Hello - Hell No !!!

Watched Hello!! yesterday...... 10 minutes into the movie, you get to realize why the name of the movie is Hello!! It is, I guess to ensure that people do not leave the cinema hall halfway....

Jokes apart, a truly horrible effort at trying to make a movie out of a book. For those of you who liked 'One Night at a call Center', by Chetan Bhagat, you will hate the movie..... And for those of you who did not read the book, you will hate the movie!!! The only thing that stands out at the end of the movie is the solace in the fact that Atul Agnihotri is a consistent guy. He is as bad at directing as he ever was at acting.... (Remember the song on the bike??!!)

Well, the movie starts off with an item number by Mr Khan with mind bogling lyrics as 'Bang Bang Bang, Boom Boom Boom'!! (what was he thinking!!) After the item number, he gets ready to leave when his departure is delayed due to a technical fault with his chopper!! While sitting there, Katrina Kaif sits next to him as she needs to use the charging unit for her laptop and that is the only place where she can get it. She then starts off the narration of a 'oh so pathetic' story on the condition that Mr Khan makes a movie out of it....

Focus shifts to Connexions, a fictional call center in every sense of the term..... It is a rainy night an everybody is getting ready to get to their shift in time. And whether you believe it or not, everybody has his sob story in life starting from the supervisor Shyam, son of divorcees Vroom, the ever dutiful wife Radhika, aspiring model Isha, aged Military uncle and the soon to be married to a NRI gal, Priyanka. They are all part of the same team which handles Customer care calls for an appliance company... They are all cribbing about their lives at work when we get to know that Shyam and Priyanka were going steady before they broke up and Vroom likes Isha.... Between all this, there is news of employee retrenchment by their manager Mr Bakshi, an America loving SOB manager.... Due to a system issue and rise in tempers, they all decide to take a break from work and go and booze before making their way to office... (Wonder how!!??)

On the way back, Vroom is drunk and so eh crashes through a construction site, the car thus ending up at the very precipice of an under construction 'something'(Never got to know what it was!!) here, amazingly, none of them are able to get any signal on their mobiles... And then God calls!!!!!

Most of the conversation is one sided and illogical.. Basically God asks them to stand up for themselves and follow their mind in what they do. After all this they go back to office, teach a lesson to Bakshi and stop employee retrenchment....

The way they stop employee retrenchment by increasing calls is phenomenally crazy!!! During a fire drill the same night, Shyam and Vroom convince everybody assembled that they have to receive more calls to enable retention. Therefore, the suggestion, call up all customers and tell them that there is a mysterious virus attack on the US through appliances (whoa!!) and by keeping on calling, they can somehow annihilate the attack!! (Basic premise here is all Americans are dumbasses!!!!) And thus all is well that ends well.

And hey BTW, if you are not bored by the sheer idiotic of it all, you come to know at the end that Katrina is God!!!! My God!!!

The movie to talk about in a few words is a slap on the book, a slap on the faces of each and every employee of the burgeoning back office industry through its potrayal and and therefore deserves a slap on the face of Mr Agnihotri, Mr Bhagat and all of the cast!!!!

Even if you are supremely bored, I suggest you watch a crappy movei on Zee Cinema or Set Ma rather than sitting through this joke of a movie!!!!

Is I-Banking dead?

The depressing news on Lehman and Merrill Lynch has got me thinking (read: worrying) about I-banking's future. There's no sugarcoating the fact that last year, the five of the biggest banks on Wall Street were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stears, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. Now 3 out of those 5 are gone.

What exactly is in the cards for finance guys coming out of business school who want to go into I-banking? I can imagine tons of offers being rescinded in the upcoming weeks/months. I guess this will put a lot of pressure on the other major career choice for top B-school candidates: consulting. Now it will be that much tougher to get into consulting as well. Plus with a weak economy, I can imagine consulting hiring will be down as well. This really sucks!!!
This from a Chicago GSB student posting on GMATClub:
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Today during a part of our orientation, we had a Finance professor explaining some courses of the curriculum, he started saying:"As you may notice, we have 2 major sub-concentration, one is for those who want to go to Investment, Portfolio and Risk management - also called sometimes as Capital Markets. The second I might as well not spend your time talking about as there are no jobs available, people call this sub-concentration Corporate Finance, and those who studied it used to be called Investment-Bankers."

Then, he said out loud: "For those who want to change careers to IB it's going to be tough, and my advise is not to do so, but as everybody says here: You know You best."

I didn't know if I was supposed to laugh or cry. But it's true, it's going to be HARD, extremely HARD for those seeking banking.
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So when will the finance sector start to recover? When will banks start hiring again? 2011, 2015, 2020, never again...? We'll just have to wait and see, but waiting of course is the hardest part. The future of I-banking looks bleek.

I found a really clever presentation through BW forums for anyone looking for a simple explanation of the mortgage mess that got Wall Street into so much trouble:

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

It sure cleared up any confusion that I had regarding the current situation. Doesn't make things any better, but it may bring a smile.

Stock Markets tumble!!!

The world stared fear in its eyes yesterday. The stock markets went on a one-day steep fall starting with Asia followed on by Europe and finally hitting home in the US.



Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 3.58% to close below psychological 10,000 level at 9955. The Straits Times Index (STI) declined 5.6% to 2168, which was not seen since June 2005 (more than three years ago).



The various stock indices had fallen sharply losing between 58.7% to 25.8% from January this year.



6 Oct 08 2 Jan 08 Change (%)

Dow Jones (USA) 9955 13043 - 23.6

S&P 500 (USA) 1056 1447 - 27.0

FTSE100 (UK) 4589 6416 - 28.4

Germany DAX 5387 7949 - 32.2

Paris CAC40 3711 5550 - 33.1

Nikkei 225 (Japan) 10473 14691 - 28.7

Shanghai Composite 2173 5272 - 58.7

Hang Seng (HK) 16803 27560 - 39.0

Mumbai BSESN 11801 20465 - 42.3

Australia All Ord 4540 6434 - 29.4

New Zealand NZX50 2990 4033 - 25.8

STI (Singapore) 2168 3461 - 37.3



The credit crisis has moved on from US to affect the European financial institutions.



The fear now is that the world economies will slow significantly resulting from this financial crisis. It is a case of loss of confidence by investors after watching their investment portfolios dwindling in values by the days. They are cutting back on consumer expenditure hence hurting the economies in the process.



It is tempting to go into the stock market and buy shares of companies which have come off from their peaks and plumping new depths. The reality is when one buys into a stock and no sooner the share finds another new low.



The advices from most analysts have been that this is not the lowest level yet. It may still drop further and it may take six months to a full year in order to see a clearer trend for the stock market.

Rock On - A Review

I was talking to a friend yesterday, and i got to know that she has not yet watched this movie yet.. So for i hope she will watch the movie atleast after reading this review!!

Rock On is a brilliant movie – a very simple concept converted into a brilliant motion film supported by terrific performances by debutant actor Farhan Akhtar and Arjun Rampal, and the whole cast ensemble.

Rock On makes you swing emotionally, making you laugh and cry, and teaching you to revel in the joys of life. It is a story of four friends who live music and run a rock band fondly named Magik. Things move good and then things turn bad and they move apart. They are again gelled together, courtesy wife of Farhan Akhtar, who is an affluent investment banker and a reticent. All four friends have moved on and chosen the path never meant for them.

I am sure all of us have had great friends during our school or college time and then lost touch with them. Now, due to Orkuts, LinkedIns and FaceBooks we are able to trace them; that’s good for you, but there are people who we lose in lives and even if we trace them on SNSs we will not contact them. Either we had a fight with them or things turned so sour that we are afraid to take an initiative. In any case, we are so engulfed in our current work-life balance that old contacts hold very little relevance.

Rock On glorifies this divide between 20s and 30s very well. All of us move on and hardly care for what has been left behind us. A once-talented poet has no inspiration to write and would waste his life doing stocks; a drummer would spend his life selling diamonds to beautiful rich women; a super-talented guitarist would never be successful because he is too ethical and over-sensitive in this manipulative and money-minded world; a keyboard expert would be lonely in India’s most crowded city. That’s what the four friends of Rock On become.

When life brings these four friends together again, they are now matured adults who want to prove nothing to the world but to their collective ego. When their hearts call out to be with each other, you know that finding reasons behind everything is not logical. Logic is for those who live life too seriously; those who live life, live it from their heart, they listen to their soul and are often termed crazy in the contemporary world. Rock On only makes me believe in this more.

Rock On shows that if you lose friends you are not fortunate to get them back always; they may be in the last stages of their life, and you will realize that you lost precious time. It makes you realize that the love you took so much for granted and left behind is now being embraced by your worst friend or best enemy. Not everyone is as fortunate as Farhan; he kicks away his love to only find someone more considerate and angel-like! We need to learn from this movie but also notice our script is not written by a benevolent Bollywood writer. It is written and destroyed by us.

I guess I have written more of a philosophical message than a movie review. You will love the music too! For me, the best movie of this year so far at least musically. I have now lost the count of the number of times i have played the tracks from this movie!

Jeffrey Archer - A Prisoner of Birth

Jeffery Archer released his latest novel entitled “A Prisoner of Birth” and is now available in paperback. The title was most apt for the storyline that was written.

I spent past few days reading it and I could hardly leave the book. The storyline captivates you and you just wanted to read till the end to see how it develops and ends. That explains why I have not been able to blog for the week.

Jeffrey Archer still has his magic and able to weave a story that has its fair share of unexpected twists and turns. However, at most times, you would have expected the outcomes that you intended. In this case, it pampers and writes for the readers in mind.

Jeffrey Archer’s stint in the prison came through very well in the book. I believed that allowed him to write with such authority and convictions in that part of the story. It is real and believable. It takes personal experience, though not so pleasant and even traumatic, for writer immersed in the situation to write that well.

As I journeyed with the lead character in the story, I became the character wanting to do what he set out to do. Jeffrey Archer's major strength is in writing witty exchanges in the various criminal court hearings. You have to read it to appreciate and savour the power of the English language used, which is his native tongue.

I will leave readers to read the novel and experience it for themselves.