My rather disorganized commentary on Burma

So I have been an absent blogger for the past week or so… despite a slew of important events that obviously are in dire need of comment from my end… As an excuse for this I will use 2 very important but pathetic factors… first is the vicious cold that attacked me in the middle of perfectly fine autumn weather… rendering my brain, and hence blogging ability, utmost useless… second is the sudden internet crash that brought all my important, life sustaining activities to a halt on Thursday evening… In retribution for this unacceptable mishap, I have cancelled my subscription to HBO (deemed worthless anyway by the conclusion of Sopranos a few months ago)…

Anyway… about the most important news event of the past week… and for me, probably the last year at least – the unrest in Burma… or as the media decided to call it – the Saffron revolution… a cute & modern name by the way… given that we had purple, orange and cedar revolutions in the past couple of years… and that’s not even counting the coup in the all-important republic of Kyrgyzstan, who name/ colour I have already forgotten…

With this in mind… I’d like to also ask for a moment or two of silence to the most idiotic and absurd of all tyrants/ dictators… who just happened to drop dead just a few short months ago… Yes… the wise and ageless seer of Turkmenistan – Turkmenbashi himself... many a despot in human history has mercilessly murdered friend and foe alike… many a dictator has led his country into humiliating ruin… many a tyrant has lived in lavish palaces while his people starved… nothing out of the ordinary here… but to have the gall to rename the calendar in his own honour… now that’s priceless…

Anyway… the events in Burma… in the last week I think a lot of us went from very excited, to hopeful to dejected… the popular uprising, the saffron revolution, looked great and promising… especially for the media… but end of all ends, at this point at least, looks like it ended up nowhere… or to be exact – with a lot of people hurt or worse… and little actual results to show for it (that’s if we don’t count the cover of the Economist as a result)…

now of course I might be an undue pessimist here… and given the fact that the situation in the country is truly humiliating… for anyone and everyone involved… some good might come out of this… for after all… the powers supporting the junta – Russia/ India/ China really don’t want a public relations nightmare with the West over this… and I am sure somewhere in the bottom of their hearts, even the evil generals running the country might have a soft spot for actually doing something positive and not having their historical legacy be a giant blemish on Burmese long and storied history…

But fact of the matter is that change for Burma must come from the exact same source as the problem – the military… all of monk & citizen protests, all of international sanctions and condemnations will do very little good… until something within the military itself gives… and by this I mean independent of what some crabby old general says or orders, someone still must execute… and as we saw last week, when the average soldier is willing to follow orders, no matter what the popular opinion on the street is… the results will be quite negative… for after all soldiers have guns and average people do not…

