I don’t understand this hoopla about securitized products. Aji would have agreed with me. She did the same thing, making amba-barfi.
She displayed pure genius on the sub-prime front with 'Beri-chya-vadya'. For the ignoramii, 'Beri' is the gunk left at the bottom of the pot after making ghee. Aji scraped off all the tar, insured it with liberal amounts of powdered sugar and cut that into squares. As kids, we were allowed only the junior tranches - the broken-edged, crumbled, CCC rated barfis on the edge of the pan. Guests got the perfect cuts, smoky-sweet squares, fit for all credit & blood-sugar scores!
We learnt to hedge early on, trading off a scolding from aai with some pampering from aji and vice versa. Summer vacations & card games were our initiation into the market. Anyone who has held on to a king and a queen in badam-saat because the seven hasn’t been played yet, knows the agony of a market choke-up. We called options too, playing 'paach-teen-don'. If you made more hands than required, you had an option in the next round, to call for a card or a hand from the loser. What happens if it was almost evening? Someone would get up and declare that it was time to play cricket. Options be damned.
That’s the beauty of being a Jimmy Cayne or a Dick Fuld. You can get up and go away to play another game.
