I need more wine to face
2009
Photo by Sigit Mursidi
December 2008
I
found this ad in a corner of one hotel in Jakarta. Although I
consumed it very moderately; admittedly, I sipped a little more wine
to brace the 2009. There are reasons to it. First, my enthusiasm was
already “adjusted” by the financial drama starting December and
culminating just before Christmas:
the rich are behaving so
badly. Then,
sadly by the never-ending animosity in the Middle-East, which gave the
local politicians the legitimate reasons to
use it to their benefit
to my gloom and doom. Secondly, just when my numbskull brain
concluded that the world’s financial fiasco was made in (and was
miraculously contained in) the USA, the India’s pearl company Satyam
got its founder
arrested on
January 9, 2009, the European
press cheered
and finally, as the share
price of Satyam lost about 80% of its value, it also dragged the
Indian Rupee down.
Who
would ever thought that a great company with 53,000 employees with
clients as starry as GE, Nestle, Qantas, and EADS, and the winner of
corporate governance award, could end-up doctoring its balance sheet
by as much as US$1Billion in “variance”? I was expecting that India’s
corporate community would do all that is possible to avoid such a
case. After all, there was a quote by the New York Times that India,
as a country, was actually doing the
macroeconomic-right-things.
Oh
well, all of you, best wishes in treading the beginning of Q1 of
2009. Close your book cleanly, pay your taxes, and start your
business. The 12-1 is almost halfway through.
