Another blog, just like the rest. Neither the worst, nor the best.

When you and I were just eleven December 18, 2006

You were small and you liked to scream,
talked of silly riddles and a fond dream,
had an angels voice, and an Irish fist
and when you and I were just eleven,
you taught others and me how to twist.

You drew beautiful clouds, starry skies,
while I scrawled dung heaps dirty flies,
your hair short, shoes polished, fingers neat
and when you and I were just eleven,
I realized that love was bitter sweet.

I left without a word, had nothing to say,
but sometimes I did wish, for the day
when I’d come across you and you across me,
it never did happen as I always knew,
but it did happen, when you and I were twenty three.

And now that I see you, in those black robes,
I know you’ve reached the finishing ropes.
Flying towards the distant sun in the sky you drew.
When you and I were just eleven, I realise,
I should have taken to another brew.

Congrats on graduation 🙂

Love,
papaBear

The Devil’s Advocate November 22, 2006

Just happened to read this in the morning. Under normal circumstances, I would have taken sides. Rather taken Karan Thapar’s side to be precise. However, this one seems a tough nut to crack. Maybe, it’s Ram Jethmalani’s answers or maybe it’s the fact that Karan Thapar kept coming back to the same point again and again. The whole picture seems too fuddled up now. As it is, I don’t have much of an idea about the Jesica Lal murder case.

Interesting however, is how the “mutual friends”mentioned above keep needling each other and asserting their self righteousness. Thapar, on the other hand does admit at times to the possibility that he might not have an scruples after all. On the whole, the interview seems less of an exercise in journalism and more of an exercise in exorcism. I dont think, this is how interviews on sensitive issues are conducted. But then, may be the quintessential journalist’s role is undergoing a radical change. Come to think of it, programs like The Big Fight and the other’s in the same boat might be harbingers of what might be the new wave of journalism, with factual (or non-factual?) verbal parrying as it’s central focus.

On the other hand, Barkha Dutt’s interview of Brad Pitt is a depressing tale. Why would someone of Barkha’s calibre want to intervie Pitt? Thats for people like Simi Garewal to do. Not for a house-hold name, an upcoming journalist looked up to by a part of the nation as a a role model.

It is intriguing (atleast for me) to see, that such a change of roles is what Karan Thapar was trying to insinuate and Ram Jethmalani trying to defend.
Life does seem to be a tangle at times.

Late Monday night – office blues November 20, 2006

It’s 1:25 AM, or 1:25 in the night. It’s Monday. I am in the office. Maybe for another hour, till the exchange closes. I have open positions, but there isn’t much that I can do. The liquidity is the same as that of coal tar after a few hours under the sun. Doesn’t smell much either. Not much to be done. But then, there is hope – a feeling that a rally would occur and I would get rid of this load.

I never thought that my most recurrent endeavor and pursuit on my first job would be the oft recurring question, “How not to get fired?”.

Heavy eyelids. I, desire to sleep off and wake up late and then head for a hunt in the wild with a bow and arrow and to bathe in a waterfall and to cavort with maidens in forbidden pastures.
Dreams have do unbecome themselves in some style :).

—
Red

Delusional Enlightenment, Part 2 of 0 November 14, 2006

Warning : This might fuck with your mind for quite some time to come! Read at your own risk.

Note : You might want to read Part 1 of 0, for an enhanced (or lessened) sense of continuity and comprehension.

