August 16, 2005

Business and Bums

Say hi to the new, improved Rohit: the one who wakes up at 6 a.m. and sleeps at 11 p.m., religiously; the one who wears expensive dress shirts and even more expensive dress shoes; the one who carries a briefcase and standard-issue IBM laptop; the one who rides to work on the MUNI with a countless number of other yuppies, white iPod earphones showing unabashedly; the one who spends his days in the airports and nights in corporate hotels. Yes, that's right ladies and gentleman: Say hi to Rohit—the newly inducted faceless businessman.

January 17, 2006

Life of Lower Expectations

As I am sure is painfully obvious to anyone who has wasted precious minutes of his or her ostensibly futile life on this site, I don't pride myself on my sunny disposition or rosy outlook on life. Yet, the tag line for this web site remains Optimistic Cynicism, which indubitably causes no small amount of confusion for readers unable to see the optimism for the cynicism. Allow me to present my day yesterday to perhaps clarify:

April 05, 2006

Confessions of a Prolific Profligate

Perhaps twenty years from now, as the pressures of mortgages, marriage, middle age, and mediocrity mount, I will look back upon the decisions I took in my early twenties with a mixture of regret and nostalgia, simultaneously pining for and revolting against the licentious lifestyle that came to embody my yuppie years. Certainly, the same cannot be said for the self-righteous hordes that look upon my actions with contempt and condemnation today, secure in their oft-preached, rarely practiced virtues of purity, security, and monogamy.

Perhaps the future for me holds nothing but repentance, but for the moment, there are no apologies, no remorse, no contrition. You see, dear reader, for my colleagues and I, philandering isn't so much an indulgence as it is a necessity, borne not of desire, but of decree.

August 28, 2006

Mission to Miami

My week-long stint in the Sunshine State, or Florida as it is referred to by those not enamored by its rather dubious and suspect moniker, ended today as my flight left Miami International Airport a little over a day before Ernesto is scheduled to hammer south Florida, and landed at SFO several hours later. Stepping off the airplane into the mild and beautiful San Francisco evening, and for the first time in a long time, not feeling the intense moisture in the air like a punch in the stomach, I could not help but be happy to be returning to California. Not that my trip to Florida wasn't fun--it was--but there's only so much one can take of the tropics.

December 14, 2006

Viral, Virulent, Virile

Working in corporate America, and especially, in consulting, buzz words are a way of life. Annoying, irritating, nonsensical, preposterous, ridiculous; these are all adjectives that might be used to describe the so-called business speak. As far as I can tell, no one enters the business world using business speak; it's not nature, it's nurture. Like an insidious virus that may lay dormant for years after contraction, only to emerge virulently, and at the most inopportune time (i.e., a week before your wedding—oh wait, different virus), business speak is something that develops slowly, but rages potently once mature.

May 02, 2007

An Economic Analysis of Interpersonal Relations

As long time readers will, no doubt, recall, more than three years ago, I presented a now infamous (and copiously referenced) analysis of interpersonal relationships, asserting that all such relations can be defined solely on the basis of convenience, exploitation, and self-aggrandizement. In essence, I was taking a sociological perspective on relationships, which I further expanded on with my manifesto on Facebook friends, or more generally, relationships on social networks, one year later. Today, I would like to take a different, more rigorous approach to the same problem, i.e., how do we taxonomically distribute the various interpersonal relationships in our lives? Considering this is an economic analysis, there can be only one criterion (as I am sure most of you can guess): value.

May 14, 2007

Nihilism: Ages 3 and Up

As I am sure even the most inept of cretins could likely attest to based on a cursory glance of this website (or a moment's interaction—that's all they would be likely to get from me), I am not someone who could generally be considered kid-friendly. I am neither nice nor cuddly, have little patience for incompetence or density, and in general, have absolutely no interest in interacting with individuals (children or otherwise) incapable of communicating at my desired level. Elitist, arrogant, caustic, I am; endearing, compassionate, approachable, I am decidedly not. Yet, despite my complete indisposition for the role, and even my well-publicized disdain, I continue to be the subject of inexplicable adulation by small children near and far. The latest episode (some might say attack) happened on the BART ride home last week, and needless to say, it was a battle for the history books: Cute, Innocent, and Precocious versus Bitter, Caustic, and Nihilistic. What follows is a play-by-play of my battle royale.

February 11, 2008

Say It Ain't So, Rohit

Those readers who have only recently joined me in the meaningless and ultimately futile enterprise known as my life—I mean, the Realm—may justly assume that the purpose of this blog (insofar as it has one) is to indulge the self-absorbed, narcissistic tendencies of its (optimistically) cynical author as he drifts aimlessly in a turbulent sea of mediocrity, loneliness, and despair. While this may indeed be what the illustrious Realm is about these days, incoherent rambling about mediocrity, loneliness, and despair was not where it got its start. In its original manifestation, the Realm existed for two purposes: (1) to counteract a world obsessed with and deluded by theoretical agents of purported happiness such as love, marriage, and children; and (2) to hate on bums. In a much-referenced entry last year, I acknowledged my shameful hypocrisy with respect to the former; today, I shall do so with respect to the latter. Say it ain't so, Rohit. Say it ain't so.

March 11, 2008

Deleveraging the Personal Brand

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps it is because I am within a day of finals again (damn quarter system!), but for that, or some other reasons not worth indulging in as public a forum as this, I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately—our own, those of others, and those of society—especially, the relationship of such expectations vis-à-vis the (patent) meaninglessness of life. In particular, how do we (in the royal sense) reconcile the lofty—and very likely, unattainable—expectations that we and others set with the certain and blinding futility of life? In a dense and meandering article last year, I suggested that the way to resolve this paradox was essentially to ignore it, letting hope and (daily) contemplations of suicide coexist uneasily, mentally disquieting though that approach may be. Today, I propose an alternative solution: deleveraging one's personal brand (as we say in contemporary parlance).