@rgumental @dvisor

Someone asked me a few days back about whats happening over the Eurozone crisis. It took a while for me to explain. However, i've been thinking about the correct way to explain it in a simpler language. Here it goes Imagine a big joint family ( i.e, European Union), whose members are practicing different professions . Each has their own pet concerns, but supports each others in times of need .Suppose a profligate member of the family starts spending beyond his means. To meet his expenses, he starts approaching money lenders or banks. The lenders, because of the fact that he's from a reputed family initially starts lending to him at lower interest rates or without guarantees. This puts additional fillip to the spending person and his income expenditure gap widens. Gradually, lenders tend to doubt his capacity for repayment and reduces loans to the all members of the family. This creates difficulties even for the well performing members of the family . The knee-jerk reaction ...

Seventy Eight years ago, two nations (lets say A & B) were distressed with inflation , corruption & unemployment. A person in country A ( a hero, already by then by his clean background ), blessed with extra-ordinary oratory & crowd pulling skills  , proposed an 'Enabling Act' .  It was supposed to be the 'Law to remedy the distress of people', which gave him sweeping powers..  He didn't have the necessary majority to pass the bill in parliament. By a carefully crafted campaign of mass public hysteria, he appeared to have the backing of masses,especially middle class . Parliament was burned on one day. Shortly after that, the Enabling Act came into place. The immediate economic impact was enormous. The corruption level was minimized, economy was galvanized, the nation dramatically pulled itself out of the great depression .. and much more...Masses hailed him as the hero who replaced a non-functioning system (Parliament) and brought efficiency in all sp...

One of the most mis-informed notions about democracy is the term 'participatory' . Much of the literature that you would see on politics / democratic society uses this term to say that citizens / electorate should have a say in every decision that Government takes. And, to this basis, many Governments / media / someone else often calls for referendums to decide on a crucial decision. The Lokpal referendums happening in India is a classic example..The main problem with this referendum process is that often, the electorate is mis-informed / does not think about the real implications while exercising their votes. For eg:, If you do a referendum in India on whether income tax should be abolished or not, you are quite likely to get a 95% + vote on the affirmative side.. Similarly, if someone floats a referendum on whether India should attack Pakistan, the answer is likely to be on the affirmative side more often... But the point is that, such decisions have quite a lot of other i...

Whisky & Buttermilk are individually great.. But most sane people won't make a cocktail mixing two.. And you won't drink buttermilk by pouring it in a whisky glass...  And I think this Google plus is like a platform where they have attempted to bring two different social needs together. Fundamentally, facebook is about connecting to people whom you know.. Engaging in conversations where you expect people whom you know to reply..  On the other hand, twitter is aspirational to the core. You tend to follow celebrities, politicians, sports-persons etc..  What google plus has attempted to do is to bring these two fundamentally different social needs together... In a way, your public circle in google plus is equivalent to your twitter network.. And the other circles that you make are more or less your facebook networks. The tweets that you make are likely to be much different in nature from your facebook status message updates.. And vice versa as well..  ...

" If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. "   - George Bernard Shaw So, again it happened.. One more round of blasts in Mumbai..  As I'm abroad now, I'm somewhat away from the 24 hour sensational / breaking news culture of Indian news channels. Yes, the Government should put in better counter terror mechanisms in place, better intelligence or whatsoever.. But I don't think they can eliminate this scourge altogether.. If some stupid wants to blast some area, there is very little that a Government can do about it..  even a well funded & efficient organization like Mossad has not been able to eliminate terror completely..   Eliminating these, if at all possible, is a political & societal solution rather than a military or intelligence one. And I think I buy some of the comments made by police officers quoted in media.. You may prevent a lot of these ..But one fault , entire wor...

There's a joke that's going round here in Kuwait ( Yep.. I'm in Middle East again for a 2 month consulting assignment ).. Whoever who sits with their heads up in a discussion room / gathering is a Nokia phone holder.. whoever who sits by looking down is an iPhone owner ..because they will be fiddling around with the gadget in a perpetual manner :) .. I'm surprised at the level of popularity that this device has achieved over here.. iPhone & iPad are said to be perpetually running out of stock.. I checked couple of stores.. they keep only the latest version ( which is often exorbitantly priced ).. For eg: There is a huge price difference between iPad 2 with just wifi support & iPad 2 with wifi & 3G support.. And all the shops have only this wifi + 3G option available.. Smart sales strategy Unlike the Western markets, the 'App-Culture' has not quite caught up here. But no matter, people keep playing on with this device for whatever reason.. And peopl...

For a news-hungry media deprived of anything new in the post-IPL season, Baba Ramdev is set to give some good entertainment. All of us are fed up with corruption stories to varying extents. Whether it is the enormity of crores in the 2G scam or black money laundering, we have to agree with the fact that this needs to be curbed. However, Ramdev's demands are far fetched to be addressed even in a totalitarian regime, forget a liberal democracy like ours. These include pulling out 500/- & 1000/- notes, capital punishment for the corrupt & so on.. More than Ramdev's histrionics, the troublesome aspect is the authoritarian attitude creeping into ordinary people and the overdrive of emotions crowding any iota of logical thinking. The idea that an individual who has made his mark in Yoga can reform a parliamentary democracy with his absurd ideas is as preposterous as thinking Sachin Tendulkar can elevate Indian football to World Cup soccer level  because he's God of Cric...

