Nothing Spectacular

A routine Saturday

2012-01-28T13:22:00.005+05:30

I wake up to a cuddle from my daughter. She has been up for 30 minutes now, and is happy to see papa wake up. "Papa! Come! Toy room", she shouts, in a voice that will brook no opposition. She does part of her puzzle, part builds a tower and speed reads "The Monkey and the Crocodile". Then she grows restless, and goes off to look for Mamma, who is pottering around in the kitchen.

After a while, Papa has to go and see what the car cleaner is up to. She jumps at the opportunity to go down. Once down, she takes off towards the swimming pool, reminding her guilty father about his promise to take her swimming the last evening. The swimming pool has not been cleaned yet, but she wants to shower in the stalls next to the pool. Papa explains that she cannot shower because she has all her clothes on, and if she showers, her clothes will get wet. She finds that a good reason to not shower.

She is happy that papa is down with her. She opportunistically tugs me into the main road. She is very careful, watching out for big cars that come our way. She pulls me along into the by-lane next to the society. The by-lane has people squatting on the road and using the hand pump to wash clothes, utensils, themselves. She walks right past the squalor - her target is the rooster that lives there. She sees a brood of hens and is delighted. "Cluck cluck", she tells them. She looks for the goats, but cannot find them. "Goats sleeping", she tells papa.

Mamma has gone for grocery shopping when we return. She looks around for her mother, then settles down with papa. She demands a boiled egg. She won't eat the yolk. "Green", she instructs again, pointing to the white of the egg. Papa and baby sit together in the verandah in companionable silence. After the egg, she wants an orange. I peel one carefully and feed her the pieces. She feeds me in turn. Wipes her hands on my freshly worn t-shirt. We both sit and look out at the cars below.

This is a Saturday like every other Saturday. Doubt seizes me. Will she remember all this? Will she love me when she grows up? I think about it for a minute, and tell myself that I don't really care about tomorrow. I ask her "Where is papa's favourite laddoo?" We both grin, as she points to herself. This is the best Saturday ever!

Unconquered

2012-01-20T16:36:00.002+05:30

Saw this on a wall in the kid's section of Crossword, and googled the lovely poem. For those who like this sort of thing, 'Invictus' means unconquered.

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Patris est filius

2012-01-20T16:20:00.002+05:30

No, I'm not trying to learn Latin. The phrase in question means "He is his father's son" and I think this is true for all of us. Perhaps more appropriately it should say "He is his parent's son".

Yesterday, on a long distance flight, after watching a very nice documentary on Steve Jobs, I was generally thinking about life in general and my tiny daughter in particular. I figured that a lot of her mannerisms, preferences and reactions to situations were very much like her mom's or dad's. And then I got to thinking about myself, and the same held true as well! As I grow older, and start settling into predictable ways of thought and action, I realize that I am very much like my parents.

This, of course, is not surprising. All the DNA that I have comes from the 2 fantastic people who have brought me into the world. Still, it is a bit humbling to know that most of my actions and reactions are hard wired, and that what I thought was my free will is actually the genetic code of a long chain of people before me. Some minor differences here or there, but substantially similar. Feels quite comforting at the same time as being disturbing.

Is there such a thing as free will? Or are we prisoners to our destiny?

Portents to a New Year

2012-01-13T23:32:00.001+05:30

2012 has begun, and boy! has it been all wrong! Work, family, health - all fronts have taken a severe beating. Hopefully this is an aberration which will not last too long. Even my first post in the year is causing me trouble (i'm typing this on a blackberry and cannot get capital letters to show up)

Anyhow, ups and downs are part of life. Writing helps me vent out some of the stress, which is why I often find myself writing about generally unpleasant things. In keeping with my theme for this year, I'm trying to LET GO of all the stress and fears and unpleasantness. Why worry? I have gone through multiple situations in life which I thought would break me up (and perhaps they have!), but Hey! Tomorrow IS indeed another day

Another thing I'm trying to let go of this year is my desire to punt. Providing short term excitement, and always leading to long term pain, this habit is very pernicious. I have tried thrice before to give it up, and each time I have succumbed to the siren. Hopefully this year is going to be different!

In a random conversation, I was recently asked which were the best years of my life. Thinking about this, I was overcome with nostalgia about my time as an engineering student. Little money, no certainty, but dreams of world conquest! Anything was possible! My present was no obstacle to my future.

Now there is a big contrast. All my thinking is incremental and linear. My present is defining my future. Sigh! I sure hope my best days are yet to come. Otherwise life would have been pathetically futile!

Another random thought - is there a God. I mean, a plan? A method to life? And if there is one, is He benevolent? Or is He indifferent? Or, like the ancients of this country believed, is He all too human? So far I have believed in a benevolent God, but sometimes this belief gets tested.

Anyway, enough ramblings for the day. Tomorrow, here I come!

A post after a long time...

2011-12-31T23:53:00.002+05:30

Seems only lately that I have had any time to think and reflect. Not that things are too busy otherwise, I think it was just the lack of incentives - perhaps it was too convenient to not look back. In any case, NOT doing something is usually never a cause of good things, and therefore this last night of the year 2011 is a good time to kick the habit.

2011 has been a good year to me - I read an year ago on one of the widely followed horoscope sites that 2011 would be an unmitigated disaster for Capricorn, and that if I got through the end of the year I should basically thank my stars. Well, its over now, and it was quite pleasant, thank you! A few things changed, a few losses, some sadness, and some happiness. The year gone by is making me ask some hard questions, some questions that have no answers yet. I'm an year older, but am I better? Clearly, in the scheme of things, I am going to lead an inconsequential existence - the world would not notice my absence in the least. What really is important then? What can I do without, and what would I die without?

Looking back, I have got mostly whatever I wanted from life. Some of this has been good for me, and some not. In hindsight, huge victories now seem pyrhhic, and big letdowns seem providential. The way I have lived so far does not offer any hope for a more fulfilling tomorrow.

Aeons ago, Prince Siddharth left a kingdom, a wife, a son and a family for essentially nothing, and became the enlightened one. Perhaps there are some inspirations to be drawn from there? What if I let go? Gave up on want? Would a lack of desire in life be enough? Or does one need to keep a positive goal always? Should I aim to make others happy? Myself happy?

An experiment would be in order. I will try to make 'let go' my anthem for 2012. Let go of desires, worries, attachments. Perhaps the waves will carry me through where the compass looked like failing!!

Wish all your wishes for 2012 get fulfilled as well!

Chennai!

2011-06-24T22:57:00.002+05:30

It has now been approximately 4 weeks since I have moved full time to Chennai. A very interesting 4 weeks indeed! In which I have had to deal with rouge auto drivers, a missing truck and the possibility of my entire household being stolen!

I now (almost) answer the phone saying Vishesh paseraen, have meals consisting exclusively of either idli, parotta korma or upma and can manoeuvre easily in and around Alwarpet, Teynampet and Mylapore.

I have been to all (of the 2) hotspots in Chennai - all of which would not be a patch on the shadiest pub in Nayi Dilli. Surprise surprise - I have also been denied admission to one of aforementioned places because it was women's night!!! I have marvelled at the people taking pictures with extended families inside airplanes and airports because they think that is so cool!

In short, Chennai has been pretty nice. May it retain its small town feel

Proof of our 'clean' PM's intent

2011-06-02T10:55:00.002+05:30

Minister steals a telephone exchange, loots BSNL

CHENNAI: Indeed a shocking, daring robbery. A telecom central minister from Tamil Nadu got the BSNL to connect 323 telephone lines to his home, not in Delhi where he had work, but in Chennai where he had none. He got all the 323 home lines listed not in his name but in the name of the Chief General Manager BSNL Chennai. These lines virtually constituted a telephone exchange in the minister’s home. It was exclusively used for his family business by laying 3.4 km long secret cable along public roads to connect the lines to the business premises. This had caused huge loss to BSNL. Who was that enterprising minister? The infamous A Raja? No. It is the famous Dayanidhi Maran; Raja’s predecessor, now the central Textile Minister. The CBI, which probed the fraud, wrote to the Secretary Telecom on 10.9.2007 recommending action against Maran for the fraud.
Dayanidhi Maran was obviously not playing marbles with 323 telephones. He got the BSNL to lay separate and exclusive underground cable from his Boat Club home to the SUN TV office at Anna Arivalayam in Anna Salai and fraudulently linked the 323 home lines to his brother Kalanidhi’s SUN TV network. The first 23 of the 323 lines bore numbers ‘243722 11’ to ‘24372301’ and the next 300 lines bore numbers ‘24371500’ to ‘24371799’. Since the first four digits ‘2437’ were common for all 323 lines, the lines constituted a home telephone exchange. The Dayanidhi home exchange was operational in the SUN TV establishment for at least months from January 2007 through the fraudulent cable connection from Dayanidhi’s Boat Club home. They were no ordinary telephone lines, but costly ISDN lines, which could carry tons and tons of TV news and programmes faster than satellites to any part of the world. These lines, the CBI says in its report, are “normally used by medium to large commercial enterprises to meet special needs such as video conferencing, transmission of huge volume of digital data of audio and video” – precisely the facility that SUN TV would need for its telecasting operations. For this, the SUN TV would have paid huge cost. But it got it all free, at government’s cost.
The Maran home exchange, says the CBI, was “programmed in such a way that no one other than the authorised BSNL staff were aware of the existence of such an Exchange created for his [minister’s] exclusive use”. It added that by linking the minister’s home and SUN TV office by the stealthy cables, “it would appear as if the lines were used in the residence of the former minister, but actually the cables laid facilitated SUN TV network to utilise the services of BSNL provided at his residence”. Google map shows the distance to SUN TV as 3.4 kms along the main artery roads of the area, which were dug up to bury the illegal underground cables from Maran home to SUN TV office! It was not one of those secret White Collar frauds, but a crime committed in the open roads.
What could be the probable loss to the exchequer by this fraud? On “a sample study”, the CBI says, “it is learnt that 48,72,027 units of calls have emanated from [just] one Telephone No 24371515 in the month of March 2007 alone, which is indicative of the massive multimedia transfer in the underlying connections”. Just one of the 323 lines accounted for over 48 lakh call units in March 2007 alone – Yes almost 49 lakh call units in one month, through one of the 323 phones! Assume that each of the 323 connections was put to use as efficiently as Marans had operated the Number 24371515; the total number of call units SUN TV would have unlawfully robbed the BSNL during January 2007 to April 2007 [Maran resigned on May 13] could be as high as 629.5 crore call units. With the prevailing rate of 70 paise per call unit could the loss to BSNL be as high as `440 crore? Only a thorough investigation can reveal the true loot. But, the story does not end here. SUN TV’s print cousin ‘Dinakaran’, too has got its share of the loot. Says the CBI: “It is also learnt that similar service connections with ISDN facilities have been provided at the office of Dinakaran, a Tamil Daily, belonging to the group of SUN TV Network at Madurai, though specific phone numbers are not available”. But how did the CBI get to investigate the fraud and where is its report now? It calls for a brief flash back.
Maran, a grand nephew of Karunanidhi, was the central telecom minister from June 2004 to May 2007. Perhaps the only Hindi knowing family member, Maran was Karunanidhi’s eyes and ears in Delhi and his connect to Sonia Gandhi. The ‘young’ and ‘dynamic’ minister was amongst the most powerful in the UPA government of which the DMK was the most critical partner.
Telecom Ministry sitting on CBI report for over 44 months
Need an illustration for Maran’s reach then? Not only could he threaten Ratan Tata to part with a third of Tata DTH shares, but he also could threaten him not to reveal that he had threatened him! But suddenly, Maran fell from the cliff into the pit, thanks to a costly slip by Dinakaran, a Tamil daily owned by Dayanidhi’s brother Kalanidhi Maran. On 9.5.2007, Dinakaran carried an opinion poll that had trashed Karunanidhi’s son Alagiri as non-entity in Tamil Nadu politics. Alagiri’s angry supporters burnt down the Madurai establishment of Dinakaran on the same day, snuffing out the lives of three innocent staff. Karunanidhi sided with his son Alagiri against his grand nephews, the Marans. Result, Dayanidhi was instantly out of the DMK and the central ministry. It was then that the CBI probed the daring fraud. And now back to the main story.
The CBI had recommended action against Maran as early as in September 2007.
But the CBI letter is obviously sleeping somewhere since then, and for the last 44 months. The CBI letter had specifically asked the Telecom Secretary to bring the matter “to the notice of” Raja. So the case against Maran of DMK was to be approved by Raja also of DMK.
With the 2009 elections approaching, as was expected, warring nephews and sons of Karunanidhi patched up on December 1, 2008, with Karunanidhi saying, “my eyes grew moist and heart was content.” The CBI letter was perhaps used to make Marans fork out generous terms for peace. After the 2009 elections, Dayanidhi, who got elected, attempted again to make it to the Telecom Ministry, but could not.
He became the Textile Minister instead; and he is so even now.
With the family feud subsiding, the CBI letter against Maran began gathering dust somewhere in Telecom Ministry.
Haunted by the 2-G scam, Raja resigned in November 2010 and Kapil Sibal took over. Sibal is sitting on the CBI report since then.
And Maran, as Textile Minister, is sitting in cabinet meetings along with Sibal.
And despite the CBI advice for action against Maran sleeping for over 44 months, now Prime Minister promises to Baba Ramdev that he would tackle corruption with “seriousness” and “without delay”, while he himself is still sitting with Maran in cabinet meetings. It seems as much a comedy as it is a tragedy.

Risk...

2011-03-17T23:38:00.002+05:30

Risk is often thought to be a four letter word in the figurative sense. I have begun to realize lately that I do not understand its meaning at all.

To some, taking a risk means trying out a new cuisine, or buying an unknown brand of computer. To others, risk taking means investing in equity markets or taking a large loan. To some, it means trying out an alternate career path, like entrepreneurship or a job in a start up. To yet others, risk means the possibility of losing your life or that of your loved ones to illness, accidents or acts of God.

I always think of risk as a probability - what is the likelihood of a certain (unfavourable) event happening? Being a numerical person, I boil everything down to numbers. However, this does not work too often. This is because I can never choose between (as an example) 2 risks - a very small chance of a very big loss or a somewhat probably chance of a medium sized loss. In other words, a walking person could fall into a very narrow but very deep well, or he could fall into a bigger diameter hole that is not too deep. How does one choose between the two?

Whenever I think of risk I automatically think of money and career. But if I ask myself honestly, how important are these? Education, a growing economy, a simple lifestyle and a belief in the dignity of labour really should minimize typical risks on this front. On the other hand, risks of illness, life or limb are the ones that one should worry about. I think we are wired in certain ways - we cannot do much about un-influence-able events like cancer or earthquakes, so we do not worry about those risks. However, we can influence individual career / money decisions to a large extent, and so worry all the time about these, even though they may be really low priority in the larger scheme of things.

I watched with morbid fascination videos of the tsunami engulfing towns in Japan last week. I was thinking of the guy driving his car, trying to outrun the irresistible water. What if the guy had got a bad appraisal from his boss last week and was worried about his job? What if he had a loan coming due shortly with no funds to pay it off? Did it really matter?

I understand that events like this are one offs and not commonplace. But the bigger question still remains - does one spend more time trying to minimize the very small risk of loss of life, or the medium probability risk of not being extremely wealthy?

I still haven't figured out the answer!

Extreme capitalism... the good professor has a point!

2011-03-16T20:34:00.002+05:30

Came across this interesting article today: Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University comes out all guns blazing against the businessman-politician cosy club in the US.

...Sachs says the "real story" is much bigger than Wisconsin: It's about stagnant wages of public and private sector workers alike, and the increasing and increasingly pernicious role of big money in politics.
The following statistics speak to Sachs' first point:
Since 1973, the median take home pay of full-time workers is virtually unchanged on an inflation-adjusted basis.
The top 11,000 households in America have more income than the bottom 25 million.
Since 1976, 58% of real income growth has gone to the top 1% of Americans.
"We've reached the greatest income [and] wealth inequality in history," Sachs says. "This is a new ‘Robber Baron' era, of course."
And just like the titans of industry in 19th century America, "the people at the top buy the politicians," he laments. "All of them - all parties. Everyone is in the hands of the super wealthy."
Decrying a "shocking game that got out of hand," Sachs notes President Obama is seeking to raise $1 billion for his presumed reelection bid. "He's not going to get it from poor people, he's going to get it from rich people," Sachs says. "So when push comes to shove and rich people say ‘we want our taxes cut', that's what happened."
Which probably goes to further the point that most places in the world, be it India, Libya or the US, the rich and the powerful screw the poor and the weak. All the teeming millions need is the 'soma' of Ayn Rand's Anthem (or was it Aldous Huxley's Brave New World? I forget!) to forget their plight. The US worker gets it from a standard of living better than anyone else in the world (but not a fraction of the US elites'), the Indian daily wage earner gets it from the Naxal speeches of his misled brethren, and the Kuwaiti sheik gets it in the form of 1,000 dinars in his bank account.
Long live revolution!!

