How to marry a millionaire

My apologies to those who were looking for the secret bait. This is a forward I received some days back. It reminded me of a story I had read in You Can Win by Shiv Khera. A neighbor eyes a luxury car a man had as a gift from his brother and exclaims : I wish I had a car like that ! The man says : Oh, you should say "I wish I had a brother like that". To this, the neighbor's wife retorts: I wish I were a brother like that. "

Attitude - it might not be everything, but it is something.

A young and pretty lady posted this on a popular forum:
Title: What should I do to marry a rich guy?

I'm going to be honest of what I'm going to say here. I'm 25 this year. I'm very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above. You might say that I'm greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York. My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married? I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you? Among those I've dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit. If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden (?), $250k annual income is not enough.

I'm here humbly to ask a few questions:
1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)
2)Which age group should I target?
3)Why most wives of the riches is only average-looking? I've
met a few girls who doesn't have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys
4)How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (my target now is to get married)

Ms. Pretty


Here's a reply from a Wall Street Financial guy:

Dear Ms. Pretty,

I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analyze your situation as a professional investor. My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I'm not wasting time here. From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you. The answer is very simple, so let me explain. Put the details aside, what you're trying to do is an exchange of "beauty" and "money": Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square. However, there's a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can't be prettier year after year. Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It's not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worried 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a "trading position". If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term - same
goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or "leased". Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income. This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps. If you are interested in "leasing" services, do
contact me…

signed,
J.P. Morgan

Hat tip: Nitin Balakrishnan

Yuppie! It's my first snow

The weather forecast said it's going to be 2 degree C today. And I did not know that it needn't be 0 to have a snowfall. Of course , now when I think of it, the upper atmosphere is colder. ( How could I have forgotten my Standard VII geography lesson: Air temperature drops uniformly with altitude at a rate of approximately 6.5° Celsius per 1000 meters)

So, when my roommate said it is snowing outside, I stopped whining about how I am going to miss my favorite class this Thursday (no MGT650 on Thanksgiving) and jumped with joy. I was about to go out in flipflops and shorts to save time but that would have been too adventurous for my health. I took exactly 5 secs to pick a coat, a cap, a pair of jeans and rush downstairs.

And I did everything I had always wanted to viz catch snowflakes with my tongue ( the cold sting is amazingly invigorating), let the snow flakes rest on my nose and eyelashes, and walk with chips of snow falling on my coat and melting at the tips of my shoes.

There's a beauty associated with everything you experience for the first time. Repetition often takes the charm away. But some things always make me happy. Like the rains. I said "Balls to the storm" to reach Cambridge once, when weather prediction was that Noel could hit. I can't see it as severity of weather , but as something different. (Not wise always.Note to myself)

I know winters can be boring with almost no outdoor activities. And indoor activities restricted only to watching movies, reading ,cooking or browsing the net ( How much can an average human being sleep? )But I am going to try and make the best of it. :)

But yeah, you miss your near ones at times like this :(

Why do I feel sometimes that the magnitude of my happiness depends on sharing it? OMG! I had a life! What am I doing to myself? Get out of it! Get out of it! *develops a severe case of OCD*
*****
Ok. Here's a caption contest. Write whatever comes to your mind when you see these pics. I told AM : "Solitude is the mother of creativity" when he sent them in a mail saying :
picked up my cam and tried seeing things around the room ...
my life is restricted to my room ... and you say you don't have one?!!
Jesus! if only people would ... :D
well, tell me what you think about the pics ... and you can cut out the sweet things like "oh, they're nice" ... that's what i expect from other mortals, not you

Ok then, here you are: ( I know it totally depends on the mental frame you are in at a particular moment. I just want a snapshot of your mind. Don't dwell on it too much. Needn't be one word caption either)
#1

#2


#3


#4

Simple truths

You’ve probably heard the three keys to making money in real estate…location, location, location. Now I’m going to give you the three keys to self-motivation…reinforce, reinforce, reinforce.
-Mac Anderson newsletter

Here are 3 short movies each of 3 mins. To some it might appear hackneyed, but heck- some things are worth being reminded of.
The Race
The Strangest Secret
The Power of attitude

From the torn pages of my diary -II

Saiki forwarded me the link to Dubey's photo album, and it unlocked a treasure house of old memories. Days past, old friends.

I met the 2004-2006 PGP group of IMI through Saiki. Let me try and arrange the events chronologically.

Day 1: Some cold evening in February 2006,Sector 44, Noida
I am running a temperature when one of my friends comes to me and says that I have to go out with her. Zindagi aur maut ka sawal hai :P (It is a matter of life and death) I have to oblige and we go out for a rendezvous with a guy she has met online. He has come over to our campus for a Quiz. I stand aloof at a distance while girl and guy walk towards each other. Each taking one step at a time. I yawn and think if they don't pace up I will fall asleep. Girl and Guy meet. I count stars in the sky. However, Guy walks towards me when he discovers that I am unwell and introduces himself. And I think: Bhodro Chhele ( Decent chap )
(To be proven wrong later. Ek number ka bandaar hai..)

