One year later.

Another year - and a chilling reminder that I last posted on this blog in January 2011. I could've sworn it was just yesterday. Time's a cruel master, isn't it? I feel faded. Not withered, though. Thankfully, a regular diet of calorie-rich food has ensured that I look spherical. This makes me even less prepossessing than usual.

I wonder if a story posted on this blog would even elicit a response now. Is there anybody out there?

Hiring at The Bank

The floor on The Bank's corporate office, on which I spend a few hours daily contemplating the futility of modern life - in other words, the floor which hosts my workstation - is also popular with the Human Resource Department for holding it's interviews.

So it wasn't really a surprise when, making my daily break for freedom, I happened to pass a prospective candidate speaking to the HR recruitment manager (who had, I presume, been present for the interview).

The candidate must have expressed some concern about her background (educational/professional) was not suited for banking and whether that diminished her chances.

"Here at The Bank we think out of the box," the HR girl simpered, "We have engineers who have done very well in CBG - Corporate Banking, and so on. We don't recruit people only with a Banking background, we believe in hiring all sorts of people so that they too, in turn, are able to, um, think out of the box and bring something different to their teams."

"Typical HR spiel," said my fellow-escapee as the doors of the lift closed before us.

"Topical, rather than typical," I replied.

"How so?"

"Why do you think we hire people without a clue about Banking?"

"Because we can't afford to pay a Banker's salary?"

"No, silly. It's because a Banker would realise within a week that The Bank doesn't have the first idea how to do what it's supposed to do - Banking!"

"We don't?"

"We're like an army made of potters, poets and cooks that is afraid to hire an actual soldier because we're afraid he'll laugh at us."

"Hmm, that does make a lot of sense."

"I always make sense."

"So do you consider yourself a banker, then? Are you the soldier that's laughing at the rest of us civilians?"

"Me? Hell no, I'm worse than all of you. I'm the court jester that doesn't even want to be in the bloody army!"

"I suppose I'll see you on Monday," she said, as her chariot pulled up.

"As surely as pigs have wings," I nodded back, starting the long walk home.

The dust from the construction site opposite The Bank swelled up before me. I coughed as I strode past, wondering if the poor, uneducated schmucks working their daily-wage jobs to make enough money to buy their next meal, were as clueless about the poison they were breathing as those in the building opposite.

The only difference, sometimes, is in the colour of the collar.

Poke

It moves!

Yes, and I'm still alive and - this is the bad news I guess - working on another Elver story. You have been fairly warned.

Solitude

I sometimes wonder whether I ever really asked for much from life but to be left alone. Unfortunately - and I do not doubt that a large part of it is my own doing - that is one thing that has not happened. Life barges into my world, demanding stuff (like waking up in the morning) that I really would rather not do.

There used to be a pleasure in going out and meeting people, in knowing more, in working, even. It seems to have gone to that place where my will to fight and my desire to express an opinon went some years ago.

"Solitude" was once a poem in my school textbook by W. Cowper. Now it seems to have become the one thing I cannot have.

Learning something new.

I recollect that one of the things they told me – back when I was still undecided about whether I should join the stinking hell-hole (quite literally – try going near the coffee-machine) was that it would be a ‘wonderful learning experience’. Over the last few days, I’ve come to realise that this was no idle boast.

I have learned, to be more specific, a quite brilliant way to pay yourself out of company funds without reporting it to the relevant regulators or paying tax on it or anything else. Here’s how:

Let’s say you’re the MD & CEO of a (purely hypothetical, of course) company called i3 Infotech Pvt. Ltd. For the purpose of this illustration, we shall assume your name is V. Srinivasan. You are rather chummy with some of the people who work for you in this company – some jolly chaps who we shall call Feroze, Shivanand, Sripat and Meherzaad.

.

Well, you set up a subsidiary company of i3 in Mauritius – a shell company that does nothing and is fully capitalised by the parent company in India. Then you set up another shell company in Cyprus that does, if possible, even less.

That done, you invest in the shares of the second company at 1 Euro per share and buy – oh, let’s say about twenty shares in the names of these chums of yours – the ones who work for your company and all that.

Then, about a year later, you sell these shares (of the company that does nothing and as such cannot really appreciate in value) to the subsidiary in Mauritius. Those twenty Euros now become worth about 526,000 US Dollars. Yessirs, that’s an appreciation of 1,314,900 percentage points in one year.

After that, you pay the money to those chums of yours as purchase consideration for those shares. I suppose later you have those chums send the money to you – I haven’t learned that much yet.

What I have learned, though, is that the money invested by shareholders in i3 Infotech has been paid to its top management tax-free, without any reporting and without any declarations being made.

Somehow it’s something I wish I’d never known.

Another year goes by

And I feel wearier than ever.

Win number 100

A copybook win for the Indian team. The pattern was perfect – bat first, make a big score, enforce a follow-on and pick up the innings victory. This is the sort of thing that never gets old, I guess.