Domain Maximus

It was one of those dinners that happen way too infrequently nowadays.

Fungus was there. The author and the missus. Pastrami completed the four-umvirate even though he was only half the man he is normally. Bags under his eyes. Shoulders slumped in exhaustion. Mouth pursed in that weird way of those who have worked 36 or so straight hours on an investment banking deal that will yield rich dividend in time.

(While I sympathized with him, inside I leapt for joy. The more he worked, the more he made bonus and the more he paid for Long Island Iced Teas at the Hard Rock Café. He rounds his credit card bills to the thousands you see.)

Alas money is not everything. Nothing can buy back sleep once lost. Not even a lucrative buy back option. (Got it? Got it?)

But also it was Pastrami’s birthday celebration redux.

Earlier this week he had spent the night of his actual birthday hunched over his laptop at the office doing the things he does on tough deals. Making term sheets, creating spreadsheets, downloading porn, playing Poker on Facebook, hitting on the ladies in HR. They call it ‘the grind’. A party had been out of the question till the deal had been closed and both parties signed on the dotted lines.

Thankfully a couple of days later he emerged from his professional tapasya an exhausted but satisfied man. A quick round of phone calls later we were all at Tamnak Thai. Heinekens were being sipped. Pastrami was awake but looked grim.

Normally, regulars at this blog will know, Pastrami has a tendency to slip into precarious predicaments. There was the infamous time when his family realized he was gay. Also I did poke him in his eye once with my stylus.

But this time we assumed him grimness came from just having worked like a dog all through his birthday.

“Pastrami the usual?”

“Hmm…”

Thai green curry and steamed rice. The missus, another veggie but one bored of Thai green curry all the time, demanded a change. She ordered a refreshingly different Thai red curry.

These veggies I tell you…

Fungus wasted no time in ordering a herd-killing spread of lamb, pork and chicken. All cooked in the Thai fashion with generous helpings of lemon grass. Also much chilli.

We dug into our food with feverish gusto. (Note: The food would reciprocate fiercely the next morning. We are talking Krakatoa here. Lava. Pompeii. It still hurts. Freaking magma.)

Pastrami continued to be silent. He chewed in slow motion. He was completely quiet except for a brief moment, which gave us hope, when he asked for a diet coke. But he went back into his shell again.

“Dude. Something wrong?”

“Hmm…”

“Bad day at work…?”

“Hmm…”

I reached for the Thai Red Curry. The missus dissuaded me with the pointy end of a fork between the third and fourth knuckle.

“Arrey yaar. What is this reticence? Why don’t you talk to us? We are your friends no?” I said fighting back tears bravely.

“No I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

Whoa! Embarrassment and Pastrami? A blog post loomed. If only he would open up. And I could type.

Fungus chirped up: “But tell no? Sometimes it’s good to share things with friends.”

Pastrami took a deep breathe. And then narrated his short but lively tale while we sipped our Heinekens and tried not to think of permanent tendon damage.

Pastrami had been called to attend a meeting with his boss late the previous night. The meeting was at a client’s office and it had something to do with Corporate Finance or Slump Selling or some such topic I remember flunking with aplomb.

The whole team, some seven or eight people, stuffed into a small conference room. Once everyone was settled Pastrami’s boss flipped open the laptop and began the presentation. Pastrami was expected to note down the client’s reactions and questions.

A few moments into the presentation Pastrami notices that the client CEO’s laptop screen has quickly moved into screensaver mode. The way they sat in the room, only Pastrami could see it.

The screensaver was a version of a recent Swimsuit Calendar. The CEO had one of those VAIOs with 19-inch screens and vivid life like images on the LCD screen.

Pastrami is only human. He was distracted. In the beginning he pulled his eyes away to the excel sheets and models and Powerpoint on the large projector screen. But in time he began to anticipate each model on the screensaver. The way her hair blew in the wind. The way the sand stuck to her bum. The way her voluptuous…

“Pastrami! What do you think of the slideshow? You’ve been quite interested in it! Which parts did you like?”