World Cup India? Not on current form...

2011-03-14T23:11:00.002+05:30

I'm betting that India will not survive the semi finals of this World Cup, if they get through the quarter finals. So far, India have beaten Ireland, Bangladesh and Netherlands. They have tied with England and lost to South Africa. There has been a consistent failure to defend any kind of total on the bowlers' part, consistent wrong captaincy decisions at critical points and no fielding prowess to speak of. There has been no spark of creativity to charge up the team.

It is not too late, however. In 2003 in South Africa, India pulled up their socks after the first 2-3 games and won everything to get to the finals. However, that effort was led by some aggressive captaincy and great bowling by the quicks. On these placid subcontinent pitches, Afridi is able to consistently take 5 wickets, and Piyush Chawla is able to consistently get hit for sixes.

Tendulkar will probably end his career as the most deserving World Cup winner to have never won. Sad, but what can one guy do in a 11 person team game?

But the rudest thing will be that India's lost Cup will be soon forgotten and all attention will turn to who is dating who during IPL 4.

Who's buying?

2011-03-10T13:07:00.002+05:30

Inspired by my own doomsday article, I decided to check out prices of apartments that I could think of buying in Gurgaon. What I saw stunned me!!

Reasonably good apartments sell for 10-11k per square foot. For a mid size (2000 sq ft) apartment, this translates into a total buy price of approx. 2.5 crores!! The new constructions, due for possession 3-4 years out, are priced at 7-9k per sqft. This too translates into a total price of 2 cr. Assuming today's interest rates, this would imply an outgo of approx 2 lacs per month as EMI!!

The question that popped into my mind is - who is buying all these apartments that are getting launched at these prices? Are there really that many people who can pony up 2 lacs per month on their home loans?

Beats me!!

Scary thought

2011-03-09T23:43:00.003+05:30

I was chatting with a close buddy yesterday, and we came to the topic of how tough it is to buy a home these days. I then had a really scary thought.

Take a guy in 1970. Let's say this guy is very well educated, works in the best career of the times, is an ideal saver, is not extravagant and has a disciplined financial plan. Let's say this guy keeps a bulk of his money in safe fixed deposits or bonds. This guy, upon retirement circa 2000, would not have enough savings to last him even 10 years at today's expense levels. And as for ability to buy a home, the very notion is laughable! Inflation and the cost of living has exploded so much in the last decade that I fear for my future. What if this hypothetical guy of the 1970s is me, 40 years out? Will I live in penury in my sunset years?

What is the solution to this conundrum? I can think of 2 ways -

1) Hock yourself to the max in debt and buy a house as soon as you can. Keep slaving and paying back this debt over 20-30 years. If real estate today seems expensive, it will seem very cheap tomorrow.

2) Allocate substantially large amounts of savings to equity. This is risky in the short term, but very safe in the long term. In fact, this is the only protection against inflation - on 2 counts. One is that purchasing power is maintained and secondly, there is lower taxation on capital gains.

Net net, the solution is to harness the power of compounding, live frugally today and ever after! This, to me, is a depressing thought. Just when you think life will get easier, you realize that it is uphill for some more distance!

Just a passing fad?

2011-03-03T23:54:00.003+05:30

At one point in time 3-4 years ago, I counted more than 25 friends, colleagues and classmates who blogged frequently. It used to be fun reading varied expressions of humour, philosophy, cussedness or general points of view. Not anymore.

Perhaps I need to find newer blogs, but the regular contributors to blogs seem to have dropped dramatically. And the ones that still remain are much less prolific than before. While the easiest hypothesis (one endorsed robustly by the wife) explaining this phenomenon could be that blogging was a fad which is passing its baton to newer fads like twitter or facebook, there could be other reasons for this too. A few listed here:

Perhaps blogging is an outlet for the inability to express your innermost thoughts to a very close friend. 3-4 years out of business school, disillusioned with corporate life, not yet married - a perfect time and age to blog. Now, the same cohort is mostly reconciled with their jobs, has a spouse to communicate with, or is generally plain busy with kids, career or grocery shopping. Therefore lesser blogging.
Freshly minted bloggers harboured secret dreams of world conquest via the next masterpiece novel (I know I certainly did! Fame, riches, fawning women - I would be the toast of the town). However, after the first few pioneers in this field did just that to mediocre success at best (think Amit Varma's My Friend Sancho or Great Bong's random book or Meenakshi Madhavan's You Are Here; though perhaps Sidin Vadukut's Dork was the exception), the dream faded and consequently blogging became less attractive.
Mind control through the popularization of blogging was a secret CIA plot for world domination which was foiled by an intrepid US President working under the alias of Dubyaman.

I must confess that the 3rd reason is just because a list of 2 seems too short! Anyhow, the fact remains that following blogs aint what it used to be.

A perfect storm

2011-02-24T23:53:00.002+05:30

The Jasmine revolution(s) underway in Egypt, Libya and other parts of the Arab world have affected crude oil prices tremendously. Brent crude is now within striking distance of its all-time high of $147 / barrel. India, which imports more than 70% of its crude oil requirements, is going to be a big victim of this spike.

The Indian nation finds itself in a familiar position - caught in a cleft stick with no hope of redemption. Oil prices cannot be raised under the current APM dispensation since inflation is currently very high (more on this later). However, burgeoning oil prices would mean higher subsidies and consequently higher fiscal deficit. This is bad for the entire country since a) government borrowings would crowd out private investment which we sorely need b) it would increase cost of debt as the country's ratings would suffer and c) it would place downward pressure on the currency, thus making oil imports even more expensive.

The reasons why we find ourselves in this hopeless situation are also familiar. When times were good, our government paid no heed to fiscal consolidation and kept the money spigots open. This money lined the pockets of esteemed gentlemen like Suresh Kalmadi / A Raja and got stashed in Swiss bank accounts. So now when times are bad, we find ourselves in the situation of the grasshopper who did not save anything for the winter.

The key question now is - what can be done. I have a somewhat radical and easy solution - reduce taxes (Excise / customs / sales) on petrol products to very minimal. Currently, 40% of end prices are made up of these taxes. Simultaneously, free ALL crude products to market prices. This will a) prevent many more deaths of conscientious officers trying to prevent petrol adulteration with kerosene b) improve the environment c) create a demand curve where high prices will translate to lower usage and vice versa. There will be no upward pressure on inflation since the money supply in the system will remain constant (inflation is and always is a monetary phenomenon). This has been categorically stated by many more learned gentlemen than me in the government's own committees. To help the really needy, provide coupons to them which they can redeem to buy LPG / kerosene at market prices.

However, I do not this this solution will be adopted. This is because a) we have a venal and inane opposition who only like to play one-upmanship, the country be damned and b) we have an equally venal and inane government which does not believe in decisiveness, the country be damned.

So, by popular vote, the country IS indeed going to be damned!

Mice in Men and Catcher in the Rye

2011-02-23T22:28:00.003+05:30

Mice in Men:

I picked up this book of short stories, written by a doctor called Anirban Bose at the airport, hoping to fill up the 2 hours of my cramped flying time. Surprisingly, I found some of the stories quite good! Perhaps because I did not have too many expectations to begin with, but most of the stories held my interest, and most importantly, gave me a different perspective on things.

The fictional stories all have a doctor as the protagonist, and are slice-of-life / twist in the end type of stories. Good for a couple of hours of reading. Especially good are 3 stories - Stockholm Syndrome (written like a suspense thriller), The Best Way to Eat Mangoes (fantastic story, totally identifiable) and The Best Oishi (hauntingly true - brings a lump in the throat).

Catcher in the Rye:

What can I say about this evergreen classic that has not been said before? I read it for the third time recently, and loved it even more than before. Holden Caulfield, madman, genius, supreme humanist - the guy has characteristics that would make each reader identify with him. A loser in the conventional sense, the guy is one of the most memorable protagonists in popular literature.

Tedium

2011-02-22T12:48:00.003+05:30

One big reason I'm not the least bit interested in the cricket World Cup currently underway is because I think the format is totally flawed. There are 14 teams playing, including such worthies as Canada, Ireland and the Netherlands. As a consequence, the 1st round matches are so one sided and boring that there really is no point watching them, or even following them in popular media.

I think ideally there should have been just 8 teams, divided into 2 groups. A total of 12 matches played before the top 2 from each group played the semi-finals and then the finals. A grand total of 15 matches for the entire shebang. Much more efficient than the current total of something like four times that number of matches and an equal number of days.

Would be interesting to see if any of the matches get any half-decent TV ratings. I would bet on very low ratings and advertisers losing their shirts!

When will Microsoft ever get its act together?

2011-02-19T00:59:00.004+05:30

In IIT, where I first came across computers and the Internet, I used mostly Linux and other Unix based operating systems. They were difficult to grasp the first time around, but once you got the basics figured out, they were quite easy to configure, customize and use. They were very very robust. At that time, I did not understand why most people were so anti Windows and MS Office. I used MS based systems mostly to watch movies since for some reason Linux did not have a good viewer (at least in the late 90s).

Today, after having used Microsoft based computers for no less than 9 years, I understand what I could not a decade ago. My computer is a state-of-the-art HP EliteBook. I have the most expensive hardware on this system. My operating system is the top-of-the-line Windows XP Professional. I don't understand why my computer operating system still keeps hanging ever so often. Every time this happens, the only thing I can do is to reboot. Each reboot takes around 10 - 15 minutes of my time. At 1am, when one is fighting a deadline, these 15 minutes are worth their weight in gold.

Another example - I used Lotus Notes for email during my time at McKinsey. Now, having used MS Outlook for the last 3.5 years, I must confess that it is the most heavy, most cumbersome and most buggy piece of software that I have encountered. It causes my computer to underperform so significantly, that I often shut it down when I'm working on critical stuff.

I have stopped using Internet Explorer altogether - Google Chrome is so much lighter, responsive and intuitive - it has become my default browser.

Microsoft has a monopoly position in these products - the least they can do is to make them REALLY REALLY good. However, they cannot seem to get it. They have had similar experiences with web-based email (Hotmail, which is so much inferior to GMail), smartphones (their OS is nowhere even close to Google's android or Apple's iOS) or even search (Bing could not dent Google's market share). These guys are in the best place to invest vast resources and cream the competition. But they don't seem to get it!

What is up with Microsoft???

On Facebook...

2011-02-16T06:58:00.001+05:30

While googling for some Social Network dialogues, I came across this website. Funny!

http://iinventedfacebook.com/

The Social Network

2011-02-16T06:35:00.002+05:30

I'd been trying to see the movie when it was playing at theaters in India, but could not see it because the wife and I could not take our little quiet-loving daughter to a movie hall. I thought I had missed the bus on this movie despite all the rave reviews etc. And then, I finally got to watch it in the strangest and most unexpected of places - on a domestic Jet Airways flight! (Interesting aside: I could watch the movie only because I was seated in the economy section. Apparently, the business section had some issue whereby the in-flight entertainment section starts late and ends early - I would not have been able to watch the entire film at one go)

I thought the film was absolutely fantastic - the sparkling dialogue, the brilliance of the lead actor and the chutzpah of the film make it a must watch. What I liked very much was the idea of Mark Zuckerberg (and I'm sure it is nowhere like this in real life) - a guy who is in-your-face, unapologetic about being smarter than you, and says it like it is. A guy who is excellent at what he does, has searing ambitions and the wherewithal to make things work! The best part about the movie was that it filled me with an infectious optimism and a sense of how small beginnings can lead to great things!

I don't understand what all the pre-release controversy was about, though. At no point did I feel that the movie set out to make a villain out of the guy - I thought he was fair and center the hero of the movie. He gets a very sympathetic treatment from the script and from the viewer too.

The best line in the movie: "It's as simple as this: if you had invented Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook"

Ambush by the big boy

2011-02-16T05:41:00.002+05:30

For long, English business news in India was dominated by CNBC-TV18. NDTV Profit and Bloomberg TV were not even significant challengers. The Hindi segment was dominated by Zee Business. Into this cozy world, the Economic Times launched a new business channel called ET Now.

From all accounts, ET Now had a lot of teething troubles. This, despite luring away a significant chunk of CNBC's anchors and other employees at very lucrative rates. However, ET Now has now flexed its muscles even more by exclusively tying up market 'analysts' and 'experts' such as Ashwini Gujral and Sudarshan Sukhani. These dudes (bless their general ineptitude and lack of any accurate predictions about market moves) have not been appearing on CNBC's website (moneycontrol.com) for a couple of months now. I must confess that reading their views (if only to disparage them!) was the only reason I ever visited the website in any case. Lately, I find myself visiting the Economic Times' website much more than moneycontrol.

CNBC's cupboard looks a bit bare currently - they are now trying to cultivate a new crop of 'experts' but it looks like a very long shot to me. However, I think moneycontrol still has a much better product when it comes to reporting earnings (estimates as well as analyses). ET scores poorly on that front.

Additionally, to make a significant dent, I think ET Now needs to re-think its distribution strategy. For example, I don't think I can watch ET Now on Tata Sky (not on the basic 250 channel pack anyway). So a natural consumer of the channel's content is unable to watch it, which certainly does not augur well for subscription or advertising revenues.

Would be interesting to see if BCCL can replicate its dominance in print to TV. (Aside: I really don't understand why they are dominant in print - the ToI is just a gossip rag, with the HT a much much better product. As for ET, the less said the better. Business Standard is vastly superior and Mint is so far ahead of both that its not even worth mentioning in the same breath)

Peepli Live

2011-02-08T23:27:00.003+05:30

I saw this movie today, a long time after having bought the DVD. At the end of the movie, I feel quite depressed - the story's treatment in the movie is quite light and deft, but the content itself is so cynical and bereft of any hope that it is difficult to not feel uncomfortable. The worst part about the whole shebang is that it rings so true!

There are many things wrong with our country. The debilitating poverty, the sensationalist media, the venal politicians, the useless bureaucrats - all these come alive in the story of Peepli Live. The only bright hope - a young journalist with his heart in the right place - succumbs in the end to no avail. The world goes on, and many Hori Mahatos continue to die.

I think the reason why the world that this movie portrays exists is because the victims let it exist. Perhaps due to the caste system ingrained in our genes, we as a nation are so used to accepting someone else's superiority that we bend over backwards and take it. We like not only turning over the other cheek, but we offer to self flagellate for good measure. We continue to be chained by the accidents of our birth - if one is lucky enough to be born in the right family, one gets the most exciting opportunities. But one born to - for example, my maid - stands no chance to change the trajectory of his life. And this is the worst tragedy of our times.

Blessings

2011-01-31T23:58:00.002+05:30

There are a lot of things we take for granted. Usually, the things that are going well never attract any attention from us. It is the trivial niggle that occupies 90% of our thinking time, and causes much stress. Like much in life, what is is just the opposite of what should be.

I tried today to count my blessings - and boy! are they bountiful? I have the most wonderful wife in the world - she is the reason for my happiness, the one that I would trust my life with. My daughter's toothless smile can melt away the most cynical thought in my mind and make me light hearted in an instant. My parents' love gives me the courage to follow my convictions. I live in a country that throws up immense opportunities for new ventures. My true friends don't really care about the size of my car or the favours I can bestow. My education allows me to read and understand books that broaden my horizons.

I read today about a billionaire who has sold off his mansion and his limousines, and now lives in hotels and gives away his wealth in charity. The guy has no family to leave his money to. Thinking about this gentleman, I felt as if I was so much better off than he.

In the end, the core of my happiness consists of very few material pleasures and a lot of non-material pleasures. By worrying about the former, I run the risk of missing out on the latter, and turning into an ungrateful being. I hope I can re-capture the emotion of this post whenever I fret and fume about trivialities!

