a little difficult getting into the groove of working 15 hour days.

I've finally got a new phone with my post paid O2 contract, and it is a beauty. After having lost my MOTOSLVR, i had been suffering from intelligent-phone-withdrawal-symptoms for the last few months. This phone has more than made up for it though.

The Nokia N80 (3G) has everything you would expect in an intelligent phone, but the features that really stand out are:
1. Wi-fi!! - I can check my email on the phone for free all the time, without having to pay GPRS access charges. And in a city like London with it's profileration of wi-fi, i am almost always connected. I read that Skype might release a Skype for symbian phone shortly.. That combined with wi0fi means i shall be able to talk to people all over the world for free from my mobile phone!

2. Actually, the first point alone is a killer, but lemme add some more. It has a 3 megapixel camera. Now, I don't have a regular camera, so I'm not going to bother to buy one now. I have seen that I almost never have a camera with me when I feel like taking a picture, so better not to have a camera, but to have a good camera phone.

3. It has quickoffice, so I can open Word docs, excel sheets and PPTs on my phone and even edit them to a certain extent on my phone. Adobe reader is not free though, so might have to pay for it.

4. Lifejournal - Is Nokia's blogging software. It presents to me in a sort of blog form all my photos, messages etc, but can also be used to upload photos directly to flickr or Livejournal, as well as post Livejournal entries directly from my phone. That would be possible anyway since it has wi-fi and a browser, but this software apparently makes it easier. Maybe my next post shall be from my phone.

Hopefully, I shall be able to put more photos on my blog now, like Mihir. Anyway, after the first few frenzied days of photographing almost everything I saw, I have finally settled down to enjoying the other features of the phone.

Parashar has come over to London for a couple of months for his training, so yesterday Khare and I met up with him for a few drinks. Few drinks on an average, that is. For Khare, to the disappointment of most people who know him, has become a complete teetotaller. I might need to say this again, Khare has become a complete teetotaler. This is the same Khare who sipped through half a bottle of rum the night before the Corpfin mid-terms, which he went on to top. The Khare who carried a hip-flask full of rum in his back-pocket was now sipping coke and pretended that nothing was out of the ordinary. This was a cause for much lamentation and chastising by the two of us, who as his wingies in first year looked on as he staggered towards such accomplishments.

Parashar on the other hand had a steady stream of double Jack Daniels coming towards him. Some people get violent when they are tipsy and others become saints, but Parashar would merely take back his old glass to the bartender and harass him to serve him in the same glass again.

I had a large bottle of cider, which at 5% strength made me feel quite good, and I didn't really feel like getting drunk and staggering back home. All the while I was wondering about whether I would ever be able to give up drinking alcohol. The answer was a certain NO. Now I'm no alcoholic, that's for certain. I go for days or weeks at a time without having a drink and have not been really drunk for a long time now. However, I would not be able to live with the thought that I would not be able to have a drink at any point of time if I wanted to, that would be almost impossible. I just hope that I don't ever come to a point where I have to completely give up alcohol, for that certainly make the future something less worth looking forward to.

P.S. Any queries on WHY Khare has given up drinking should be directed at him.

I'm back in London now, have been here for a week already . Though I liked New York quite a bit, living in a hotel in the city knowing that I would be there for only a month isn't the way I wanted to experience it.
I'm currently busy giving my regulatory examinations before I start working. I thought they would be easy, but they're not. Thankfully have passed the first one and hopefully will get through the next two without incident. The weather in London right now is great, usually sunny, with a little drizzle now and then, just the way I like it.

Last night Anirvan, Nidhi Bansal and I were in Anirvan's room having dinner preceded, accompanied and followed by a few drinks. Pretty soon we started to listen to L^2 music and reminiscing about IIMB, how great those 2 years were and how they were the best years of our lives. I think it is inevitable that whenever IIMB people meet who haven't spoken with each other at length for a while, the conversation will inevitably steer towards how great the times at IIMB were. Of course, if we meet more often we shall have other stuff to talk about, but I'm sure that we shall always refer back to incidents in IIMB all the time, such is the impression it has left on most of us. One thing I often think about though is that great as those 2 years at IIMB were, I hope they were not the best years of my life. Because I don't want to live life knowing that the best years of my life are already gone and it is all downhill from here. Having said that, I find it difficult to think of what could compete with those 2 years, hopefully there is something to look forward to.