Fluttering eyelashes, dilating pupils, profuse sweating, shivering of limbs, streaks of light
blazing all around, hues of red and white, dotted with smithereens of blue and scarlet. Blood flowing through the veins, felt in the brain, bone melting and collapsing into ether which people say doesn’t exist. A feeling of raw power, raw energy and brains go on a vacation. Temples throb. Weird sounds in my ear. Nose drops to the floor and smells the carpet, which in turn tells a rather unasked for, uncalled for tale in its spirit of servitude and grattitude. Ear on the carpet, hears my heart beat, blush, bludger and babble. Veins look dotted with sounds. Doesn’t make sense to you, does it? Made perfect sense to me back then and even now. From where I stand, looks like you’re the one on the trip. Makes me sound like an all knowing, all seeing tree of fucken wisdom, dont it? This is what the ride does to you. It doesn’t exhume the real you from beneath all the onion peels of education, status, intellectuality and other crap that cover it. It brings out the you that never was. Thats why it’s different each time. Thats why, poor ol’Jorgensen smiles as he can feel things slipping into the mist and disappearing away. All walls and boundaries gone, everything changing into everything else. Elana sees reasons go away. Eyes shut, she savours the feeling. Rest, at last. Freedom from having to conform to do things in a
pre determined fashion, freedom from having to make sure that every thing stands the test of rationality. Freedom. She realises that it is freedom that she seeks, through the bondage of reason. But when you are on the ride, the shackles are removed and the craving stops when the experience hits you like a jack hammer. You are shattered. Then your brains are no more. Poor Sheiffer, he sees his innocence being murdered and replaced by another one, only to be murdered in the next trip. Senstitivity, par excellence. He should have been born during renaissance and trained as an artist. Would have led the same life of oblivion in relative terms, but would atleast have been recognized while he rotted, all dressed in finery, but alas in a coffin. For all his capabilities, he lacks ambition. Courage too. Make that confidence three. But none of it matters when you are there. All gone. All done for. Sing a requiem no more. There wont be anyone to hear it. He is what neither he, nor anyone else can ever be. Jorgensen is a mad eel. Squirming and writhing on the floor, his frame bending, twisting, eyes red. Plays on his air saxophone. Pretty damn good when feeling low. Though he has just started playing, his music speaks of
an emptiness. Hunger for filling a ceratin void in his heart. It exposes the part of him that almost everyone but Elana missed totally.

His music makes me feel hungry too. Makes me want to roast him, spice and eat him. Come to think of it, I feel hungry. SO hungry that I Want to eat a horse. Will have to wait till Jorgensen is high no more. As for me, I get lost. On purpose when it comes to this. Lost. Comfortably lost. Forgotten by those I forgot. Feel like I have dissolved away. Feel, I am part of the slush that crap becomes when it is crap no more.

Is it worth the pain? Let me ask you, is pain the right cost? All our lives, we wondered what was wrong with us. All our lives, we asked “who am I?”. Now, the ride removes “The Who” and “The I”. What simply remains is “am”. This is when the primordial high dawns. The joy of being. The joy of being alive. The joy which depends on nothing else. Since you don’t trip like this, you look for it elsewhere. Hankering for this is what makes you stand in queues. Makes us flaunt our credit cards. Makes you go to places like The Savoy. Makes you fly business class, want illicit sex, want infidelity and redemption wrought with anger, want to discipline your own children so that they don’t become like you. But they inherit your lust for this joy. They want it too. And so they go on conning themselves, choosing different things as a release, different avenues for conning themselves. And then you find fault with them for choosing avenues other than what you chose. Like your parents found fault with you. The same fucken story continues. The same song is sung again, in a different tune.

If only, your father tripped. And your mother did too. You probably won’t be born. And if you were, then you’d be too soft in the head to care. If you weren’t, then you’d be a worshipper of sublime truths too. The same as me. You would find solace to the angst and not give a fuck about anything else, let alone anyone else.

We are relics of immense beauty in a world that has gone bohemian. If we survive, soon we shall be in an asylum, which will have us as prime exhibits for the shrinks to be and as prize catches for those who shall move on ahead, stepping on our shoulders. But that won’t stop any of us from it. We will still be “on the road”. We smile in the embrace of the iron maiden and spit on the face of the statue of liberty. Sooner or later, you will understand what I mean when I say that. Surely, riding a bay is like surfing in your dreams.