Return of the King

2011-01-29T13:05:00.002+05:30

Alert: This may be very boring for all those who are not die-hard fans of Lord of the Rings

Thanks to the imdb link here, I came upon a treasure trove of dialogues from LOTR: ROTK. Some memorable ones:

Witch King: [taking Eowyn by the throat] You fool. No man can kill me. Die now.
[Merry stabs the Witch King from behind; the Witch King shrieks and falls to his knees. Eowyn rises and pulls off her helm, her hair falls down over her shoulder]
Eowyn: I am no man.

[she thrusts her sword into the Witch King's helm and twists; he shrieks and implodes]

Theoden: Eomer. Take your Èored down the left flank. Gamling, follow the King's banner down the center. Grimbold, take your company right, after you pass the wall. Forth, and fear no darkness! Arise! Arise, Riders of Theoden! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword day... a red day... ere the sun rises!
Eowyn: [to Merry] What ever happens, stay with me. I'll look after you.
[the King rides past his men, hitting their spears with his sword as he goes]
Theoden: Ride now!... Ride now!... Ride! Ride to ruin and the world's ending!
[He stops and faces Sauron's army]
Theoden: Death!
Rohirrim: [echoing] Death!
Theoden: Death!
Rohirrim: [echoing] Death!
Theoden: DEATH!
Eowyn, Merry: Death!

Theoden: Forth, Eorlingas!

Gimli: Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with an Elf.
Legolas: What about side by side with a friend?
Gimli: Aye. I could do that.

Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way.
Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path... One that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass... And then you see it.
Pippin: What? Gandalf?... See what?
Gandalf: White shores... and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Pippin: [smiling] Well, that isn't so bad.
Gandalf: [softly] No... No it isn't.

[Frodo drinks the last drops of water from Sam's waterskin]
Frodo: There'll be none left for the return journey.
Sam: I don't think there will be a return journey, Mr. Frodo.

King of the Dead: The dead do not suffer the living to pass.
Aragorn: You will suffer me.

Arwen: From the ashes, a fire shall be woken. A light from the shadow shall spring. Renewed shall be blade that was broken. The crownless again shall be king.

Gollum: They cursed us. Murderer they called us. They cursed us, and drove us away. And we wept, Precious, we wept to be so alone. And we only wish to catch fish so juicy sweet. And we forgot the taste of bread... the sound of trees... the softness of the wind. We even forgot our own name. My Precious.

Elrond: You're outnumbered, Aragorn. You need more men.
Aragorn: There are none.
Elrond: There are those who dwell in the mountain.
Aragorn: Murderers. Traitors. You would call upon them to fight? They believe in nothing. They answer to no one.
Elrond: They will answer to the king of Gondor.
[pulls out Anduril]
Elrond: Anduril, Flame of the West, forged from the shards of Narsil.
Aragorn: Sauron will not have forgotten the sword of Elendil. The blade that was broken shall return to Minas Tirith.
Elrond: The man who can wield the power of this sword can summon to him an army more deadly than any that walks this earth. Put aside the ranger. Become who you were born to be. Take the Dimholt Road.
Elrond: [pause]
[in Elvish]
Elrond: I give hope to men.
Aragorn: [in Elvish] I keep none for myself.

And the best:

Gimli: Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?

Trending or cyclical

2011-01-26T00:00:00.002+05:30

Not having posted anything for the last 4 weeks, I feel a little weird! There is a good reason for this, however, that is fodder for another post.

As often happens whenever I'm struggling with my thoughts for an extended period of time, I tend to get philosophical. One random thought that I'm currently grappling with is this: is the trajectory of life always trending, or is it cyclical? Does the good keep getting better, or are there violent swings? Looking around at my immediate circle of acquaintances, I tend to think that there is a definite pattern to individuals' trajectories in career, family life, luck etc. However, the observation period is too short (perhaps 5-6 years) to truly suggest acyclic behaviour.

When I read biographical accounts of peoples' lives, which of course is spread over at least 30-40 years, there seems to be an element of cyclical patterns. Good times are followed by bad, and vice versa. However, I'm not sure about this sample set as well, since the ones who have biographies published after them are more likely than not great successes in some aspect of their lives, and tend to dramatize the swings in their past lives.

So at the end of this little thoroughly unscientific thought experiment, we are left with no conclusions. Perhaps it boils down to belief - context and situation make any given statement true, as well as untrue. However, there is a certain harmony in believing that things go in cycles - great scientists have postulated (and proved) that all matter is made up of waves. A wave, by definition, is cyclical - it ebbs and flows. Why should life be any different?

On a totally different note, and for no particular reason, I am reminded of Aragorn in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings "A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight!"

Out with the old, in with the new

2010-12-25T23:33:00.003+05:30

This year seems to be ending with quite a whimper - no mega song and dance, and no grand celebrations, no mega resolutions for the future. While such a sweeping generalization is probably incorrect by definition, it does seem that this is true for me, most of my buddies, the stock market, the political system, the country and the world in general! Considering that its not just the year which is ending, but also the decade, this seems doubly surprising.

The reasons for this are probably many - personal realizations, political instability, economic consolidation and mostly uncertainty about the future. In my opinion, such times are perfect for new beginnings. When one is not drowned in the hubris of a great yesterday nor drunk with the possibilities of tomorrow. Grand plans, sweeping changes, hairy goals - this is the season for renewal.

As a wise man once said: Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached!

So here's to all of us becoming better, wiser, happier, healthier in the New Year. Wish everyone a fantastic 2011! and a marvellous decade ahead!!

Getting better...

2010-12-20T18:04:00.002+05:30

...with time! Our portfolio is getting to better its outperformance of the Nifty index with time (as it should!!)

Will post the next update 6 months later.

Mighty impressed with the Ombudsman

2010-12-15T14:32:00.002+05:30

I have generally been happy with my banking relationship with ICICI Bank. They have a good internet banking system, and for years I have not had to go to the branch (and thank God! for that - the only time I went to the branch, it was chaotic, with hordes of people being served indifferently by rude bankers).

However, recently I came upon a mysterious debit in my bank account. The amount involved was not very large, around INR 6K, yet it merited some attention since it was totally unexplained. I therefore called up the call center, and found out that this was collection for a credit card. When I asked whose card it was, I was told that it was MY card!! I of course, know that I dont have any such card, so I probed deeper. I was told the card was issued in 2001!!! and that the last transaction had also been in that year!!

This was galling because of 2 things: 1) how can anyone debit my savings bank account without my authorization? forget the merits or demerits of this particular card, my bank account cannot be debited without my permission. 2) this credit card was issued 10 years ago - how was i to know if there was some 'insurance charge' or annual charge put on it at that time, and at the 36% rates that credit cards charge, had now become 6k. Theoretically, they could let it run for 100 years and present my grandkids with a bill for billions of rupees!!

I protested to the bank via various fora - the complaint mechanism, writing to the branch manager, calling up the call center etc etc. I got no satisfactory response. I then complained to the RBI Ombudsman online (it is a very simple process) and forgot all about the issue (of course I cut off all ties with ICICI Bank also).

Today, about 2 months later, I got a sudden call from ICICI Bank, saying that this was in regards to my complaint to the Ombudsman - they would reverse the debit, and clear all the outstanding on the card. So I am mighty pleased :-) and impressed!!

This is how IT and process streamlining is making life better for Indian citizens! Long live the IT revolution! Long live consumer protection!! Down with ICICI Bank - they probably do this to many people, and refund the few that bother to complain - I myself just happened to complain in a fit of pique - I would have not bothered a couple of hours later.

Look Ma, it works!

2010-12-09T18:24:00.004+05:30

For those who like to track this sort of thing, time to look at the portfolio we had created way back in August. We have had a roaring bull market in October and a vicious bear in November. Today was particularly a carnage that happened ostensibly without reason. In short, the markets have been true to form - unpredictable in the short term.

No mean achievement, therefore, that the portfolio is now outperforming the index :-) With annualized returns of 23%, we are beating the Nifty by about 1.5%. We are not calling it a victory just yet though - we shall continue to measure and report!

Too Big to Fail

2010-12-09T13:55:00.002+05:30

I think I'm done with reading books about the financial crises of 2008. Too Big To Fail, by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a mega journalistic narrative that captures, blow by blow, the conversations, thoughts and actions that happened in the US Government, Federal Reserve, markets and Wall Street investment banks in the three months that financial armageddon hit the world. I finished the book late last night, and came away reasonably impressed.

On the whole, it is an interesting and very commendable piece of work, but not in the same class as, for example, Barbarians at the Gate. The insights that the book offers are many - the Goldman Sachs nexus within the US Government, the filial loyalties that Wall Streeters have to their firms, and the heroic efforts of Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke to do something, anything to stave off the crisis.

Turns out that most of the measures taken by these gents only exacerbated the sorry state of affairs in the markets. But one cannot really fault these gents, who were really solving very very messy crises each single day.

At the end, one cannot help but feel a bit sorry for Lehman Brothers, Dick Fuld and its team of executives, who did nothing that everyone else did not do, but were singled out for punishment. Many say that this was because personal animosity between Fuld and Goldman Sachs, and circumstantial evidence certainly points in that direction.

What I liked about the book was the little back stories of the key players - Dick 'Gorilla' Fuld, Jamie Dimon, the real hero of the crisis, Gary Fleming et. cetera. The key lesson for me was that tough times dont last, tough guys do!!

White Nights

2010-11-24T00:08:00.003+05:30

I have not seen Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya, and nor do I intend to see it. However, a couple of reviews of his most recent movie, Guzaarish, mentioned the earlier movie, so I thought of checking out the plot. This led me to Dostoveysky's 'White Nights', and I realized with great joy that I had earlier read this story, loved it, and had forgotten both the name of the story as well as the author (for some reason I thought the author had been Kafka!). Anyhow, glad to get back in touch with this fantastic story.

Plot below (thanks to Wikipedia):

Like many of Dostoevsky's stories, "White Nights" is told in first person by a nameless narrator who lives alone in a city and suffers from loneliness and the inability to stop thinking. The character is an archetype of a perpetual dreamer. He lives his life in his own mind, imagining that an old man he always passes but never talks to or houses are his friends. The short story is divided into six sections:

First Night

The story opens with a quotation by Ivan Turgenev

"And was it his destined part

Only one moment in his life

To be close to your heart?

Or was he fated from the start

to live for just one fleeting instant,

within the purlieus of your heart."

The narrator describes his experience walking in the streets of St. Petersburg. He loves the city at night time during which he feels comfortable in the city. He no longer feels comfortable during the day because all the people he was used to seeing were not there. He drew his emotions from there. If they were happy, he was happy. If they were despondent, he was despondent. He felt alone when seeing new faces. The main character also knew the houses. As he strolled down the streets they would talk to him and tell him how they were being renovated or painted a new color or being torn down. The main character lives alone in a small apartment in Saint Petersburg with only his older, non-social maid Matrona to keep him company.

He tells the story of his relationship with a young girl called Nastenka (a diminutive of the name Anastasia). He first sees her standing against a railing while crying. He becomes concerned and considers asking what's wrong but eventually steels himself to continue walking. There is something special about her and he is very curious. When he hears her scream, he intervenes and saves her from a man who is harassing her.

The main character feels timid and begins shaking while she holds his arm. He explains that he is alone, that he has never known a woman, so he is timid. Nastenka reassures him that ladies like timidity and she likes it, too. He tells her how he spends every minute of every day dreaming about a girl that would just say two words to him, who will not repulse him or ridicule him as he approached. He explains how he thinks of talking to a random girl timidly, respectfully, passionately; telling her that he is dying in solitude and how he has no chance of making a mark on any girl. He tells her that it is a girl's duty not to rudely reject or mock one as timid and luckless as he is.

As they reach Nastenka's door, the main character asks if he will ever see her again. Before she can answer, he adds that he will be at the spot they met tomorrow anyway just so he can relive this one happy moment in his lonely life. She agrees, stating she can't forbid him not to come and she has to be there anyway. The girl would tell him her story and be with him, provided that it does not lead into romance. She too is as lonely as the narrator.

Second Night

On their second meeting, Nastenka introduces herself to him and the two become friends by relating to each other. She exclaims that she has been thinking and knows nothing of him. He responds that he has no history because he has spent his life utterly alone. When she presses him to continue on the matter, the term "dreamer" pops up as the main character explains that he is of that archetype. The main character defines " 'The dreamer' - if you want an exact definition - is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort."

In a precursor to a similar speech in Notes from Underground, the narrator gives a verbose speech about his longing for companionship leading Nastenka to comment, "...you talk as if you were reading from a book".

He begins to tell his story in third person as he call himself "the hero." This "hero" is happy the hour when all work ends and people walk about. He references Vasily Zhukovsky as he mentions "The Goddess of Fancy". He dreams of everything in this time; from befriending poets to having a place in the winter with a girl by his side. He states that the dreariness of everyday life kills people while he can make his life as he wishes it to be at any time in his dreams.

At the end of his moving speech, Nastenka sympathetically assures him that she would be his friend.

Nastenka's Story

The third part is Nastenka relating her life story to the narrator. She lived with her strict grandmother who gave her a largely sheltered upbringing. Her grandmother's pension being too small, they rent out their house to gain income. When their early lodger dies, he's replaced by a younger man closer to Nastenka's age much to her grandmother's distaste. The young man begins a silent courtship with Nastenka giving her a book often so that she may develop a reading habit. She takes a liking to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Aleksandr Pushkinas a result. One day, the young man invites her and her grandmother to the theater running The Barber of Seville.

Upon the night that the young lodger is about to leave Petersburg for Moscow, Nastenka escapes her grandmother and urges him to marry her. He refuses immediate marriage, stating that he does not have money to support them but he assures her that he would return for her exactly a year later. Nastenka finishes her story at the end of this, noting that a year has gone and he hasn't sent her a single letter.

Third Night

The narrator gradually realizes that despite his assurance that their friendship would remain platonic, he has inevitably fallen in love with her. But he nevertheless helps her by writing and posting a letter to her lover and hides away his feelings for her. They await his reply for the letter or his appearance; but, gradually, Nastenka grows restless at his absence. She takes comfort in the narrator's friendship. Unaware of the depth of his feelings for her, she states that "I love you so, because you haven't fallen in love with me." The narrator, despairing due to the unrequited nature of his love for her, notes that he has now begun to feel alienated from her as well.

Fourth Night

Nastenka despairs at the absence of her lover and his reply even though she knows that he's in St. Petersburg. The narrator continues to comfort her to which she's extremely grateful, leading the narrator to break his resolve and confess his love for her. Nastenka is disoriented at first, and the narrator, realizing that they can no longer continue to be friends in the manner that they did before, insists on never seeing her again; however, she urges him to stay. They take a walk where Nastenka states that maybe their relationship might become romantic some day, but she obviously wants his friendship in her life. The narrator becomes hopeful at this prospect when during their walk, they pass by a young man who stops and calls after them. He turns out to be Nastenka's lover into whose arms she jumps. She returns briefly to kiss the narrator but journeys into the night with her love leaving him alone and broken hearted.

Morning

"My nights came to an end with a morning. The weather was dreadful. It was pouring, and the rain kept beating dismally against my windowpanes".

The final section is a brief afterword that relates a letter which Nastenka sends him apologizing for hurting him and insisting that she would always be thankful for his companionship. She also mentions that she would be married within a week and hoped that he would come. The narrator breaks into tears upon reading the letter. Matryona, his maid, interrupts his thoughts by telling him she's finished cleaning the cobwebs. The narrator notes that though he'd never considered Matryona to be an old woman, she looked far older to him then than she ever did before, and briefly wonders if his own future is to be without companionship and love. He however refuses to despair.

"But that I should feel any resentment against you, Nastenka! That I should cast a dark shadow over your bright, serene happiness! ...That I should crush a single one of those delicate blooms which you will wear in your dark hair when you walk up the aisle to the altar with him! Oh no — never, never! May your sky be always clear, may your dear smile be always bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart ... Good Lord, only a moment of bliss? Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man's life?"

Let's measure!

2010-11-23T23:30:00.005+05:30

On Aug 27, I had posted this, with ideas for 5 potential trades. I thought it would be good to take stock of how these trades would have done given that it has been a quarter since the ideas. Here is a table outlining the performance of these hypothetical trades.

Approximately 21% annualized returns. Not a spectacular performance, but then not bad either! Just buying the index would have given approximately a 9% return over the same period, but this portfolio is designed to be perform even when the index does not. So in theory, it should outperform over a longer time frame. I will keep tracking it and reporting results to see how the damn thing goes.