So what must happen? Well if we take a look at the history of the Russian revolutions… in very broad and simplistic manner… what was the difference between the revolution of 1905 and October 1917? In the former, the street stood up in outrage – i.e. the proletariat masses… while both the army and the peasantry did not budge… Result – a bloody putdown…. October 1917 – all major classes of the population, starting with proletariat and liberal intelligentsia all the way through peasantry and the armed forces were deeply unhappy with the situation at hand – a horrific & pointless war (WWI) and economic ruin at home… Hence, when the revolution was launched, not only was it driven by the working class & liberal intellectuals (as is the case in Burma), but also by the very soldiers who were suppose to protect the ‘home regime’… And as a matter of fact, the whole success of the communists during the Russian revolution and subsequent civil war hinged on the fact that they were able to recruit the best and the brightest of the army to their side… And this I have so far not seen in Burma… for all the popular protests… for all the newspaper headlines… and revolting pictures of massacre and murder… there has not been one mention of the Burmese army ‘crossing over’…
And once again… to stick to the Russian angle… if we even go to the Moscow coup attempt of 1992 or the Orange revolution in Ukraine… what was the difference… in the former – it was the fact that general Lebed (now long gone) disobeyed a direct order and put his tanks in front of the Parliament on the side of the ‘democractic’ government… and that in Ukraine, when Kuchma ordered a forceful dispersion of the protesters camped out in Kiev’s main square, the head of the Kiev military district told him to go f*&cjk himself and walked out…
And this leads to my next question… is the ‘absolute’ removal of the generals in the best interests of Burma as a whole? On that I am not so sure… for while there are practically no positives to these baboons being in power, there is one distinct thing they do bring to the table – order and stability… for we must remember that the country in question is not a uniform entity like say Portugal (I was going to say Belgium… but just remembered that its trying to split itself in half)…. And that burma is full of various ethnicities and nationalities… most of whom have centuries long hatred of each other and would probably like nothing more than to go slit their neighbor’s throat, Balkan style… and much like Marshall Tito did in post WWII Yugoslavia… the generals are probably deserving of some credit in keeping at least this part of the Burmese equation under relative control…
Now if the generals were all of a sudden yanked from their palaces… Saddam Hussein style… would there really be anyone in place to control various ethnic tensions and movements? For remember, there have been at least a dozen of these nationalistic revolts going on around Burma in the last decade or two (like say Karen National Liberation Army)… For lets be students of history here and remember how much we all hated evil old Saddam, and how we really wanted him deposed… and how nobody (outside my grandfather) ever mentioned the fact that without Saddam, and the Republican guard, and the secret police, the good people of Iraq would all of a sudden lose their minds and start killing each other in ever more liberal and creative fashion…
So with this in mind… As much as I want to say down with the generals and the evil dictatorship and in with freedom and liberty… I am really starting to think that slow and steady might be the best way to do it… Think Chinese version of communist capitalism… granted in a lot of ways its not inspiring… but it sure as hell beats the Russian ‘lets go capitalist overnight’ experiment of the early nineties…. So a meaningful solution would be perhaps for the generals, in kind response to the current mess and of course to the 2008 Olympics in china, to start slowly and steadily relinquishing control… not all at once, mind you… but slowly and steadily… liberalizing the press… allowing free, uncorrupted enterprise… inviting foreign investment… while giving themselves a chance to bow out with grace and good face… while building mighty pagodas in the plains of Bagan to make up for all the world of sins they have committed in the last 50 years….

3 issues of the week

So I’ve had a wonderful weekend… starvation on Saturday… drunken mess on Sunday morning… first free ambulance ride on Sunday evening… and a fine round of golf on Monday (outside the fact that I got outplayed by an 89 year old man)…

I have two things on my mind tonight… no… actually three… first of all – the most noble of them… the current events in Burma are quite exciting… and perhaps even promising… who knows what would actually happen if the military junta over there did get overthrown or pushed aside… perhaps controlled dictatorship is better than absolute chaos… something that’s a distinct possibility for a conglomeration of nationalities and ethnicities that Burma is… but on the other hand… having traveled there… and experiencing possibly one of the finest weeks of my life on Burmese soil… remembering the countless people who approached Magnus and I wanting to talk about ‘freedom’… perhaps this will turn out for the best… and I must say… the one thing I am looking forward the most for tomorrow, is researching the events there further and trying to think up of a way of getting involved… but that’s the young Pioneer (see communist brainwashed youth) speaking in me …

