Meeting with an Indian finance geek

With my mothers help, I found a few relatives in the financial field. Dewang seemed the most knowledgeable. Kotak is the best local firm around. So, I took the rick to Kotak's Kalina office. Walking into the aircon was an immediate relief. It was not a large campus. Only a couple of buildings off the main road, concrete walls secluding them from the noise. I asked the receptionist and she pointed me up - "Managing director ka office 4'th floor". It was the corner room and Dewang was in a meeting. I made myself comfortable on the cushy office chair. It was even chillier than the rest of the building. Dewang appeared soon, in a thick half sweater and apologized. It usually is that cold, unfortunately. He realized we had never met. I told him that Divya didi had mentioned him very often. I found out that we were relatives from two different angles. He was my cousin from one, and my nephew-in-law from another. It is a bit odd to think that Divya didi, 15 years my senior, is my niece and her father, almost 40 years senior, is my cousin. We had conveniently chosen to refer to them as didi and mama. These things were common in feudal families in those days. My maternal grandpa was the youngest of 8, his eldest two sisters being almost 30 years senior to him. The two were already married and had mothered children before his birth. How we were cousins, I forgot to ask. But he recounted. It was through Surat, where his brother and sister owned a nursing home of high repute. What mattered was our present overlap of interest. He had managed his own mutual fund when younger and was now a banker at a leading firm. I had seen Chicago's financial world. My grand niece, or maybe niece, Mansi  was now a student at Wharton, also studying finance, the second or third person in a large envelope of relatives to hit the shores of North America in recent years.

We got down to business quickly and he was pretty quick to point that Indian investors were very risk averse. After what had happened on Walls Street, it would be hard to convince pensioners to invest in complex quant products. I told him about my experience in Chicago and my long association with ill-fated CDO's. He did not think it was impossible to find firms interested in hiring a Walls Street banker to succor decision making, but he was not very sure if the quant route was really palpable. I did not feel disheartened. I was certain I wanted to settle down in India. I discussed my future options with a few other colleagues of his and they did seem to know what I had seen. It was an interesting conversation but I almost felt like quitting finance to do something less exotic, locally. When will India allow unleashing investor appetite for exotics ? Hope, it is soon. We need to catch up with those East Asian tigers. Meanwhile, I am actually taking the idea of returning to generic physics and engineering related computing research.