Analyzing each of the 5 trades, I think the only place I went significantly wrong was in the oil marketing companies. However, current under performance is primarily due to rising crude prices, which in turn is due to a weak USD. I remain confident that the pack should recover with continuing weakness in the global economy.

The (very reasonable) assumption here is that one would have put an equal amount of money to work on each leg of a trade (e.g. if one has Rs 100 in total for this portfolio, then I would buy / short a stock worth Rs 20. For a paired trade, I would buy for Rs 10 and short for Rs 10). CMP as on date includes dividends paid between 27 Aug and today.

Augean stables getting cleaned? What a stink...

2010-11-19T13:56:00.002+05:30

Looks like this is the come-to-Jesus moment for Indian politicians.

The Supreme Court of India has rightly asked why the supposedly clean Prime Minister was dawdling when A Raja was brazenly stealing the country's wealth in broad daylight. The government is in a bind, the Maharashtra CM is gone over stealing war widows homes, and the CWG culprit also is out of the Congress party's charmed circles. In Karnataka, the BJP CM is trying to brazen out the fact that 4 of his relatives were alloted plots in prime areas for a song. This is par for the course, and the fellow has to explain himself NOT because he should be flogged and jailed for corruption, but because this has come to light at a time when the BJP wants to embarrass the government on corruption charges. Meanwhile, an independent think-tank says that fully 50% of India's GDP is made up of black money, which pays no taxes and is illegal!

All this action is great for our polity. However, it is by no means enough. It all started gaining momentum because Sonia Gandhi got moving on the Adarsh society scam. (Aside: Much as I am against dynastic politics, I believe that Rahul Gandhi and his mom are India's best bets for probity in public life at this point in time). This is great, but we need to institutionalize comeuppance in our system. A corrupt person should be caught by a truly independent investigative agency, something like the Central Election Commission (the CBI? Ha Ha Ha - this is probably the most docile and conveniently blind of lapdogs in the world), be tried by courts which do not take 20 years to deliver their judgements, and be meted out swift punishment.

All this can be done, though it is by no means simple to do. But then, greatness for a country does not come on a platter - it has to be won through hard work and bloody-mindedness.

There's something about them...

2010-11-10T18:24:00.002+05:30

Watching Michelle Obama dance very gracefully to a Koli song along with tiny schoolchildren while Barack nodded enthusiastically in tune with the music, the wife made an astute remark. There is something about both of them! An elusive something that captures dignity, grace and honesty.

I agree totally! The couple go on eco-friendly holidays, are fit and athletic, undeniably intelligent, super powerful, and yet seem down to earth and likable (sic: of course I have never met them myself so can only rely on portrayals in the mass media).

More power to the Obamas! I hope the dude overcomes his mid term electoral drubbing and wins a second term for himself. He, and his wife are shining role models in an increasingly cynical and bleak world.

Goa!

2010-11-08T22:16:00.003+05:30

The wife, kid and I spent a few indolent days in Goa recently. We stayed very close to the Cansaulim beach, and I for one was quite impressed. Nice, spotlessly clean beach, no crowds, clean water and white sands!

Add pina colada (nice), Corona beer (nicer) and Margaritas (nicest) to the mix, and we are talking serious hedonism! However, the most fun was had by the daughter - she made sure that her dad got a lot of exercise to wear off the alcohol (carrying her about) and that her mom did not suffer from too much of sleep (feeding her on demand). She had a blast in the pool, and made zillions of friends, on the airplane, in restaurants or where we stayed.

We did not venture out much (in fact, not at all) but did enjoy some good Goan cuisine. Alas, crabs were out (sigh!). However, we did get compensation in the form of a rainbow!

New York, New York

2010-11-02T23:43:00.003+05:30

First, a confession - I am a confirmed Indophile. Despite having had many opportunities to work and live abroad in the short span that has been my working life, I always chose to stay back in India. And insularity had nothing to do with it - I have travelled quite a bit - all over Europe, South East Asia, Australia and Africa.

Now that that is out of the way, I come to the main point - I think New York is truly the greatest city in the world. Apart from day trips once or twice each year, I have experienced NY for exactly a week. And what a week! The wife and I lived in style at the Ritz, practically overlooking Ms. Liberty and in shouting distance from the Bull of Wall Street. We had many drink-sozzled nights with our IIM buddies in the Village(?? - I was too drunk to be geographically astute) and we partook of some wholesome junk at various restaurants across the city. The sheer infectiousness, the rhythm, the joie-de-vivre of the city totally took us in.

I think the eureka moment came when we were on our way back to our hotel, and the taxi driver started speaking in Pakistani urdu on his cell-phone, describing some nocturnal activities that he had been upto / would like to be upto (a conversation which would have made my ears turn red, had they not been already numb with generous helpings of alcohol) to his buddy, and the wife and I exchanged suppressed giggles, that I got it. New York is a melting pot, a city that gives you the freedom of anonymity in exchange for your enriching its already super-rich cultural milieu. When someone attacks New York, they attack all the nations of the world. They attack humanity.

New York rocks!

Weird rules spoil the game

2010-11-02T23:09:00.003+05:30

More often than not, we as a country prefer to have a plethora of rules. Exemptions, special situations and sub clauses are the norm. We truly have spaghetti - like laws (and I don't mean that they are yummy!), income tax rules, excise duties and what not.

A prime example of this is the Coal India IPO. If one had applied for shares worth Rs 100,000 (the maximum amount under the 'Retail' category), one would have got shares worth approximately Rs 46,000. However, if one had applied for shares worth Rs 100,001, one would have got shares worth Rs. 5,000! Rules such as this, while meant to protect the elusive 'small investor' just make it mandatory for people to game the system and apply all sorts of means (like applying as a retail guy even though I'm actually a HNI through other peoples' names or 'renting' demat accounts for hot IPOs) to maximize economic benefits. Rupenben Panchal and her ilk proliferate in such a system. Such systems are always regressive, and it is high time we realized that we are all homo-economicus i.e. we respond to incentives.

We need to make rules simple and easy to understand. No one should be able to say - I need to pay mega$$$ tax since I made mega $$$ profits. However, applying sub-clause xii-b under section VII part ix of 1960 Companies Law as applicable in 21c Excise and Exports Amendment 1984, I can declare myself insolvent. Hence no tax.

HOMP

2010-10-30T23:38:00.002+05:30

The wife and I have a new addiction, if one could call it that. Every night, at 10:30 pm, after putting the little one to sleep, we sit down in front of the idiot box and catch Highway on My Plate on NDTV Imagine.

Rocky and Mayur, the co-hosts of the show, are delightfully quirky and keep cracking one liners and pulling each others' legs. (e.g. of a typical throwaway line: If God did not want us to eat animals, he would not have made them of meat!) The food on display invariably looks yummy, and typically is described very alluringly, and the wife and I have a tough time trying to control our hunger pangs. The icing on the cake is that the dudes travel to exotic places which more often than not, are very scenic. For example, the last 3 shows that we have seen have been set in a remote tea stall in Leh while a blizzard rages outside, Kumarakom, with delightful views of Lake Vembanad from atop a ferry, and breakfast of toast and kahwa overlooking snow clad peaks near Srinagar.

After watching today's episode describing chettinad crabs, I'm salivating and waiting to dig into some crab next week in Goa!!

The court should ask Manmohan Singh this question...

2010-10-30T02:28:00.003+05:30

From a news article (emphasis mine) - good questions all. The real question however is - why did the PMO allow this to happen? And why are they not doing anything about it till date? I'm confident the CBI probe will not yield anything till at least 2014, when it will be time for a new election.

The Supreme Court on Friday slammed CBI for its "slipshod" investigations into the 2G spectrum allocation scam, in which the alleged role of Telecom Minister A Raja has come under the scanner, saying "the same minister is still continuing today".

"You (CBI) have not done anything. The matter is serious. The same minister is still continuing today. Is that the way the government functions?

Do you follow the same standards in respect of everyone? One year has (already) gone by," a bench comprising Justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly said. The remarks of the bench came as soon as Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Haren Raval began responding to the submissions made by the counsel for an NGO which has brought the issue before the apex court.

The ASG said the enormity, complexity and volume of the documents involved in the issue required some more time to complete the investigation. "We have so many phone calls to examine," Raval said.

However, his submission was cut short by the Bench which said "it's only slipshod. You are dragging your feet". Raval then resumed his submission and said the complex nature of the issue was the reason the investigations into the scam has taken some time. He said that to maintain continuity, the investigation is being carried out in right earnest and senior officials of competence are conducting the investigations into all aspects of the matter.

At this point, the bench shot back "will it take another 10 years?"

A Case of Exploding Mangoes

2010-10-30T01:44:00.002+05:30

After quite a while, I read a book which made me stay up late in order to finish it. It had been lying around the house for quite some time, bought by the wife who never got around to reading it (and perhaps for good reason too! - but more on this later)

The novel tells the (probably fictionalised - but you never know!) and utterly gripping account of the tales surrounding the death of General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan's military dictator of the 70s. Full of black humour, the writing is very terse and takes time to build up tempo and atmosphere, culminating in a page-turner of a climax. It is a very male oriented story with bald recitals of great brutality and oppression, which makes me think the wife would not have liked it a bit. However the treatment is not unlike Catch 22 or some of the other great books. Definitely an author I would want to read again.

General Zia comes across as a bit of a buffoon, which all dictators probably are, and the ISI comes across as a loose weapon, which again is probably true. The Americans come across as double faced snitches, which they definitely are. There is a hilarious (and disturbing) chapter in the book about a certain bearded gentleman named OBL 'of Bin Laden Constructions' trying to hobnob socially with the CIA and Afghan mujahideen.

So finally, who killed General Zia? Was it a krait's poison? A son's revenge? His own colleagues from the army? Poison gas? Or a crow? Or all of them?

They don't make 'em like the old times anymore

2010-10-09T11:15:00.000+05:30

On a super short and totally unnecessary trip to the US, which involved a total of 32 hours of flying time (and 10 hours of transit time) in a total period of 94 hours, I have seen 7 movies so far. I’m typing this on the aircraft, trying to relieve my mental inertia, and I have 5 more hours of flying time to go. I may watch some more. The list so far includes Iron Man 2, Shrek Forever After, Wall Street (the old one), Robin Hood (the new one), Badmash Company, The Untouchables and Clash of the Titans.

Most of these movies are just a pile of junk. Iron Man 2 is so juvenile that its funny. Robin Hood (and I had great expectations from Russel Crowe) is no Gladiator – it is just dull and dreary. Irony - the merry men are somber and depressed. Badmash Company is puerile and Shrek is just repetitive and boring. The less said about Clash of the Titans the better – it is a shoddy attempt to make a Lord of the Rings type movie – it just falls flat. The only two worthwhile movies are the golden oldies. Wall Street, which I’ve seen umpteen times but which still captivates with its voyeuristic glimpses into the world of glamour and serious money, though the events in the movie seem quaint now in this age of derivatives and algorithmic trading. The pick of the lot is certainly Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. It tells the story of the capture of Al Capone. It also tells me why America is a great nation, and will remain the foremost nation in our generation, never mind recessions, double-dips or Sarah Palin. Power packed with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro and Andy Garcia (the pick of the lot, I thought), it depicts the power of the individual over the system. I cannot see such a thing happening in India (nor any other country).

I wonder why new movies are just not in the same league as the old classics. Is it because we have moved away from the dramatic core, powerful scripts and simple ideas into animated wizardry? The top grosser of all time – Avatar – was so bereft of any emotional core that I was left wondering if I really saw the original. Give me Casablanca any day!

Now for number eight – perhaps Juno for the 2^nd time? Or Rocket Singh?

An eventful week

2010-09-21T17:43:00.002+05:30

Last Monday, just before heading out to another week of work, I had remarked to my wife that this would be a killer week, and that if I came out smiling at the end of it, I would be surprised. This proved to be quite prophetic. But not quite in ways that I could have foreseen.

On Wednesday, I was supposed to fly down to Bangalore for a day. It so happened that I felt a bit (make that quite!) unwell on Tuesday, and following excellent advice from the better half, did the uncharacteristic - I went to the doctor. Once there, the fun and games began - turned out that I had acute febrile fever of north of 103F. I was immediately put on some kind of drip, packed up with medicines, and asked to get all kinds of blood tests done. Done and dusted, I had dengue fever!

The next 8 days were extremely painful, with fever yo-yoing between 100F and 103F, general weakness and an inability to do anything. The worst thing was that I had a very bitter taste on my tongue, and eating was a big pain. Not to mention the liters of blood that I had to get pricked out of me for the very frequent platelet and other tests. Even currently, I'm not recovered fully. I do not have any visibility on how and when I'm going to get better, and I'm sick to the gills with the illness.

So the week was quite bad. I've probably blown away any chances of a decent bonus this year end, have been snapping needlessly at my immensely patient and loving parents and wife, and been a general good-for-nothing.

The only silver lining from this entire bad affair has been a refocusing of priority into what is truly important and what is all chaff. I have realized that there are many things wrong with me mentally, and that I need to lighten up and loosen out a bit. Fundamental life changes are coming around!!

Bravo!

2010-09-17T23:52:00.002+05:30

I posted a rant on the highly corrupt telecom minister of India a while ago. Feels good to hear that while I only ranted, someone else has gone ahead and done something about it!

A couple of organizations and a senior journalist have filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, and the Court has sent notices to A. Raja, the Department of Telecom and a lot of affiliated parties. Kudos to these gentlemen.

The CBI has been 'investigating' this case for the last few million years, and I am sure they will keep 'investigating' it further till the culprit dies of very old age, or the Govt. is voted out of power or till the DMK and the Congress fall out. Long live the judiciary!

Rich (and nasty)?

2010-09-08T12:22:00.002+05:30

There is something surprising about a private banker warning his colleagues about the rich. It would be like a director ofVolkswagen AG casting doubt on motorists, or the boss ofMcDonald’s Corp. distancing himself from people who eat fast food. Rather like valets, the main aim of the private banker is to court the wealthy.

At a conference in Zurich last week, the head of Barclays Wealth Management’s private-banking unit, Gerard Aquilina, appeared to issue a red alert about the richest of clients.

“Beware of the complexities of dealing with ultra high net worths,” Aquilina told his audience. “Demanding and often unreasonable” requests from them may create “impossible demands on the organization.”

Such as? Help with getting children into the right school, securing credit to buy property, or obtaining last-minute concert tickets, for example. Even worse, the richest of the rich turn out to be pretty stingy as well. They don’t even want to pay the full fee for all the services they demand.

It was strong stuff. But it was also an insight into the way the rich have changed over the past decade. They are, it turns out, a nasty bunch of people who are only getting nastier. And the banking industry only has itself to blame.

Customer Demands

To some degree, Aquilina’s warning can be seen as the kind of observation you find in every industry. Executives in any business tend to feel the real trouble always comes from the customer, who is often stupid, unreasonable and annoying, and sometimes all of the above.

No doubt, the software engineers at Microsoft Corp. fume about all those blockheads who don’t know how to partition their hard drive, or re-configure the registry file. There must be countless airline executives who occasionally dream about how smoothly their planes would circle the globe if only they didn’t have to fill them up with stupid tourists, their snotty children, and their overstuffed bags.

It’s always the case that people are going to be irritated by those they have to serve. There’s no reason that even super- smooth private bankers should be exempt from that. But Aquilina makes an interesting point.

There is an increasing amount of evidence that the rich are a vicious tribe of people. One study last year from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the rich are ruder than others. Another piece of research, conducted at the same institution, concluded they were less likely togive to charity than poorer people were. A third study, carried out at the Humboldt University in Berlin, concluded they were “nastier,” in the sense of being keener to punish others.

Top of Tree

Nothing is shocking about that. You don’t get to be rich without being difficult and demanding. You need some sharp elbows to get to the top of the tree, and there is no point in being squeamish about treading on a few toes along the way. And the rich have a lot more to protect than other people: They have to be fierce to hang on to all that wealth.

They have probably been vicious ever since one caveman used a bigger club to take control of the grandest cave on the hill.

In the past, most fortunes were built in association with ordinary people. Factory owners were aware of the shop-floor workers on whom their wealth depended, and that shaped the view of themselves. Carmaker Henry Ford doubled his workers’ average pay to $5 a day in 1913 and shortened their working hours. The Cadbury family of chocolate makers in the U.K. built a small town for many of the company’s workers in Bournville, near Birmingham, in the 19th century. That made them more human.

The growth of the financial-services industry and the bonus culture has changed that. The investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who make up most of the new rich elite don’t have much contact with ordinary people. They assume their wealth is entirely the result of their own brilliance. And they cut themselves off from normal life.