Second thing is the semi-absurd fiasco of a United Nations assembly we are having here in New York this week… first of all, now that UN is an established organization with clear standing in this world… there is no more reason to have its headquarters in New York… I realize we are the capitalist capital of the world, bla bla… but does anyone outside here know the absolute disaster we, new Yorkers, have to live through each time these talking heads come to town? I mean its nice and all to know that of all the places in this world, it happens to be here… but on the other hand, when you see five miles of traffic down second avenue… or five square blocks cordoned off by secret service for the president of Zambia… one really has to ask if maybe Rochester or Albany or maybe even Lexington, Kentucky would be a nobler, saner choice for everybody invovled…
My second thought on this UN thing is the visit to New York by our favorite Hitler wanna be, Mr. Ahmadinejad… I don’t know if anybody followed this, but I thought his treatment at Columbia was an absolute disgrace… Especially considering the heat the school took for having him speak there… shit… if you are going to let him speak… at least treat him hospitably… instead the man gets introduced to the audience as the ‘honourable tyrant and dictator’ by the president of the school of international relations… and then gets grilled in a highly rude fashion about his esteemed opinions on the Holocaust, 9/11, etc… now I think this Ahmadinejad guy is an absolutely petrifying combination of street-smarts, charisma, assertiveness and delusion… and I really think his opinions, as outright mis-informed and absurd as they are, are driven by one underlying motivation – “Persians are somebody… and don’t you forget it.” So hence I think a lot of his foot stomping idiocies… from his theories on homosexuality to Iranian nuclear problem, really boil down to the fact that Persia (i.e. Iran)… much like Russia, India and China is finally ready (or thinks its ready) to assume to dominant position on the world stage… A position occupied for a long long time by tall white, blonde men… So with this in mind… I think if Columbia was to invite this guy to ‘speak,’ it really should have given him an opportunity to do so in a respectable and hospitable fashion… for no matter what his actual opinions are, he is without a doubt their ‘guest’… and if you don’t like the guest, what he is wearing, how he smells or what he talks about – don’t invite him into your house… but if you do… common courtesy and respect are not unreasonable to ask for…. And again, while being highly, even aggressively, ‘questioning’ of Mahmoud’s words and thoughts would be OK – he was after all there to defend his views… right… Being an unhospitable demagogue (as the head of Columbia’s international relations school was) is still inexcusable… and really does put our country (the good old US of A in a terrible, closed-minded and ignorant light abroad)

My final point of concern for today is of the nauseating variety… I have to compose a ‘telega’… translated as a complaint letter in English… about one of the superiors… it wont be an actual letter… but essentially talking points for the conversation ill be having with another of my bosses over this lovely gentleman… the great part of this is that end of all ends I think its all pointless anyway… and I am doing this under the guise of ‘not taking any shit’… instead of actually defending some ‘career’ position I might have… anyway, the ‘telega’ will consist of one giant point – this guy is an absolute dickhead… and a few supporting arguments… like he is fond of accusing without bothering to learn the facts… he tries to single out without any reason… and overall, his main motivation seems to be quite KGB’ish… dig up all the shit possible… put it in one big pile… and start tossing it against the wall to see what sticks… screw everything else…

a restless farewell...

Its Yom Kippur… one in the morning… I’ve been starving myself for a good six hours now… the lips are dry… the head is spinning… is it the lack of food… the lack of water… or the copious amounts booze I drank last night that make me feel so damned crazy???

Yes… last night was a true success… myself and two of my dear b-school friends went out to a ‘gastro-pub’ in alphabet city… who the hell came up with a name ‘gastro-pub’, I don’t know… to me it sounds like it could be one of two things… either a thing metrosexual… and hence unmanly… or an intestinal disease of vicious nature the clears one and all in its path… including the two boiled eggs you had for breakfast this morning… pieces of cheesecake floating around your innards from the night before… and even that tiny speck of pot you swallowed by accident while trying to clear your ancient pipe… right after the shower… and about ten minutes before you took off for work… the day was starting on a frantic note you see…

Anyway… if I had to choose one… I guess I’d have to go with the metrosexual thing… which is of course nauseating… but in a lax, pathetic, you can deal with it once every other gibbous moon sort of way… and that’s what it turned out to be… a very chic and modern sort of establishment… with white toothed waitresses… a wine list… and a menu exotique… full of garbled foods I never heard of… as well as fine cheeses and mussels and things of that nature…

Anyway… the drinks were as fine and as merry as drinks get… and I can get into this big whole complimentary shpiel about how great life was… and how drunk we all got… and yaddi yadda yadda… who cares… nobody wants to hear about the glories of my life… especially me… What I want to talk about are things dark, disturbing and unjust… perhaps bizarre, cynical and uneven… but certainly never happy, cheerful, well adjusted or even reasonable…