Delusional Enlightenment, Part 1 of 0 November 14, 2006

Warning: This might fuck with your mind for quite some time! Read at your own risk.
Riding a bay was never this easy. But yes, you had to think it through.Sort of like floating on a wave that you saw in your dreams. Sheiffer Frown always disagreed with this. He felt it a trifle unbecoming of him and his stature to allow his intellect to be seduced by the charm of imagination. His twin Elana, felt otherwise. And they quarreled to no end, neither allowing the other a foothold, much to the humor of Jorgensen, who did enjoy trifling matters a little more than the average nihilist. They never went anywhere. Just met in places, obscured by crowds, not for the want of oblivion though. They did breathe their last in oblivion. That, you and I, would have to agree to, in order to be able to self righteously proclaim our sanity or whatever shreds of it that we can forage in times such as these.

The trouble was never the fact that I, Albrecht Furtinson, had more Temapazine than I could handle. The trouble was when there wasn’t enough of it. Fate does play cruel tricks on us.It does toy with us. It makes us question and then it makes us question our own questions. This happens till our curiosity bites us in the ass. And then we’ve had enough and can’t face our reality, and so there comes a substitute. Temapazine.They tell me this is not what its supposed to do. My ass.

It does this and a lot more when you spike it with a “little something”. It all started with the quest for the “little something”, one rainyevening. Sheiffer was standing in the hallway with a dirty left shoe hanging from his mouth, fidgeting with his hands inthe other for cash. Too excited to notice, the dangling shoe, let alone prying eyes like mine. Elana, circumspect and skeptic asalways, Jorgensen, smiling like a horse and a silly one at that, looking around for some grass. They looked pretty. With their,etiquette, their love for art, with their elan or the pretense of it, they looked like angels out of rehab. It always made me want tokick them in their teeth. But you can’t hurt something pretty. It’s strikeningly similiar to being a peadophile. I might be a lot ofthings, but I wont be that. Some evil has to be left for other’s as their rightful share in the grand inheritance that the persent timesare. After all we are the devil’s own children. Jorgensen kept smiling like he was just discharged from death row. Elana returned to her reading. Sheiffer found a 100 strongwad. “This should help us brave the weekend”.

It did help the weekend brave us.

His Insanity, The Duke, would be appalled on seeing us. “Again?”, he would snort. And then he would snort a line. “Again?”, wewould snort. Derisive laughter would fill the dark room and when His Insanity would deem fit, we would partake of the “manna”. Ofcourse, money changed hands much before we reached the room.

Duke thought it sacrilegious to mix money and forays into the unknown such as these.

He was a veteran. Gone soft in the head, and always had a hard on for custom. If you don’t have much to live by, I guess you have a thing or two for rituals, ways and means. Guess when you see the end near, you realise that the means are more important.

A room that looks more like a safe from the inside. One bath tub. A pint of gin. One bottle of opiate smuggled from the district sanitorium.4 baskets of bread. A saline drip or four in this case. One kaledioscope to con yourself that you are high on life. Four needles – “no sharing, or my Royal Insanity, The Duke, would be displeased”. A bottle of amphetamine, one bottle of vicks, permanent marker, betel nuts andabout a bottle of whiskey and you are just about to begin.

Plug the bath tub and pour the saline, the whiskey, the permanent marker and the pint of gin. Then add the pills and the opiate. Mix well.Mix very well. Smile. Offer a prayer for the dead brain cells and for those about fizzle out of existence. Praise His Royal Insanity.Place a betel nut below your tongue. Fill the drip satchels. Affix the needles properly. “Plug and Play”.Louie Armstrong’s voice in the back ground. Jorgensen’s lack of faith in even nihilism, forcing him to believe that seizing the day is the summum bonnum. His Royal Insanity’s eternal battle against the forces of the human scientific temper, waged under the sigil of his stupidity. Sheiffer Frown popping up and down, thinking of the devil knows what. And Elana. Life plagues me even more and rends my very being every time I think of her.

Another Day, another story November 9, 2006

This has been a day of surprises galore. First, i find out that a friend of mine got placed in A.T. Kerney. Then, I find out that a senior of mine from IITK (also our hall president in the year 2001-02), is getting married in a month or so (or maybe within a week; can’t seem to place whether it was November or December). Then I find out that a wingie of mine is switching jobs from CEB to American Express.