   Of late I’ve been asked by some people who are waiting B-School admits / have got B-School admits on what to do once they begin the course. It is true, that unless you talk to people & find out what are the things that you should expect in a B-School, you might be in for a rude shock.The following are a set of things ( extremely personal opinion, I should say) that may help a new B-School entrant in his / her 2 year stint at the institute 1)  A lot of you may have come into B-School harbouring thoughts of a radical career change into investment banking / consulting from your monotonous IT jobs. I wouldn’t say that it is impossible. But keep in mind that a lot of things that you are keen to achieve are constrained by your life so far ( read, your gender, what you have in your ‘CV’   -  things you cannot change ). So, don’t get upset if you don’t get a McKinsey / GoldMan Sacchs shortlist in summers :) 2) B-School is not always a place where ...

Unparalleled concentration of power in any pillar of the society is a recipe for disaster, be it executive, judiciary or parliament. That is one of the basic philosophies upon which Indian constitution is built. To be fair enough, all these three pillars have reigned in themselves when one of them was trying to enlarge their power. However, I would admit that this system of checks and balances have not forced each other into an efficient system. And that deficiency is the root cause of these civil society movements which we’ve witnessed in recent times. Even so, the systemic inefficiency cannot be a justification for creating another pillar of constitution vested with unbridled authority I don’t intend to repeat all the arguments again. If you have not read those, it is a must that you read through these links 1) http://www.indianexpress.com/news/of-the-few-by-the-few/772773/1 2) http://calamur.org/gargi/2011/04/06/my-issues-with-the-proposed-jan-lok-pal-bill/ 3) http://www.li...

I recently came across an article which explains a new ( and I should say, ingenuous ) way of operating lotteries in Kerala.. For non-Keralites, lottery industry is something thats very sensitive politically in Kerala, especially considering the impending state elections in April.. The method goes like this 1) There is a reference lottery - Bhutan/Sikkim . Suppose they sell a lottery ticket in which ticket number has 10 digits 2) The Kerala lottery operator will float a shadow lottery to this, bearing a ticket with 3 digit ticket number & lets say, two/ alphabets ( the alphabet part is just to have a unique ticket number ) 3) The winners will be identified on the basis of last 3 digits of the winning reference lottery ( Bhutan/Sikkim ) 4) Of-course, the ticket cost & prizes are vastly different for the shadow lottery ( They have factored in the law of probabilities :) ) The interesting thing about this is that it is almost equivalent ( except the winning part ) to taki...

 If you have upgraded to the new version of Google profiles, you wouldn't have missed the uncanny resemblance it has with facebook ..My profile is at  https://profiles.google.com/ajithprasadb / The Buzz feed is sort of a stream update that you have on your facebook home page, the picasa links to your photo album... If you have configured maps, you would see a location snapshot as well.. And if google puts some intelligent thoughts into the data volume in the underlying gmail account, it can easily bring in a friends / connections network to that profile page as well.. Though, this is still far from where facebook stands in today's social web, i think finally google is getting into the social space in a correct way.. There won't be any big launches or anything like that... They may slowly start adding more & more services / features to that profile page..And in one year or so, I won't be surprised if that profile page becomes central to our social page communications...

( Test post - Will be edited as I experiment with this feature ) - Finally working well except for the width :)

 There is a big problem with many writers in Finance / Economics.. Most of them are stuck with one philosophy & keep on repeating that in every book that they dole out..  Few months back i picked up " The Big Short " by Michael Lewis.. I have to say that till now I havnt been able to complete it because in one way or other most of the ideas / stories that he describe are present in one way or other in his earlier book - " Liar's Poker " ..  Individually these books aren't bad.. However, collectively these two are repetitive..    Another prominent writer who falls into this category in George Soros who keeps on harping about his concept of reflexivity in every book that he writes.. Same case with Tim Hartford ... Buying Logic of Life turned out to be a waste after reading Undercover Economist    Infact, I'd bet these writers are diluting their brand value by doling out similar ones .. Even though I liked Taleb's both books  - Fooled By Ran...

Dear Nokia Share Holders, Over the last few days, you would have read & re-read the so-called open-letters ( letter 1 , letter 2 , & the revolting letter -3 ) many times.. If you were an institutional investor, you would have made handsome profits by shorting your dear 'NOK' if you knew what was coming. If you were a retail long term investor you would have been puzzled with the enduring hold/sell question seeing the wild market fluctuations that were coming minutes after each of those letters. One cannot collectively put blame on all share-holders for the mis-management happening. If your holding is/was small, you would have had absolutely no chance in influencing the decision to pick someone   - who has literally no big background in smart phone business - into the most important position in your dear 'NOK' . However, I cannot selectively address the audience. Hence I've to hold you responsible. What your CEO has done is to make your dear 'NO...

I happened to read this  http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/23/peaked_performance/?page=full    recently.. It got me thinking deep.. I used to follow athletics closely about a decade back.. Of late, nothing much has happened in terms of breaking the world records..  And really how far it can go.. Just take Long jump & High Jump   .. Mike Powel's long jump record has been there from 1991 ( In between, i guess Ivan Pedroso broke it, but that was probably annulled ) .. Javier Sotomayor's record has stood there from 1993.. As the article claims, unless someone invents a better Fosberry flop technique, high jump may stay for some time.. But, no matter whatever technique is being used, aren't there practical limits which human beings cannot simply scale.. ? For eg: , can we ever think of someone running 100m race in some 8.5 seconds ? ( Given the fact that the current record is 9.58 by Usain Bolt ) . Won't that be a sort of physical ...