So this is where we get back to reality… for yesterday really was a momentous day… outside of the fact that I got into a screaming match with my beloved managing director (of finger pointing glory described in an earlier blog)… anyway, to focus on the story at hand… yesterday was a very important day in my life… it was a time of season… a time of change… a time to live… and a time to die… but before I totally go off on this tambourine man jibe… here is what happened…

I went out and got myself a digital camera… a digital camera of big expensive variety… the type you see geeks all over the city carrying, wrapped around their wrists, flinging around like sort of yo-yo’s… occasionally stopping to capture a particularly artistic shot… like say of a traffic light that’s not red, not green but in that fluxed state of yellow…. And the thing is that after spending half a month’s worth of my salary on a piece of electronic equipment, you’d figure I’d be feeling like a million bucks… I’d be feeling like I did something great and important… something that gave me a bright outlook on tomorrow… something that changed my life… (for that kind of money it better!)… but no…. I felt like a filthy traitor…

I felt like a filthy traitor because while my new camera is of the digital SLR variety… and its big and its heavy and its shiny and purports to make a great photographer out of me… at home… while I was out blowing my hard earned pennies on this piece of technological wonder…. There lay a black camera case… black in nominal terms for now it’s a combination of black and yellow from all the dust it collected in nether reaches of Ethiopia and Sikkim and Burma and Guatemala and who the hell knows where else… and inside that dusty black camera case is another piece of electronic equipment… not nearly as pricey or fancy as the one I just spent half of Kolkata’s GNP on… but valuable none-the-less… though a bit scratched up and dusty… and perhaps malfunctional and occasionally unreliable… but end of all ends… deeply… deeply… oh so deeply beloved…. And yes… I am talking of my best friend – my Minolta Maxum 5… of discontinued model variety… with eternal grease on the shutter button… hopeless scratches on the lens… and a film rewind mechanism that does whatever the hell it pleases… some people call it backwards and ancient… many a photography expert has laughed at me for still using a ‘film camera’…. I’ve sometimes wondered what the hell I was still doing with it… say when some of my finest pictures from Belize got exposed or overlayered thanks to the afore mentioned rewind mechanism boo boo…. But end of all ends, I LOVE MY MAXUM 5…

And now… like a filthy poseur… like a dirty traitor… I was abandoning my truly beloved, my truly trusted, my truly battle-tested companion for a hunk of metal that every six figure making, former Metallica loving, artist-wanna-be lugs around more for show than any artistic merit in of itself… and there I sat last night… drunk as an overfed swine… choking away on cancer sticks… listening to Cure… and looking at that black camera case on the floor… thinking of all the good times we had together… like when I fell in shoulder deep into monsoon swollen stream in Luang Prabang, Laos… and I thought my Maxum 5 was a goner… or when I took a bit of an aggressive picture of a very large African-American gentleman selling rags on Broadway and 27th… and we had to hold on for our dear life for that man, all six foot seven, 300 pounds of him, was coming to kill us both… or when I kept on pulling it out of my bag as I wondered through the woods of Sikkim and my Mexican companion kept on demanding to know why I was taking so many pictures…. Or shit… that time in Rangoon… where that lovely older gentleman approached me as I was smoking a cig… and talked to me… and my Maxum 5 was there… holstered in my bag… my trusted companion… my friend… (I am starting to get weepy)… what a filthy traitorous swine I real am….

How things will be

Anybody who has dealt with me in the last half a decade (or a five year plan if we go old school) knows full well that I am amidst a prolonged mid-life crisis… starting with say the milkround (business school interviews) in january of 2004 (I realize my math is off here) I have been fruitlessly searching for a meaningful and rewarding career… or at the minimum a slight whiff of one…

