Last week, Bertie attended two Diwali parties on the same evening. This must be a record for our reclusive friend, and he certainly had not planned for it to happen that way. Once his niece realised that Bertie and the missus would be going out, she sweet-talked the couple into letting her host a party for her friends at Bertie’s house. A large living room and a well-stocked bar were the main draws. Bertie was told that Gen Z did not care about food and if they got hungry, they would ‘figure’.
The original plan, therefore, was for Bertie and the missus to say a polite hi to the assembled youngsters and exit stage left. On the appointed day, and not unexpectedly, the missus was taking longer than anticipated to get ready, which meant that Bertie had to socialize with the kids a bit more than the planned quick greeting.
Bertie actually likes how Gen Z talk—fast, to the point and irreverent. Whenever Bertie does not understand any slang, he makes it a point to ask, and the kids love nothing more than tutoring a borderline millennial in their dialect. Thus, in a short span of a few minutes, he learned the meaning and etiquette of using the words ‘giving’, ’pookie’ and ‘left no crumbs’. When Bertie mentioned that his favourite ice-cream flavour was vanilla, he got branded a ‘basic ass bitch’ by his niece to all-round guffaws from her friends.
The topic of discussion soon turned to US visas and the weak job market, except for those who have ‘AI/ML’ on their CVs. For the first time, Bertie saw anxiety in those young eyes—most of them freshly minted graduates, about to enter the big bad job market. The kids were talking about how the return on investment (ROI) from a foreign master’s degree or an MBA had diminished considerably and that their Indian graduate degrees were not going to cut it in the job market. As the adult in the group, Bertie was asked what they should do—settle for a sub-par job here and hope to get a postgraduate degree later or swallow the weak ROI and hope that things would eventually turn for the better.
Bertie was saved from answering by the arrival of the missus, who announced that they were getting late as if it were Bertie’s fault. He reflexively apologized and made for the door.
At the subsequent party, calling someone a ‘basic ass bitch’ would have led to instant eviction and a permanent persona non grata status. The crowd here was a mixed group of Bertie’s finance brethren and the missus’s college friends. The main topic of discussion was money and investing. Bertie remembered the last edition of this do, when everyone was falling over each other to show the XIRRs (extended internal rate of returns) that their private bankers had produced by investing in exotic portfolio management service (PMS) and Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) schemes.
This year, though, the hotshot PMS and AIF managers had been dropped from the conversation like hot potatoes. “AI and gold are the only things that matter,” declared one of Bertie’s friends. An impromptu show of hands revealed that everyone owned Nvidia. Bertie was asked for his opinion on a few mainland-listed Chinese AI stocks whose names he could barely pronounce. He deftly made his way to the well-laid buffet, which told him that, unlike Gen Z, millennials thankfully still cared about food.
As he dug into some juicy chicken dumplings, another phone screen was thrust in his face—this time with a long list of metals and their prices. The dreaded Mendeleev’s periodic table and the unpleasant memory of a chemistry test flashed in front of Bertie as he tried to focus on the screen owner’s question. “Platinum—what do you think? And Palladium?” Bertie pointed with the fork to his mouth, indicating the dumpling that was being processed, but the screen owner did not seem to notice. Once Bertie could speak, he asked, “What about Indian equities?”
“Bah!” said the man. “It’s time to go overseas,” he declared with conviction. The contrasting sentiments of the two get-togethers remained with Bertie on the ride back home.
Bertie is a Mumbai-based fund manager whose compliance department wishes him to cough twice before speaking and then decide not to say it after all.