It is an industry that mints billionaires and also breeds arrogance, selfishness and snobbishness.

Aquilina has put a spotlight on an industry that only has itself to blame. Maybe that’s why he’s warning others.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author of “Bust,” a forthcoming book on the Greek debt crisis. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Is this guy for real?

2010-08-31T15:54:00.002+05:30

Apropos the earlier post, here is an interesting statistic I picked up today. While I do think the guy is making wildly exaggerated statements to get some headlines, I do think the guy has a point (which is why trade #1 in the earlier post).

Judge for yourself!

Oil Should Be Around $10 a Barrel: Analyst

CNBC

On Monday August 30, 2010, 12:57 pm EDT

The price of a barrel of oil would be closer to $10 if the commodity wasn't traded as an investment instrument, given the record-high levels of U.S. oil inventories, Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, told CNBC Monday.

"I honestly think that if there were no investors using oil as an asset that the price of oil right now would be $10 or $15 or $18, but it wouldn't be anywhere near where it is," Beutel said.

"We have so much oil right now, more than we've had in 27 years. Why is it 27 years? Because that's how far our records go back. It's probably the most in 50 or 100 years," he added.

Part of the reason the price of oil is currently above $74 (BIS: US@CL.1) a barrel is because of a belief in the economic recovery, Beutel said.

Comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke over the weekend gave the commodity a boost as he signalled a willingness to support the fragile economic recovery with additional policy measures.

From a historical perspective, Beutel pointed out that the current level of inventories is even higher than when the price of oil was below $20 a barrel.

"We've got 50 million barrels of crude more than we had two years ago. We have 176 million of distillate," Beutel said. "When I started in the business back in 1980 we used to think to ourselves: "Gee, we would love it if we had 140 million barrels of distillates to start the winter."

Not all market watchers agree that the price of oil should or will go lower. Jonathan Barratt, managing director at Commodity Broking Services, told CNBC that he thinks oil will rise to between $82 and $85 a barrel.

Investment thoughts

2010-08-27T23:37:00.002+05:30

Whiling away time late Friday night, thinking of what trades to put on in the market next. A few thoughts (disclaimer: these are just ideas, and I may change my opinion on them anytime!!)

Oil marketing companies - in the next 1 week, all the 3 oil marketing companies (IOC, HPCL, BPCL) will pay out 2-3.3% of their current market value as dividends. This will be tax free in the hands of the shareholder. If one has spare money lying around in the bank, one can earn the equivalent of interest for the whole year in 1 week. And the best part is that it is going to be tax free! Of course the stock price will get adjusted downwards for the payout, but here the bet is on a continuing weak global economy and consequent weak oil prices. If crude oil prices remain below $73 per barrel, I think the oil marketing companies will rise in value at least 5-10% from here. It is a big IF, but I am comfortable with the risk / reward here.
Tata Motors - sales of the Jaguar and Land Rover are picking up. The domestic business is going great guns - commercial vehicles are on a roll, the Nano is ramping up volumes, and demand for the Indica / Indigo are robust. If Jaguar and Land Rover sales sustain at the current trajectory, it will a) magnify earnings per share because of the highly leveraged capital structure of the company b) allow quick de-levering (high leverage has been a major overhang on the stock) and c) lead to a re-rating in the p/e or ev / ebitda multiples. The multiplicative effect of these 3 drivers could lead to $$$ returns! The rewards should more than compensate for the risk of downside.
Tata Steel - a sentimental favourite for me. Currently trading at lower than 5 year average valuations due to fears about Corus performance. The brain likes it because a) the India operations are superb (lowest cost producer in the world), b) most of Corus' losses stemmed from the fixed costs at a particular plant, which has since been shuttered and put on the block and c) the Tata group have managed to turn around all of their global acquisitions - Tetley a decade ago to Jaguar Land Rover a couple of years ago. The heart likes it for reasons unknown! Overall risk / reward seems quite favourable.
Sell or short Suzlon. Loads of debt (approx 10x EBITDA), negative EBITDA (high fixed costs), no new orders internationally in the last 3-4 quarters and general poor perception of quality (broken blades being a big issue with its windmills). The company does not have enough cash to even service its debt, let alone pay the principal back. As of now, seems like a candidate for bankruptcy. Again, I dislike this stock sentimentally for reasons unknown.
Reliance Industries - because this is the big daddy of Indian stocks and has underperformed the Index by 30% this year. This cannot continue - either RIL should rise or the Nifty must fall. Long RIL - Short Nifty is one trade that suggests itself

Other ideas welcome!

Pyaar ke side effects

2010-08-27T04:02:00.003+05:30

This post is actually about shaadi ke side effects - one very strange effect in particular. I had heard about this phenomenon, but seeing it in action is very mystifying!

The longer you are married, the more you become like your spouse. A slow and gradual process, no doubt, but utterly unhalting. Before our marriage, the wife loved milk, I did not. I loved watching movies, she did not. I was a late sleeper and late riser, she was the opposite. I liked eating out, she was a home-made healthy food freak. She was a big yoga fan, I was not. I had 10-12 cups of tea a day, she was a 2-cups-a-day girl. I was the more foolhardy risk taker while she was the quicker tempered one.

And now, I am a milk maniac, she has a lot of tea, I wake up at 6:30am without an alarm, while she sleeps for a bit longer, I have become a yoga fan, the last movie I saw was 7-8 months ago, I prefer the plain and simple ghar ka khana; she is a successful entrepreneur while I hold on to a steady job. She has become patient and I fly into rages more often. We have even begun to have similar choices on colors, cars, homes, books, people and music!! This was unthinkable as recently as a couple of years ago. Its almost as if we are converging into the same person!

Fascinating development!

Anagram

2010-08-19T08:43:00.002+05:30

Heard this one recently -

Suresh Kalmadi: Sir U Made Lakhs

Disillusioned

2010-08-19T08:08:00.004+05:30

Yesterday, as I spent more than an hour in my car navigating the many traffic jams that had proliferated in the rain, I saw a disquieting event. At a jammed-for-miles traffic intersection, there suddenly appeared a cavalcade of old Ambassadors with flashing red and blue lights, which then proceeded to take the wrong side of the road, speeding away to their destinations. Traffic from the other side was disrupted, the people who had been waiting in line for more than 20 minutes kept sitting there in their vehicles like idiots, and the policemen manning the intersection did nothing except wave the cavalcade forward.

This led me fuming - why is it that my time is always considered less precious than some likely corrupt, illiterate, venal, small time thug? Why are rules only for me, and not for this same person? I remember an ad on radio during election time talking about the "garibon ka massiah" Kanwar Singh Tanwar, the BSP candidate from South Delhi. This very same thug's son recently crushed 2 people to death in his speeding BMW, which he was driving in an inebriated state.

The thought led to many other (I had lots of time to kill in the jam), and I realized that everywhere, in every sphere, the Indian state has failed. I look at the Commonwealth Games fiasco, and feel ashamed. I look at the big dug-up holes that pass for in-process-of-beautification roads in Connaught Place, and dont know how to explain it to myself. The latest on these holes is that the contractors have given up on getting them repaired in time, so they will be filled back with mud, and 'beautified' AFTER the Games are over. Meanwhile, Kalmadi and his ilk line up their pockets with Rs 11,000 crores, delivering leaking stadia, substandard roads, and shoddy pavements. The RWA in my colony spends its precious time getting petitions for cutting trees so that they can create yet another cemented parking lot for their third cars. Meanwhile, every rain, the lane outside gets flooded and breeds slush and dengue carrying mosquitoes.

The Indian state is failing. No - this is beyond the state. Indian society is failing. There is little I can do about it. I am not sure if the reason is poor governance and systems or Indians themselves. The 'real' India of the villages still believes in male chauvanism, caste based 'khap' panchayats, feudalism and illiteracy. The 'elite' Indians living in cities like Delhi are rapists, totally selfish, corrupt, narrow minded and a threat to social living.

I can ignore all this and keep going through my daily grind (as I have been for ages). I do not know what else I can do?

Did you know?

2010-08-11T16:13:00.001+05:30

Doing some research on media in India, I came across this gem...

The longest movie in the world according to Guinness World Records is The Cure for Insomnia, directed by John Henry Timmis IV. Released in 1987, the running time is 5220 minutes (87 hours) and has no plot. Instead, it consists of poet L. D. Groban reciting his 4,080-page poem “A Cure for Insomnia” over the course of three and a half days. The movie is inter-spliced with clips from porno and heavy metal music videos.

Weird!

Completing the troika

2010-08-01T06:58:00.003+05:30

$20 million is a big amount, in any country in the world. Very few of us earn this kind of wealth over entire lifetimes. So, when one hears about a guy who made $20 million EVERY WORKING DAY OF A YEAR, one is compelled to wonder - what did this guy do? What makes him special? What makes him tick?

Answering these questions is "The Greatest Trade Ever" by The Wall Street Journal's reporter Greg Zuckerman. The book traces the history, demeanor and turning points in John Paulson's life, as well as the thoughts behind the trade that led to a $4 billion payout in 2008.

The book is a definite page-turner, focusing on the human interest stories and very light on the technical aspects. This is definitely a good thing, since a lot more people will be able to enjoy the colourful stories told here - whether of Andrew Lahde, who dropped out, hustled big time to raise peanuts, and then had the best investment run of all time, only to drop out again (the letter he wrote thumbing his nose to the Establishment is a classic), or of Jeff Greene, who stole Paulson's trade and (almost) suffered big time, or of Paolo Pellegrini, the 46 year old starting from the lowest rung in Paulson's fund, working with 20 year olds.

Comparisons are odious, but since this is the 3rd (and last) book I've read on the subprime trade (others reviewed here and here), it makes sense to rank the 3. I would rate the Greatest Trade Ever up at #1 place, very very marginally ahead of The Big Short, with Roger Lowenstein bringing up a mediocre third. While a lot of the characters in the 1st 2 books are the same, its just that The Greatest Trade Ever has a lot more, covered in lesser detail. This makes it less involved, but also lighter reading (not that Michael Lewis is any slouch in that department).

Overall, a good investment of time and money!

Road trip to Shimla

2010-07-15T22:25:00.007+05:30

We decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to drive our little one to Shimla and get some respite from the heat and humidity of Delhi. The drive, on the day of a Bharat Bandh, was very nice.

It took us, despite some unscheduled stops - to fix a burst tire, and for a blockade by some mercenary looking, slogan shouting BJP workers - about 10 hours door to door, with the road from Delhi to Ambala being very nice, Ambala to Kalka being pretty bad (but 4 laning is in progress), and again a slow 90km hill climb from Kalka to Shimla.

Shimla was a real pleasure. It was cool and very pleasant, now sunny...

and now foggy:

Now clear,

and suddenly cloudy.

But overall, just very very pretty.

Highly recommended for weekend trips out of Delhi. The drive is quite enjoyable, and the climate uphill (at least in the summer) to die for!

Thanks Megha

2010-06-30T12:21:00.001+05:30

for introducing me to Flipkart yesterday. Highly co-incidental that these guys are in the news today!

BANGALORE: Popular belief has it that parents of young Indians with coveted degrees from the Indian Institutes of Management or Technology, quail at the thought of their children giving up a job in a multinational corporation to start a business. However, when Sachin Bansal, a Computer Science Graduate from IIT-Delhi, landed his first posting at global retail major, Amazon, his family was happy but wanted to know when he would launch his own business, so they could look for a bride for him.

“In our community a person with a salaried job is less valued than someone who runs their own business,” says Bansal who quit Amazon after a year to kick start his own e-commerce venture Flipkart.com with fellow IITian Binny Bansal. “As it happened I was married within a few months of starting out on my own,” he says.

That was more than two years ago. Today, Flipkart.com is the country's largest online bookstore, selling more than five lakh books since its inception in end 2007. “We sell a book a minute,” says Bansal who started selling movies, music and games on the portal this fortnight.

It was no cakewalk though. Flipkart could count only family and friends as customers in the initial months. “The first real order came nearly four months after the launch when we were able to source a customer request for the book ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World',” says Binny Bansal, who also worked at Amazon for eight months before launching Flipkart.

For one, the two Bansals had to bet on word-of-mouth marketing amongst peers, college mates, friends, blogs and social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to find new customers as they had to keep their budget tight. “We had spent just about Rs 4 lakh to set up the business in the initial days,” says Sachin.

The partners, who moved to Bangalore with their jobs, would park themselves at the entrance to some of the city’s largest book fairs, distributing flyers to announce the launch of Flipkart. “The bookstore owners were very tolerant, they rarely objected to our presence,” he says.

Thanks to their control on budget, the company broke even in just six months, in March 2008 and the first thing they did was to rent an office and hire a helper. At the end of their first year of operations the business had grown enough for the Bansals to hire a team of six. “We had to sell at lower rates and also make sure that every customer had the order delivered at his doorstep,” says Sachin. They relied on free shipping, discounts and personalised service to build the business.

The sales picked up once Flipkart extended cash-on-delivery system to customers across 25 cities. And soon it was in the radar of venture capital firms. “The online retail business (excluding travel, classifieds, content) is worth at least $150 million and is growing very rapidly,” says Subrata Mitra, partner at private equity firm Accel India, which invested Rs 4 crore in Flipkart.com in mid 2009.

This helped the e-commerce outfit focus more on expanding its reach and increase its offerings built largely around strong regional content. Flipkart, with six million titles and the promise of free shipping across the country, claim to be the largest online bookstore in India. The site also has nearly 20,000 movie titles including English, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Bhojpuri movies and 12,000 music titles in Hindi, English, vernacular and instrumental music. The games catalogue includes games for devices like PS, PS2, PS3, Ii, Xbox and PCs.

But there are others such as Indiaplaza.in, Rediff Books and the web version of offline store Landmark, fighting in the non-travel e-commerce market that industry experts estimate at $100 million in India.

“Multi-category retail is the way to make profits in this business, I do not think an online store that sells a single category of products can build traffic, grow sales and be profitable,” says K Vaitheeswaran, co-founder of Indiaplaza.in, an online shopping mall that was set up by a team that built the country's first e-commerce company FabMart over a decade ago.

As consumer demand for new products and services creates more opportunity for young Indians to build businesses of their own, the Bansals’ decision to strike out on their own while still barely a year and a half out of college is paying them rich dividends. “By the end of March 2011 we hope to be a Rs 100 crore company,” says Sachin Bansal for whom enterprise is clearly the calling card of choice.

What's happening?...

2010-06-26T00:03:00.002+05:30

...in the World Cup, I mean? Just up from a watching a highly disappointing Brazil - Portugal match which ended in a tame 0-0 draw. The league matches are almost up, and soon we will be talking business - no draws from the next stage, and the men will be separated from the boys.

This World Cup has been unique - both finalists from last year have been kicked out unceremoniously in the first round itself. France after making a mockery of themselves (poor coach Domenech!) and Italy after playing some really un-spectacular football. All my favourite teams have played at least one bad match each - Argentina against Nigeria (though Messi has been spectacular after that match), Brazil against Portugal, Germany had a terrible match against Serbia, England against Slovenia. The only big ticket team which has been playing well consistently so far is the Netherlands.

I have not seen any of Spain's games yet (I hope to correct that at midnight tonight), but so far, I don't think there is any one favourite for lifting the cup. If Messi continues his golden run, then it could be Argentina all the way! Though I'm now rooting for Germany (Brazil are off the top of the charts for now). Fickle me!!

Another book

2010-06-24T15:59:00.003+05:30

For a change, I splurged almost a thousand bucks to buy Roger Lowenstein's "The End of Wall Street" when I was in the US (it was not yet available in India, so I had to buy the hardback version from there). Having read and really liked "When Genius Failed", I had high expectations from ol' Rog. However, I was a tad disappointed at the end (which also explains why it took me more than a month to finish this baby - or roughly 15x the usual time).

The book reads like a bland retelling of the furiously moving events in September 2008, when Lehman went bust and the world got into a tailspin. While it goes way back, to 2005-06, to explain the genesis of the problem, it does not offer any new insights into why whatever happened, happened. Most people who read the news (or visited Bloomberg's website) would know all this stuff.

Comparisons are odious, but if I compare this to Michael Lewis's "The Big Short", I would short Mr. Lowenstein and go long Mr. Lewis. As opposed to The Big Short's human interest and genuine freshness of content, The End of Wall Street does not offer either. Nor does the title seem very apt!