Now that we are close to 2008, this is a lot of water under the bridge… in that time I’ve failed countless interviews including
- having to explain to an angry pregnant HR woman at Deloitte why I believe pregnant women should not be allowed to smoke
- cover up a foul stench of liquor off my breath during a Diageo interview
- told a BarCap managing director that a research position in Singapore would be interesting but I really do prefer New York
- got almost interviewed by Chelsea Clinton at McKinsey (job denied - smart enough but lack presentability)
- was informed by my former employer, Lehman Brothers, that I lack confidence to be in a ‘trading floor’ environment
- got a rejection email from CSFB informing me that while they are not interested in me, I rally should be pursuing a career in trading
- Failed in the last round of American express global rotation programme
- Scheduled the worst possible time for my Deutsche Bank global markets interview… arriving to find two vice presidents so tired that they could barely listen to my bundle of incoherent lies and half-truths
- Decided not to stick with an Indian hedge fund where I interned… only to see them grow 10X the size and make an absolute killing in fees while totally underperforming the market
- Messed up simple foreign exchange/ interest rate parity arbitrage question at my dream job interview with Lazard emerging markets
- And cancelled another ‘dream job interview’ for emerging markets analyst mid-process because I was taking a job at my current gulag of employment (was fed up with interviewing)
- And oh yes… Did nothing about perfectly fine opportunities presented to me by my dear friends to either do a) Carbon trading in India b) start up a retail bank chain in Ukraine
- And one more – having received a fine opportunity to run my own group at my current place of employment… ended up getting stuck with two of the worst numbskulls for employees in Wall Street history (I’ll take 50% responsibility here)

So to sum up… despite ample opportunities to find reasonable career success and glory… I seem to consistently grab crushing defeat out of clutches of absolute victory…

What lesson to I gleam out of this, in all my worldly wisdom? I mean I am good enough to get these opportunities… so why is it that I am so damned unlucky… like Urkel at a strippers convention….?

Well… the one thing I have noticed is that in this world is that the lucky are good and the unlucky are well… not good… and no matter how hard the latter try… no matter the ingenious plans they devise… no matter the hot sweat they pour over their plans… somehow they always get screwed over… while the good – well somehow they always get lucky… taking the worst possible debacles and creating miracles out of them… doing nothing yet showing everything for their results…

And in this I think I know what I am talking about… for some absolutely unknown reason… whenever I pick up a pen or a camera… something positive comes out… I have seen my most far-flung… my most worthless, thoughtless efforts come to great success… I have been ‘noted’ for things I had absolutely no interest in being noted for…. It all just kind of happens… but that’s the thing… it doesn’t kind of happen…
Fact of the matter is… each time I pick up a pen or a camera… even if I have no clue what I am going to write or photograph or think about or whatever… I always know what I want and I always know what ‘should be’ coming out… its something that I cant explain or describe… but every time I look in my camera’s viewfinder… at any random waking moment… I see exactly what I am looking for and what I am trying to accomplish… there is no thinking… there is no planning… its just obvious…
Likewise with my literary efforts… they mostly start out random… they mostly have nothing but the vaguest idea behind them… but the next thing I know I have a couple of thousand words down and they all seem to make sense… usually each and every one… without me having pre-planned nothing, and I mean nothing, but the vaguest of ideas behind it…

My career on the other hand… the numerous hours I have spent writing down answers to ‘my greatest weaknesses/ my greatest strengths’ questions… the number of times I;ve recited like mantra why I should be hired for this or that job and what my plan is 5 to 10 years down the road (usually to be in a senior and super senior position within the firm in question)…. All of this goes to absolute crap since I mean none of it… I see none of it… I feel none of it… fact of the matter is I really don’t give a crap about any corporate culture… fact of the matter is one of my strengths is being funny, witty and doing whatever the hell I please (not good in a corporate environment – trust me)…. And fact of the matter is no, 5 to 10 years down the road I do not see myself as a managing director in your firm… wearing a suit seven to ten times more expensive than the wrinkled Today’s Man rag I am wearing today…. Thinking important thoughts… deciding who to promote and who to screw over… and counting how many strippers I am planning to bang at the next Vegas industry conference….
Though to be honest… In 5 to 10 years I do see myself being paid up the ass and doing whatever the hell I please… whenever the hell I please… though certainly not wearing a suit… or attending an investors meeting… or dreaming of my 22 year old secretary’s bosoms while pictures of my Prozac happy wife and spoiled children stare at me from my desk….

