Wise Man Say... 08.03

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

- Anon

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Wise Man Say... 08.02

The Best Biryani in New York

Omigod! I think I may just have eaten the best biryani there is in New York City! Sangam is that proverbial hole-in-the-wall restaurant (it only seats six) that serves fantastic food from a limited menu. For most such places, the hype usually overshadows the food, but for Sangam, believe the hype, man (or at least get there fast, before the hype does overshadow the food). 

As for the hype, here's what you need to know. I actually found and ate every last grain of rice of the biryani that we got on our last visit, literally - including a few that had fallen off my plate and on the table (much to the disgust of my date). I gnawed at the lamb bones. I even ate the frikkin' raita! I thought of my Mom.

In addition to the biryani (of which there are lamb, chicken and vegetarian variants), Sangam makes a Nargisi roll to die for. My only grouch is that they use ground chicken instead of lamb or beef. And for dessert, there is phirni, which, no exaggeration, will take you back to Birhana Road in Kanpur.

They have some vegetarian dooh-dahs - samosas, veggie rolls and the like - which are probably quite good too (I have no idea, 'cause I didn't try them - see no reason to).

Here's the kicker - Two people can eat there for under 30 bucks! The biryanis go for $7 - $9 depending on what you get, the rolls are $8 for a pair and the phirni is $3. And... on weekends they're open till 2 in the morning!

Someone please wake me - this has got to be a dream.

Apparently Ishrat Ansari, one of the co-owners started the restaurant because his wife made the biryani for some friends, word spread and soon they were deluged with requests for more. I say, good call Ishrat.

 

Sangam, 190 Bleecker St., New York, NY 10012. Ph: 212.228.4648. Open 1PM - 11PM M-T; 1PM - 2AM F-S.

READY! AIM! ........... fire

Given the financial turmoil that Wall Street and most of it's players are in, massive layoffs amongst the heavy hitters of the financial world was to be expected. Everyone on the Street knew that they were coming and in their own way, perhaps even prepared for it. However, the layoffs in this cycle have been different than in those of crises past.

In 1987 after the stock market crash, in 1998 in the aftermath of the LTCM and Russian default crisis and in 2001 after the bursting of the dot com bubble and 9/11, there was a huge amount of bloodletting on the streets of Downtown New York. But it was done en masse, publicly and in one fell swoop. Merill Lynch laid off close to 20,000 employees in 2001, over 10,000 in the fourth quarter alone, undone by the double whammy of the bursting of the tech bubble and Sept. 11.

However, the layoffs in this cycle are markedly different. They are almost being done on the down low, the corporate equivalent of the 3 AM knock on the door. The New York Times in an article called them 'stealth layoffs' and that 'the first clue that someone is gone can be e-mail messages that are returned to senders from a former colleague’s inactivated corporate address.' People who have worked at their companies for a decade or more have been, and are being, shown the door. And in the face of all the 'different opportunities being pursued' and 'different directions being gone in' and the amount of 'time being spent with the family' all around us, almost no public acknowledgement is been made of the people leaving.

Although Wall Street has announced the elimination of about 65,000 jobs in 2008, this time the layoffs have been spread out over weeks and months. As a result of this death by a thousand cuts system of layoffs there is an atmosphere of 'fear, paranoia and anger' amongst employees as they wonder who will be next or when the bells will toll for them. The constant and ever present of losing their jobs, of not knowing in the morning if they will be unemployed by the evening and most of all, not knowing when it will stop is taking its own heavy toll. One banker interviewed by the New York Times pretty much hit the nail on the head when he said that before the layoffs there was a sense of loyalty with the bank, a sense of pride, "that they got my back." But he said that that idea of loyalty had gone from most banks.

Most Wall Street financial institutions have extensive orientation programs for new employees and one of the things stressed is how the institution takes care of its own, even talking about its 'alumni networks' and the excellent business relations it has with its former employees. When new people join the firm, they introduced with great pomp and pride at the weekly meetings but when they leave (voluntarily or otherwise), absolutely no mention is made of it. It's as if the person never even existed.

Call me naive but the realization that an organization could be so mercenary in kicking to the curb employees it felt that it didn't need anymore was kind of shocking. And how is it that most of the financial institutions on Wall Street are behaving the same way in how they deal with layoffs? Like some sort of fashion fad, everyone seems to have gotten the same idea at the same time. I wonder how that works - do CEOs of major investment banks get together and develop a common firing strategy for the year? Bizarre.

And sad.

Still Standing... barely.

Ah, it feels good to be back - I think. Professionally, the past 10 months have been a roller-coaster ride of epic proportions, and even now, when I am all puked out, it still goes on. In the last year Wall Street and the US economy have gone through a slide that is historic in scale. When I joined The Bank last year, business was at record highs. We were on our way to having a banner year and in the grip of some serious hubris - we could do no wrong! People were lining up to buy just about any product that the Street would sell.

And then, the bottom fell out. A combination of banks and financial institutions making loans to people who didn't even come close to qualifying for them; selling loans that were little more than lipstick on pigs and selling securities that promised to turn base metal to gold has led the Street to the brink of the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression.

About a year later, nearly 20,000 people have lost their jobs on Wall Street alone, with no signs of the bleeding stopping anytime soon; the venerable Bear Stearns has ceased to exist, foundering from it's perch on the Fortune 500 in less than a week; and fear and paranoia stalks those of us still standing. Going to work every morning not knowing if one will have a job at the end of the day makes for a whole new definition of stress.

A few years from now, if not already, histories will be written about the 'Great Credit Crunch of 2007' and learned scholars will try to explain what happened, why and who did what to whom. It will all be very well researched and footnoted and annotated and will become part of business school syllabi. But, as Rose Bukater says of surviving the shipwreck at the beginning of Titanic, "the [actual] experience of it [is] somewhat less clinical."

An experience I would never want to relive.