I just want the money, honey!

PART 1

I finally got an opportunity to catch up on 'Inside Job' today. Directed by Charles Ferguson, the mind behind the awesome 'No end in sight', and dealing with the intricacies of the global financial crisis, the film tries to present the well-known (I hope you have been following up on the Sensex for the last 2 years) happenings of the fateful 2008 sub-prime crisis. While the crisis itself has been a subject of numerous documentaries and books in the short span of 2 years, one thing which stands out as far as Inside job is concerned, is the fact that the origins and the after-effects are presented in a lucid, simple manner. Moreover, a rarely seen side of academia has been thoroughly probed-Greed.

While hedonism is indeed a much-debated topic, I believe that the idea behind it is pretty simple. You just don't give a damn about anybody else. So while the bankers and legislators were colluding among themselves to make the most of their share of the pie, we were enjoying the apparent boons of soaring share prices and investments. So, everybody sort of missed the big picture, and it took a very subtle evil to shake this mirage-greed. As a Chinese economist puts it in the movie:

"Real engineers make bridges; financial engineers make dreams. And when these dreams turn into nightmares, the whole world suffers."

Should we not be thinking in the long term, because every problem of ours is explained to us as being caused by a lack of oversight, or simply short term gains.

PART 2

The best one-liner I've heard in a long time:

"If IIT were a human, what it eats today, it shits an year later!"

As it turns out, moving papers to and fro from one department to the other in our institute is such a huge ordeal, that NREGS can easily be implemented here to feed a few hapless souls. Red-tapism can easily be countered by, yes, digitizing all procedural framework. Heck, I think this might turn out to be a useful project for some of the final year students, who often crib about the lack of utility of their 'year long effort'.

Life is ultimately about karma, believe it or not!