And finally, Diary, he asked me where I saw myself in 5 years. Now I have a precise standard answer for this—running my own profitable 100-man start-up located out of an Indian metro, potentially ready for an IPO, involved in the fields of new media, green technology, Internet services or gymnasiums.

But deep inside I knew that I had no answer. Where DO I see myself in 5 years?

Working with Dufresne in London? Ignoring emails from Gouri in India? Working with immoral, money hungry, unprofessional people like Dominic?

Is this what life is supposed to be like?

I don’t know Diary. This mad race to make money and profits and material wealth … is this what I have become?

Yet another rat?

Sad and depressed.

8.43 p.m.

Arrey, Diary, I completely forgot to tell you about the LLTLF Group B meeting.

IT. WAS. AWESOME.

When I landed up for it inside the 7th floor conference room, Emily was already there with a bunch of other people including … my heart is beating faster at the very thought of it … Chinese Pudding. I distinctly remember her not being there at that initial meeting with Tom. Why was she here?

Casually, without really looking at Chinese Pudding, I mentioned aloud that a few new people seemed to have joined the cause.

Emily smiled and explained that there had been some reorganization of the LLTLF set up. Group A, headed by that illegal Irish immigrant bastard, would take care of all content and talent management. It would be their job to schedule events, book comics, decide on themes and so on.

Group B’s job would be to take care of all things that happened behind the scenes. This included event management, finance (wink, nudge), logistics, fundraising, presentations, out-reach to community and so on. While both groups had important jobs, Emily explained, B would be much bigger by virtue of the much larger mandate. We had dozens of things to do. And in order to do everything she had expanded the group by recruiting a few more volunteers from the interns and the administrative staff.

During a new round of introductions it turns out that Chinese Pudding (Real name: Jennifer Huang) briefly worked in event management in Hong Kong before enrolling for an MBA at the London School of Business. Jenny, as we are all supposed to call her informally, will take care of all event management, publicity, media and press. Emily asked me to take care of Finance and clarified that Tom himself wanted me to do this. I told her that I was honoured by the responsibility. After this she went around allocating a few other leaders. All in all, the group now has 37 members and 5 leads (Event, Finance, Community, Funding and In-house Communications).