Once I am finished with the regulatory exams and the desk presentations, I shall start work from mid-October, the beginning of a long working life. I hope I do take a year off in a few years from now and do something interesting with my life, though there is no guarantee of that happening. I shall just have to hope for the best.

Well, i've been in New York for a month and a half now, and shall be leaving in another 3 days to go back to London. This was my first time in New York, in fact in the USA, and in the last month and a half I haven't been to a single touristy place in or around New York. The most obvious one that comes to mind is the Statue of Liberty, but of course there are other things to see, like the MoMA, The Met or a Broadway show. My brother shall be quite disappointed that I didn't see anything here.

To tell you the truth, I'm not really much of a tourist. Don't get me wrong, I love going to new countries, but I don't particularly like going to see monuments, geographical landmarks or Museums. I did that for 3 months during my exchange programme, when I travelled all over Western Europe and went to all the places favoured by tourists. But I also discovered that that's not my kind of thing.
I prefer to go to a new city and just walk around, soak in the atmosphere, eat cheap local food and drink good local beer. My favourite part of Europe is still Leipzig (in Eastern Germany), where I was on exchange and which served as my base camp, where I made loads of friends, learnt the language, and really got to know the place well. A little too well perhaps, if you have ever heard of my near-drowning experience at a certain lake in Leipzig.

So here I am, leaving New York after a month and a half, without doing a single touristy thing. What I have done is walked all over Mid-town, in the Central Park, The Upper East Side and a little bit of the Upper West Side. I've eaten in restaurants serving a wide variety of food, specially typical New York style delis, diners and Pizza places. Considering that we had classes all day as well as exams, I think I've done a fair bit. Perhaps next time I shall check out the hipper areas of The Village, SoHo etc.., but I'm going back to London quite satisfied.

OK, a small confession.. I have done one touristy thing. I bought myself an NYC coffee mug to add to my coffee mug collection and remind me of my time in NY.It is a little tacky, I know, but it is more useful than most other souveneirs. I am a complete coffee fiend, and not too regular with dishwashing, so a large collection of mugs is quite handy.

A few days back Anirvan and I got an invitation to a party in Brussels from our friend Caroline who had come to IIMB on exchange. So I got on the net to find out the procedure for getting a Schengen Visa, which all Indian passport holders have to get. I found that the procedure to get a visa (through the Belgian embassy) was so complicated that it was almost not worth it, I doubt if I shall be going there. I have been to the Schengen countries thrice before, but always with a German visa, which is generally much easier to get. To add insult to injury, I found the list of countries which do not need a visa to visit the Schengen countries, which includes Bolivia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Nicaragua and a lot more.
That just completely pissed me off, to think that someone from Malaysia or Guatemala could just pop over to Europe for 90 days without a visa, while I needed one.

So I decided to find out where exactly I COULD go without a visa, and I was quite disappointed. The list is:
Nepal, Bhutan, Mauritus (visa on arrival), Thailand (visa on arrival) and Hong Kong (for visits upto 14 days). As far as I know, that is it! (If you know any others, please do let me know)
The only silver lining was that because of my UK work permit, I am allowed visaless travel to Switzerland.

It is just insanely difficult for a person with an Indian Passport to travel around the world at short notice. In fact most European countries will not even give me a Visa unless I have a documented invitation from someone in the country or go as part of a package tour (and then they shall take a couple of months to process it anyway). Since I shall be working in London for the next few years, I have it in mind to make several weekend trips to continental European countries, specially in summer. Now I have given up plans of going to Croatia (Adriatic Sea coast) and Bulgaria (Black Sea coast).

