Leonard Wong sits next to me on the structuring desk. Like every other male of his race - he's got those enigmatic thin eyes, and the second-long smile that accompanies every sentence. But he's a nice guy, I decide. After all, he had expressed involuntary surprise at hearing that I'm between years at my institute where I'm doing MBA...and that to most of our kind is a shot in the arm.
So back to Mr. Wong. Lunchtime is just over and I'm at the pantry again, looking around for something to wash down the footlong sub with. He asks me, Subway? Again? I respond with my usual "veggie" lament and the fact that the Chinese didn't actually think of us coming in 5000 years later when they drew the boundaries of their country. And thus the conversation goes to China.
ME: So you're Chinese?
LW: No, I'm Malay. My family's back in Malaysia. I get to see them once or twice a year only.
ME: Wow. That must be some life. (inside, I'm like shrieking away)
LW: Haha
ME: Hey just tell me the difference between the Yuan and Renminbi?
LW: It's the same thing. But in Chinese, Renminbi means money of the people, which is like a 3 letter word. Yuan, on the other hand, is like single letter in our alphabet.
ME: How do you know all that? You're Malay right? You wouldn't know Chinese...
LW: No no. I'm Malaysian Chinese. So that technically means that my ancestors would have been Chinese, though that really seems distant as I graduated from London.
ME: Hey by the way how many letters do you guys have in your alphabet? There must be like a zillion of them!!!
LW: Ya - too many.
ME: So by what age does a kid learn all this stuff?
LW: I don't know. You kind of pick up stuff on your own - and when you're a kid there's pretty much nothing else to do.
ME: (why didn't I think of that?) So what - there'll be like 1000 letters? Wildly guessing?
LW: Way,way more than that. (he googles, then wiki's) See - there are about 56000 characters in the Chinese language. But then we hardly use more than 20000 of them, so that's a reasonable approximation.
ME : So it must take like very little words to say anything in Chinese, and I quote that on my hotel's address card, the English address is like a whole 2 lines, whereas the Chinese address is in 1 word!!
LW: That's common. But I don't know how true that is elsewhere. 'Cos I've seen Chinese translations of English books, and they're almost the same thickness.
ME: (deciding it's time to show off my math skills) So let's assume that on an average every word in Chinese has like 5 letters, each of these could be one of those 20000 letters, or a blank, which would account for most of the less-than-5-letter-words. So that's like 20001^5 words which would be an upper bound...and the same calculations for English give me 27^10, assuming that on an average, English words have 10 letters. No where close, is it? So that means the languages must have a major disconnect in their vocabulary. That is, something that takes very little time to say in English, must take a lot of verbosity to express in Chinese, and vice versa. Maybe that's because the language is so specific about every minute detail, that every shade of meaning is a different word altogether.
LW: Ya, that's true. We read English translations of Chinese material, and it makes no sense...and then we read the original...and we're like Wow, now it makes sense..
<there are titbits of this conversation, not really important, that I don't remember, so I'm not going to type some things out. Our conversation trails off into nothingness, with me getting back to going through interest rate swaps, and Wong going back to his Bloomberg terminal>
Interesting conversation at an I-bank, I must say ! Be back with more.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Day zero
They always said banks would be fun for a math whiz. If you always topped your class in math, or did that extra equation that made you the apple of Ms Fernandes' eyes, well then yeah, banking is the place for you. So when your "summers preparation" starts, focus on banks and crack a day-zero bank as they call 'em in the IIMs. That is what they always said.
They being the people who we look up to, or rather, are supposed to look up to. Role models, been-there-done-that's, call them what you will. They told us you can retire by 35 and go on a lifelong cruise of the Pacific if you took banking. Sounds queer, yet interesting, ain't it?
The funny thing about a bank is that when you enter you are greeted with all the smiles in the world and all the welcomes, especially from the people at leadership and talent management...in particular this person who for all practical purposes I shall dub "mother". So mother greets us on the 15th floor in this conference room, where of course she begins to carry over from the colorful and gregarious presentation Mother's counterparts in Mumbai made. Of course there's the regular chat about the fish drying and other Oriental practices that appear weird to most of us and nauseating to some. (go veggies!)
But then the real roller coaster ride starts. Mother calls us out of the team room one by one, which is by now ominously resembling a slaughterhouse, where some rep from the desk we're on comes to "escort" us to our place.
Desk. That's a new word, jargon for people new to banks. It's bankese for department, and basically has this bunch of 6-8 people sitting on a desk (no points for guessing how the name came.) So here we are on this long table, seated amongst about 50 other people, so technically there are like 5-6 desks in a row, and 2 -3 rows in a room. First thing that strikes me - why are they so hard pressed for space? Even software companies in India have cubicles.
Anyway, as Mr. Bossman preparesto go to Korea, the rest of my desk is giving me its hellos and all that - and looking at me like a strange creature from a gazillion miles away. Nonetheless, it appears mother has taught them well, and they promptly bombard me with study material enough to go through till Mr. Bossman returns and approves my projects. At which point, I settle down, with shady glances to what people are doing and interestingly looking around for signs of what "they" told us would be lovely about a bank. Not too much greenery around, I observe.
And oh yeah, I'm just an intern.
They being the people who we look up to, or rather, are supposed to look up to. Role models, been-there-done-that's, call them what you will. They told us you can retire by 35 and go on a lifelong cruise of the Pacific if you took banking. Sounds queer, yet interesting, ain't it?
The funny thing about a bank is that when you enter you are greeted with all the smiles in the world and all the welcomes, especially from the people at leadership and talent management...in particular this person who for all practical purposes I shall dub "mother". So mother greets us on the 15th floor in this conference room, where of course she begins to carry over from the colorful and gregarious presentation Mother's counterparts in Mumbai made. Of course there's the regular chat about the fish drying and other Oriental practices that appear weird to most of us and nauseating to some. (go veggies!)
But then the real roller coaster ride starts. Mother calls us out of the team room one by one, which is by now ominously resembling a slaughterhouse, where some rep from the desk we're on comes to "escort" us to our place.
Desk. That's a new word, jargon for people new to banks. It's bankese for department, and basically has this bunch of 6-8 people sitting on a desk (no points for guessing how the name came.) So here we are on this long table, seated amongst about 50 other people, so technically there are like 5-6 desks in a row, and 2 -3 rows in a room. First thing that strikes me - why are they so hard pressed for space? Even software companies in India have cubicles.
Anyway, as Mr. Bossman preparesto go to Korea, the rest of my desk is giving me its hellos and all that - and looking at me like a strange creature from a gazillion miles away. Nonetheless, it appears mother has taught them well, and they promptly bombard me with study material enough to go through till Mr. Bossman returns and approves my projects. At which point, I settle down, with shady glances to what people are doing and interestingly looking around for signs of what "they" told us would be lovely about a bank. Not too much greenery around, I observe.
And oh yeah, I'm just an intern.
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