Gulp. I have asked Dominic to send me the final proposal.

So many things have gone bad this week. I am sure/hoping this will go well.

9.03 p.m.

Should I spend that money in my account before clarifying with the bank? I am not so sure.

9.05 p.m.

Bought a Raveena Tandon DVD box-set online. Great value. 16 movies. Not very expensive.

8 April 2007

7.45 a.m.

Dominic is a criminal genius. He is the Dawood Ibrahim of consultants.

His revised salary estimates are seven times as big as mine. And mine were already inflated hajaar.

I flipped through the numbers and they are insane. He is going to charge Lederman 12,000 pounds a month for an analyst, 16,000 pounds a month for an associate and so on. Unbelievable. Even with just 7 consultants working for 6 months, Dominic has drawn up a total salary estimate of over a million pounds.

My god. What a fraud.

So basically I have to tell Tom that we’ll be staffing the new Lederman–Dufresne project team with 2 analysts, 2 associates, 1 senior associate, 1 manager and 1 vice-president. Dominic, of course, will be the VP. I will be one of the associates. There are profiles of the other 5 people in the document. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any of them.

I have to run now. I am hoping Tom doesn’t make too big a deal out of the whole thing. I just want to get this shit out of the way and get down to the job of consulting.

Is that too much to ask for?

10.05 p.m.

YAAAAWWWWWWWWNNNN.

So tired. And so bored.

The meeting with Tom took less than fifteen minutes. He flipped through the document, laughed for a really long time, and then assured me that he’d get the board of directors to approve it. Meanwhile my first job, in return for the project being approved, is to make sure that the LLTLF budget for the next six months is at least 7 million pounds. I was going to ask him for details. But Tom told me to talk less and fraud more. We both chuckled and then I left.

I told Dominic that the project was on. So he then decided to convene another meeting after lunch.

Fucking tired Diary. So far since coming to London I have sat through at least 60 meetings and conference calls. Now you know that there are few people as passionate about the power of teams and collaboration as I am. And I have been like that since even before my MBA. But sometimes some of these meetings seem absurd. Last month there was a yoga pre-workshop meeting to decide if the company should organize a yoga workshop for employees. And because I am Indian—and therefore an expert on yoga—they asked me to attend and give inputs. They asked me stupid questions about whether pranayama could lead to weightloss and if tantric yoga improved sex life.