After Jerry spoke, Jenson gave a vote of thanks where he said that all of us were more than willing to make any number of sacrifices to build Dufresne into a great and prosperous company. And personally, he never thought of his work in Dufresne as a job but as a passion.

PUKE! PUKE! PUKE!

The entire JHA team is still hoping that we will get the strategy and operations optimization project. Prasad has been speaking to the private equity guys for a while and he says that it is quite touch and go.

If that doesn’t come through then I don’t think I will have anything to do for a while. Vineet tells me that there is some talk of a very high-profile banking project starting sometime in February or March. But he said that it was very technical and only people with banking experience would get picked for the bidding meetings.

IS HE TRYING TO TELL ME I DON’T HAVE BANKING EXPERIENCE? HELLO? BOSS! I may not have ever actually worked for a bank. But remember how I made that superb banking simulation in Excel for the ‘futures, options and risk management’ class in business school? The option pricing model was so complicated that the classroom computer crashed and kept rebooting for forty minutes. Prof. Bhanumati called off the class and we had to come back the next weekend for a make-up session.

Okay, I need to cool down a bit. Things are bound to improve on the project front in time. I should not let that chootiya Vineet make me feel insecure.

And BTW there are rumours swirling around that Reema and Vikram Singh have put in their papers. They might be going to Tony’s company it seems. He told me they weren’t hiring! You can’t trust anybody nowadays.

Things with Gouri have improved somewhat over the last three weeks. She still thinks that I have commitment issues and that I only ‘went after her as a game’. I don’t know how to convince the girl that I genuinely like her a lot. Other than marrying her or something. That would shut her up.

According to Jignesh I should be patient, responsive and give her some time.

Jignesh is the world’s best roommate by the way. He minds his own business, hangs out once in a while and by and large never gets in my way. Sometimes I wish Gouri were like him, instead of sending me puzzling text messages. When I was going home from work today she sent me this: COFFEE? PROBABLY NOT. TOO MUCH TO ASK. I DON’T KNOW WHY I BOTHER. YOU’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? NO, I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

Some cousin of Jignesh’s is coming to stay with us for a few weeks. She’s some sort of film-maker from Delhi looking for locations.

13 December 2006

2.20 a.m.

Bad news. Jerry told Anandakumari that he doesn’t want to spend another rupee on the corporate film. Apparently there are no budgets at all available for any non-core activities. So we’ve given it to one of the guys in IT who will edit it using Windows Movie Maker in the office. It is a lot of very good acting talent going waste. But Anandakumari says it is the only option.