AGAINST ALL ODDS. My Autobiography Excerpts. Chapter One.

FINALLY: These Are The excerpts From My Upcoming AUTO-BIOGRAPHY " AGAINST ALL ODDS". With The Permission Of The Publisher Here I Present The First Chapter Excerpts.

Chapter One: AGAINST ALL ODDS

It was around 5:30 a.m. I must have been sitting there in my chair for hours. I kept looking out the windows of my office. There was a silence of death surrounding me. There was not a single person on the entire floor of the executive offices. This was the same office that used to be full of people, all KMS Investment bank floors were deserted tonight. No mad traders screaming their orders, no sales assistants running with their hands full of trading tickets racing to fill the orders before the prices change on the financial exchanges. My phones were not ringing off the hook. There was not a line of people waiting to see me as I went from one meeting to the next. Walking people back to one of the three doors of my office after the meeting, seeing them off at the door as my secretary would be waiting to escort them to the elevators.
Tonight, it did not matter what the financial markets around the world were doing. I did not care what happens in a few hours to the New York Stock Exchange, or where the dollar opens up or how the pound closes. When the sun would rise today, there would be one less player in the financial world.
I stood up and walked towards the glass windows. I could see the bright lights of Brooklyn across the east river. I was on the 24th floor of 110 Wall Street. I would see one or two cars driving by on the FDR drive. My office was on the east end of Wall Street. I could not stand there for more than a few minutes, my legs were hurting me from sitting in my chair, I had cramps or may be my thoughts had become too heavy for my legs to carry its weight. I do not know what it was but I had to sit down again.
I started to walk towards the sitting area in my office. As I got closer to it my mind brought back a flurry of memories at the speed of light. This was the same couch where the Prime Ministers and heads of States had sat discussing fiscal policies and economic reforms with me. This sitting area had played host to United States Senators and Congressmen, political hopefuls looking to get campaign funding from me. People from royal families and Princes from my Arab brother countries had sat here and informed me of their intentions to liberalize their fiscal regulations. Just last week I had sat here and closed a $980 million dollar take over deal involving 7 international commercial and investment banks. This was the same sofa where I had put my sons to sleep whenever they came to visit me during the day. The reason for my success, my mother, had sat here and prayed to Allah to keep bestowing his blessings upon her son. But now, the same hand carved coffee table and those sofas were here to serve only one purpose, to hold a man whose legs were giving up, to give comfort and support his body. I was cherishing the peaceful silence of the surroundings amid the cyclone of thoughts going through my mind.
I had trained myself for years to think positively. I craved situations where I could create out of chaos. I knew subconsciously that there was not a situation that does not hold a positive aspect in it. It does not matter what the situation is what matters is how you perceive the situation to be. If you think that it will work against you than you close off the wonderful window of creativity your mind has and start to concentrate on what the negative results of that situation will be on your life. I believed in the power of the most creative thing in the entire universe, mind. And I had it. So what I had to preserve was not something of any tangible value, something that will reassure the world that I was still on top, or I was still successful. What I had to guard was my positive thoughts and my ability to understand the situation from every conceivable angel.
I had to do what I was good at, keeping my cool. Let the world crumble down around you and you stand there like a pillar of strength, that was me. Even though it had not even been 15 hours since my bank had closed down. Or I had lost almost $75 million dollars of my personal stock value because of no fault of my own at the age of 33 years. Right now, what mattered was how I plan out a strategy to combat the situation in hand. When I conquer the present I guarantee my future. It felt like a war was about to begin. And I had to win because accepting defeat would be like living without oxygen. It’s simply not possible. It was not an option for me to give up. I was not built like that. I had not trained my mind to come up with solutions, fight negativity, create, build, think bigger ideas and live a life of fulfillment to surrender to circumstances. This was my moment of calling. And I had only two choices, either to give in or to rise again. Rise and show the world that it is not money or visible affluence that made me successful, but it was my strength that brought me to the top of investment banking from the middle class streets of Karachi. I had to show the world that the ultimate period of test in a person’s life is not how he reacts in the moments of glory and success but how he shows courage and clear leadership vision in the times of despair. Success is not rising to the top alone, greater success to me was to rise to the top again when the world has written you off based on their understanding of success, and not mine.
