Monthly Archives: May 2013

Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros

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By Anita Raghavan in NYT

Rajat Gupta

It is worth reading saga of Gupta and Rajaratnam , two highly achieved and high-profile Wall Street Gurus of Indian descent,  who were seduced by high society and greed and were recently convicted of insider trading.

“Gupta embodied the generation of Indians that the academic Vijay Prashad has called the “twice blessed” — those who benefited from both India’s independence in 1947 and the 1965 overturning of a United States law that had restricted Indian immigration to 100 people each year. Gupta was a boy in the 1950s, when the Indian Institutes of Technology were established to produce a new generation of engineers. After earning degrees from I.I.T. Delhi and Harvard Business School, he received a job offer at McKinsey during the rise of the corporate consulting industry. In 1994, when Gupta was only 45, he became the first Indian C.E.O. of a major American company. He “pioneered a new way of leveraging the firm’s intellectual capital,” recalls Jeffrey Skilling, his colleague from 1979 to 1990, who later went on to become the chief executive of Enron. “I think Rajat was a shoo-in for election to managing director, and frankly I don’t think anyone had a chance against him. He was that good,” wrote Skilling in an e-mail from federal prison in Littleton, Colo., where he is serving a 24-year sentence for his role in Enron’s collapse.”

In the paragraph below an interesting insight and caution by Gupta on love and seduction of money;

“Speaking at Columbia University around this time, Gupta reflected on his new ambition. “When I look at myself, yeah, I am driven by money,” he said. “And when I live in this society, you know, you do get fairly materialistic, so I look at that. I am disappointed. I am probably more materialistic today than I was before, and I think money is very seductive.” He continued: “You have to watch out for it, because the more you have it, you get used to comforts, and you get used to, you know, big houses and vacation homes and going and doing whatever you want, and so it is very seductive. However much you say that you will not fall into the trap of it, you do fall into the trap of it.”

“While Gupta departed McKinsey with a fortune, he was now mingling with a crowd that included Bill Gates, Henry Kravis and Henry M. Paulson Jr., then Goldman’s chief executive, with whom he traveled to Indonesia to see the Komodo dragons. For many of these men, $100 million was not rich; it was simply the price to play. If Gupta wanted to compete on the same level as Stephen A. Schwarzman, who would go on to give $100 million to the New York Public Library, or Sandy Weill, whom he knew from the Weill Cornell Medical College board, he had to be a billionaire.”

“Rajaratnam was also an expert at preying on his sources’ weaknesses. His first major target was an Intel marketing executive named Roomy Khan. He caught her attention by mentioning that his wife, Asha, was a Punjabi Indian, like her. Then he reeled her in by promising a well-paying job at Galleon in return for early readings of revenue indicators at Intel and, later, tips about acquisitions, like the Blackstone Group’s bid to buy Hilton Hotels. (She found out about the latter from a South Asian Moody’s analyst, a roommate of her cousin’s.) Rajaratnam also persuaded his old Wharton School classmate Rajiv Goel, a perennially frustrated executive at Intel’s treasury department, to feed him information in exchange for introductions to his high-powered friends. Rajaratnam’s most prized recruit, however, was Anil Kumar, a former classmate from Wharton and a graduate of the I.I.T. system who worked as a technology consultant at McKinsey.” Click Link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/rajat-guptas-lust-for-zeros.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘The First New Atheist-200th Birthday of Kierkegaard’ By Morgan Meis

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Kierkegaard said “The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”

Søren Kierkegaard was born in Denmark on May 5, 1813. He was a difficult and troublesome boy. He quarreled with his father and lived a flippant and self-indulgent life as a young man. Then he had a conversion experience. He broke with his fiancé and became an urban hermit of sorts. He studied philosophy and started to write. He believed that he had a truth to tell the people of his time. The people didn’t want to be told — do they ever? This caused him to fight with his fellow Danes and anyone else who got in his way. He became an object of ridicule around Copenhagen. The local papers made fun of him for his hunched back and clubbed foot. He wrote many books under various false names, most of which were ignored. He died in relative obscurity at the age of 42.