On the trading floor, there have been screw ups and surprises galore. Fuck ups and un-fuck-ups too, all adding to the spice in life. The feeling of impending doom, the feeling of falling from a cliff, into the canyon and all. But then, well, I still feel alive.

Not much progress on any front. I find myself complaining again about the lack of time in a day. Wish, there were 300 hours in a day. Rather, being the self proclaimed smart ass that I am, I would want my perception of time to be tweaked. Something like bullet time in Max Payne.

Lined up for the weekend is this bachelor party that the trading floor is supposed to give to one of our buddies in here. Keep wondering about it. Somehow, since the breaking of the world (😀),
I have been not too keen about affairs like this. I feel the lack of enthusiasm for most things said and done, for most things under the sun (aila poem 😀).

And so thats that. I wonder where all those people are, who were a part of my life once. I wonder as to why we ever met, if we had to part abruptly like this when my time to forage for myself came. Maybe I should unleash my barrage of questions on the world and use this super human thirst for answers (which in turn lead to questions) for crime fighting (😀).

Adios.

—
Red

Monday November 6, 2006

Number of guitar scales learned : 0
Number of people I wanted to beat to pulp : quite a few
Profits made on the market: negligible
Acts of stupidity which differentiated me from the rest of humanity as a separate species in myself: 4(maybe more)
Number of hours spent half asleep due to a lack of nicotine: 8 hours and counting now
Feeling that the sky is going to fall on my head: Imminent

So that almost sums up the day. Of course, it doesn’t talk about the existential angst and the other mental septic tanks which I frequent, less often than earlier if I might say so. Another 3 hours till EurEx closes. I however, leave in a few minutes. Some people at the work place claim that trading is about luck, more than anything. I don’t know what to say now. I have mixed opinions about my luck, mostly varying to abysmally poor to horribly ball crunching.

Feel diffident again. Maybe due to serious lack of adrenaline or something else. Is it food? Is it love? Is it the virginity that refuses to get lost? Is it the uncoolness inherent in a person who is not from Hawaii or SaoPaulo?

I guess it’s due to lack of suitable perception of the world around me. This is a call for altered perception, wherein the residual self image meets with a non dope induced reality.

Yanyway, I need to sleep now.

Updates November 3, 2006

Well, what do you expect? It’s the same old me and the same old you and the same old “authority” that is dishing out scoops of ice cream, dotted with blobs of dung from the heavens.

Yanyway, my job has changed a bit.

I have begun trading on EurEx and am now dealing with German 5, 10 and 15 year treasury bonds. Its been three days to be precise. I wonder if what I have seen so far is to be the snapshot for the time ahead, the days and the seemingly long nights to come.

There definitely is a great element of discipline in trading. Both mental and physical. Add to it the fact that you have to sit on a chair for around 10 to 12 hours (well, you can go to the loo and to the pantry for food/coffee as and when the need arises). But more than anything, its the need for controlling yourself and your emotions that sets most of us here ticking.

The realisation that its more about mental strength than about analytical skills or pure luck is dawning. I wonder how many would agree with this thesis. But seriously, its more about having confidence in yourself, when the numbers start to go against you. Whether that confidence is based on your analysis or on pure gut feeling or on a totem, is an altogether different story.

Analysis is only so good. Theres an apt analogy to this. The light at the end of the tunnel might as well be a speeding freight train. So you would do well to get the hell out of there. 🙂
People who trade sure know how to dish out uncalled for attitude every now and then. Be it their lingo or be it the money they make or the fact that the money they lose is more than most people’s life time savings. They sure know how to assert their superiority. The most ironic prat is that they also groom you to be like them. Makes you wonder what you would be like a few years into the business. Come to think of it, a rouge outlaw in a western – something like the Butch Cassidy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is what comes to mind. Quick on the trigger (mouse button in my case) and quicker still on the mouth. So that’s about it I guess.

Have an open position. Need to double up according to the rules of the game. Need to close it so that I can sleep without any regrets in the weekend. Lest see how it turns out.

—
Red