So, after my research I found that the Schengen Visa that I was cursing so much a while back is actually still the easiest to get for me. So that means that for spur-of-the-moment weekend trips I shall have to stick to the Schengen countries, most of which I have already been to. Anyway, at least I shall get to see Scandinavia now, which I missed out on during my exchange semester, and I can also see more of Spain and Portugal.

This has left me feeling quite disappointed, to find that the world is your oyster only if you have a passport from a first world country. I will not be able to travel as freely in Europe, or the rest of the oyster, as I had hoped, so I shall now have to depend on meticulous advance planning (and taking leave from office on random days to apply for visas) to be able to travel around.

Anyway, I guess I can't really hold it against any of those countries, given that there are over 1 billion Indians, noone really wants to take a chance and see what happens if they do allow us in without visas.

In the last one month in New York I have heard quite a bit of discussion about which is a better place to live in, Manhattan or Jersey City. One of the (ridiculous, in my opinion) reasons I have heard for Jersey City being better is the view from Jersey. One of the best (and most famous) things about Manhattan is definitely its skyline, and the Jersey City camp claims that it is superior as they can look at the view of the Manhattan skyline from their windows, while those in Manhattan have nothing better to look at than Jersey City!



Now, this (I have not taken this photograph) is what the Manhattan skyline looks like from New Jersey in the evening.
It does look really good, I admit it, but would I want to live in Jersey and just gawk at Manhattan when I could be living in the real thing?




This is a photogaph of the sunset view from the other side, Jersey City seen from Riverside Park in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That's me, with my cousins Mitul and Jeet, taken by our cousin Joy.

I agree, the view is really shabby, but it's the convenience of being in a place like Riverside Park (a great place) and yet being just a few minutes away from the bustle of Times Sqaure that make Manhattan great.

I guess you know what my view on the matter, I'd rather live in Manhattan in a tiny apartment with a shabby view, than live in Jersey City, which is just a glorified suburb.

I am in New York City right now, and have been here already for a month. I'm here for my the training program conducted by my employers, to make a man of me before I start working. I shall be working in London, but the training program is being conducted not on geographical lines, but according to seniority, so we IIMB grads are training along with the US MBAs in New York. Here with me are Khare, Anirvan and Jayant from IIMB and a handful from A and C.

New York City (actually, just Manhattan)

My first experience of the city after I got out of JFK airport was of numerous random unauthorized Taxi guys trying to cheat us on the Taxi fare to Manhattan. Even the airport officials were in on the scam, trying to convince us that the regular Taxis were not running (of course they actually were). And that was certainly not the last time in NYC that I felt a little uneasy/vulnerable.

Since then, at each step I have noticed just how similar Terry Pratchett's fantasy city Ankh-Morpork (also known as the Big Wahoonie) from the Discworld series is to New York.
Actually, the hot dogs peddled on the streets of NY are probably not as deadly (or tasty) as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's meat pies, but the general energy and buzz about the place is reminiscent of Ankh.

But having said that, I usually feel quite safe walking around in NY even at night, but then again that's probably because I have usually had to walk along and near Broadway and 34-40th Streets which are quite busy even in the night. Until now i have been a pakka Manhattanite, having not stepped off the Island yet. I do not really have any plans of going to The Bronx or Brooklyn in the near future either.

In ten days' time, I shall go back to London, and to tell you the truth, I am looking forward to it. I quite like NYC, but I don't want to live out of a suitcase in a serviced apartment anymore. Perhaps one day I could come back to work in NY and live here for a few years, I think I would like that.

Well, this is my first blog post. Ok, after I wrote that, I took a couple of minutes off to think about whether this shall be a blog or an online journal.

After having thought about it, I couldnt really make up my mind, so I guess it shall be a mix of both. However, I shall try to refrain from reanting about random occurences that either do not really affect me or can be read about in the newspaper (what value could I add to that anyway?). I guess that means this blog shall be about my life and interests (which is mainly music and books).

I also know that in the initial enthusiasm of having a blog, I shall probably post regularly for a while and then taper off later, but I figured I might as well give it a shot.