‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’
Courtesy Mridula Ramesh’s book ‘Watershed: How we destroyed India’s water and how we can save it’, we learnt a couple of years ago that most of India’s cities are consuming more water than the monsoons can supply thus leading to Indians’ drawing down the nation’s groundwater resources at a rapid rate. Courtesy Tim Smedley’s long read in […]
Malthus and the misallocation of capital
Whilst climate change is real and needs to be arrested and possibly reversed, there is a school of thought that argues against mindless environmental activism which could potentially derail human progress in itself. Alexander Ineichen is one such voice who calls for a more nuanced approach. He cites the collapse of Sri Lanka and its […]
How India is heating up
In case you haven’t noticed it, India’s summers are increasingly becoming insanely hot. This is not the findings of a Western funded NGO which wants to scupper the ‘India Story’. Instead, this is the result of simply plotting the temperature data from India’s Met Department. If you click on the link shown in the source, […]
FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023: How Indian women’s football was built on barefoot dreams
In India, cricket gets 95% of the sponsorship money. As a result, athletes playing other sports are seen as children of a lesser god. And if these athletes are women, then they are often left asking whether god will ever come to their rescue. No, we are not talking about India’s women wrestlers; instead, we […]
Yevgeny Prigozhin: the hotdog seller who rose to the top of Putin’s war machine
Just last weekend, Russia seemed headed into a civil war with one of its prominent private armies ‘Wagner’ fighting in Ukraine rebelling against the official military and marching within 200 miles of Moscow. The mutiny was aborted with no officially stated reason yet with the founder of Wagner leading the rebellion, Yevgeny Prigozhin moving to […]
ROIC and the Investment Process
The most commonly accepted metric to assess the effectiveness of a company’s management team is its return on invested capital (RoIC). Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan of Morgan Stanley are in their typically articulate form in this research paper showing how RoIC should matter for investors and businessmen alike. They sum up the concept of […]
Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why
This FT long read tees up its star protagonist, Shanna Swan, and her life’s research in the following manner: “The mystery is this. Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in the developing […]
Forget the frivolous narrative, Bazball is a hard-nosed, winning strategy
We are living in an increasingly disruptive world where incumbent beliefs and approaches are challenged at an unprecedented pace. Not all disruptions work, some do fade away. To figure out ex-ante what’s likely to work and what’s not, we look at various disruptive instances and draw lessons from them. This piece discusses what is perhaps […]
What Role Should Cash Play in Your Portfolio?
Over long periods of time, equities tend to deliver reasonably positive outcomes and outperform most other asset classes, particularly cash. (The article refers to cash as liquid assets for the ease of access such as bank deposits or money market funds and not to currency notes as popularly understood in India). Yet, we are surprised […]
Leela Row Dayal: The first Indian woman to win a match at Wimbledon
As we continue our celebration of the rise of India’s women, we highlight an Indian woman who created waves in Wimbledon nearly a century ago. The BBC says, “A writer, dancer, playwright, mountaineer and a national tennis champion, Leela Row – the first Indian woman to win a tennis match at the Wimbledon – was as […]
Martin Wolf issues a wake-up call on the state of democratic capitalism
This is part of the Author Talks series at Mckinsey. Nienke Beuwer of Mckinsey interviews Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ Chief Economics Commentator on his new book titled: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. As the title suggests, in the book Wolf posits that the combination of democracy and market economy that has delivered global prosperity since WW-II […]
How the US is pushing China out of the internet’s plumbing
Whilst many of us think that data is carried across the world by satellite communication, in reality 99% of the world’s data is carried by subsea cables. After pushing Huawei and ZTE out of the market for networking equipment, China’s geopolitical rivals are now determined to push China out of the market for the subsea […]
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