Black Swan

My MBA gradesheet shows that I have majored in Finance (which also explains my huge number of backlogs), but somehow I am ashamed of that fact (not the backlogs, the Finance major). I find it so much cooler to say “I specialized in general management”, which is a polite way of saying, “actually I fooled around in my MBA.” I could still get away with it in Company D, but when you join an I-Bank and say, “Oh I am a right brained person”, people look at you like you are Paris Hilton.

And it doesn’t help when you sit right in front of the Equity Research team. As soon as the markets open, everybody gets excited as if Aishwariya Rai just gave birth to a baby. All kinds of alien jargon like “rally”, “short sell”, “stop loss”, “option trading” are thrown around by people (why is it mostly men?) and the next half an hour would be spent on the geek’s version of locker room discussions, i.e. vomiting the contents of the Economic Times they just memorized on their way to work. Male bonding amazes me at times…

No, I am NOT passionate about the markets and no, I do not trade, but that doesn’t mean I am not human. I may not get orgasms comparing the P/E valuations of different companies, but I also have feelings. Every time someone at work asked me, “So where are you investing these days?” like an innocent, truthful person, I would say, “Actually I let my dad handle my investments”. Over time, I have noticed that this honest admission leads people to treat me like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

But thankfully, I have discovered some sane people (all of them women) on the floor with whom I can take coffee breaks and discuss the Kardashian sisters, travel destinations and other people’s shallow tastes.

At times, you wonder if there is indeed a valid reason for stereotypes…