The Roads Less Travelled …

… during which the world seems to have taken a U-turn on its head, I blog again.

Manchester United stutter after their money making trip to Riyadh and drop points drawing with Spurs and losing at home to City. That the loss was on the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster is a matter of further chagrin. The logo free retro jerseys and one minute silences are all right but IMO a win would have been a better tribute to possibly the finest set young players England has ever seen,  Fergie’s Fledglings and Wenger’s Wedglings included. Capello on the other hand seems to be instilling the winning mentality, the lack of which is the latest scapegoat for England’s failure in international competitions. Now that Joe Cole has made the left sided position a matter of non-issue they had to find a new excuse but seem to be running out of options here.

Big fish attempts to eat big fish fight big fish. Microsoft, the big bad wolf seems to be very keen on eating the lost and wandering Red Riding Hood that now is Yahoo!. With no presence whatsoever in the web domain MS is seeing its leadership position in matters relating to personal computing erode away at rate faster than Carl Lewis record breaking sprint and Yahoo!, though a rambling and directionless firm, has enough user base to give a semblance of competition to Google. Now whether Google is the benign woodcutter or an evil warlock is yet to be seen. But the fate of Red Riding Hood in this story seems to be sealed.

Financial markets continue to their Samudra Manthan, with each new day bringing joy and sorrow in some measure. Indian markets have taken to liking the sine wave functions, rising and falling with the phases of the moon. On the global front, UBS seems to be the hardest hit institution in every financial crisis. They seemed to have discovered some earlier unknown positions in subprime mortgages. Talking of the unknown, Societe Generale or SocGen suddenly discovered that they had been Leesoned by a rogue trader who manipulated their effective management controls to plunge the bank into almost a crisis. If they were a little more aware of their trader’s activities than and not of their obvious frenchness, matters might not have come to this stage.

Lastly, me has been not reading and trying to get a new job so that I can read books and see even after I pass out of IIMA. Hopefully, I will blog again soon.