Rohan Weerasinghe is the chosen one– chosen to head a major New York law firm, that is. Weerasinghe is now the Senior Partner at Shearman & Sterling. An American of Sri Lankan descent, he becomes the first brown person EVER to ascend such great heights.
From the firm’s press release:
Weerasinghe, 54, was previously head of the Capital Markets Group, and is a member of the firmÂ’s Policy Committee. He joined Shearman & Sterling in 1977 and was elected to the partnership in 1985. Born in Sri Lanka, Weerasinghe was educated in the United States and holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar. Weerasinghe earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College summa cum laude.
Do you think the Harvard Annual-giving people call him three times as much? I’m just asking…
Still wondering why this is a big deal? According to Columbia J-school Prof Sree Sreenivasan,
This is a major achievement for a desi lawyer (and on par with Rajat Gupta’s becoming head of consulting company McKinsey & Co. in 1994).
In fact, this may be a larger opportunity for glee that we thought:
Weerasinghe…is believed to be the first non-white senior partner at a top New York firm.
See? It’s huge!
:+:
Oh, like you could resist using that title. Pffft.
“Now is the hour! ROHIRRIM!”
nerd alert! nerd alert!
I still don’t get it… will someone explain?
Anil, you don’t get a desi getting tops in a law firm or ‘the rohirrim’ comment? If the later, than it’s in reference to ‘Lord of the Rings’. The second book involves the Kingdom of Rohan (get it?) and the claim to fame is Horses, and the riders of Rohan are called Rohirrim.
Yeah, I’m a big LoTR fan …:)
“Rohirrim” is a reference to the warrior horsemen of the land of Rohan in JRR Tolkien’s fictional depictation of ancient Europe, Middle Earth (where the Lord of the Rings series took place).
If I’m not mistaking, that particular quote was said by King Theoden before one of the battles.
it’s a direct quote from Lord of the Rings /LoTR…Rohirrim is “elvish” for ‘People of the Horse-lords’. i made the joke b/c the Rohirrim are from the mythical kingdom of Rohan.
in the final movie, Return of the King, the Captain of the Rohirrim shouts “Now is the hour! Riders of Rohan – oaths you have taken. Now, fulfil them all – to Lord and land!!” as he riles up the troops for battle against those unfortunately-portrayed-as-eastern/brown Orcs. 😉
anil, due to some recent posts/comment threads, i’ve had LoTR on the brain, that’s why this poor, innocent post got saddled with this title.
look, razib…more NERDS!
I dream about the day when a top elite Law Firm will have a Singh or a Weerasinghe in its name. Well, as for now just having Weereasinghe as a senior partner will suffice.
no shame. no shame.
well, i got the reference, so i stand guilty as well….
i dream of a day when brown boys and girls won’t know anything about LotR because they are too busy playing football and snorting crank with the popular kids….
Lord of the Rings IS Popular Razib. Nerds are cool now, didn’t you know?
I, however, am not a nerd because that would imply that I’m smart. Smart people don’t use nonsense words like “depictation” instead of real ones like “depiction” in posts. Sometimes I can be a real dumbass.
Nerds are cool now
do they have sex with the hot chix? if not, i don’t give a fuck how ‘cool’ they are….
“If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. Women”
-Onassis, Aristotle
Nerds are so not cool. Even geeks like me aren’t socially acceptable. Geeks>Nerds btw. Yeah so what if MTV awards constantly awards comic book movies and has a comic book theme and lord of the rings is “da shiznit dawg” doesn’t mean we don’t get vilified and looked down upon in the pecking order every day socially. That goes for all ages. And genders. Oh and btw, I have a dream too. I dream of a day when a brown brutha from the lower class(middle eastern descent, Guyanese descent) gets invited to all the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and high society parties and mingles with rich doctors and campaign donors and lawyers and………refreshes their drinks.
A brown man crawling on the edge of high society and middle class obscurity. That’s my dream, my nightmare.
“What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie, for those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them.” – Kurtz.
dream on prol.
Lovely … my hurricane nightmares have now been replaced with this.
Nerds are cool. We can keep ourselves occupied for hours on end with the littlest amount of thought or a rock / piece of metal / cloud pattern / reading material as a starter.
