Messin up my day.. and your's.. if you cared

And why does it feel so different dealing with Axis Bank these days?? no one seems to understand anything.. even headless, templated stuff like Retail loans take 3 months to execute.. and for customers that have thrice the size of their proposed cumulative exposures, in liablities with the bank.. talk of Relationship banking and all that shit...

I have been witness to the drastic fall in quality of Indian banking owing to its explosive growth in the last two decades.. I know qualified labour is hard to get & not cheap either.. but having to see Axis degenrate was the last thing I would have expected.. sorry folks, I know some Axisians are my best friends and I want them to know something's wrong..

Stickin it up!!

My brother in law, a respected Editor and a brilliant author (by my own admission) has spent half his productive life working for a company that wanted Germans out of business – no points for guessing this one was led by an American Jew. With the best business acumen, some brilliant Investment bankers at disposal to strike great deals (who all are American Jews, by the way) and some of the world’s most disguised hostile acquisitions to boot, his employers are still some distance away from overpowering this proud, utterly mechanical & military yet religious and family oriented European community.

My brother in law, with what I would reckon would be some significant contribution in challenging the German ability to do profitable business, is handicapped to the extent of being married to a woman who works for SAP and is in love with her German bosses as much as she hates the Indian ones. Now that’s a difficult one – an enemy within! But beat it – he’s got one more to handle.

Now, he has always complained of my driving styles. He (probably a tad disrespectfully) calls it “stickin your car up someone’s ass”. Always objecting – and paranoid - as I found my way through the ever crowded streets of Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi or Bangalore (well, India is a more aggregated synonym) he has been the single largest critic of driving ever so close to the car ahead of you.

As Sebastian Vettel lifts the trophy in Sao Paulo today, I get to see a certain pattern in his driving preference and choice of employers. 7 Germans of the 20 in the track today and all of them stickin there’s up someone else’s ass.. wit one that wins the battle.

Red Bull is based in Milton Keynes – but by the way – despite ignoring whatever has gone into building the history of 20th Century Europe, there’s no denying that a Brit is as much German and vice-versa. So a British car & a German driver - as summed up by Vettel himself – a fantastic day!

There’s fun in stickin your car up someone’s ass – guess you need to love Germans to enjoy that!

And Red bull has, quite poignantly, chosen to play the Oasis classic Champagne Supernova as their theme music today ! Congrats Christian - to the top in 6 years is incredible indeed!!

A Pink Slip from New Gujarat

Joel Stein believes he knows why India is so poor. And I know exactly why British humor was always preferred over American – at least in the intelligent, educated world.

It is no news that Americans, especially the white ones, are fairly thick - sometimes in skin, mostly in built & almost always in brains. It couldn’t have been otherwise, going by the history & pedigree of the white American settlers. I mean no happily established & handsomely earning, intelligent individual would ever desire to leave shores for a distant land and settle amongst a bunch of tribes they mistakenly called Indians. That’s exactly what their forefathers did – either got kicked on their bottoms out of their homeland or left owing to their utter incompetence to earn a living in civilized Europe. No wonder then that such limited intellect would cause humor capable of making only lesser beings laugh, if at all. Joel’s fellow Jew Gwenyth Paltrow once infamously spoke of that in the open – of the limited capabilities of American intellect when compared to Brits.

This immigration thing has taken epic proportions ever since a bunch of religious fanatics flew a couple of aircrafts through the middle of a busy New York street and crashed them (guess accidentally) on a tall building that housed half the Jewish wealth in the world. Americans were extremely disturbed – with their legendary intellectual limitation, it took them a couple of months to realize that it was a bunch of high school dropouts from obscure (developing?!!) nations that crashed their much-touted Financial & Defense headquarters like a pack of cards.

So what? stop immigration! Let not one Asian mosquito come in through the portals of JFK. After all, the Latinos down south are better – they only do drugs and small burglary. They will never fancy flying planes through your underwear.

So everyone started talking against immigration - quite oblivious of the fact that their forefathers had themselves once migrated from across the world to US of A. They came in shiploads from across Europe and shot the locals out of their habitat. Soon, some other very scrupulous folks from the southern tip of the European continent (known widely for their racial strengths in Burglary, Piracy & lately football) started picking up Africans at gunpoint and smuggling them as Slave Laborers in the New Land of the Free. Immigration wasn’t a problem then, so more of these were welcome. These slaves could till the land, work on cotton gins and (for god’s sake) do brilliant music on Saturdays – stuff their white masters cannot till date - with the solitary exception of one Mr. Eric Clapton.

