Old Wine Old Bottle

Madoff, the hedge fund guy, has done a great job of the $50Bn and the good part is the time for this thing to hit the market....when it rains it really pours. But the interesting piece is the scheme, it has been repeated so often in every part of the world that it really beats me how people can still pull it off? It needs colossal incompetence from the regulators and really smart investors (yeah it was a hedge fund, the big money club) for anyone to play this game.

India also has a similar concept called a Chit Fund (most of the times they run the same scam) in which a company/individual takes in deposits from a number of investors promising above average market returns and then from the new deposits pays off the deposits and interest of earlier investors. Sooner or later the thing collapses and the most recent set of investors loose all their money.

Two learning's from this:
One is that the early bird makes a killing in such schemes because they earn the extraordinary returns and also get their money back (assuming they are smart enough to get out when they can) so that's the route to take the next time you see a similar thing going around and
Two there is no end to human greed which just blinds our better judgement and makes us fall prey time after time to all schemes promising easy money.

Guys there are no free lunches and no extraordinary returns atleast not for long

The ladder on the wall

The tanking of the US economy and its ripples across the world have had a profound effect on me. No, I did not lose my job nor is my home being foreclosed but this thought came at the demise of Lehman Brothers 'Thank God I was not working there'. All my MBA brethren will know what status this company used to have in B School campuses just a year back, for others it really was tough to get into this place, very smart people made the cut so if you are the CEO of a company which recruits the brightest from around the world then by logica simplica you are on top of the smart food chain, but can anyone of you remember his name (the CEO's). I bet except for the ardent quizzer no one else knows, its Dick Fuld.

Now Dick must have been a really intelligent and hard working guy to be up there (they don't let you go back home unless you clock in a minimum of 18-20hrs a day) and he was surrounded by all intelligent hard working people, then what went wrong. This guy really had an ignominious exit from Wall Street if you tracked the news items. I personally think for people of such calibre to have to see such times in itself is sad, but the bigger question is that if this can happen to them then it sure can happen to the rest of us also.....years of hard work and reputation go up in smoke in 6 months, I am sure nobody will be ready to touch him with a barge pole right now.

And he epitomised success as is taught to all of us.

I would not debate and discuss the follies that Lehman made but will take a higher view of things in which companies come and go, its a law of nature. Then why do we waste our lives missing on so many things which are so important while we put all our energy and resources climbing up the corporate ladder (really they make us work hard), its like we work real hard to climb the ladder only that it is against a wall that is very shaky....can fall any time, can change any time.....maybe its the wrong wall.

Thinking....would it have done Dick good to have harnessed all this energy and effort towards something else, more meaningful, more permanent. Maybe we need to go back and revisit our definition of success, this one doesn't guarantee anything.

On Gita

Have been reading the Gita lately and one of the points that consistently comes up in the entire text, one which fascinates me, is the unified view of good and evil taken in the text. Religions around the world have always very clearly demarcated between the good and evil and have clearly mentioned how each is treated after death, Christianity has its heaven and hell, Islam its jannat and dozak has similar concepts and so has Hinduism in its swarg and narak and practically every other major religion in the world. In all the religions the primary aim of all living entities is to achieve a pass into the good afterlife, an entry through the PEARLY GATES.


In this backdrop Gita is the only text which deviates from this well established norm and states that there is no such thing as heaven and hell but these are concepts for the less developed mind, a mind which will not be able to fully appreciate the complexity of the aim of life, a mind which has been trained in terms of rewards and punishment to move in a direction which will help the soul finally achieve salvation.

Krishna says that 'I am all the good and all that is bad in the world, both good and evil reside in me, there is nothing outside me'. This is a remarkable departure from the theory we are fed since childhood that if you are good then you go to heaven while the bad fellow goes to hell. On the contrary every soul based on its karma comes back to earth and keeps moving up on the spiritual chain till finally it achieves the its aim of getting one with the creator and realising the ultimate truth.

The aim of the human life according to Gita is self realisation, knowing the true nature of oneself which can be achieved either through the study on oneself or through karma yoga (selfless service). The most famous words which every Hindu is brought up with come here where the Lord asks us to work for his glory and not for the fruits of labour. This is interpretted in a number of ways but one of the best which may help one keep on track to achieving a desireless state of mind is that we have already been given so much by God that anything and all that we do should be in His glory, as a re-payment of debt rather than as a job in which we get paid at the end of the specified task.

Gita gives a very detailed step to step guide suiting everyone's disposition to move towards God. It is the complete book a Dummy's guide to nirvana and answers all questions that may arise. One has to understand it and follow the path. So where does that leave the other religious texts of Hinduism.

The Vedas in Hinduism state a number of rituals which promise a person material wealth in this life and a secure place in Heaven post it. The idea behind these is to introduce the mind to a path of spirituality and ignite in it the desire to know more and understand the meaning of life. In this respect the Veda are a lesser text which are only to be used till a particular maturity of thought is achieved by an individual. The Veda create various gods and goddesses to satisfy the variety of desires that each individual may have in the material world, but all these texts, rituals and gods become useless once one realises the futility of the grants they can give. Then one is pulled towards the supreme being (who manifests as all these gods and goddesses) and tries to realise the true nature of this God.