Yet again for the fifth or sixth time I have been thwarted at my attempts to imbibe some culture. And this will be the last time. Finished. No more. If I want I will read Wikipedia entries of Al Pacino and Amadeus and Homo Sapien Number 2. But I am never stepping inside a gallery or a museum again. I cannot handle this humiliation every few months.

Before leaving I left my name and number at the Hermione Gallery in case they have other performance art projects which require paid volunteers.

But otherwise I am never ever entering a culture place again.

23 May 2007

5.32 p.m.

Leaving for Heathrow at 3 a.m.

Unfortunately I have no packing to do whatsoever.

Dufresne fellows are so kanjoos man. I was hoping they would put me up in some hotel in Brussels for a night. Instead buggers are sending me in the early morning and then flying me back at night. Day trip it seems. What a miserly thing to do.

Johnson chettan in Thrissur keeps saying that some people are so miserly ‘that if a 5 paise coin falls in a pile of shit, they will lick it up with the tongue’. London HR is full of shit lickers.

At least they are sending me on business class in BMI airlines. Even a four-star hotel would have got me some points on the American Express card. Wasted opportunity.

Met Tom for a quick meeting in his room. He is going to set up a series of monthly transfers into the LLTLF corpus account. Two million a month or something like that. I think that is too much for the foundation to spend in even six months of events and fundraisers. Tom told me to make a 3 year plan and work this number in somehow. He said the justification was simple. This way he would ensure that LLTLF was decoupled from Lederman’s broader annual CSR cycle and had enough funding to commit to a 3 year cycle of events. Also apparently this gives us an opportunity to ‘invest the surplus corpus in risk-free investments that can then potentially support the foundation in perpetuity’. I did not fully understand but I told him it was a very good idea.

Then he winked at me and told me to start Enroning those investments. (I have no idea.) I laughed and winked back at him. After this he called in Sugandh and told him to do the paperwork for the monthly transfers. Sugandh immediately noted this down on a new BlackBerry. (They gave him a BlackBerry! It is the new Bold. Even I don’t have a Bold. What the fuck man.)