knotty numbers

How sober can a bank be??

Am put up in an office the size of a football court, with people walking around as if keeping their mouth pursed the max time possible is their chief KRA. They do open their mouths, and when they do - all that comes out is what was the ENR NUNP NFA NTC blah blah - compare this with my peaceful (!!) existence at an ad agency, where if the client asks me for an 'artwork right now'(their favourite line) I could actually tell him that our building had a massive explosion today and am amidst the ruins, being rescued by the firepolice...I could actually get away with it, thanks to the fact that the Client sat in singapore!!

If at all there were moments where we positively needed to make sense we got away by saying things like 'to acquire a distinctive and cultish brand image in middle class india it is imperative to use the 'XVBHK' model of brand mapping where qualitative studies are done with 4000 customers to arrive at a desired positioning' spruce up the presentation with a Marlboro here and a Harley Davidson there & voila - u r thru! all this without no solid evidence or reality mind you! and ofcourse you can always give outlandish ideas like 'We need to get the car suspended in air for 48 hours for free publicity' - even if it werent executed you could put it in your acheivement column saying Client had 'budget issues' in executing it!

compare this to this place where your boss expects a joblist to be supported by 23 excel sheets and 5 pivot charts...worst yet is when your are given a 50 page list of 'acronyms' and are expected to rattle it off from the back of your tongue - no wonder banks are full of geeks!!

Finished reading 'one hundered years of solitude'for the second time - these so called magical realism books are the ones where you get to understand the full story after 3 full readings....one book I cant go beyond 12 pages is midnights children ----- all crap!!

but 'one hundred...' is not so bad - its a bit like god of small things (or is it the other way around?)swampy, dark, sad, depressing yet funny.. an epic in its own right this one...

another recent read was digital fortress - with this one I think I have cracked the DNA of Dan brown stories, a nerdy but handsome hero, unusually successful in a strange career heroine, & they will have 24 hours to clear through cryptically difficult stuff to save the world or the likes...dont think am interested in picking up any more of such stuff - wanna watch davinci... the movie though - just for Tom :D

have picked up catch 22 to read now ( there is no chrono. order of the books I read, have missed out alltime classics for a long time - this one was much overdue)hope it is good - its a joy to read a great book...and better still to talk about it...

lets see if it inspires me to do that...