Day 2: February 14, 2006. Valentine's Day, Delhi
Guy and Girl are too shy to ask each other out. So I decide to step in and ask the Guy : "Will you be my Valentine this year?" over the phone. Girl giggles by my side. He understands what it means. Jumps up and down and says "Yes.Yes. Yes". I ask him to wear something black, put on Green Brute and get a companion along so that I don't get bored :D

Four of us (Girl, Guy, Guy's roommate Sajal aka Biddu aka Dubey) meet at Delhi Haat and have a great time. Initially, I pretend Guy is my date and wink at him. He sees the joke and walks arm-in-arm with me, with Girl feeling flustered and turning pink.

We even click a picture to make my then boyfriend jealous. Guy sits next to me and keeps staring at Girl. And I say to myself: Aah! The Joys of Love!

Saiki and me @ Delhi Haat. The kick boxing kids :D

Day 3: March 5, 2006, Qutab Institutional Area, Delhi
Dada (my elder brother, Anirban) is about to leave for his visa interview in Kolkata. Dad has come over to Delhi to visit us. Girl says that she wants to go to the IMI Fest Kritva, but can't until I accompany her too. I ask permission from my two legal guardians and leave for IMI that evening.

I hop into a movie crossword round on reaching and team up with Dubey to come close second to the IIFT team. We get to the next round of Dumb Charades but lack of coordination results in hilarious results. Dubey takes permission from the judges to say only one thing, unrelated to the movie title I have to guess, and blurts: Kuch to bol yaar! and the whole auditorium bursts into peals of laughter.

In the evening , I meet Indu and get introduced to the others in the group. We dance to DJ Suketu's tunes and "Bin Tere Sanam" becomes an instant hit. I even make Ghosh dance. An achievement in itself. Next morning , Dad and my maternal uncle show me dancing on the TV. I smile and agree : I had a great time.

Day 4: April 8, 2006, Fun and Food village , Gurgaon

Water theme park. 12 odd people -Shivani, Anamika, Indu, Preeti, Kshitij, Swati , Ghosh, Rajat, Dubey, Saikat, Girl and me- have the wildest splash possible. And the only unaccounted for leave from my office :D

Day 5 : April 9, 2006, PVR Priya, Delhi
The same group goes to watch Shaadi Se Pehle. Dubey's suggestion . Rajat's sponsorship. We keep whining through the movie and waiting when we can butt-kick Dubey when we get out. We actually take turns to do it :D

Some weekend, PVR Saket, Delhi
Dada, Guy , Girl and me go to watch Transamerica. I click photographs of Guy and Girl holding hands together under the table and tease them about it. Girl blushes. Guy flashes his teeth.

Several days later, PVR Spice/Waves@CSM, Noida
After Bro has left: Guy , Girl , Me go to watch several movies together. And we always manage to make Girl feel embarrassed by our kick boxing fits in public. :D

Several months later, Boston
I am scripting this post and thinking - we might not be in love with the same people we were two years back, but our friendship has survived. Maybe this is why I believe in friendship more than I do in romantic love.

** A tribute to Girl, Guy and all the friends I made at IMI. The post was written in the present tense on purpose. The memories are so vivid that it doesn't feel I am so far away from them or so many seasons have changed since I last saw them .

Saturday Night Fever

And AM asked me that embarrassing question: What are you doing on a Saturday night sitting and reading comments (on your blog) ? I had to defend my position saying "I have just come back from shopping with my roommate." Then the conversation shifted to safer topics like the present scenario in Pakistan and Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Presidential candidate.

It was a girls' day out and it was fun. KM (Kiran Kirti Muppalla) and I kept saying to each other those weirdly humorous lines from Om Shanti Om ( remind me to write the review later):***Yenna Shotgun, Me Murugan in peculiar tones and laughed our heads off.

While we were walking towards the T-station, she observed that "It doesn't feel that cold when you are walking with someone" I suggested that it might be 'cause you are protected on one side from the crazy breeze when you are walking side by side or it might be that talking keeps the mind off the severity of the weather. And then I plunged into a deep reverie of how tough times appear more bearable when you have a companion in your life. She, who is quite used to my sudden seizures of philosophical musings, just smiled sweetly and took care that I,lost in my thoughts, don't amble straight into a car.

The journey proved labyrinthine as the red lines are closed from Park Street Station to Kendall till Monday for some construction and we had to take a shuttle bus. The simple itinerary of J.F.K/UMASS -> Central Square(~20 mins on T) proved to be J.F.K/UMASS ->Park Street Station on T, Park Street Station-> Kendall (MIT) on shuttle, Kendall ->Central on T again. We could have gone to Galleria in Lechmere using the green line by then. But KM opined that stand alone shops are better . And anyways, I prefer Central Square to any other destination on the T anytime. Except maybe Prudential Center , which houses my favorite Barnes and Noble bookshop.

