Guess who’s subprime now?

Perhaps it’s in utter bad taste to laugh at the misfortune of others, but while you count the zeros in the proposed 700-billion dollar bailout of Wall Street, please allow me to laugh my ass off at the never-failing deux a machina... the golden age of the sharp-shooting Savile Row-clad ibanker is officially over!

Why such perverse pleasure one might ask, at the obvious misfortune of others? Growing up in Mumbai where money is worshipped more than Mumbadevi, there is only one real career worth it, one that chases money and multiplies it at geometric rates. “OPM, OPM, other people’s money, always remember, that’s the real crux of wealth creation,” ranted the professor of my elective commerce class, furiously chewing on his own shaggy overgrown moustache as I sat frazzled barely able to balance the balance sheet in front of me, certain that OPM was only the opium of the select few.

Further, if you studied economics and didn’t have ambitions to become a banker, something about you was decidedly suspect. Nonetheless I bucked popular trend and packed my bags for econ grad school. But if your school is necking the City of London can the investment banks be far behind? Doesn’t matter if you’re an Urban Planning or Art History major, there is a banker inside everyone, cooed the recruitment reps at Goldman Sachs and Boston Consulting Group as they hosted discreet tea soirees to ‘chat with’ prospective applicants. Of course this was 2001 post 9/11 and real jobs were less than nil; the soirees were apparently held only to keep up appearances of financial health.

My family had plans for me. Since I couldn’t manage to become a banker, I could do the next best thing; marry one! I had to open myself to “good boys from nice families who earn well and will give you a stable life” (what does that mean anyway; a lifetime supply of organic hay?). All protests were silenced and then followed the brigade of mumbling mamas’ boys who spoke in Bonglish, walked with a shuffle, and on learning that I wrote, threw in trivia like, “Do you know, American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year 2007 was ‘subprime’?” Needless to say those meetings barely lasted till the last sip of my cappuccino!

And then I met the ibanker XP version. These guys didn’t look too bad, had tremendous self-confidence and usually an interesting hobby or two tucked away; from mountain holidays to collecting Asterix comics.

I was just beginning to be won over to the ways of the ‘stable life’ when I realised I was the one being scrutinised... and for the first time in my life, I might fail the examination! As it happened I wasn’t quite the trophy ‘banker wife’; I had a free and frank mind I had no problems airing, a bohemian joi de vivre that bordered dangerously close to left-wing egalitarianism and worst of all, no burning ambition to leave India, and  become an NRI wife in New York-LA-San Francisco!

So they cut their losses and vamoosed. Without even a courtesy it-was-nice-knowing-you. Manners and money have an inversely proportional relationship in 21st century capitalist society. And in the case of one of these suitors who was an HBS grad on his way to join Lehman Brothers in London with a fat paycheck of 200,000 pound sterling (as proudly advertised by his father) money meant not having to say goodbye. My father clucked in open disapproval and my grandma threw in the towel. A year later Lehman lies in shambles and 25,000 employees left stranded as the London office shut shop. It’s cruel to laugh, but it’s impossible not to!

Sure, I don’t think all bankers are humourless callous all-knowing jackasses; I have some very dear friends from this profession after all, most with a wonderful sense of humour and impeccable manners. And they don’t think the sun shines out of their backsides either. But as far as romancing the bankers go, unless anyone is serving Farhan Akhtar shirtless on a silver salver in his sensitive n’ sexy ibanker avatar in Rock On, I’ll pass, thank you!

 deblina@dnaindia.net