Year End Reviews - My Own Too!

What do I write? What do I write today? I am fumbling for words, for thoughts. It is rarely that I don’t have three or four subjects flitting about like butterflies in my mind, trying to find an outlet in my blog.

There are several issues of newspapers and magazines doing year-end, decade-end reviews. I like them. The reviewers are all erudite fellows giving profound pronouncements about the markets – stock and commodities -, political uncertainties, the terror attacks, the future of the world – meaning the environmental catastrophe that we have been ignoring – the ice-thin  sheet of environmental safety over which we have been skating at high speeds. Defaults are high (e.g. Nakheel Group, the Dubai group that's building the world's tallest tower - The Al Burj), many more financial entities are going bust a la Lehman Brothers. There’s a tendency among money managers to pay themselves high salaries. Have you observed? Look at any organisation, the finance guys who manage the company’s funds always get away with high salaries and perks. Come on guys, what a selfish thing to do. Well that’s going to change. It has to. We should have looked at our marketing and production guys, they are where the company’s real excellence is, not the guy who totals it all up.

It’s as if the brakes are difficult to put on the way we are progressing, like a “runaway train” as Elton John sang in his song of the same name. The lyrics that accompany it go thusly:

“When we break out of this blindfold

I am gonna take you from this place.”

Noble thought, but take you where? Yes, breakneck speed and blindfolded we are progressing towards a destiny we don’t know where it will lead. In fact, there’s nothing finite about anything anymore. We all tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to control people and the way we think. Marx and Engels did, Mahesh Yogi did, Beatles did, Elvis did, Jim Morrison did.

Coming back to year-end reviews I guess the ones I liked are: Forbes and Crest. The first tries to harness several things in its ambit and succeeds, and Crest (May this newspaper from the Times of India group survive is my fervent wish) sounded very knowledgeable and upbeat in its prognostications. Its contents are well balanced and for once I really like a Times Group publication. Good for them. It seemed well written and edited. As for me I did my year end review long ago. Go back and see.