The client CEO boomed with a smile on his face.

“What?” Pastrami frantically clutched at conversational straws.

“What do you think of the slideshow? Anything you liked in particular?”

“Well…”

“Don’t be scared of your boss. Give me your honest opinion…”

Pastrami figured this guy was a real stud. Not harm in playing along if it meant the deal would go through.

“Well I really liked Deepika’s picture. Sheetal was a little too aggressive if you ask me. That little tigress! Sarah Jane would have rocked. But that’s just my opinion. Ha ha ha!”

The room reverberated in deathly silence.

On the drive back Pastrami’s boss spoke to him: “He was referring to my…”

“I know…”

“You thought?”

“Yes…”

“Oh shit…”

“Yeah…”

“Little Tigress… damn…”

“Hmm…”

Just as he ended the story the Tamnak Thai people brought in the cake we had ordered for him. There was a candle on it that had already been lit.

And around the candle our message:

“Happy Birthday Pastrami! May 2008 be your year with the LADIES!”

He flinched.

We winced.

“Happy Birthday Pastrami!”

“Shut it…”

Sigh.

p.s. Do a good deed today. Sign up at GiveIndia and support one of the certified NGOs there. You don’t have an excuse not to.

Do you have friends who are totally, totally on a different wavelength?

Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don’t mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It’s as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can’t get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: “How do we give the magazine a new look?”
Regular Sidin answer: “Let’s get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!”
Arty Lady’s answer: “Let’s chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands.”

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn’t even pause to think. It’s as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

“Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet’s face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?”

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion’s share of tongue from the floor.

“Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please…”

“What were you planning Sid?”

“Handbag…”

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.

Unfortunately time pressures and a laptop less Sunday means I have nothing original to blog about for the time being. However I do have the latest Businessline column to cross-post. Sneaky third-rate manipulation of regular readers no doubt. But better than nothing no?

However expect a blog post about the successful completion of the fabled GM diet last night and the ensuing feeling of hilarity at slightly better fitting jeans and shirts that have more room (not quite flapping around me in the wind yet.)

Over the weekend a few people had the idea that I must select a cross-section of my blogs/columns/whatever and publish them in book form after duly groveling around for a publisher. There was a show of hands in favour of the move. I continue to dilly-dally.

And finally, if the powers wills it and a visa and ticket are forthcoming, a four-day dash and splash to Malaysia (Truly Asia!) is in the offing. KL and Genting to be precise. Do drop hints on how to make maximum use of my time in a way that I can tell all about it to the missus when I return. Is there a desi-blog crowd there by any chance? Will blog from there if all goes well of course. And will keep the Petronas pics to a minimum.

Without further ado on with the column and off I go kicking off work for the next issue of JAM.

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(The version you see in the actual newspaper is different from this for pretty obvious reasons.)

What is common to the words dollar, pound, dirham, rial, peso, gourde, ouguiya and ariary?

If you thought “Hey! These are all funny sounding words that appear right in the beginning of a humour article in a major Indian business daily published out of Chennai!” then, technically, you think right but I sincerely hope you are not involved in a business function other than HR.

In reality these words are all names of currencies of various countries all over the world. And why am I talking about currency today? That is because in today’s column we are going to learn a little bit about the concept of ‘currency’, how it evolved and how currency, in theory, and money supply, in practice, is extremely critical to the functioning of an economy like India’s and even more so in mine.

Let us start with the basics. Currency is as defined as a unit of exchange that facilitates the transfer of goods and services. Or, as us humour columnists put it, “That wonderful thing that all the people with regular jobs seem to have a lot of and which is the primary reason we make friends with people in the banking and investments circles who have expense accounts.”