So yes… I am officially amidst a mid-career crisis… one I have a feeling I will have to resolve with a drastic action… involving heavy hallucinogenic drugs… colouring my hair purple… and sitting on some mountaintop somewhere in India…

Jealousy

Its 1230 in the morning on a Wednesday night… its my ‘alone’ night for Mila left me unattended to sick thoughts and ill behavior… I’ve taken full advantage of the free time – got home at 9PM from work… turned on television… watched it for what amounts to two hours and forty five minutes… thought of doing something productive… took a shower… had a lovely cherry compote from Brighton Beach… thought about smoking a cigarette… decided to err on the side of health… and now finally decided to do something meaningful and important – write in my blog…

Now for the thought of the day… and how jealous I’ve been feeling lately of something… jealous of what – its hard to say… nothing in specific… like the thought of Magnus being stuck in Cairo traffic in a filthy Lada cab while a fat turbaned man went at it with a particularly stubborn mule in the middle of the busiest intersection in all of Egypt… or my dear friend Matjaz traveling up and down the safe and sane region we know as the Balkans… yes… traveling up and down that wondrous and diverse land conquered by Slavs and Greeks and Turks and probably a whole bunch of others in-between… trying to meet important people and get the right contracts to develop a thing called commercial real estate… yes… imagine… there you are in Sarajevo… say in 1994… in the middle of some bombed out building… smoking cheap cigarettes and eating grass (cuz there aint no food around)… a careful Serbian sniper just took out a grandma on her morning stroll just a block away… and you sit there and think about life and how things will be when all this madness is over… when they finally clean up the bomb fragments and blood stains and random shoes from the cracked pavement… when you and your old friend Branko from the other side of town can have some good rakiya again… for you see Branko turned out to be a Serb and is now killing Bosnians… for reasons he probably don’t know… and you are killing Serbians… just like Branko for reasons you don’t know… and it all goes on and on and you think and wonder in those terrible hours of where its going to get everybody in long ten years…

And ten long years pass…. And Serbs and Bosnians are still not friends but at least have the decency to hate each other from afar… and through newspaper caricatures… and the bombed out building where you were smoking your cigarettes (rolled from that caricatured newspaper) and eating grass… well now its one of the top investment stories in all of the EMEA region (Europe/ Middle East/ Africa for the ignorant ones out there)… a nice private equity firm showed up and bought up the property… sometime before they paid some bribes… and a long time afterwards they will continue to pay some bribes… the local politicians are ecstatic – the country is growing! The local proletariat is happy – they have work! And the local women are thrilled – Victoria’s secret is coming to Sarajevo, along with Kmart, Wendy’s and McDonalds… and shit for the rebuilding effort, they crazy Swedes are even opening up an Ikea on the outskirts of town… they are claiming to be using aged wood from burned Muslim villages to make furniture that is both modern and convenient… and oh yes… even Home Depot is right around the corner… yes… the first one in all of former Yugoslavia… for how are angry former soldiers to occupy themselves but to build houses and other contraptions with their bare hands (you cant expect them to waste time on metrosexual non-sense like Ikea… now can you?)… and everyone is happy… and everyone is thrilled… for that bombed out, rotten building (and about a dozen other ones all around) have now become a giant shopping mall with horrendous music, stale air and uniformly happy sales staff… even goofballs from EBRD showed up, taking grinning pictures next to Ronald McDonald and exclaiming “Europe is finally coming together” in thick German accents… the only ones unhappy are the town drunks… for what good are shopping malls to them – old rotten burned out buildings work much better for their purposes…

And that’s what my friend Matjaz is doing… building a better tomorrow… for the people of today… And I am jealous… for forget all the slogans and all the construction and all the investment and all the money… I want to know what the town drunks are doing, now that they’ve lost their base and home…