Thus, the short and painful life of Søren Kierkegaard. Over the last 200 years, however, Kierkegaard’s writings have resurfaced in influential places. A mad German named Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed with Kierkegaard’s writings. He helped to keep Kierkegaard from falling into complete oblivion. Another rascally German rediscovered Kierkegaard in the early 20th century. This was Martin Heidegger who, unintentionally, turned Kierkegaard into an intellectual predecessor of Existentialist philosophy. More recently the Post-Modernists rediscovered Kierkegaard, fascinated by his use of fragmentary writing and multiple narrative voices. Kierkegaard is the philosopher who will not go away.

Today, at the 200th anniversary of his birth, Kierkegaard seems as relevant as ever. That’s because there is a public discussion about faith in America today. Kierkegaard’s central concern was faith and the problems of faith. Today, the evolutionary biologist and sometimes children’s author Richard Dawkins is at the forefront of the faith debate. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is a frequent contributor, as well as the neuroscientist Sam Harris. The late, great Christopher Hitchens was the angriest and funniest participant. We’ll call these figures The New Atheists. Click Link for full article;

http://thesmartset.com/article/article05081301.aspx

Posted By F. Sheikh

Infinite Energy Source- Ice You Can Set On Fire (Methane Hydrate)

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What If We Never Run Out of Oil? By Charles Mann

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

“In the 1970s, geologists discovered crystalline natural gas—methane hydrate, in the jargon—beneath the seafloor. Stored mostly in broad, shallow layers on continental margins, methane hydrate exists in immense quantities; by some estimates, it is twice as abundant as all other fossil fuels combined. Despite its plenitude, gas hydrate was long subject to petroleum-industry skepticism. These deposits—water molecules laced into frigid cages that trap “guest molecules” of natural gas—are strikingly unlike conventional energy reserves. Ice you can set on fire! Who could take it seriously? But as petroleum prices soared, undersea-drilling technology improved, and geological surveys accumulated, interest rose around the world. The U.S. Department of Energy has been funding a methane-hydrate research program since 1982.”

“But it has also unleashed so much petroleum(Petroleum is a grab-bag term for all nonsolid hydrocarbon resources—oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on—that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source—ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate.) in North America that the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based consortium of energy-consuming nations, predicted in November that by 2035, the United States will become “all but self-sufficient in net terms.” If the Chikyu researchers are successful, methane hydrate could have similar effects in Japan. And not just in Japan: China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Norway are looking to unlock these crystal cages, as are Canada and the United States.”

“If methane hydrate allows much of the world to switch from oil to gas, the conversion would undermine governments that depend on oil revenues, especially petro-autocracies like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Unless oil states are exceptionally well run, a gush of petroleum revenues can actually weaken their economies by crowding out other business. Worse, most oil nations are so corrupt that social scientists argue over whether there is an inherent bond—a “resource curse”—between big petroleum deposits and political malfeasance. It seems safe to say that few Americans would be upset if a plunge in demand eliminated these countries’ hold over the U.S. economy. But those same people might not relish the global instability—a belt of financial and political turmoil from Venezuela to Turkmenistan—that their collapse could well unleash.”

Click link for full article.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/?single_page=true

( Posted by F. Sheikh )

 

Preventive Measures Submitted by Nasik Elahi

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In Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report,” set in the year 2054 and released nine months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, homicide-squad detectives no longer spend their time tracking down people who have committed murder. Instead, they go after people who are about to commit murder, swooping down to stop them in the nick of time. Spielberg’s police officers don’t fight crime, they fight “Pre-Crime.” They don’t catch killers, they catch pre-killers.

Click the link below for reading the rest of the New Yorker article.

http://m.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/05/20/130520taco_talk_hertzberg?mbid=nl_Weekly%20(53)