•Vinay Sitapati: In one column, you have made a passing reference to Satyam and Raju. You made the larger point that there is a huge trust problem. Are you collapsing old-fashioned fraud like Satyam’s and bad investment issues which has taken place in America? The trust problem of Satyam and Lehman Brothers are completely different.

I don’t think that Lehman Brothers was a trust problem per say. I think it was an unsustainable business. On Wall Street, things go on and on until they don’t. Lehman Brother’s just got caught up in that. As did so many companies that got over leveraged.

I got to know Ramalinga Raju because he reached out to me,originally, to tell me about Satyam’s outsourcing to villages and that was the first time I wrote about him. The second time was when I wrote about 9/11 and the Raju Foundation working in villages. He seemed very intelligent. He had to be pretty intelligent to pull this off. He was a very smart guy and I don’t mean in a crafty way, I mean you can have a really interesting conversation with him. This has left me very sad. Was the charitable work he showed me a fake too? I have no idea. I never had any real idea about Satyam’s business.

What this whole crisis between Citibank and Lehman Brothers has done is that now you have to live with much more uncertainty in your life. I have a phrase, ‘Are you Madoff proof?” He has become an adjective, he deserves to be an adjective.

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