Nerves of Dubious Quality

Quantum mechanics, The Tree of Life, women and finance are amongst the most difficult things to understand that I’ve encountered in my life so far. As someone who’s had a hard time understanding anything remotely financial, I always held finance people in high regard. Sure, they were earning obscenely high amounts of money that most people felt they were undeserving of, but I’d always figured that if anyone could actually comprehend all that financial mumbo-jumbo, they were worth all that money. In any case, if you were in finance, you always seemed to be studying and giving all manner of exams for certifications that sounded truly serious and weighty – so perhaps all that money you earned was in some way compensation for the lack of a life otherwise. If you wanted to spend a lifetime studying and didn’t care much about the money, academia was your career of choice. But if you wanted to spend a lifetime studying, and be richly rewarded for all the trouble you went to, it was either finance or law.

The blind assumption that the finance sorts were supremely intelligent humans, though, is something that I’ve started to question whenever I read anything related to the stock markets, and my worst fears have now been confirmed with stock markets all over the world crashing over Brexit. The reality is that the finance people are not the smartest in the world; they are simply the most nervous in the world. From my limited understanding of the stock markets, here’s how it works: If you’re happy about something you go about buying shares, and if you’re sad about something, you go about selling shares. After doing this for a decade you either get very rich, have an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht in Monte Carlo and a lifestyle disease; or you get very poor, still have a lifestyle disease and are out on the streets scraping through dustbins for your next meal.

Coming to Brexit, it seems that all the finance types expected Brexit to not happen. They were so thrilled with themselves about this that they decided to go out and celebrate by buying a whole lot of shares. And now that Brexit has happened, they’re a panic-stricken bundle of nerves running about like headless chickens selling these shares left, right and centre. That just doesn’t make any sense, does it? It’s like printing the invitations to your wedding when you haven’t even started dating. And what was the rush to buy all those shares? If Brexit were anyway round the corner, wouldn’t any normal person just wait a few more days and then decide? 

Now, a lot of you might think that Brexit is a huge deal, and it’s only natural that the financial markets react to such a big development in the political and financial world. And I would’ve been fine with that if it was just Brexit that led to the nervousness – but the stock market guys are always nervous, aren’t they? It’s not just the big recessions or financial crises – every political announcement, every time interest rates are changed, every time interest rates are not changed, every by poll in every obscure constituency seems to make the stock markets nervous and collapse in a heap of panic. I can’t think of a bunch of people that get as nervous as often as the stock market guys. The entire financial system seems to be based around getting together the most nervous bunch of people you ever came across, handing them all your money and saying “Here, buy and sell shares as you please”.

Perhaps all those exams and certifications that the finance people write are not full of questions regarding the economy and derivatives and PE ratios and all that, but instead look like this:

Exam for Aspiring Financial People Who Buy & Sell Shares & Determine the Fate of the World Economy

1. The US has just had an election and voted in a Republican government. Will you:
1. Celebrate because you’re fond of right wing policies and feel they might benefit trade with India.
2. Be disappointed because your political leanings are more left liberal.
3. Not be affected as it doesn’t truly affect you in any way, plus you’ve started seeing this shrink who’s told you to be Zen about such things.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
2. Beyonce has delivered yet another number one hit and her new song is the rage at all parties. Will you:
1. Rejoice as Beyonce has just the kind of foot-tapping dance music that you love, and sometimes even writes vaguely feminist lyrics.
2. Rave on about how music isn’t what it used to be and how it was so much better in the 60s and the 70s.
3. Not be affected too much as you can always download stuff you like anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
3. Tanmay Bhat has yet again said something in poor taste about another eminent personality. Will you:
1. Join the chorus of outrage and loudly condemn Tanmay Bhat and wish ill upon him.
2. Jump to his defense because you believe in freedom of speech and are appalled by people taking the moral high ground.
3. Not be affected too much as you know this will all be forgotten two days later when Salman Khan says something even more daft.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
4. Pluto has just been stripped of its planetary status. Do you:
1. Break into a celebratory jig, as you were always suspicious of Pluto being a planet because of its unusually inclined orbit.
2. Break down in tears, as Pluto was your favourite planet because it shared its name with a cartoon dog.
3. Not be affected, as you’re no longer in school so you need not remember any of this anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.

As you may guess, it’s only if you answered D for every single question that you would pass the test. After all, Spiderman’s uncle may have said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. But in the financial world, with great power comes great nerves.