Currency, or money, in paper and metal form has become such a part of our daily lives that we tend to completely forget about it and take it for granted. Then suddenly, one dark and gloomy night, we are traveling in a cab to our homes and suddenly remember that we haven’t carried our wallet. In fact we don’t even have a wallet. We then tell the cabbie to stop under a tree a few minutes from our home in order to relieve ourselves in peace. We then walk a few steps before breaking into a mad dash for our building. We have managed to escape somehow.

The above was a completely fictional incident made up for the express purpose of this column. But it brings out the huge role that currency plays in our lives.

Now before the advent of the concept of currency man had a terrible time trying to buy and sell stuff. A typical conversation between a shopkeeper and a customer would be as follows:

Customer: “Two apricots please!”

Shopkeeper: “Here you go! That will be four dollars!”

Customer: “But this is before the advent of the concept of currency dude…”

Shopkeeper: “Dammit!”

Of course I am exaggerating here. In reality that period in history saw the widespread adoption of the barter system whereby people just exchanged things with each other. For instance you might get two horses for forty chickens. (Twenty-five chickens if the horses were Chinese.)

But this led to several problems.

First of all you sometimes never found someone who had horses to exchange for your chicken. But you found someone who had pineapples and wanted chickens. So all you needed was a guy who wanted pineapples in return for horses. Alas, then you found someone who loved pineapples but had only, say, primitive table lamps to offer. So a lot of people ended up hanging around for hours at the market. This alone slowed human progress by several thousands of years.

Secondly you could never store your goods for use at a later day. So while the other guy had horses that he could keep for months you had to barter potatoes that, after a week, began developing fungus colonies the size of horses. This led to tremendous amounts of business rivalry and even industrial espionage. Then finally, after years of lost trades and bad produce, tradesmen struck upon the concept that would change business in the world forever, namely credit period.

“Thanks for the bananas man! Your cheque will be here in just three days!” the evil trader would say. “Sure! No problems boss!” his counterpart would reply feeling very confident, “I am sure you are a man of your word!” The trader would then ride away to a safe distance before letting out a loud evil laugh (Muahahaha) because, ironically, banking was still several centuries away.

Thankfully before long the people of ancient Egypt came up with the idea of currency to help in all financial transactions. They used silver ingots to represent an equivalent value of stored grain. This way the value of the silver and the ingot itself was standardized.

Egyptian paymaster: “Here take this silver ingot you builder!”

Builder: “Wait a minute! Is this some sort of pyramid scheme?!”

The rest, as they say, is monetary policy.

Later on the Chinese began to get a little sick of carrying around coins and decided to substitute it with paper money. Before long wallets became an essential part of Men’s fashions and people were circulating banknotes with little poems on them with words that often rhymed with ‘pluck’ or ‘crass mole’.

Today currency plays a less visible but an all the more important role in our daily lives. Sure we have Debit Cards and Credit Cards that no longer necessitate the carrying of coins or paper money. But without a well managed currency system an economy is in shambles.

For instance if the currency is easy to counterfeit then the market could easily be flooded with copies. Suddenly people use this fake money to buy things and this can actually push up prices due to greater demand. The same thing happens if the people in the government indiscriminately prints notes and mints coins, takes this currency into the market, walked past the junction, behind the post office and into their homes where they spend it at leisure.

Exchange rates are another interesting outcome of national currencies all over the world. Because the value of a currency is stable at least for short periods of times the concept of an exchange rate took shape. This kind of stable currency system is essential for World Trade.

And last of all the currency system led to the development of banking. Banking played a vital role in the development of human society. They helped businessmen, traders, consumers like you and me and, most of all, investment bankers like the guy who has just called me out to lunch at a swanky new Five Star here in Mumbai. He is been behind me for weeks now and waxes his eyebrows. But what the heck.

So I must run now. I hope you enjoyed this little recap of currencies and how they help make our lives better. So the next time you pick up a thousand rupee note and spend it on an insignificant thing like dinner, clothes or life-saving drugs, pause for a moment. Think about the many millennia of evolution that has made that particular note reach your hand. Wonder at the ingenuity of the human mind.

And then send the note to my address.

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