Deeply disturbing

2010-06-18T01:53:00.002+05:30

I have been following off and on the latest story in international media - the Gulf Coast oil spill, which is releasing approx. 60,000 barrels per day of oil into the ocean. By any metric, this is the largest ever man-made environmental disaster in the history of time. The ocean is a big thing, but I dont think even it can suffer endless degradation.

People say that BP is squarely to blame. To quote a Bloomberg article: "Evidence of BP’s corner-cutting, to the point of intentional negligence and reckless endangerment, is everywhere. According to lawmakers, BP used six instead of the usual 21 centralizers before cementing the well, didn’t test the cement bond, chose a cheaper method to prevent gas from rising unchecked to the surface, and stinted on a backup blowout preventer -- all to “save time/money,” to borrow a phrase from one internal BP e-mail."

My point is not that BP is evil or that no one should make mistakes. Instead it is this - how does one equate environmental disaster on this scale (and boy, is it truly gigantic!) with money? BP says it will keep $20 billion in escrow to pay for damages. How many fish is that worth? How many people who die eating contaminated fish will that compensate for? How many loved ones would you trade for $20 billion? 100? 10? 1?

I think this is a symptom of our times - everything equals money. We are cavalier and depraved when it comes to preserving our ecology. However, I don't think this state of affairs can last very long. Something is going to give. Soon. I just hope it does not happen in my kid's lifetime. Meanwhile I do what little I can to protect the environment near me.

Waca Waca

2010-06-16T19:18:00.003+05:30

My closest friends are usually very surprised whenever I mention that I used to play football (and not too badly, I might immodestly add) in my student days. I was a key goal-scorer for my teams, both in IIT as well as IIM. My rather rotund frame does not suggest this in the least (but hey! look at Maradona in his new avatar as coach - the guy is positively fat! Who can think that he was a terror on the field?). However, all this is a preamble to say that for the next few days, I am an obsessed guy - with the FIFA Football World Cup in South Africa.

So far, the highlight of the tournament for me has been Maicon's near impossible goal against North Korea. But I'm sure this will be surpassed easily. Predictions? I don't think Argentina are going to make it to the semi-finals. I have not seen popular favourites Spain play as yet (they open their tournament against Switzerland today), but so far my money is on perennial favourites Germany and Brazil.

And for those who have not heard it yet, here is Shakira shaking her booty in the World Cup theme song:

Tenderness and security

2010-05-30T13:40:00.002+05:30

I am always amazed by the wife's immense patience and tenderness in dealing with our child. And I think our daughter understands this quite well too. For her, her mother is the fount of all security, love and tenderness. She is happiest when ensconsed securely within her mother's arms.

Some wise person said - God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers. I think I agree!!

Follow up on Analyst Credibility

2010-05-19T15:31:00.004+05:30

Saw the following interesting article on Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs Hands Clients Losses in ‘Top Trades’

May 19 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. racked up trading profits for itself every day last quarter. Clients who followed the firm’s investment advice fared far worse.

Seven of the investment bank’s nine “recommended top trades for 2010” have been money losers for investors who adopted the New York-based firm’s advice, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from a Goldman Sachs research note sent yesterday. Clients who used the tips lost 14 percent buying the Polish zloty versus the Japanese yen, 9.4 percent buying Chinese stocks in Hong Kong and 9.8 percent trading the British pound against the New Zealand dollar.

Pretty interesting, I thought. Shows how much the large investment banks follow their own analysts' advice! Clearly, they did not implement the 'top trades' otherwise how would they have made profits EVERY SINGLE DAY in the last quarter. In the same time period, clients following the recommended trades would find themselves in a much worse position. If the chef refuses to eat in his own restaurant, I would rather go hungry than eat there!

Very ordinary

2010-05-18T11:45:00.004+05:30

Another book I'm reading right now (though with great difficulty) is called 'The Immortals of Meluha'. Frankly, I bought the book because of its cover.

The premise of the book is very very interesting - it is set in 1900BC and tells the beginning of the story of Shiva, the God of Gods. However, the execution is so pedestrian that it makes me quite sad. It reads like a Bollywood masala movie script, not the insightful, graceful and dignified attempt I had hoped it would be. I could take out Shiva, and put in Shahid Kapoor or some equally frivolous current heartthrob into the story, and nothing would change (Disclaimer: I have read only 25% of the book - like I said, with great difficulty - so it may still redeem itself. However, I doubt it)

I wish it had been a better book!

Michael Lewis does it again

2010-05-18T11:22:00.003+05:30

I read 'The Big Short' in a couple of totally engrossed sessions over the weekend. Michael Lewis ( author of Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball) has written another masterful, funny and insightful page turner - this time a blow-by-blow account of the great credit crisis of 2008.

The book is fantastic because its central characters are a bunch of oddball, eccentric misfits who saw what no one else could. These guys (the 'good' guys in the book) made tons and tons of money even though they had not set out to do so - all they wanted was to uncover (discover?) the truth. And all of them paid a big price for their success. The book also looks at the guys on the other side - equally smart guys who were 'long' (ie they were buying when the good guys were selling). One notable dude is a Morgan Stanley trader, who was right, but not right enough, and who ended up losing $9 BILLION in a single trade. And in the center of the mayhem, touching all the characters, good or bad, was a particular trader from Deutsche Bank.

All the guys, the guys who were right as well as the guys who were wrong, made lots of money personally from the momentous events that unfolded. In doing so, some institutions were bankrupted, a few million livelihoods lost, a generation's lifelong savings evaporated and a few fortunes made.

The book raises very important questions - for one, what are we doing today about a system where all gain is private but all loss is public? The answer, unfortunately, is that we are not doing anything. The American financial system (and by corollary, the world) is hostage to what benefits Wall Street (and in particular Goldman Sachs). And secondly, is money really worth more than a few pieces of paper? Michael Lewis, the guy who saw the big picture, and quit Wall Street to fulfil a higher calling, is absolutely the right guy to answer this question. The answer is not surprising, but its quite weird how none of us ever seem to grasp it in our own lives.

However, enough of the moralizing! The book reads like fiction, is a page-turner and is a definite must-read!

Murder: How an industry was systematically killed

2010-05-12T12:33:00.003+05:30

The great Government of India has killed the telecom industry with such astounding brutality that it deserves special applause.

A bit of background - the telecom industry is somewhat special - to survive, it needs spectrum, which (like the Reliance D6 gas) is a national resource. A lot of players invested a lot of capital and took huge risks to start the industry from scratch in the 1990s. Just when they reached the end of the long investment cycle (10-15 years later!) and should have sat back to earn their returns, the government of India jumped in and started killing them.

First, in Jan 2008, the (dis)honourable minister for telecom suddenly changed rules midway and said that more operators would be allowed in the industry. This, despite the law saying categorically, that new licenses would NOT be given out. The incumbents, who should have got more spectrum by law, were now told - sorry! you will not get any more. We will give it away (almost for free) to friends and cronies (who by the way are going to make millions of $$s selling this spectrum to the likes of Telenor, Etisalat etc etc, without investing a single rupee of their own. Sorry, correct that - they are going to bribe me, the honourable minister, so that I can get a nice little fund going in my Swiss bank accounts.) Also, I'm going to keep an arbitrary date for consideration of applications for spectrum, so that ONLY my friends get this spectrum AND I'm going to change the rules on which incumbent gets spectrum first.

As a result, Reliance Communications, which by law was last in queue to get spectrum, will now jump to #1 position.

In any other country, this would have led to corruption charges against said minister, and he would have been in jail. But thanks to our strangely perverse country, the minister not only thrives, he actually got a second term in the government of the supposedly 'clean' Mr. Manmohan Singh despite a huge uproar on the blatant theft of revenues that should have accrued to me, the mango man of India.

The result of this was that fly-by-night operators came in, the industry got screwed because of irrational pricing, call quality suffered and investors got punished.

But the honourable minister had only begun. He now says - ha ha! you incumbents - you had the temerity to oppose my despotic theft - I will make you suffer more. So he says, retroactively AGAIN changing the rules - I am now going to arbitrarily decide that spectrum above 6.2 MHz (which I gave you 4-5 years ago for the same price that the new guys got it for) will now be priced at rates determined by the 3G auction (or more than 10-12 times what the new operators paid for their spectrum just last year). I will, perversely enough, not charge anything from the new operators. The losers, not surprisingly, are Bharti, BSNL, Vodafone and Idea. Reliance Communication, not at all surprisingly, totally not affected by this decision.

The incumbents today are large, respected companies not because they bribed thieving ministers and bureaucrats. They have built companies painstakingly, putting to risk large amounts of capital, effort and resources, and believing in the law of the land and principles of justice. To see them being systematically killed is a matter of shame. Strangely, perpetrators of this murder continue to line up their bank balances and enjoy their positions of power. But such is life in our country.

Analyst? With credibility? Ha ha...

2010-05-11T22:26:00.003+05:30

I have nothing against research analysts. I have quite a few friends who are research analysts with respected fund houses. A few are very good and I respect their views. However, I would never ever want to become a stock analyst. A vast majority of these guys have no credibility. I would strongly advise the retail investor to strongly disregard analyst views and NEVER ever buy based on analyst recommendations. Trust me - my job gives me access to all the reports ever published, and I read quite a few of them (for a few laughs, and mostly during leisure time).

Sample this. I choose this at random - this is, in my view, a representative example of what analyst views are worth. Disclaimer: I do not have anything against these particular fund houses, just used here as examples. All of them are as good or as bad. Take a sugar company called Shree Renuka Sugars ('SRS'). The business is cyclic, and totally commoditized. Everyone knows that commodity cycles turn with great regularity. If sugar is scarce today, it will be in plenty tomorrow (and vice versa).

In a report dated Jan 18, 2010, Morgan Stanley recommended Overweight on SRS, with a target price of INR 125 (adjusted for bonus). In a short period of 3 months, the price target was reduced to INR 70 (or a downward movement of 45%). This was primarily because the stock corrected by approx 45% during this period! The world did not change in this 3 month period, and the outlook on sugar should have been known as recently as 3 months before!

Ditto Merrill Lynch. As recently as Feb 11, they said BUY with a price target of INR 173. In 2 months, the price target suddenly became INR 80 (or 50% of the one before). Talk about volatility!

Or Credit Suisse. They take the cake. They went from INR 128 to INR 58 in a similar period of time.

Credibility, anyone?? Why should anyone believe these jokers? It is not my case to trivialize the important work analysts do. However, there is something called perspective! And something called balance. And foresight. Just moving target prices around because the stock moves in that direction does not a credible analyst make! When will this change. Dot-com, Enron, Lehman - nothing has changed analyst behaviour so far. I wonder what will!

Elina

2010-05-07T16:31:00.006+05:30

The reason for my vastly reduced blog posts these days:

Volatility? Whew!!!

2010-05-07T16:06:00.004+05:30

Interesting times for markets globally, to say the least!

Tiny, inconsequential Greece re-engages with history books, with a government soon about to go bankrupt, a striking and rioting public that seems spectacularly dense and insular, and overall an enactment of the theatre of the absurd. Repercussions include a 1,000 point drop in the mother of all equity market indices, the mighty Dow Jones - in about 15 minutes, and while the media goes to town with the usual cliches - never happened before, six sigma event, yada yada yada - my take is that these days six sigma events happen every six months. Poor Spain and gluttonous Portugal have to suffer for the Grecian's fun. Lesson: In the party, get drunk while you can. If you are still sober when it ends, you may be left cleaning someone else's puke!!

The Sage of Omaha puts his 40-year reputation on the line as he defends the newest villian of the times. Move over Osama bin Laden, Goldman Sachs is here. 2 idiots who got screwed are crying foul at Goldman's mercenary ways, but I think they are more to blame than they let on. Caveat Emptor, anyone? They forgot the golden rule - Goldman Sachs will screw you when it can.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem set to gain a majority in the UK (though not a government, apparently). Traders troop in to work at midnight in the financial district of London. The Tories promise to implement what I think is the solution to the whole 3 year old debt-fuelled crisis - cut the UK government deficit and apply brakes to government spending. For the sake of Britain's economic future, I hope they get their shot at fiscal prudence.

And here in India, Reliance Industries emerges unscathed from its bruising courtroom battle with kid brother ADAG controlled companies - I think the outcome is very rational and fair and square in the national interest - natural gas found in India's territory cannot be divided between individuals. It belongs to the mango man (the aam-aadmi) and should be priced for the benefit of said mango man. So sorry, Mr Anil Ambani - you cannot make umpty zillion rupees buying my gas for cheap (disclosure - I own RIL shares)

What does one make of all this? My opinion (could be in-famous last words) - ignore all the noise. Buy the dips and hold emerging market (Indian) equities for the next 5 years. While one may or may not make a packet, one will surely be spared watching the value of painstakingly hoarded cash erode due to inflation. And keep at least 10% of the portfolio in gold. It remains the only hedge against global insanity

Too smart for our own good?

2010-04-06T20:19:00.002+05:30

An experiment that shows that too much smartness could be counter-productive! I think this is also the reason that good businesses are not built solely by numbers and analytics, but by that indefinable thing called the instinct or gut-feel or intuition.

Sourced from here:

The Trouble with Humans: Why rats and pigeons might make better investors than people do

"Psychologists have long known that if rats or pigeons knew what the NASDAQ is, they might be better investors than most humans are. That's because, in some ways, animals are better than people at predicting random events. If, for instance, you set up two lights in a laboratory and flash them in a random sequence, humans will persistently try to predict which of the two lights will flash next. Stranger still, they'll keep trying even when you tell them that the flashing of the lights is purely random. Let's say you flash a green light 80% of the time and a red one 20% of the time but keep the exact sequences random. (A run of 20 flashes could look something like this: GGGGRGGGGGGGRRGGGGGR.) In guessing which light will flash next, the best strategy is simply to predict green every time, since you stand an 80% chance of being right. That's what rats or pigeons generally do in a similar experiment that rewards them with a crumb of food whenever they correctly guess the next outcome".

But humans are apparently convinced that they're smart enough to predict each upcoming result even in a process they've been told is random. On average, this misguided confidence leads people to get the right answer in this experiment on only 68% of their tries. In other words, it's precisely our higher intelligence that leads us to score lower on this kind of task than rats and pigeons do.

Karthik calling Karthik

2010-03-03T22:33:00.002+05:30

is a good movie. Not romantic, not horror, not even very thrilling. Dark, foreboding and realistic. And very very spooky - I've been having nightmares last two nights on account of this movie.

Farhan acts well, especially in the climax, when the mystery gets revealed. Deepika looks lovely as usual, and the few other characters are all quite real. The movie is probably one that wont be remembered for long as anything special, but I kind of admire the people who made it, since it represents something different from the run of the mill kind of stuff we are accustomed to seeing. The songs are also good, and do not jar in the least.

Recommended as a watch for a taste of something different.

Dork

2010-03-02T18:27:00.003+05:30

Finished reading Dork (authored by Domain Maximus) over the weekend.

Immensely entertaining for the first 85% of the book. While I thought the last 15% was a bit abrupt, I think overall it is a fantastic effort.

By the way, inner sources say the book is derived from largely true life incidents in the author's short year at a "leading mid-market consulting firm". I can totally identify with it :-)

Someone is finally talking sense

2010-03-02T18:17:00.002+05:30

I have a young cousin who wants to get into IIM. She believes that an MBA (or PGDM, to be precise) from any of the IIMs will set her up for multi$$$ moolah.

This is obviously not true. Who is to blame? Fair and square, I think our popular media is the culprit. They print grotesque, inaccurate and non-comparable salaries year after year after year on the front pages of newspapers. It has become a given, a vulgar and obscene race to bigger and bigger material scores - speak to a layperson, and they will ask "Beta, you are from IIM? Oh you must be earning crores". If one tries to talk sense to this person, and explain how things really are, the reaction most likely is "Hmmm. This dude was probably near the bottom of his class. The Economic Times / Times of India / Jhumri Talaiya Khabrein cannot be wrong"

Anyhow, I was mightily pleased to read the following article. I hope it encourages other institutes to speak up and let the truth be known:

IIM-A has denied a front-page report in The Economic Times which said a recruiter made a Rs 1.44 crore-plus salary offer at final placements currently on at the school.

“Sure, no one’s talking yet. But ET has learnt that Deutsche Bank, which had set the upper ceiling in 2008 by offering a Rs 1.44-crore package, has broken that record this year”, said the ET report.