The Days of Being Civil

A few weeks ago, the IAS results were announced with great fanfare across newspapers in India. To be honest, I was a little surprised that it still made for front-page news given the number of career options that are there these days. It’s not like design school or hotel management results ever make it to the newspapers, so why the IAS? Perhaps it was one of those slow news days when no politician said anything embarrassing or outrageous, and there wasn’t any scam, scandal or disaster that was otherwise keeping the nation preoccupied and driving everyone into a state of outrage. It did, however, take me back to the time when, as a child, I wanted to be an IAS Officer. This doesn’t mean anything much because at various stages in my childhood I’d also wanted to be a zookeeper, a detective, a pilot, a librarian, a teacher, a sports journalist, a basketball player, a doctor, a shopkeeper and perhaps a dozen other professions that I simply cannot remember now. So it’s not like I suddenly felt that my life was a series of abject failures littered by crushed hopes, bitter disappointments and shattered dreams just because I didn’t end up being any of the above. If anything, I feel like my life has been a failure because no one is willing to pay me to just travel around and write about it.

But coming back to the IAS Officer business, as a child I had no clue what being an IAS Officer entailed, but it just sounded suitably impressive. I suppose it was because of the word Officer at the end of it – it added just that amount of heft and authoritativeness that was hard to match. Of course, when I later realized that all of Bihar came to Delhi to study for the IAS exams and it involved a level of dedicated, single-minded devotion to studying that comfortably surpassed engineering college preparations, I steered clear of the civil service exams. In any case, those were the days of a different, pre-liberalized India, when, childhood fantasies aside, apart from IAS Officer, there were precisely three career options to choose from – Doctor, Lawyer or Engineer. While Doctor had the whole nobility and lifesaving thing going for it; complex biological diagrams were enough to deter a weak-willed student such as myself who was always looking for the easy way out. Even before that, Doctor and Lawyer sounded scary since it meant more years in college and everyone told you it also meant studying for the rest of your life to stay updated in your profession. Of course, it isn’t like Engineering was a piece of cake either. After the 10^th boards, all of a sudden, the kids who took school very seriously suddenly treated it with casual disdain – school was something they just had to pass and get out of the way. 2 years of rigorous preparation and liberal burning of the midnight lamp was devoted to engineering preparation, only for a majority of them to then spend 4 years of engineering college lost in a haze of marijuana, old monk and navy cuts. Basically if you weren’t studying for medicine or law, here’s what your career choice flowchart looked like:

Pre-Liberalization Career Choice Flowchart for Someone not Studying Law or Medicine

Thankfully, by the time I got out of school, other options that involved considerably less studying did open up and I was able to slip out of the constricting dragnet imposed by the flowchart above. Now that I think of it, I suppose at least some other professions like advertising or marketing had always existed, but somehow no parent ever told you “Son, I want to see you grow up to be an advertising or marketing guy one day”.

In this day and age, though, the whole clamour for a job in the civil services does seem a little baffling. Even accounting for the security of a government job, why aren’t people as eager to join, say, the Censor Board, instead of the IAS? Of course, with the whole fiasco over Udta Punjab, it’s clear that the censor board is entirely peopled by idiots with the rational and emotional intelligence of pond scum. The qualification criterion is probably limited to displaying large amounts of incompetence with a liberal splash of sycophancy and a predilection for moral policing. But the occasional bad press aside, doesn’t it sound like one of the best jobs to have? I mean, think about it – if someone offered you money and asked if would you rather spend your days running the country or watching movies, what sounds like a more attractive prospect?

Imagine coming in to work everyday with the question “So what movies are we going to watch today?” You’d get paid to watch a particularly steamy sex scene again and again to decide whether it should be banned or not. It’s the sort of job you’d love to be thorough with. “Hey, play that bit where he utterly ravishes her naked body in a fit of passion one more time, will you? We must be absolutely sure if this warrants banning or not.” Your quarterly targets would be based on the number of movies you’d watched. Ordinary people goof off at the office and watch videos on the internet, you’d be so tired of videos that you’d probably be mastering Calculus or unraveling the mysteries of quantum mechanics in your spare time. The only downside I can think of is that if you’re really junior, you’d probably only be given the lousy Akshay Kumar or Abhishek Bachchan movies for the first few years, and you’ll have to work your way up the censor board food chain before getting access to the critically acclaimed art house stuff. Still, your job would hands down beat any of those regular jobs that involved crunching numbers or making strategic presentations.

