In July 2011, I met with a number of attorneys in Mumbai and Delhi. In one meeting with a gentle attorney, he asked my price. I said US$1,000,000.
Prior to my Red Dot visit I sat next to a Japanese gentleman on an airplane. He pretended to be a business person. He spent a considerable portion of the trip explaining to me how the Japanese have little patience for the iHinders. The Hindus, Mr. ちび日本人 asserted, talk much and say nothing. He seemed oblivious to the irony that the Japanese had been talking at me for over a decade and saying nothing.
You've now had more than a decade to prepare. If you are anything like the Japanese, you've managed to get absolutely nothing done, while making a great show of being very busy.
Batter up.
In my third year of law school, I had an informational interview with attorney Herbert Thornhill in New York City. At the time, he was working for one of the Japanese mega-banks. He told me that he went to work for a huge entity because he didn't want to work for an employer that would be subsumed into another. His mega-bank had recently been merged to form his current employer. Is that a mega-mega-bank?
Another interesting point I learned from Atty. Thornhill that day was about Japan. In my job search for my first attorney job, I was not looking for work in Japan. I'd been told new attorneys ought to start their careers with American legal experience for at least the first few years out of law school. That 'wisdom', if it ever was that, is most definitely not true. Newly minted attorneys might do better to get as far away as possible from the corruption and deceit that infects almost every aspect of the American legal industry.
I suspect Mr. Thornhill was obliquely referring to Japan's unwillingness to encourage me to work in Tokyo. In hindsight, I would have called Japan a hedgehog, albeit, the term wasn't yet in vogue. When he suggested that Japan's ship had come in, and wondered aloud why Japan would keep pushing that ship out to sea, I replied that Japan was fine the way it was. Why let in more 黒船？
A few years later, at a symposium regarding the British handover over ill-gotten 香港、a questioner wondered
Why would China kill the goose that laid the golden egg?
The reply was
Chinese history is littered with dead geese.
