Happy Festivus

After 2020, a Festivus airing of grievances feels appropriate, if not cathartic

“I got a lot of problems with you people. Now, you’re going hear about it.” – Frank Costanza

Seinfeld buffs know that today is Festivus. This isn’t the best medium for an aluminium pole or feats of strength, but I can manage an airing of grievances. In no particular order, here’s my list …

• China.

• Investors talking up their book, only to exit the same on the sly.  

• Partisan hacks masquerading as star academics, with glib, vacuous sound-bytes on every topic.

• Dean of XL whose DCF ‘valuation’ note for loss-making business is a combination of spurious guesswork and fake precision (“Cost of capital to rise from 6.50% to 7.23% by 2031”).

• Dhanda soru kids, moralizing on world’s problems, without having lived a day on own money.

• Empirically disproven theories that just don’t die (Exchange rate forecasts galore, despite no model passing a back-test for even a few currency-pairs).

• NRIs on perennial India fault-finding trips, physical & virtual. Slumdog Millionaire, sans music.

• Ed-tech and psycho parents uniting to ruin childhood.

• Veritable Woodstock of vested interests in India’s worst covid hotspot with no mask, distancing or legality. Yet, not one super-spreader reference in media.

• Investor, lucky to manage long-term money, sharing pretentious essays with others who aren’t.

After a year like 2020, my #1 grievance is with an unhelpful bunch of people who made the year feel worse at every stage. That tiny minority of perma bears, perma cribbus and perma cynics with perma grievances, whose voices get mysteriously amplified in media discourse. We’ll mess this up. We’re doing it all wrong. We’ll all die. We’ll never have a life. It’s poetic justice for whiny dementors to wallow in denial and disappointment, while most have put 2020 behind. It’s Festivus, for the rest of us.