In a blog link sent by student media co-ordinator Rohan Desai, the school said (Desai also urged that we put-up the link on our blog to reach a wider audience):

“We would like to clarify in interest of the entire community that this is incorrect. Also, converting dollar salaries to rupee terms does not portray the correct picture and hence we provide the average dollar salary separately in our press releases.

We felt compelled to communicate this clarification because we believe it has the potential of driving aspiring students into making misinformed decisions and also gives incorrect signals about the economy.

IIMA over the last few years has chosen not to disclose the highest salary offered as we believe salaries are just one component of the jobs offered and also because the highest salary is in no way representative of the recruitment scenario.”

While the purpose of this blog is not to run-down competition, and we have never done that,Mint understands why students, and teachers, wish to project b-schools as more than just places where students turn into crorepatis. While salary figures are indicative of the economy, we stick to the official version released at the end of the placement season.

Placements can be covered in other ways. This is one of the reasons why the writer of this blog was allowed to live on-campus during placement week in 2007 at a time when there was a media black-out.

Pronab Da zindabad!!

2010-02-27T11:47:00.004+05:30

In my humble opinion, the Union budget 2010-11 has its head and heart firmly in place.

For one, the budget does the right thing by reducing direct taxation and increasing indirect taxation. This increases compliance, because the poor overtaxed salaried guy (aside - this is not anecdotal - India has one of the highest personal and corporate tax regimes globally. Scandinavian and developed countries have higher overall tax rates, but they more than compensate in the form of social security benefits. Most Asian countries have tax rates closer to 16-20%. Not surprisingly, compliance is abysmal - close to a pathetic 12-15% from the figures I remember seeing most recently) gets relief; and the smirking tax-stealing business guy pays up more indirectly for all the conspicuous consumption. Reduced direct taxation also stimulates the economy by incentivizing greater consumption - we are a unique country which does not depend on exports for growth, and we should try our damnedest to keep it that way.

Secondly, the budget signals a return to fiscal prudence by targeting a lower fiscal deficit (through lower 'non-productive' non-plan expenditure) and makes a case for transparent and proper reporting of the deficit. No more hiding subsidies 'below the line' by issuing oil bonds and all other kinds of instruments designed to win votes today but burden our children and grandchildren for all time. Additionally, the budget firmly puts disinvestment as a revenue source. Less government is good government.

For all the hoo-haa the short sighted scaremongers in the BJP and the perennially stick-up-my-ass communists are making about petrol price hikes, I think it is a good thing. Petrol prices need to be deregulated - normal laws of economics (demand drops on rising prices) need to be allowed to work. For the economy as well as for the environment.

If anything, the budget should have firmly introduced fuel price decontrol, the direct tax code as well as the GST tax regime. But overall, I look at the budget as a glass slightly more than half-full.

And the hypocritical opposition can shout themselves hoarse.

Kenyes versus ... (err... who is on the other side?)

2010-02-23T18:06:00.003+05:30

While our day to day lives are relatively humdrum and routine, we are in the midst of a ferocious worldwide war. The (small) problem is that there is no other side in the war.

The war against the biggest recession globally in the last 60 odd years is being fought as per the principles of John Maynard Keynes, who famously advocated massive deficit spending to work one's way out of a recession. In tandem, central banks globally are printing massive amounts of currency, increasing government spending and increasing government roles in business. The general theory is that debt will be inflated away, savers will be punished, currencies depreciated, and consumers incentivised to 'shop till they drop'.

I'm no expert, but somehow I don't see why this should work. The reason for the recession (as I see it) was too much debt and excessive leverage, leading to asset price inflation in US residential homes. When the bubble burst, people's wealth (equity in their homes) was wiped out, leading to reduced spending, de-growth, mass unemployment, and further wealth erosion - a vicious cycle started. The risk in Keynesian medicine is that it stokes the very fires that led to the problem - artificial floors to asset prices could lead to massive stagflation if consumption does not respond to fiscal stimulus.

Maybe I am old fashioned, but I think it is better to take the bitter medicine today (like Paul Volcker advocated in 1971-72 by massively raising inflation rates. The economy staggered for 3-4 years, but inflation was gone for good, and the next 20 years of excellent growth followed in the US). The problem is that everyone these days is a Keynesian. Where are the monetarists, the Volckers? How will we know who wins this fight if there is no other example to counter the recession? Where is the alter-ego to 'helicopter' Ben Bernanke?

I think (fear) we will keep seeing events like Dubai / Greece / Portugal for the next few years, where nations with excessive debt will keep being unable to pay off their dues. And the Keynesians will declare themselves winners, whether they win or lose.

Increase GDP - buy alarm time pieces!!

2010-02-22T22:09:00.003+05:30

I am generally sceptical of the numbers our esteemed government churns out. Having served a large government entity in my previous career avatar, I can imagine how un-robust the data collection process in a large and totally un-automated organization must be.

Even so, this news article takes the cake - the headlines scream that the index of industrial production index (IIP) in December was up almost 17%, or the most in more than a decade. The truth is that 7% (or approximately 40% of this growth comes from (believe it or not!!) 'alarm time pieces'!!!! These esteemed articles, which in my considered opinion no one uses anymore, have a weightage of ~0.3% in the IIP index, and the government would have us believe that growth in this category was 2500% (25x of production a year ago). The mind boggles at this stupendous statistic.

So I know now how India can overtake China in the economic growth sweepstakes! Every urban person just needs to buy a ruddy alarm clock!!!

Addendum

2010-02-06T18:42:00.002+05:30

Speaking of Ishqiya, here is another part of the movie I loved... this song plays in the background when Babban is 'having fun'

I agree totally with Calvin

2010-02-06T00:09:00.002+05:30

here... (thanks for the link!)

I demand euphoria!!

Ishiqiya

2010-02-05T23:48:00.002+05:30

Saw the movie today, and liked it quite a lot. The wife hated it, though. No matter - she did not like The Dark Knight either (shudder....)

Good timepass movie, very grounded. Fantastic performances (esp Khalujaan and Mushtaq Bhai), fantastic songs and music, but best of all:

1) Ch**ium sulphate! I can almost see myself scream this from my car window the next time someone honks needlessly or cuts into my lane

2) Nandu (and his bantering with Babban): worth many many smiles

$104 million! For this!!!! Gulp...

2010-02-05T23:42:00.003+05:30

This thing (I can not think of a better word for it) sold for $104 million today! I'm speechless...

What do bankers really do to earn their millions???

2010-02-04T22:42:00.002+05:30

Now we know :-) The action starts 1 minute into the video - a must see!!

Power and Beauty

2010-01-28T21:53:00.002+05:30

Ever wondered why high heels exist? Why the most common lipstick colour is red? Why women prefer (guys with) cars to (guys with) motorbikes? Most of all, does size REALLY matter? The answers are all simple. Explained in this article (courtesy Mint Lounge)...

Pretty interesting, I thought! Though at the end of it all, I had just one question - what is a pudenda??

Reply To All | Aakar Patel

I have a game I have been trying out at parties for a decade. I ask women to give it a thought, and then choose the order in which they would be attracted to the following types of men as their partner: a) Good-looking b) Powerful c) Stable.

No other quality in these three men is defined, and they are what those words mean. Almost invariably, women choose the powerful man as the one they are most attracted to. This is followed by the stable man and last, the good-looking one. I cannot remember more than a couple of women, and I have polled dozens, who did not choose power as the thing they were drawn to most.

I ask men to choose from the following:

a) Beautiful

b) Rich

c) Homely

Men always choose beautiful first; most pick homely second and rich last.

We are uncomfortable with accepting the extent to which our instinct, formed over tens of thousands of years as hunters-gatherers, dominates our intellect. But it is true that our sexual instinct is not entirely in our control, and women are drawn towards the powerful male.

A wealthy man, no matter how ugly—Aristotle Onassis—will bed the most desirable women in the world: Jacqueline Kennedy, Maria Callas. Given that fact, powerful men often practise what is called serial monogamy, monopolizing a beautiful woman for the best years of her beauty and then moving on to the next woman. That’s why rich men often have many divorces—Larry King is on his eighth wife, Johnny Carson had four, Mickey Rooney eight.

Other powerful men have a different model, a stable family life but constant sexual relationships on the side: Tiger Woods, David Beckham and Bill Clinton.

Evolutionary psychologists attribute this behaviour not to sex addiction but the instinct to spread genes. Man has an unlimited number of potential offsprings because of his ability to generate sperm. And so the most important aspect of whether or not he will mate with a woman is not love or even attraction, but opportunity. Most males will accept this if asked, and any number of studies show it to be true.

One study, a few years ago, had a beautiful woman on a college campus approaching strangers to have sex with her. Every single man she approached agreed. When an attractive man did the same with the campus women, not one agreed. Again, the reason for this is thought to be primal, and it is this. A woman will have three or four and a maximum of perhaps a dozen or so children (Mumtaz Mahal was rewarded with the Taj Mahal for producing 14). So, in a species where man is provider, she must be more careful in selecting her mate because she has to ensure he is capable of protecting her limited offspring. This explains the female attraction to power.

Gujarati women find Narendra Modi very attractive sexually and, even more than the man, it is the urban Gujarati woman who has made Modi a heroic figure in that state. An ageing woman does not have appeal in society because man is instinctively trained to see that her utility is low. This is why women hide their age more than men. It is because of her declining fecundity that age is unattractive on a woman though it’s irrelevant in the rich man. This is not to preclude that a man might find a beautiful woman of older age sexually attractive: He will (remember the opportunity rule). But this will be a relationship of casual sex, because man is first drawn to the nubile woman. Exactly how nubile? The male preference for shaved pudenda offers an indication.

The idea that women are drawn to power opens up doors that many men would rather be left shut. The myth in health literature that penis size does not matter is subscribed to primarily by men. Women would actually have been attracted genetically to the large organ before the use of clothing, which is quite recent. This is because a larger organ is more efficient at depositing sperm, thus ensuring fertilization.

We know that organ size matters because it conditions the unusual behaviour of males in the toilet. In the men’s room, when a urinal is open between two standing men, a third man entering will avoid the spot in the middle and head for the fifth urinal so as to keep one open space between him and the next man. This is because he is conscious of his neighbour sizing him up.

Indian men are particularly insecure and toilets here have a wall—often as high as a standing man’s head—between each urinal.

Incidentally, this competition among men for women is a clear indicator that the anti-homosexual sentiment of Christians and Muslims is Old Testament prejudice. Instinctively, all heterosexual men should like homosexuals because they are not a threat. Often we send out sexual signals that we think are effective, but are actually meaningless. The man who colours his hair black does so without understanding that his youth isn’t what women primarily find attractive in him. It is important, however, for a woman to colour her hair, and the defiant woman who doesn’t, finds it difficult to get men to view her in a sexually attractive light.

Despite the male obsession with large motorcycles, and the advertising that suggests that women find them alluring, an expensive car, say a Mercedes-Benz, is much more effective at communicating a man’s quality. Money power being the key here, and not mechanical power. Similarly, the female predilection for handbags is unfathomable to men, though wearing stilettos is a good idea. Women should wear high-heeled shoes. They make a woman physically vulnerable, teetering, and that makes her attractive to a man, because he likes to think of domination. The heels reform her posture forwards, and that also has its appeals.

Nail polish and lipstick are most appealing to men when red, because it indicates health and vitality, and that was the original purpose of cosmetics. Brown, blue and black and such other colours are quite useless in attracting men.

So can we escape our instinct? Yes, but only episodically. It keeps coming back and it’s always lurking in our head if we observe it. Our prejudice is quite marked and women who are both gorgeous and intelligent are remembered for their beauty. A man who is striking-looking and intelligent is noted for his brains, even by women.

It’s banal but true: To improve their odds in the love market, men need to focus on making more money and women on looking more beautiful.

Unadulterated BS

2010-01-15T00:50:00.003+05:30

I have nothing against Mr. Bejan Daruvala. The dude writes a weekly zodiac horoscope in the Sunday Times of India, which I'm sure a lot of people read and forget in a jiffy. However, these days Mr. Daruvala is beginning to bug me a bit - the guy has become a financial expert!!! He advises people on what to buy, sell or trade!! So much so, that he gets star billing on CNBC (dunno if he actually appears on the channel, but certainly on the website!)

I found this mildly amusing initially, but now the trend seems to be really propagating. I was stunned to find that a well educated (MBA, no less!!) acquaintance checked Mr. Daruvala's prophesies daily. Call it superstition or looking for divine guidance, but I call it sheer idiocy. Investing is tough enough as it is - but using these kind of 'astrological' guideposts is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Check out some specific examples of divine guidance:

05-02-2010 to 18-02-2010 Repeatedly make entries and exit. The time is not good. If you follow the above rule you will make money in atleast 7 out of 10 deals.

19-03-2010 to 01-04-2010 Sell off shares that you purchased at low pricesas they will fetch good prices. Wait for the prices to fall prior to purchasing.

02-05-2010 to 19-05-2010 Not a very good time. Don't trade unidirectionally. During bullish time trade bullishly and in bearish trends trade bearish. Stick to the trends and don't act reverse to avoid risk, advises Ganesha.

Wah!! This last one really is very useful :-) I just wish to offer the poor suckers who trade according to the wishes of this dude a bit of unwanted advice - if this guy could really predict the market, would he be wasting his time telling you how to trade?

Idiot? Certainly not...

2010-01-06T06:27:00.004+05:30

I read this article and felt a bit confused - is this good or bad? Then I figured that this is really really bad - in fact a guaranteed fact that shows just how massively screwed up our education system is!

Nobel laureate Ramakrishnan failed IIT, medical entrance tests
5 Jan 2010, 2138 hrs IST, PTI

BANGALORE: Venkataraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2009 but decades ago he failed to clear entrance tests for both the IITs

and a reputed medical college.

At a public lecture at the Indian Institute of Science campus here, he recalled his journey from Baroda where he went to school and college before moving to Ohio University for his Ph.D. He shifted to Baroda from Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu when he was three.

He noted that he appeared for the IIT entrance test but "did not get a single seat in IIT".

"My parents were somewhat old-fashioned; they did not believe in coaching classes (in preparation for entrance test)," Ramakrishnan told a packed J N Tata Auditorium, where many could not even enter because it was crowded. They (his parents) thought coaching classes were "nonsense".

He also appeared in the entrance test for a seat in the reputed Christian Medical College in Vellore in Tamil Nadu but was unsuccessful. Giving an explanation, he said that those days, there were only a small number of seats for men.

The (really sad) takeaways I have after reading this stupendous article is
Getting into IIT (and other prestigious institutes of higher education) is a function of what kind of coaching class you have been to
There are no avenues within the country for potentially brilliant scientists or other skilled professionals if they do not conform to the rat race (IIT / SRCC / AIIMS / NLS etc etc)
Now that I try to think hard, I cannot recall any Nobel prize winner who is from IIT. I can think of many people in finance though (self included!). To me, this is a travesty of IIT's purpose

Thoughts in a New Year

2010-01-03T22:12:00.003+05:30

A New Year, and a new day, week, month, and if you so believe, even new decade. A time to sit back, relax and count the innumerable pleasures of life. A time to feel the privilege, bask in joy and burst with happiness :-)

Worries on the horizon? I can not recall a single day when I was not worried about something or the other. One year out, I don't even remember 95% of the things I was worried about - feels funny that such trivial inanities should fill 95% of my waking thoughts. When I count my joys, my reasons to be happy, I find I discount them very quickly. Life moves on instantaneously towards the next goal, the next struggle, the next trivial pursuit. How much of this do I really care about? How much of this do I desire? How much can I do without? Mostly all.

The fundamental bedrock of needs - health, safety, family, friends, freedom - are all present in abundance and for free. It is up to me to savour these or take them for granted. I hope I can make the right choice!

Happy new year :-)

Tis the season to be merry...

2009-12-21T22:44:00.005+05:30

1) Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day

2) If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you

3) It is darkest before dawn. That's the best time to steal your neighbour's newspaper

4) Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away and you have their shoes!

5) Warning sign on a Japanese food processor: Not to be used for the other use

6) Instructions on a Chinese product used to relieve painful haemorrhoids: LIE DOWN ON BED AND SLOWLY INSERT POSCOOL UP TO THE PROJECTED PORTION LIKE A SWORD-GUARD INTO ANAL DUCT. WHILE INSERTING POSCOOL FOR APPROXIMATELY 5 MINUTES, KEEP QUIET

7) Market definition: Bear market: a 6-8 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewellery and the husband gets no sex

8) Market correction: the day after you buy stocks

9) Institutional investor: someone who sells a stock big time a day or two after you have bought it, for no apparent reason

10) From an engineering exam:

What does this mean?