So the lazy and slow-witted white masters started getting richer and sat sipping their treasured cup of Tea (best made in India) till one day His Majesty decided to impose some Taxes on these settlers. This enraged the forefathers of America. They could smell peril in the air – the danger of being relegated to the life & challenges of a second class citizen. The life they lived back home and the only one they deserved by merit, yet the one they had managed to escape by the dint of a lengthy sail across the Atlantic. The fear itself was enough to make them Stomach-sick.

The forefathres revolted. They won’t pay these silly taxes and accept His Majesty’s claim to their land. (Beg your pardon - the Land of the Indians that they had now started calling their Own Private America or even fancy stuff like New England). His Majesty wouldn’t relent either – especially since he was known the world over for the cunning of his parliamentarians. He made things more difficult for these folks by making Tea much cheaper with a condition of a Token tax amount.

It was now common economic sense versus obstinate stupidity - and without a moment of hesitation, the Americans chose the latter.

Having chosen to act against the Regency, the early Americans needed opportunity. Soon enough, one presented itself in the Boston Harbor where three shiploads of Tea lay anchored, waiting to be carted in to warehouses. The migrant white masters now decided to storm the harbor (probably with an intention to make some quick bucks by holding these ships to ransom). However, courage fell short at ground zero and the Revolutionaries couldn’t master enough of it to present themselves to the Royal Customs officials & Naval Authorities stationed in the Harbor. So, in their unfailing zeal to liberate America, they dressed up as Indians (!!) and descended slowly on the harbor to grab control of the Ships – eventually offloading the cargo into the Sea!

Hurrah! What a way to liberate your beloved country – true subterranean style!!

We Indians fought and liberated our country from the same British authorities. But we never needed a disguise. We fought as Indians - not as Zulus or Masai, for god’s sake. Liberating a country is not a subject matter of bunny rabbits - it needs a significant amount of strength, courage & dedication.

I can understand & appreciate the Jewish eagerness to call a place his own. Such things happen when you don’t have a homeland of your own and have been led by your leaders halfway across the world since pre-history. When you know you are a migrant anywhere in the world, it’s a tad difficult to accept. However, that insecurity is not to be overcome by calling others what you yourself are – that’s outright silly. And to judge humans by their gods – spare me!

Remember, 3 of our Poor Indian commandos died trying to save a Chabad House & its priests from Militants in Mumbai – they would have prayed to that same Elephant nosed God just before they entered your sacred premises to cleanse it of inhuman terror. It’s not gods that make humans, it’s the other way round. While these Poor Indian boys bled to death trying to protect a migrant Jewish establishment in the heart of Mumbai, the government of Israel was busy trying to strike a deal with terrorists holed up in a nearby Luxury hotel – chat transcripts are available in Public domain, if you needed.

Wake Up Joel. We have just bought some houses in Edison – we haven’t started calling it New Gujarat or some such yet. But chances are we would soon, if you don’t go to school and better your intellect as Mr. Obama would want you to.

And HE IS a descendant of a migrant laborer – so he knows where exactly it hurts.

They killed her..

This one has been removed to avoid sounding judgmental!!

Tiger burning bright - Yes, his bottom's on fire!!

Any Headhunters around – am looking or a job at Accenture. Looks like a day in the office for a Tiger can be extremely exciting – and gratifying indeed.
Just as an afterthought – would they still be urging their employee to come (he did that a plenty) on - be a Tiger.

The ugly thing about identity is that of singularity – Naked (as a physicist would have) in some cases! Why can’t we split our opinions of Tiger, the individual from his professional achievements? Infidelity & Sexual dalliance is not a subject matter of professional golf. It never was.

It was indeed great of AP to have recognized Tigers achievements and name him the Athlete of the Decade. In doing that, AP has transcended the very human tendency to be overtly judgmental of the private persona of a very public character. Press had as much business on why Diana was with Dodi as it does today about Tiger & his bevy of women.

Sarstedt & the rest..

Where do you go to my lovely?

Sarstedt was born in Delhi and spent the first 13 years of his there. I didn’t know that till about yesterday. And now I am finding his vocals very much like Cliff Richard. Typecasting? Generalizing? Subconsciously? could be. Obnoxious – isn’t it?

Equally obnoxious is the idea of splitting Andhra in two. The ghosts of Radcliff & Nehru keep visiting a thriving India. Brace for a flight of all businesses – ye IT & ITES folks. Instability is the last thing an Industry needs – more so for the DR-paranoid Financial services. Else how do you explain the relative underdevelopment of Pakistan or Srilanka – with almost similar level of people skills, cultural bent, blah, blah!!