I got up from my office because I wanted to visually reinforce to my mind by walking around and looking at what I had created that became such a threat to my enemies. I decided to walk around my entire floor and when I got done walking the executive floor I took down an elevator to visit my other floors. There were papers all over the place. Desks were emptied out earlier during the day by the employees. Office doors were left open. Phones were off the hook. It seemed like a hurricane had selectively swept only through KMS floors leaving behind the signs of its sudden appearance and its quick exit. These were the same offices where my casual visit would promote excitement amongst the employees of this bank. There would be people running around giving me briefs and inviting me to come have a cup of coffee in their offices. But tonight, these floors had replaced those people with a barrage of papers. Doors were left open and there was no one to welcome me in. It felt like the coffee pot sitting in the extreme right corner of the floor was looking and laughing at me. Except a few security guards in the lobby, I was all alone in the entire building. It was the first time I had realized what it feels like to be a person who the world was running after in the morning and not a sole to comfort you the same night. Only because in the morning I headed the institution which was growing at a speed which was envy of Wall Street and the same night I was chairman of a bank which had closed down its doors due to heavy losses in its trading. I owed it all to my head trader. Just like the chairman of Barrings Bank owed its collapse to its wiz trader Leeam Neesan. It is lonely at the top, this old saying had come true in its physical being. I did not bother me because I had never drawn my strength from crowds of people around me. It was the reverse for me. I had drawn pleasure and purpose in giving strength to others, to motivate others and to guide them on their paths of life, what ever they may have been. I spoke to the under privileged high school children around the country, I spoke to fortune 500 executives, I spoke at the universities and colleges, telling all of them my story. Giving them a living proof of what you can become if you have a different way of thinking. And all of this motivated me. Because I wanted to go back every time and show them how I had improved and give them inspiration.
I got back into the elevator and push the 24th floor button. Lights would illuminate the signs as the elevator passed every floor, signs that had KMS written on them. Reminding me of my ascent. I walked out onto the black Italian marble floor from the elevator and walked back into my office.
The lights in my office were off and I did not even remember when I had turned them off. As I sat down in my chair I could feel the bright lights from the flat screen computer monitors penetrating my eyes. All the monitors were scrolling down information from every financial market of the world. Headlines scrolling down the screens. Information being provided to make the most prudent financial decisions. In my business, information was the most precious commodity- just like what Michael Douglas said in the movie Wall Street.
I picked up a pen and started to write down a plan of action. What I would do and how I would fight the situation and turn it in my favor. At that time it seemed almost impossible but I kept writing. The more I wrote the more I understood the gravity of the problem facing me. This way of writing was not working. I decided to take a different approach. The Benjamin Franklin approach. The U.S. President Benjamin Franklin when faced with a problem used a very innovative approach. He would take a piece of blank paper, draw a line right in the middle and write on left top side of that sheet of paper the word "Pros" and on the right top side of the paper he would write the word "Cons". Then he would begin to list all the pros of tackling a problem, numbering each of them for counting purposes. He would do the same thing with right side of the page under the heading cons and list all the cons of not tackling the problem in a certain way. He would continue writing until he ran out of options on both sides. Than he would count all the reasons on either sides and which ever side had more reasons, he would take it from there and elaborate further. This approach, what it does is that it reinforces to your subconscious mind the very reason for taking or not taking a particular action. It shows you what you stand to lose if you do not take a certain action requiring your immediate attention. This was one of the many approaches I had used in the past and it worked for me without fail every time. And it worked this time as well.
Sun was coming up and I had been up for more than 36 hours by now. These were no ordinary 36 hours. A lot had happened and a lot more was awaiting me as the day comes up. I needed some coffee to keep me up. I had a long day ahead of me. I had to have meetings with my lawyers, call the major clients and brief them in detail about the situation. Even though the news had traveled around the world like jungle fire, I had not had the time to grasp it myself entirety let alone talk in detail with the clients. I had not taken any calls during the day except the ones which were extremely urgent and necessary. There was no coffee made in the office and I did not know how to operate the coffee machine. It was the first time that there was no one in the office to make some coffee. I had to go down to the street vendor. I took the elevator down and as I walked out of the elevator, I heard a familiar voice ask me something, I turned around. It was Randy. The night shift security officer. How are you Mr. Khan ? he asked. Those three words "how are you" never felt so strange before. I felt I could have given him a story in reply. But I decided other wise. With a big smile on my face, I said, never been better Randy. With this reply, I had begun my journey of never letting anyone know how much I was hurting inside. I had taken the first step towards what was to become an art of concealing my real feelings when ever someone would ask as to how I felt.
As I walked out of the building and walked towards the vendor’s cart I felt the cold chill of a typical Manhattan morning in the month of February. Somewhere in the distance, I heard some birds sing. This reminded me of what Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the late mother of the President, John F. Kennedy, had once said, "Birds sing after a storm, why should not we." She was right.