All in all, I had a bit of adventure. It was a refreshing change to be above the ground and have a look around the city. Though most of the times, my view got constricted by kissing couples. It is not a common sight in India, specially with the soi-disant moral police on the prowl. But here it's pretty normal -almost as natural as holding hands in public. However, today the frequency seemed compounded. KM and I tried to find a spot inside the T where we wouldn't be measuring the flow of human saliva . I saw an old man talking to himself , sitting right across me. And KM found a youth wearing a jeans whose one leg was black and the other was striking blue and had his hair dyed in punk green. She fervently prayed that when she has kids they shouldn't go to such extremes. (She is married and plans to have a baby soon). I said it would be ok with me as long as my son (if I ever have one) doesn't wear a nose ring. (If I have a daughter, I plan to spoil her rotten)

Honestly, I don't like staring at strangers and feel pretty uncomfortable if someone else does it. I think it's one of the most impolite things to do. So, when I had brushed my eyes inside the T , read the ads for the nth time, and talked enough to KM, I got back to my favorite activity in such situations: concentrate on my shoes or my finger nails.:D


*** Disclaimer: I don't appreciate racist jokes nor do I intend to encourage them. The humor was not in the language unfamiliar to me, ( Kiran is a South Indian) it was the way SRK delivered the dialog. So, readers please choose not be offended.

External Link: Subway maps, Boston MBTA

Aliens don't come from Mars

This is dedicated to anon who called me "pretentious" in a previous post. :)
Nothing to do with the context of his comment, the word triggered a chain of thoughts and rambling followed :D

Somewhere, at some point of our lives, we have all felt like an outsider.
In junior high (read: Standard 7-10), I was a nerd who preferred to hide behind a book and a pair of specs, acted aggressive (read: used to beat up boys badly) to cloak my emotional vulnerability , and was every teacher's favorite student. Though my grades often incited awe among my peers, I'd have traded them anytime to be "cooler". That doesn't mean I shunned extra curricular activities. I had been in the coveted ( What can be the aspiration of a school goer? Not to be a CEO since standard IV ! ) school choir for consecutive six years, was the preferred choice for judges in any extempore or recitation competition, was unanimously voted the CR for 6 years of class (until in Standard 10 where I resigned before my Tests).

Yet, I lost the first position of school final recitation competition to someone who was three years senior to me and had much better voice modulation and was trained for it. Became the second preference for the role of Portia for the school play , even though I delivered the lines better- because one of them looked way better than I did ( the directors - Madam Sharifa Samsuddin and Sir Mohan Nainan were divided in opinion because Ma'm claimed assertiveness and not pulchritude should be the criterion for selecting the character. It never really took off the ground after that) Lost the school elections to someone who was more social than I was, even though my speech was not prepared and I said what I said in the assembly ad lib and earned the loudest applause. Came close second in my Hindustani Classical Vocal exams. And yeah, never got around to tell my school crush that I really liked him.

College was different though, with more social opportunities than I could handle and my grades in second year suffered for that. More people had crush on me than I even knew and books were meant to be opened only a month before the exams. My school mates would remember me as "that Amazon", or "the studious". My college mates would beg to differ and say "happening". Work life was completely dissimilar. With 12-14 hours at job, there was hardly any social life and my team grew to be like my family. Maybe I just got lucky with my first job.

Before I start sounding like a 60 year old woman who's scripting her memoirs, I want to say that those little failures, when my best was simply not enough, got me acquainted with a simple fact of life. There will always be someone who does something better than I do. So, what do I do when I detect something I wish was my characteristic trait too? What any rational person willing to grow will. I imbibe it.

My closest peer group right now is my Management 650 team and I'd like to point out a positive aspect I adore in each one of those five people . Gordon is very enthusiastic when it comes to presentations. Though Prof Novak ( who is usually difficult to please) said that both him and I have (1)very good voice and (2)excellent eye contact, I think he scores way above me in his body language, which is very animated. Vanessa is a bundle of energy and it's almost contagious. Wendy is talented at origami. Matt speaks little, but talks a lot of sense. Mike is THE techie of the group. A few others include Katie with a wicked sense of humor and Chris with an eerie ability to get along with anybody. My friends outside my campus include SG who never complains, SK who is an empathetic listener (thanks buddy), LM who can make you feel like she's your best friend the very first time you meet her, KM who can look at ANYTHING objectively and dispassionately. Now, I'd like to cultivate or improve upon some of these traits in some degree for the rest of my life and not ingurgitate to throw out later.

They might be friends, acquaintances or mere strangers I have come across, who call me by different names or call me by my name differently. But at the basic human level, we are all the same with some dreams, aspirations, fears we share with only ourselves or very close ones. We just need to reach out to know that. Does it make us pretentious? Because we are role playing? I don't think so. We are evolving constantly. I seriously don't know what my emotional, financial, psychological, social, physical ( add as many adjectives with the suffix -al as you want ) needs are going to be after two years. But I have some idea. I am trying to work on that. And I have a long way to go.

**Life is too short to be conceited.

** Attributed to PK , someone I had rejected some 3/4 years ago, because I thought he didn't look good enough. He might still be somewhere in US, but I haven't talked to him ever since. Wish he knew, in that one sentence he had taught me one of the most valuable lessons of life. Humility.

What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?

Or conversely- What is your greatest fear?

Please try not to be anonymous. Owning up to your fear is one way of conquering it. No one is judging you here . And refrain from making direct personal comments if you are posting anonymously.