Long read: The Kremlin’s brazen tactics: Russia’s shadow fleet is doubling as a spy asset, intelligence sources say
This is a remarkable long read pulled together by a team of CNN journalists spread across the world. Effectively, they are saying that James Bond style Russian agents now travel in oil tankers around the world and conduct in-depth surveillance and espionage: “Russian personnel with links to the country’s military and security services have engaged […]
The Inevitability of Rupee Depreciation and How You Can Benefit from it
The Rupee loses approximately 40% of its value every decade. As a result, after paying taxes, you have less than a third of your income left in hand to finance your daily expenses and your long-term goals (like children’s education, retirement). However, it does not have to be like this. You can compound your wealth […]
Short read: The Misfit Tree
It’s that time of the year when there is general cheer all around. Work related stress eases a bit as people go on breaks. Families get together as kids come home from college or relatives and friends living abroad making their annual trips home. Some of us are looking forward to that long-planned vacation. Yet, […]
Short read: Indian football’s great irony: Millions for Messi, none for the beautiful game
300 of India’s top footballers today are jobless as India doesn’t have a national football league anymore. It might sound ludicrous given the game’s greatest star Lionel Messi, received a raging (pun intended) welcome in India with hundreds of thousands of fans thronging stadiums and the rich and the famous paying over a million for […]
Short read: Housework Valued
More women vote in India’s elections than men. Unsurprisingly therefore, over the past four years various state governments have started unconditional direct benefit transfers to their largest votebank – women. The Statesman says that this could be the beginning of something big, something profound: “India may have stumbled into one of its most consequential social […]
Long read: How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device in the Himalayas?
This is a fascinating story from six decades ago about an espionage act gone wrong possibly putting at risk millions of lives even to this day. It follows the Chinese nuclear tests in 1964 which alarmed the US. In a rare act of partnership with India who had just lost a war to China, the […]
Long read: The India Trump Made: Where American Bullying Is Leading New Delhi
James Crabtree is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Rudra Chaudhuri is the Director of Carnegie India. In this piece, the two foreign policy experts opine on how India is navigating the foreign policy mess that Trump has created. India’s response according to these two experts has three different strands […]
Long read: South rising, west slipping: India’s export map is being redrawn, shows RBI data
In our 2024 bestseller ‘Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India’ we had dedicated a chapter to how southern India is rapidly pulling away from the rest of India in economic growth. (The South pulled away from the rest of the country on social indicators several decades ago.) To our surprise, this point […]
What can we learn from the first investor to diversify globally?
“He taught us that in order to find the best investment opportunities, you must open your mind to all possibilities around the world.” – Mark Mobius on his mentor, Sir John Templeton Sir John Templeton (Source: John Templeton Foundation) Our brain’s craving for dopamine makes diversification really hard. If you have made money on an […]
Short read: ‘It’s the golden age of spreadsheet geekery’
Equity analysts sometimes get accused as ‘drag and drop’ champions alluding to the feature in Microsoft’s spreadsheet tool Excel, when they ‘forecast’ future cashflows often without a strong basis of business understanding. The shortcoming aside, equity analysts like several other professionals have marvelled at the power of Excel to crunch large swathes of data using […]
Short read: What China will dominate next
2025 will go down as the year when China properly flexed its muscles in the global arena. The year began with DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company showing what it had achieved at a fraction of the resources available to the American BigTech. Even better was how China dealt with Trump’s tariff tantrums with its leverage […]
Short read: Neanderthal 1: The incredible discovery that rewrote history
We humans are highly prone to consensus hugging. This hugging behaviour pertains not just to our thinking about financial markets but also in other fields including science. So, until Charles Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859, we believed that we have always looked like we look today. However, the first scientific proof that […]
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