Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Loosing my virginity.....

I read three books during the month of May. The first was 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' by Pakistani Mohsin Hamid which was shorlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007. Through a conversation with an American tourist (or spy?) in a cafe in Rawalpindi, the author narrates the life of a successful Pakistani graduate from Princeton University with a job in a top-notch New York valuation company but with a difficult relationship with an American girl who suffered Psychotic Depression from a severe unresolved grief reaction. When she committed suicide he (became depressed?)returned to Pakistan and became a fundamentalist? The story of his love and life in America was cleverly woven in the conversations while at the same time exposing the distrust and the clash of culture and values between the east and the west. The writer's attention to the details of human emotion and behaviour reminds me of the style of writing of Paulo Coelho.

Fooled by Randomness is written by Nasim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese mathematician who taught at New York University and is the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the Isenberg School of Management of the University of Massachussetts at Amherst. He also has an MBA from Wharton and a PhD from the University of Paris. He has a 20-year career as a quantitative trader in New York and London. The book essentially discusses the hidden role of 'chance' in life and in the markets. This first reading has certainly affected how I now view the investment analyses and recommendations I encounter in magazines or on tv and by my investment advisors!

Loosing my Virginity is Sir Richard Branson's (of the Virgin Records and Virgin Airlines fame) autobiography. I had bought this book many months earlier but had deferred reading it due to its thickness. But it turned out to be an easy, interesting and inspiring read.

Branson is a man who loves life. Apart from living his life dangerously, he is also a risk-taker who has been 'lucky' in some of his ventures to become the successful enterpreneur that he is which is now famously associated with the Virgin brand.

Like me, (who was chosen to go to a residential school), Branson was sent by his parents to an elite boarding school. He never liked the experience as he sufferred a fair amount of homesickness. He remembered having many 'crying nights' from missing his family that one of the 'seniors' came to sleep with him to help console his sadness. This senior also encouraged him to play 'touchy-touchy' which he later told his father who promptly ordered him to stop the game!

I can very much emphatise with Branson's experience of the "hostel's life', and like him, I too did not encourage any of my children to go to a boarding school. Luckily for me, none of my children was ever interested in going to a boarding school either.

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