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Gordon Gekko

I watched Wall Street for the first time and now get the point of Gordon Gekko. It brought to mind a conversation I had with someone my parents were trying to match-make me with way back in the day. The guy in question lived in Manhattan at the time and worked somewhere on Wall Street. I had just graduated college and working my first job in India. The living was super-simple and my public sector salary was just enough to give that sense of freedom a young person craves for. 

Now I was able to pay for things I needed and wanted (granted I was and still am a person of pretty simple tastes, so it did not take much). That feeling was quite priceless. When I connected with Wall Street guy (I cannot recall his name so I will say W), he asked me about what I did and what I thought of coming to America - specially to his neck of the woods. I told him I only knew Manhattan through books and movies so it was hard for me to tell how reality would compare against that. Scenes from movies set in Mumbai don't exactly match the reality of living there. I imagined the same is true of other places - even iconic ones.

W asked me if there was a book I had read that had shaped my impressions of NYC and as it turned out the answer was yes - that would be The Bonfire of Vanities. The character of Sherman McCoy defined Wall Street types for me and that is what I said to W. I was expecting some mild form of outrage given the nature of the  shenanigans Mr. McCoy gets caught up in leading to his catastrophic downfall. W had not read the said book but he shared that Gordon Gekko was the seminal Wall Street character for him and that I should watch the movie. 

I had no idea what he was talking about but something told me right away that this conversation had already run its course. I could not tell if W aspired to be like Gekko or was just fascinated by him in a morbid sort of way. Whichever the case, Gekko was a relevant party in this conversation and me not having the slightest clue did not help. The parents on both sides tried to get us further acquainted but we each went our separate ways. It was amusing to recall that silly conversation between two Bengali people from India about two fictional characters from New York while watching the movie so many years later.

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