My life goes vrooooommmm...mmm..mmm

...in a poor attempt to match with that nice-cheesy song from 'Salaam Namaste':-D

Everything in my life seems to be moving at breakneck speed like the visuals in front of the bikers in Road-rash or the drivers in NFS (dang, I'm suddenly itching for a go at these games and the Age of Empires - once I played AoE for 13 hours non-stop...it took a heculean attempt to uninstall those from the comp a few years back and I still get withdrawal symptoms).

Boss and work

Work gets busy. But that is a good thing. And I'm in the rare situation where the bosses have changed - so I'm the constant factor here (or hehe, like the furniture...slightly worn and frayed at the sides but still usable).

My former boss was the best I've ever had - he gave me all the space and leeway to do my own thing. It rankled sometimes though because he wasnt there often when I needed technical backup..so I had to go running to people at Citi for nuggets of financial wisdom. All said and done, though, working with him was the tops and we were a great team (we ogled at pretty ladies together, rated almost all the coffee joints around Nariman point and shared many moments of mirth, frustration and elation at different points in time). He was probably the first 60 year old I bonded with:-)

The new boss is radically different. She is an upright German lady, a no-nonsense one as they all go, and with about a million years of experience of investment banking and globetrotting. So I suddenly feel like a tightly squeezed sponge which has been suddenly immersed in a bucketful of water - I'm learning more than I ever have and its great, so far. We're fast building up a great rapport and have already established the 'good-cop, bad-cop' routine in most of the meetings we go to. The only downside is that however early I reach office, she's always there before me...so I've given it up finally.

The Marriage front

So yeah, we're having a monsoon wedding, the marriage happening on 6th July. Why so soon? We'd have loved to get married on 8th Feb (sister got married on 6th, brother on 7th) but Shikha has received an admission offer from Harvard Business School and she leaves in the first week of August. People have already started cautioning us against a long-distance relationship but we're pretty sure of ourselves, having been through a lot together. The initial years of our relationship were long-distance and though costly on the pocket, it worked pretty well.

So we're both stuck in a multitude of things:
Shikha's paperwork for Harvard never seems to get over - you get over with one item on the checklist and the next rears up! The visa preparations were painful enough, getting all of her family and me to produce income documents to show that she had just enough dough for the 2 year education (and jeez, its costing a bomb...expect to see me in tatters the next time we meet!).

Wedding shopping is bogging us down. Both get off from office by 8pm and by then are just too fagged out to do anything else. But the shopping needs to be done. So we lug ourselves to the markets. Of course it doesnt help that its either too rainy or too humid! We've so far managed to buy the wedding dresses for her and me (after much ranting-raving, I was convinced by all and sundry to wear a Sherwani which is so intricately designed that it sends me into a tizzy everytime I look at it and yeah..I still dont get the concept of spending a bomb on something I'll never wear again), random make up stuff for her (whoa, never knew make up stuff would set me back by that much), many many gifts for the relatives and perfect engagement rings (hers is simply lovely, 13 diamonds set in platinum)

Thankfully my parents are handling most of the wedding arrangements though I'll plunge headlong into them when I finally reach Delhi for the wedding. Getting leaves was surprisingly not too tough:-)..so thats one breather.

The Honeymoon planning is'nt coming along too well but picking up momentum as we realise that in most parts of the world its holiday season and everything is liable to be overbooked. I wanted to go along to Boston and get her settled down and then go travelling around US but there are no dates available for a tourist visa. So we're planning a trip across Europe and in the interests of saving already-scarce money, she'll continue to Boston and I'll return home:-) hehe, sound nice and strange? Anyone with any tips on Eurorail is most welcome to pass them on! The good thing is that I have a scheduled business trip to Canada in November so will wrangle a biz visa to the US too and make a quick dash to Boston when I can. Then she comes for the winter break in December and we'll both be too broke to do anything but hunker down at home:-D

For the days in between, I'm loading up on my Skype-out already.

The Stock markets have obviously something against me!! In a time when I am in dire need of liquidity, they chose to play a bloodbath which doesnt seem to be bottoming out! The reverse conundrum is that I am also stuck with liquidity that we planned for the honeymoon, wedding and Shikha's education that I wanted to invest for a couple of months and liquidate when the time came. With no bottom in sight, all that money lies idle:-(..which seems like a bigger waste than my existing portfolio profits wiped out. Buying at every low is good when you know that the markets will rise and if you have a medium term horizon. It doesnt make sense for a 1-month horizon when the markets are falling continously and I do not have any time to day trade or dabble in the f&o segment.

Forgive me if a large part of my post seems to be whining about money:-D..in a multiple money-guzzling situation like this, I dont have an option but moan:-)

Amongst miscellaneous updates, I've cracked the system in a small way, details of which will be posted later when they become relevant. So am quite kicked about that.

A couple of days back the news channels seemed to have gone ballistic over Mika (duh, who?) kissing Rakhi Sawant forcibly (everytime this lady opens her mouth..errr...for speaking, I mean, I am reminded of the noises in a Sabzi Mandi). While its wrong and Mika should be punished and all that, what really cracked me up was a faux-teary Rakhi saying 'sir, usne mere hotho ko kiss kiya'...or sample this: "I have soft lips and take very good care of them. Mika has no clue how to kiss a girl as delicate as me. My lips are still hurting from the assault. In fact, whenever my lips will hurt now, I will remember Mika's dirty kiss"...jeez most of her soundbytes sounded like straight out a C-grade hindi movie. What also rankled just a bit was the attitude of one Ms Naithani from St Xaviers college who was on the talk show. She went claiming that since Ms Sawant has this bindaas attitude about exposing, she should be ready to get molested too...uh oh..and noone seemed to be taking exception to that stance! Of course Rajdeep Sardesai agreed that News channels are giving all of this unnecessary coverage but seemed pretty kicked in the way that was garnering TRPs for him. If anywhere, you see the rough/crass side of capitalism in the way the news channel dish out tripe with elan and then crow about being the first to make the fan hit the shit. Nothing matters more than TRPs and advertising revenue!

CNN IBN has made public a survey which shows that 40% of the upper castes are FOR reservations in higher education. Very strange! And of course, most of the population polled says that reservations are justified. Not a surprise considering that most of them get benefitted by reservations in some way or the other. So yeah, if thats what most of the people in India want...thats what they'll get!

The monsoons are behaving like a lady who brushed lightly against us and has gone, leaving a whiff of perfume in her wake. And we wait patiently under the stairwell, waiting for her to return. I already have visions of doing the saat fere with Shikha in a strong drizzle and totally looking forward to it:-D