Welcome to my website

Probably, it is a sign of old age that one wishes to have a website in one's name - an anxiety to record one's footprints on the sands of time. Billions have walked and billions will. It perhaps is childish to record one's own. Nonetheless, I have chosen to proceed. If I don't indulge myself, who else will?

The site is meant to share with the world - most specifically my friends, relatives and acquaintances - what I read, what I write and what I do, other than for a living. That is, for the soul. The main object of the site is that it should facilitate a two-way communication between the host - me - and the guests and between guests themselves.

You can safely ignore the link to my biography that follows and explore the other links that this site has to offer. You would not have missed much. If you chose to stay with me, you probably are part of my family!

I was born in Chennai (India) on October 5, 1963 and grew up for the most part in Madurai the town famous for its Meenakshi Amman Temple - about 500 kilometres, south of Chennai.

I finished my high school (O Levels/X Std.) from Sethupathi Higher Secondary School in 1978 and was among the first batch of students who joined pre-university after X Standard (10+2+3) in Tamil Nadu. For higher secondary education, I moved to Railway Mixed Higher Secondary School. The simple reason was that the school offered courses in Commerce, Accountancy and Mathematics.

For my Bachelor's degree, I joined The American College in 1980. One of the popular alumni of the college is the Tamil film comedian, Vivek.

Drawing inspiration from the plans of friends who were preparing for the Common Admissions Test of the Indian Institutes of Management, I began preparing myself and appeared for the entrance exam in December 1982. As luck would have it, I was selected to join the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

It is not clear whether history would record me as the youngest student of the batch of 1985 or the second youngest. Suffice to say that at a ripe young age of 21 years and 7 months, I joined Madras Refineries Limited in May 1985. A Government of India undertaking, it has since been re-christened as Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited .

In August 1990, left for the United States to pursue a doctoral programme in Financial Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst - a very picturesque university town in New England.

Successfully defended my dissertation on the 'Empirical Behaviour of Exchange Rates' on January 29, 1994 and moved to Zurich in March 1994 to join the Economic Research Department at the Union Bank of Switzerland (now simply known as UBS) as a Currency Economist.

In November 1996, I moved to Credit Suisse in Zurich and began working in their macro and fixed income research department, attached to the Private Banking division from January 1997. Moved to Credit Suisse in Singapore in June 1999 and been continuing with them since then.

There is this small personal detail that I had omitted to mention in the narration of my life's journey above. I got married to Ramya on January 29, 1992 at Chennai. She holds a law degree from the Chennai Law College and a degree in Paralegal studies from the US. We live in Singapore with our two small children, Dhanya and Vyas .