“Now is the hour, Riders of Rohan, oaths you have taken!” — Éomer, son of Éomund
“Muster the Rohirrim!” — Théoden, son of Thengel
I didn’t get the reference. But then again I have an aversion to sci-fi, fantasy, roleplay etc…Tho’ Dungeons & Dragons cover materials try to lure in impressionable youth with images of Amazonian babes.
Ahh, Lord of the Rings.. Thanks for explaining guys! I would never have understood that reference since I’ve never read the LoTR books. Maybe I’m missing out on something, but I’ve never felt inclined to read those fat fantasy books. (Now Harry Potter – that’s something else.. inspite of being ridiculed for it, I’m not ashamed to say that I love the HP series!) Maybe I should give those books a try..
Hurricane nightmares? Please. I drove through the back end of a hurricane in the late summer of 2004 with my mom and sister. I don’t even remember the name but it was the one that ravaged orlando and we were driving down from North Carolina and didn’t even know about the hurricane (owing to all the Mukesh and RD Burman cds) but after a while all the vehicles on the highway disappeared except for us. The toll booths were all open. We stopped at a rest stop for a while to see what was going on at a gas station but decided it wasn’t worth the cost to rent at a motel. So we drove home to Miami and right in front of us for the next 3 hours was the hurricane leaving just as we were arriving. It felt like we were watching some spaceship leave orbit.
Well damn, I just have to contribute to this thread!
And don’t think when the day comes that I have kids (scary as that prospect may seem to others on this board), the dinner roundup won’t be my screaming for the Rohirrim to come on down.
The best part about LOTR was that after the first one was made and some call centers remained which weren’t all-Indian, I rarely had to spell my name for the operators. I knew the movie had made a lot of money, I was just stunned that people picked up the spelling just like that. It’s only shown once, I think, on the map of Middle Earth. Of course, I still had to answer the question “Oh, like in Lord of the Rings?” Maybe it’s because I was on the phone with more techies than United Airlines operators, and I think the former demographic is a bit more inclined to appreciate Tolkien?
dude, does he look like Musharraf to anyone else?
all right this has gone too far. What’s with all these jokes about Rohan(s) and stuff. Rohan’s not hilarious. Its not even a little bit funny. In fact, Rohan’s boring. Have you ever been to his house? Dotards! What is the house of Rohan but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek and their brats roll on the floor with the dogs. FIE! FIE! A plague upon the house of ROHAN!
“”Now is the hour, Riders of Rohan, oaths you have taken!” — Éomer, son of Éomund”
Great. Now’ve I got DMX on the mind.
I don’t understand why you WOULDN’T do that. Had I the chance to summon the Rohirrim at any point in my life, I would die a happy man.
My condolences. This or this might fix it 🙂
Does it count if it was in the past or does it have to be happening right now? Do one night stands count? What’s your rating scale?
What is it that everyone has and pirates try to take?
wow excellent suggestions saurav! In my opinion Tribe is clearly the best rap group of all time. My man sid m might back me up on this.
BTW, on “Ham and Eggs”, from their first album, Pfife talks about eating roti with some sour sauce…I think he might be part Carribean indian.
v, thanks 🙂 i feel a moral obligation to provide anyone who has dmx barking in their head like a rottweiler with something with a little melody…or rhythm…or both 🙂
I don’t know about best rap group of all time, but I grew up in Long Island, so I have to love Tribe also. They’re the quintessential rappers for bourgie suburbanites like me 🙂
I think phife is trini.The lyric goes “Plus in Trinidad I’m treated like the mighty sparrow”. I think we should claim him in the next Dave Chappelle Race Draft.
5 foot invasion, son–you can’t run from it 🙂
I am so glad “brown people” are getting somewhere. Now for the purple people. Note: Please don’t feed the trolls. Requests for celebrities’ contact info or homework assistance; racist, abusive, illiterate, content-free or commercial comments; personal, non-issue-focused flames; intolerant or anti-secular comments; and long, obscure rants may be deleted. Unless they’re funny. It’s all good then.
Does that leave anything? And what are anti-secular comments?