Somewhere far away the jokers are battling their butts red - in the Copenhagen summit. They killed the cause when they made emissions tradable – peddling that as a solution to the apparent issue of warming. Investment Banks made money but little went into the environment. And now the naked divide in the international community is just as evident as the editorial on the impact of melting glaciers. The BBC has put a snazzy little interactive timeline of global warming on its website which says we have been warming up more than ever in the last 100 years or so – apparently more than we did in the last 800000 years. And the net impact of that is just about 2 degrees!! Honestly – there is no evidence that we are warming in the longer run. The human (Keynesian??) definition long run doesn’t look even trvial when compared to the age of, say, Himalayas. This universe (and hence the earth) is way beyond the human mind to comprehend. So let us keep the human “Long run” aside for a moment & talk sense. We are too insignificant to meaningfully alter any natural phenomena. All I know is here you have a plot for a couple of sequels to stuff like “Day after tomorrow” & “2012”. On the sidelines – I just learnt that it takes a massive tectonic movement and a series of mega-earthquakes to push the planet out of the frosty confines of an Ice age – every time that happens. My guess is, that one has to be bigger than the one at Pompeii – so stuff like that has never been recorded in human history.

I got Anjan Dutta singing “100 miles” in the background. This guy has almost every English song worth a label translated in bong and even made money of it. Come to think of it – a Hundred Miles!! Stuff that you and I sang through our years in school – the monotony of an E-A-B sequence being played a thousand times in 2 minutes! Lord !! Sweet submission – I still love it somewhere deep down.

Like I love Denver’s “Sunshine on my shoulders”. Or Simons’ “Hearts & Bones”. We all do.

These have it in them to light up your evening after a bad, bad day in office. Or after having had to experience the onslaughts of a bollywood blockbuster in the nature of “Singh is King”!! Or maybe “Dostana”.. there’s so much choice in bollywood when you want the worst…

The subject matter of Patriotism

I have been a Ferrari loyalist for donkeys years – matter of fact, I don’t recall anything but Schumi and the red bandwagon ever since Senna crashed in Imola. What a black day for racing that was – in fact the race had better kept out of Italy that season.

Back to Ferrari and I can talk volumes about the teams & the machine. They are god’s gift to F1 – a true brand ambassador. A Ferrari 1-2 is a feast for my eyes - so much that I contributed in my little way by spending my money on a Fiat.

I have always treated Alonso with contempt and looked down upon Kimi as no more than a frozen fish. Lewis is any which ways an upstart and I wouldn’t entertain any debate on that. All that - till the last season - left you with literally no strong contender for the podium but Felipe Massa – and he’s one in red. That’s my F1.

Or so it was – until last Sunday.

On a late Saturday evening laced with modest measures of alcohol came the news of Vijay Mallya’s Force India grabbing pole at Spa Francorchamps. It appeared Fisi had managed to pull up the best in the last 5 mins of qualifiers and pushed the blue eyed boys in the 3rd row and beyond. I was surprised – more so because I hadn’t expected the rebranding to have done so much good to Force India. I mean we all had seen the racing of an octogenarian Spyker (maybe limping is an apt description of the effort) last year. If my memory serves, they were never in points and the best was a humble 14th – in a race fraught with crash outs and dry tyre bursts. From there to the top of the grid was indeed a lot of money spent in one season and Dr. Mallya seemed to have done exactly that.

So with a mind of a skeptic out to judge the world in his light, I pulled up the cane recliner and stretched in front of the TV on a bright Sunday afternoon – just in time for the Raceday. As the engineers walked off the track and the machines stood roaring for the five lights to kick them off, I tracked something familiar in the front row – a streak of White, Saffron & Green.

It grabbed me for a moment and then the lights went green and a brilliant Kimi maneuvered to his left - making his intentions known. He was here to make the most of a slightly inferior machine at the top and he wanted to hop-skip whatever came in between – 4 cars, precisely. But the thought came back and hit me like a wave. Is that real – a tricolor at the top of an F1 grid! Fisichella was leading and I wished the cane recliners could be pulled back.

Then Button spun and crashed pulling the Safety car out. They all lined up and drove like they were on Blackfriars on a busy Monday morning. I could see the distinct hue of Red creep up behind Fisi. For the first time in my life there was an apprehension seeing a Ferrari position itself for a kill as the somber face of the FIA steward in the safety car came up in the screen. The gap had narrowed to almost nothing and Giancarlo needed prayers to hold on to his lead. I wouldn’t let him down – I would rather let go my loyalties for once.

So is this the subject of patriotism? Is country above your club? Can I impress this upon an Oasis-number-chanting Man United fan? I don’t know. Force India is nothing Indian – but a name and a Principal. It’s built in UK under the guidance of a Brit and driven by an Italian & a German. But would all that not be forgotten when you see your colors in a car that is leading – the colors of your national flag?

We Indians are stuck up – guess that’s why the only car to carry a nations name is Force India!