2009-12-17T12:35:00.003+05:30

If this is marketing strategy, then I'm really glad that I didn't major in marketing. This is the sign put up by Haagen Dazs in a posh south Delhi mall.

Not only do I not understand what this means, I don't think anyone else does, either!

Are they trying to stress how premium their ice-cream is? So premium that only foreigners can eat it? Well, perhaps. But then, why are you launching in India???

In my opinion, this is a really stupid and 'guaranteed to fail' method for launching any new brand. In fact, it is probably downright illegal. If I were sitting in the head office of Haagen Dazs, I would fire the top management.

The biggest paycheck in history

2009-12-03T21:55:00.002+05:30

There is probably a lot of happiness in becoming rich. However, there is almost certainly more happiness in being right. And its best to become very very rich by being right about something that others didn't agree with! To my mind, no one captures the essence of being right more than John Paulson. Boy, he was right. And how!

This article from the tech ticker is worth a read:

The bursting of the housing bubble cost the American economy trillions of dollars and brought Wall Street to its knees. But a few savvy investors, most notably hedge fund manager John Paulson, made fortunes betting against housing and related securities.

In The Greatest Trade Ever, Wall Street Journal columnist Gregory Zuckerman details how Paulson pocketed $6 billion as his firm made $20 billion betting against the boom from mid-2006 through early 2009. These returns included $4 billion for Paulson personally in 2007, which Zuckerman describes as the single-most lucrative payout in history.

While few, if any, will ever approach Paulson's staggering accumulation of wealth, Zuckerman says there are some timeless lessons for the rest of us, including:

Have the courage of your convictions: Paulson stuck by his thesis even as the trades didn't initially pay off in 2006, myriad housing "experts" told him he was on the road to ruin, and seemingly all of Wall Street's machinery was working against him. And when the bets starting paying off in 2007, Paulson didn't book profits and run as many advised -- and some clients begged. After shorting subprime in 2007, Paulson effectively doubled down in 2008, shifting some of his firepower to bets against Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Wall Street firms knee-deep in the MBS market.

See the forest for the trees: As an outsider to the mortgage world, Paulson was able to see the carnage coming that those on the inside missed. The ability to think independently and see beyond what the "experts" are saying is critical for individual investors because more financial bubbles are likely, Zuckerman says.Hindsight being 20-20, it's clear the housing market was a bubble and Paulson's strategy of buying cheap insurance against subprime mortgages - in the form of credit default swaps - seems like a no-brainer.

But as Zuckerman details in the book, getting the trade right wasn't easy; others tried but failed to match Paulson's stellar returns because they were either too early, had the wrong trading strategy or didn't see the bet through to its ultimate conclusion.

Furthermore, Paulson struggled in early 2006 to raise money for a fund dedicated to betting against housing securities, Zuckerman reports; Paulson was viewed as an "outsider" in the mortgage market at the time and didn't reached legendary status until after the mega-profits had been booked.

I'm a rightist libertarian!

2009-12-03T01:06:00.004+05:30

I read a blog post about the political compass today. Nothing spectacular about it, just a simple questionnaire that lets you know a bit more about yourself. I took the test, and found no surprises :-( It was as I always suspected - I'm a boring kind of centrist guy - leaning towards libertarianism (i.e. laissez faire, live and let live etc etc) as well as economically rightist (the market may not know best, but it sure as hell knows much more than the smartest planner in the world)

Here is my map:

No politicians are like me :-(

Milton Friedman is the closest match. Does that mean I should have been an academician? I think, very very deep down, that I was cut out to be an academician or a researcher!!!

I love such games :-)

The end of a dream?

2009-11-27T00:50:00.003+05:30

Today I spotted a Toyota Fortuner on the road - the first time I saw the car outside of a picture or a website.

Unfortunately for me, it was quite a disappointment! I first mistook it for some version of the Innova, then double checked the name, and finally figured that the damn thing does not remotely resemble a power-packed animal. No doubt it is very efficient and indeed powerful, it just does not look so! I think the key factor is the ground clearance - our desi cars have high clearance and a higher back, while the firang cars (while more elegant) have lower centers of gravity and rounded backs. A bit of crudeness is missing!

Give me the Scorpio or the Safari anyday (till then I can dream about the Land Rover and the Audi Q7)!

Some photographs:

Fortuner:

Land Rover:

Q7:

Scorpio:

Tata Safari:

How much is too much?

2009-11-27T00:32:00.003+05:30

A question that a lot of people have asked me, and I many! How much is enough? What is the magic 'x' amount of money/assets/material stuff that if one owns, one does not desire anymore?

Clearly, unlike the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe and everything, the answer is not 'forty two' or any other number. It cannot be, is my personal experience. When I was an engineering student, I used to think a salary of 40k per month was the end-all of most dreams. Then the investment banks came in and spoiled us with dreams of many zeros at the end of some obscene number of dollars in annual compensation. The bar kept rising higher and higher (as indeed did inflation - of houses, cars, food, everything else).

My buddy, who probably earns in fractions of millions of USD in Hong Kong, has also undergone the same phenomena. Last when we spoke of such things, he said he would be happy with something that gave him risk free income of some x amount. Needless to say, he has surpassed that target quite some time ago, but is still on the hunt for more mammon. He sometimes feels unhappy at his pace of life, but on the whole the feeling of being on-the-move energizes him.

Of course, money is not the only thing most people desire. I always like to read the stupid celebrity interviews where the subject is asked to rate by order of priority - fame, money and power. Invariably fame and power get higher billings than money. This is true for a lot of us as well. Money is just a way of keeping score!

The answer to the question therefore, in my mind, is truly what you limit yourself to - and also what you can aspire to. It is a bit like Maslow's heirarchy - when one target is met, one automatically moves to the next one, because without targets there is only boredom. Rare (and very lucky) is the person who has enough! How does this mythical dude entertain himself??

The big bear turns positive on India

2009-11-26T18:47:00.003+05:30

Nouriel Roubini shot to fame thanks to the global financial meltdown of 2008. He didn't make too much money out of being right (unlike John Paulson or George Soros), but certainly earned name and fame!

Since his heyday at the height (depth?) of the armageddon in October 2008, he has been as vocal as before, but not quite so prescient, as markets everywhere have ignored his calls of doom, and have rallied massively. It is interesting to see what the big bear says about Indian markets now...

And surprise surprise! The guy predicts new highs for us next year. The reasons he gives are: 1) The USD carry trade and 2) the fact that India is the top pick in the emerging economy universe and is relatively scarce (i.e. foreign investment can come into India only in the equity market, not through debt, real estate or other investment classes). Both points are well taken.

But I start getting sceptical when the sceptics start becoming believers!! Will Mr. Roubini be right this time? That is the trillion INR question :-)

More on politics

2009-11-12T18:22:00.002+05:30

Thanks DD for this pic - check out the gold on this 'social worker'!

This is what we have become

2009-11-09T20:41:00.002+05:30

Politics always repulsed me. But our politicians every single day plumb new depths, and still retain their ability to deeply wound and trouble me. Today I am ashamed to be part of this venal, hypocritical and spineless country. It has a doomed future.

The immediate provocation - a common thug, whose only claim to fame is that he is related to so-and-so, with a very very calculated and cynical eye to a vote bank, commands a diktat which is illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. He says that new MLAs to the Maharashtra assembly should only take their oath in Marathi. While this in itself should be reason enough to put the guy in jail for the rest of his sorry life, what actually happens is that one particular person takes the oath in Hindi, and 4 MLAs from the thug's gang actually beat up this person in the assembly in full view of cameras, security and the country. These people are elected representatives who are supposed to frame our laws.

But what gets my goat is this - I quote verbatim: Eknath Khadse, the BJP group leader, called for a sympathetic view of the entire incident. "Nobody supports what happened today. But, there is nothing wrong in checking the footage again to verify the MNS claim that it was Azmi who had provoked them through his body language," he said. Khadse said since it was the first day of the new house, a lenient view should be taken.

Indeed. Punish the victim. This is what we have become. This is what we stand for. We have lost all humanity, dignity, and morality. We are doomed.

Alliterative flights

2009-10-30T21:30:00.002+05:30

Mom: You need to lose all that unwanted ungainly weight

Me: Verily wanton weight

Unwelcome unwholesome weight

Ultimately ululating weight

and then later (staring ahead on an airplane):

Me: Verisimilitudinally vituperative weight
Finally my favourite: Vacuously vaccilating weight!!!

Art.. and a new vocation :-)

2009-10-28T16:54:00.004+05:30

The wife is very artistic, and spiritual to boot. She has demonstrated an aptitude for a dazzling new career :-) Meet Mata Gayatri Devi (drumbeat roll....).

The following pics say it all...

Old email folders

2009-10-14T16:46:00.002+05:30

I happened to look through some old email folders recently (the kind that you file away while you were a young student and never look at again), and I was amazed to see that I had worked with some really great people!

Even when I was just a (supposedly lowly) intern, in a (supposedly parochial) country where I did not speak the language, there were these guys who were super friendly, considerate and helpful! While I did not value all this at the time, I really am quite touched to read those emails again as the memories come flooding back! Really, there is so much more to life than the pursuit of money and constant compromises to achieve this pursuit. Work is something we all do, and a enabling work environment really does wonders for productivity and efficiency. In my earlier avatar as a management consultant, I was (ironically!) very cynical about this mythical beast called the 'culture' of an organization. I now think it matters tremendously more than I thought. And that it exists in a good form very very rarely!

Note to self: Try to spend the rest of my days in the pursuit of happiness, and not moolah!

Amazing what some old emails can do!

Wise and Otherwise

2009-10-02T14:43:00.002+05:30

The wife picked up this book by Sudha Murty last week. I've been reading it, and its contents make me wonder a bit at how removed I am from the pulse of the our country. For those who do not know, Sudha Murty is the wife of one of Infosys' founders and runs the Infosys Foundation, a charitable and social organization.

The book itself is very easy reading, with short 'stories' each commenting upon some idiosyncratic aspect of life in the real India. It is easy to get moved by the plight in these stories of the common person in India, grappling with poverty, social pressures and ills and yet maintaining a stoic and dignified attitude. That said, the book is not heavy at all (something I had feared) and has a liberal dose of light moments.

For me the real story was the kind of transformational work being done by the foundation and the amazingly simple and direct approach of the author. It is easy to see after reading this book why Infosys is a real revolution, and why it (and its founding philosophy) will survive forever. It is easy to throw money at charity or social work (something I've been guilty of) but difficult to devote all one's time, efforts and skills at it. This is the real greatness of the author and the foundation.

I'm going to stop shorting Infosys as a mark of respect. The company has a wonderful future!

I'm very pissed...

2009-09-25T22:31:00.002+05:30

...with my bank (hypothetical situation). What do I do?

I ask the bank for compensation for my ire.

How much? One lakh? Ten lakhs? One crore? Hundred crore? One million crore?

Or a sextillion? (i.e one followed by 21 zeros)?

Not enough? How about ten sextillion?

Yeah! that sounds good! Ten sextillion then, is what this gentleman decided!

To call this absurd is akin to saying that Mallika Sherawat is ugly. i.e. highly understated!!!

When melancholy strikes...

2009-09-25T22:02:00.002+05:30

...one remembers some old time poignant movies. E.g.

Ijaazat: The story of a couple and how they discover each other when its too late. For the story click here
Parinda: The story of two brothers and how fate intervenes to tear them apart. For story, click here
One of the all time greats: The English Patient. Lyrical, forbidden love which is doomed. How humanity transcends nationality. Story here
On the Waterfront. I could'a been a contender. I could'a been somebody! Story here

The common theme running in these classics is that of loneliness. Terrifying, slow loneliness. Attractive, alluring loneliness.

Very good interview

2009-09-09T17:31:00.003+05:30

To complete the troika of bad, good and best, here is the final quote from the same website (but a different analyst):

Q: What do you do now for someone who has been left out in this rally for the past couple of months?

A: Conventional wisdom would suggest that as more and more people who have been left out get frustrated, they get sucked into the market and when the last of them gets sucked in that is when this market will break. Having said that, for me it has been a period of frustration, we are now less in cash than we were earlier much against my better judgement. We are clearly not looking at new ideas, at new stocks but adding a little bit to existing stocks in the midcap space which were looking cheap earlier, which are still looking cheap. My fundamental sense still tells me that there are too many dichotomies in this market, in this purely liquidity led. On the one hand you have consumer price inflation running away with itself but nobody believes that interest rates will go up. Commodity prices are heading higher but nobody believes that global economic recovery will suffer. The world has been through its worst economic crisis over the last twelve to fifteen months but everyone believes that the worst is over. The party is now well and truly on. I don’t think we are going to find too many people coming onto your channel and saying the next band is down. Everyone is saying that the next band is up and rightfully so because a lot of levels have been taken out. But this is a dichotomy. China is another huge imponderable here, three or four months ago, everyone was saying that Chinese growth will bailout the global economy but today China seems to be slowing down. But the view of the world has not changed. It is like one should not worry about China, everything will be fine. It is like the question you asked about the monsoon a little while earlier. The monsoon has not recovered but one should not worry, everything is fine, this market will go up. So that is the mood and it is the liquidity that is driving this mood and who are you or I to buck that trend.

And this is how it should be done...

2009-09-09T08:00:00.003+05:30

This is a different guy on the same question:

Q: What about Tata Motors, can the current price be justified? Are you revising your price targets there?

A: Fundamentally, it’s difficult to recommend buying Tata Motors at these levels. First of all the biggest chunk of revenue at about 65-70% still comes from JLR which is geared to the US and Western European markets. That revenue and earnings stream remains quite unpredictable so there is this huge degree of variability in the earnings forecast for Tata Motors. With that kind of a risk I think, these valuations may not be justified at the current levels. In the auto’s side, there are far better opportunities which have a far steadier earnings stream and a lesser degree of risk associated with the business which one can buy. It’s difficult to recommend a risky earnings stream at high valuations at this point in time.

This is a decent answer - the guy talks about headwinds for the company, says that financial performance is difficult to predict, and that a risky earnings stream trading at high valuations is not to be recommended. Anyone who buys after this knows that she is taking a pure punt. This is what a good analyst should do.

What is bullsh***ing 'analyst'

2009-09-08T23:45:00.004+05:30

Just read this 'expert' on business channel CNBC's website. I quote:

Tata Motors a good buy?

Betadpur said, it was difficult to figure out a valuation for Tata Motors. “We have looked at the street estimates. It is all over the place as far as earnings per share (EPS) for 2011, our own numbers are around Rs 20 and we can give it a 30 multiple and that gives you Rs 600 - 30 multiple seems a little too much but that is where we are. If we say everything goes well for the stock, Jaguar-LandRover picks up by 2011, that is generating a lot of cash flow for the company and the EPS goes from our current estimates 20 to 30 and then you give it a 30 multiple, you get to Rs 900-1,000 target. That is what some people on the street are saying that Tata Motors can get to Rs 1,000. That is how we believe on the numbers but I don’t think everything is going to go positive for this company. “

What a jerk!!

1) He is not saying anything

2) He is not even providing any justification for his dumbass arguments - why should it trade at 30 times? What will make EPS increase 50%? Cash flow does not equate EPS. So what specifically will make EPS rise? What about the debt overhang? What about historical valuations?

Jokers like this really get my goat. And what business does CNBC have putting such brain-dead pretenders on air? The irony is that about 20,000 people would have read this and will call their brokers tomorrow with orders to buy Tata Motors, saying they have heard (on authority) that it will soon touch Rs 1000!!

They deserve the slaughtering they are going to get!

PS: I have nothing against Tata Motors. I think they make damn good SUVs!!

Mo' on co-bro

2009-09-01T17:49:00.003+05:30

Suggestions from Icon-o-blast:

Coveted brother

Colossal brother

Concocted brother

Convoluted brother

Constipated brother

Conundrum-like brother

Follow up from me:

Contrarian brother

Copulating brother

Desi English?

2009-08-31T21:39:00.002+05:30

Heard today - "He is my co-brother".

wtf??

What is a co-brother? Is it a shortened version of cousin brother? In that case why no co-bro? Or is it colleague who is thick as a brother? I was bursting to ask, but politely nodded in sage understanding instead.

Ah, the eternal mystery of life!