The Death of Drama

I can’t stop growing up. When I started blogging in 2004, I still carried a certain level of teenage angst and as a result, most of my previous posts now resident here at WordPress had to be tagged with ‘mope’, ‘emo’, ‘rant’ or ‘rage’, or sometimes all of them at the same time. I had [...]

Why I Write

Why I Write
24th May, 2007
In just under 16 hours, I will be going to probably one of the most important interviews in my life so far. I had sensed that 2007 was going to be an important year, but this interview really has all the feel of a last chance even with the year only [...]

The melancholy of two thousand and seven

Now that this year’s other new year is done, I find myself feeling the full ominous weight of 2007’s significance and implications for my future. I am not sure when it started, but the current year is rather worryingly taking on a semi-mythical status in my mind. Several factors stand out to convince me that [...]

My job market paper

Virtually ungoverned
17th December, 2006
China is becoming the new frontier for those studying the internet’s encroachment into the physical world. Even the country’s central bank feels insecure: in November 2006, Li Chao, spokesman for The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said that virtual money had become such a worry that the central bank is drafting regulations [...]

London pleasures

Speak, memory…
October 2005
New home, new job, old (returning) friends and old problems.
It is a funny feeling to go into a new job already knowing that it was the wrong choice. No matter how much I tried to convince myself, being a consultant is just not for me. Hours and days and weeks went by, and [...]

Last leg

I don’t think I am the right kind of person to get into a debate about football but nevermind. I have always imagined that one must be slightly overweight and half drunk to command the sort of presence needed to get one’s point across in a noisy pub-like environment. Nevertheless, here is what I have [...]

Eleventh hour

I am sure that I have said somewhere before that I do some of my best (only) work when under pressure. Well, the deadline for applications to this internship at the Economist is mindnight tonight. At least I got it in on time this year. Last year I think I was two days late. Anyway, [...]

Backlash

No controversial article this time I am afraid, though not for the lack of trying. I have four pieces in the pipeline and all have to be done next week. At this rate, The Economist is going to get four submissions from me, each for a different internship/department. I cannot even send in the same [...]

Effortless

Some friends seem to be oddly interested in my wannabe-journalistic exploits so I am going to post up another sample article purposefully written for another internship position. This one is for the Financial Times. With a restrictive 500-word limit, I am not sure how they are going to judge the entries and this feels like [...]

My sin, my soul.

I have finally managed to send off one internship application. This one needed a huge 1000-word sample article. And it is not even the one I really want to do. This is the Nico Colchester Fellowship prize offered jointly by the FT and The Economist, which (I think) lets one write about politics and/or Europe [...]