Roger, Rafa & Donny

Roger and Rafa! What was that if it wasn’t the most entertaining sporting spectacle you’ve witnessed in a very long time, if not your entire life? Sheer pleasure. Unfortunately, I managed to miss The Williams Sisters Show on Saturday. Since the nineties, tennis has become a sport dominated by youth. And I don’t use the term lightly. By the time you’re thirty, which Rafa currently is, you’re practically a senior citizen in tennis years. Which is what made it so phenomenal that the average age of the four Aussie Open finalists was 34. Not just that, they have 62 Grand Slam titles among them. That’s some serious metal. All in all, such a feel-good weekend for tennis. How awesome was that moment when Federer said he would have been happy to have drawn and shared the trophy with Nadal?

I came across this fascinating graphic that demonstrates the ultimate dominance of women’s tennis by the Williamses since they arrived on the scene in 1999:

Williamses 40, ROW 30! Wow!

Moving on…

I woke up yesterday morning to the news that my alma mater, INSEAD, topped the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings for the second year in a row. Well deserved; it’s a great school.

But what does it really mean? Rankings are ephemeral. That it’s our second consecutive year in the top spot, does actually begin to hold water in my eyes. Either way, there’s no doubt that an already great business school has kicked some serious ass over the past ten years. Its success has been catalyzed by its positioning- The Business School for the World, which, I might add, it stays very true to. Founded in 1957 with a Pan-European agenda, it eventually adopted a global focus. INSEAD is an idea whose time is now. It’s a champion of an interconnected global economy, geographical mobility of talent and capital and a world with shared values. It’s the very antithesis of everything the Great Orange Dope stands for.

Which brings me to the goings on of the past 72 hours. America has become a circus and POTUS is the ringmaster. There’s already far too much being said in protest from a civil liberties and modern societal values perspective, so I’m not going to go there no matter how strongly I feel.

I just have three observations/questions:

1. If this move is meant to curb terror, why are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan not on the list when the vast majority of terrorist activity on US soil can trace its roots back to one of these two countries?

2. You can look at it from any angle but this is a religious ban, and not one based on geopolitical criteria. Many of you may not know this but until recently Israelis were banned from entering Malaysia and Indonesia. And Serbians too were banned from the latter. Why, you might wonder. Because Serbs committed atrocities against Bosnian Muslims in the nineties. This ban was based solely on religious solidarity/criteria. It’s happened before.

3. It’s bad enough that the Great Orange Dope has gone about firing off reckless, albeit promised, executive orders in his first couple of weeks in office. What’s scarier though is how clear it is that very little thought has gone into his actions. Just hours ago, he fired Acting Attorney General, Sally Yates for refusing to defend the travel ban. Not so unexpected. She’s a remnant of the Obama administration and his man, Jeff Sessions, is to be confirmed in a matter of weeks. Why not just wait till he has all his bases covered?

We’re all pinching ourselves in disbelief that we’re witnessing this theatre of the absurd. Sadly, there’s probably more to come.