Skip to main content

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.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more