Outside of the all-time dream job of being a travel or cookery show host, I cant think of too many jobs more enjoyable than joining the Censor Board – yet the entrance exams for the Censor Board of India barely attracts any attention at all. Perhaps the job is so attractive that no one ever quits and there’s already a 20-year waiting list like those prestigious clubs. I wish someone had told me all this 20 years ago - I'd probably have a job watching movies all day by now!

DeLinked In

Each week, without provocation and apropos of nothing, I receive requests from at least two complete strangers who wish to be added to my professional network on LinkedIn. This might make it sound like my professional network is the equivalent of those parties thrown by Jay Gatsby that everyone wishes to be part of. That to those on the outside looking in, it looks like the sort of professional network that helps people get jobs, make useful business contacts, publicize their successes, climb up the career ladder and that sort of thing. The reality, though, is quite the opposite. The last time I updated my LinkedIn profile was nearly a decade ago – to give you an idea, the iPhone had not been launched yet, Pluto was still a planet and not just a cartoon dog, India hadn’t played a single T20 match, and Israel and Palestine – well, ok…that situation was still messed up. But apart from that, it was a very different world.

The truth is that I’m simply terrible at business networking. I’m shy, withdrawn and prefer the quiet comfort of the written word to the raucous harshness of the spoken word. Networking, then, isn’t something that comes naturally to me. And when you throw in business along with it, it’s a uselessness that gets exacerbated exponentially to create a perfect storm of incompetence. It’s not like I don’t have a commonsensical understanding of business, but I’ve never had that eye for business that marks out an entrepreneur from, well, a regular person. Not just an eye, but I also lack the guts, heart or spine for business – it requires too much ambition and too much of dealing with people.

Of course, the unsuspecting strangers who wish to be part of my professional network do not know any of this, since it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d state explicitly on your LinkedIn profile. Still, it does make me wonder, who are these driven and motivated professionals that decided to add me to their network despite not knowing me at all? It would be understandable if I was an HR person, or if I had some big time designation like Vice President or Director or Partner or CEO. But I don’t – so it probably means that these people diligently tracked down profiles with the big shot designations first, sent them requests, possibly got rejected but persevered doggedly until they trickled down to my level. That just seems like an insane level of dedication to business networking. Was I missing out on something? Was there some very happening and exciting business life that was being played out on LinkedIn, the way it always seems to be the case on Facebook?

Each time I log in to Facebook, the first five minutes are enough to convince me that I have no life, and the next five minutes are enough to convince me that I have no opinions and am an uninformed country bumpkin who has been hiding under a rock while the whole world was seething with rage over something that offended someone. Half the people I know are partying, holidaying and checking in to fancy places. The other half are expressing opinions, getting outraged and having informed debates on topics that I didn’t even know are in the news. I wondered if it was the same on LinkedIn, but in a professional context?

What I mean is, were people eagerly updating their statuses with their latest professional achievements like “Landed a new client today – mopped the floor with my rivals”, “Got a big promotion and a bonus – time to get that sports car”, “Crunched numbers and absolutely wrestled them to the ground – I’ll totally rock the budget meeting!” or even simply “Ate a hearty business breakfast. Good food for thought”? Did they put up photos of themselves attending high-powered meetings or making strategic presentations? Was there a plethora of selfies out there but with people trying to look professional instead of pouting? Did they check in with statements such as “Checked in to CXO level meeting at posh 5 star business hotel” or “Checked in to World Trade Tech Village Global Corporate Business Park for tricky meeting with idiot client”? In other words, would logging in to LinkedIn make me feel like I have no professional life either, to go along with the social life that I already did not possess?

Thankfully this wasn’t the case, though after five minutes of browsing through LinkedIn it was clear that I had no opinions and was utterly uninformed in the professional sphere as well. People were holding forth on professional topics of interest, sharing links to new corporate developments, commenting on latest workplace trends, etc. It was an entire world of opinions and debates that I was completely oblivious to. And it’s not like LinkedIn didn’t try – they’d send me regular reminders that invites were waiting to be responded to; people were waiting to be recommended glowingly and that yet more habits of highly effective people were being discovered while I withered away in a state of ignorant stagnation. Every now and then, it even sent me beseeching mails imploring me to congratulate someone on completing 2 years in a job, and I foolishly ignored it thinking that no one actually did something like that. Yet it was only now that I realised that this congratulating is actually very real, just like people wishing you on your birthday on Facebook.

The oddest part, though, were the spate of links shared on increasing productivity and efficiency in the workplace. By the time you’d get through these, you’d have spent pretty much your entire workday. Now that’s not exactly being productive, is it?