Debashish was just like any other bengali boy from Kolkatta. Except that he came from a very distinguished family (even that shouldn’t be surprising as every other family in Kolkatta claims to be distinguished in its own right). His father was a doctor who had graduated from the Calcutta National Medical College (CMC as they say) and mother was an engineer from the Jadavpur Engineering College. His father was a “distinguished” faculty member in the Nilratan Sircar Medical College. While mother worked in a distinguished position in the government.

There you have it, the poor guy had to choose one of the two careers he and every other bengali lad get to choose even before they are born. Once, when we was ten, he made the mistake of saying that he wanted to grow up to to be another Sachin Tendulkar. Poor Debu. The repercussions of his misdeeds that followed soon after is best left unsaid.

Debu eventually followed his mom’s steps and got through (Cracked it guys !) the prestigious IIT-JEE exams. The guy managed to get a 57th rank all – India !

“Infosys’etey join korish shona ! naro kaku’r chelesh okhaney join koreychilo IIT- powai thekey pass out korey !. tirish hajar payee mashey !! jiboney shunechish ?”

He eventually joins IIT – Kharagpur and taken up computer Science as his stream of specialization.

Fast forward – So debu dada is in his third year all set to join one of the PSUs in the final year. In early January of 2005, Debu gets to read an article on the college board of a senior of his – Partho Das, two year senior to him who has got a  job with an investment Bank called Goldman Sachs with a starting salary of Rs 1Crores. Debu almost fell down hearing that figure. Management was something that Debu used to abhor for quite some time now. But then a crore vis-a-vis a paltry amount of Rs 30,000 as an engineer trainee with ONGC ? You gotta be kidding me !

Now debu always looked upto Partho Das ! He was a suave bong brother who has been there and seen that. Stayed in U.S. of A for quite some years. Stayed in London for some years too. When Partho talks people listen !Debu was always impressed with such kind. Which bengali wouldn’t ? They spend their lives in and around adda’s. If you can talk you are considered human …and if you talk well…you are considered above others ! “It was no wonder” people said when Partho got through IIM-A.

“He has the potential to become a great manager ! He can motivate people …lead them ….” they said.

Fast Forward four years – Debu is a passout of IIM – Ahmedabad and is posted with Lehman brothers in Singapore. He has a drop-dead gorgeous beauty of a wife from an arranged marriage a year after he passed out. Why wouldn’t he ? Debu broke all past records when he got an offer of Rs 1.2 Crores in day zero ! Debu was quoted extensively on all the Business Magazines in India. They hailed the new generation of Indian managerial talent who are an *integral* part of the best of companies world-wide. Debu’s past accomplishments includes his National Merit Holder scholarship for 10 straight years, umpteen Gold medals in inter-school debates and was all over the news. They said he has a brilliant mind and a sure shot CEO in the years to come. His father-in-law would have walked ten thousand miles to have married his daughter off to such a lad.

Two days back debu lost his job. One of the most talented students hailed by the corporate India went down with an organization that was reputed to recruit the best of the best.

At the moment as I am writing, the bank is valued at about $2.5 billion in New York, even though its fund management business is estimated to be worth about $10 billion alone. The bank controls assets of about $600 billion.

The U.S government’s reluctance to bankroll a rescue deal of Lehman Brothers triggered another steep fall in the bank’s share price on Friday (September 13, 2008), which dropped 14 per cent to $3.65.

USD 3.65!!!!!!!!!!

That’s like 165 Indian Rupees ! That’s like the amount I spend on coffees everyday …or to be even more precise – It buys be two cups of Lattes from the Cafe that I got to near my office.

The question that we need to ask ourselves is why ?

WHY a bank with an impeccable reputation such as Lehman Bros, that employs the brightest of the lads graduating from the *best* of the B-Schools of the world couldn’t have had the INTELLIGENCE to have realized that they have invested way too much of other peoples money into Home mortgages.

Doesn’t the bank not have even the basic of arbitrages and risk analysis and correction mechanisms in place to have risked falling into the dark hole that other firms whom we haven’t even heard about are giving it good company ?

Do these firm have the same talent as Lehman Bros ? I guess not. Possibly not rather.

Is it that the Brightest are not the best ?

Now you tell me …

What’s more incredible is the ignorance of all of it ! Why ? Just 2 days back, someone asked me quite authoritatively to find out when exactly are we all dying. She says that her daughter was checking out all the news channel to find out when exactly are the black-holes getting formed. I loved her confidence ! People, I have noticed are so very confident when it comes to Astronomy ! They don’t have even a inkling of the science of it. I don’t even bother to find out where all this “learning” has taken place. If I heard it was “Aaj Tak”, I would probably kill myself. The quality of news reporting that I am unfortunate enough to see these days is very dangerous at worst and Pathetic at best !

Now coming back to LHC, I was fortunate enough to go through this interesting web site from a Astrophysicist called Ethan Siegel. Here are some statistics to say how improbable it is to even think about the world ending due to this experiment.

So, the LHC has turned on, and has circulated protons both clockwise and counterclockwise inside of its main ring. These particles, at their fastest, will get up to 7 TeVs of energy apiece, which means they’ll be moving at 99.99999898% the speed of light! To give you a feel for how close that is, the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. In the LHC, these protons move at 299,792,454.9 meters per second. Pretty damned impressive!

The world hasn’t been destroyed yet, obviously, but what happens if one of those collisions makes a black hole? What is the worst case scenario for the Earth here?

Well, the most massive black hole one can possibly make is if all of the energy from the collision goes into making that black hole. Let’s assume that one million of these collisions occur, and all of them make black holes, which can then merge together (again, this is incredibly, unrealistically optimistic, but let’s go for it). For the maximum collision energy at CERN (14 TeV), E = mc^2-14 grams. That’s 25 tells us that the end black hole would have a mass of 2.5 x 10femtograms, which means this black hole would have an event horizon trillions upon trillions of times smaller than the size of a proton.

Now, maybe you think it’s reasonable that this black hole, if it’s created at rest, would simply fall into the Earth, consuming all the particles in its path. Let’s assume it could do this, in fact, and let’s find out how much mass it would eat.

As it falls into the Earth, it starts running into protons, and let’s assume whenever it runs into one, it gobbles it up. By time it gets to the center of the Earth, it will have eaten about 10^-16 grams of matter, which means it can grow by about 0.4% in the 30 minutes or so it takes to get to the center of the Earth. It will then head towards the other side, gobbling up that matter until it stops in the upper mantle, and then heads back towards the center of the Earth. It should do this over and over, each time gobbling up more matter (at a constant rate of about 4 x 10^-16 grams per hour), each time getting farther and farther away from the Earth’s surface, never to quite reach it again.

At this rate, it would still take three billion years for the black hole to suck in even one gram of matter! So the chances of this happening?

Zero. Not one in 50 million, like Martin Rees says, but zero. This is the worst case scenario, and it still takes billions of years to even eat one gram’s worth!

And if we come back to reality, we learn one more thing. Black holes decay, and the smaller ones decay the fastest. Even if you managed to make this 25 femtogram black hole, it would decay into normal matter incredibly fast. How fast? According to Hawking radiation, this black hole will be gone in 10^-66 seconds, which means, unless there is some incredible new physics (like extra dimensions), we can’t even make a black hole! Why not? Because anything that happens in a time less than the Planck time (10^-43 seconds) cannot physically happen with our current understanding of physics.

So there you have it: the worst case scenario.