This embarrasses me to say, but Sugandh actually clapped for two full minutes after reading that. He kept on saying: You are great sir, you are great sir … I told him that I was merely being helpful and there was no need for this clapping and praise. Unfortunately he took me seriously and stopped instantly.

After that I told him to go back to his office and work on the rest of the template and then show it to me tomorrow. He asked me if I could share a copy of my resume. I told him I would email it to him.

And then he sat for another fifteen minutes slowly packing all his certificates. By this time I was getting terribly pained by my situation. Is this how things are going to be? Every evening this bastard is going to come to my room and blackmail me?

FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Anyway he is gone now. And I have slowly begun torturing this hairdryer. It gives me an odd sense of satisfaction.

Haven’t spoken to Gouri in ten or fifteen days. Even if there is a slight chance that we might end up arguing about something, I do miss talking to her. Whatever crisis is there in my life, she has an ability to say something nice, do something or send a photo of something nice and calm me down. I have purposely tried to avoid any discussions about ‘our future together’. But deep inside I think we have a future.

But how will I tell at home that I don’t want an arranged marriage?

Fuck. No need to add even more tension.

Now I need to sit and work on those cost metrics for Dominic.

29 March 2007

7.20 p.m.

Sugandh will be here in forty minutes. So no time to go into details.

Terribly hectic morning while I sat drawing up cost metrics for Dominic. The problem was that I had no idea how much the other guys on the Dufresne team was actually being paid. On top of that these guys work with offices all over Europe. Half of them are from London, three from Madrid, one from the US, Dominic himself is from the Paris office and I am from India.

First I thought I would build a proper comprehensive model that assumes that the 7 consultants come from different offices. I would make an assumption of their salaries based on their home office locations, normalize it, based on PPP (purchasing power something) and then convert back into pounds sterling. Then I would scale up each of these salaries by a multiplying factor to get the revised cost metric and then work backwards to new home salaries. (Don’t worry if you are confused. It is a little complicated.)