India’s former Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh (1932 – 2024) – who was also a former Finance Minister, a former RBI Governor, a former professor at the Delhi School of Economics – passed away last week. Those of us who lived through the unforgettable summer of 1991 – when PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh […]
India is going through one of the strongest financialisation of savings trends the world has seen, thanks to rising awareness about financial assets beyond the traditional physical assets like real estate and gold and the ubiquity of mobile apps making it easy to transact. Yet, most of us don’t discuss our finances openly, especially with […]
The Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are admired for having pulled off an improbable balance of a welfare state and a market economy. Even more remarkable is how companies from these tiny countries punch way above their weight and dominate their respective industries at a global scale. “Lego is the planet’s biggest […]
Donald Trump’s win in the recent American presidential elections involved a considerable shift in support base from the opposite side, most notably Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. And this coalition of supporters is beginning to see conflict of interest. Most notably on the issue of immigration on which Trump and his right-wing supporters have been […]
From hit movies made by Indian women about Indian women, we move on to celebrate the late Shyam Benegal (1934-2024) whose movies were amongst the first in Hindi cinema to give women agency and to give them – rather than male actors – centrestage. Growing up in India through the 1970s and 1980s meant being […]
India is undergoing a pivotal shift wherein women are pulling ahead of men in many different spheres of life. In Chapter 4 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: the Unusual Rise of Modern India” we have given our take on the ascendancy of Indian women (see here). As always, cinema is a reliable barometer […]
In a year in which, over 80% of India’s latest crop of graduates failed to get jobs, we find that university education in India neither increases the probability of employment nor gives an uplift to earnings. These challenges are being exacerbated by the rise of AI & automation. Specifically, the skills necessary to thrive in […]
If you have watched Test cricket on grounds across the world, you are likely to have found Chennai to have the most cricket-aware crowd and enjoyed discussing the intricacies of the game with a stranger in the stands. Ravichandran Ashwin is the embodiment of such a Chennai cricket fanatic. Following his retirement, as one would […]
Over the past month, we have been bombarded with news about how Quantum Computing is here and how it will change the world and our lives. It followed Google’s announcement that its quantum computer ‘Willow’ had cracked a problem that would take a traditional computer billions of years to solve, an indication of the exponentially […]
Indians dominate business life in some of the most remote corners of the planet. This BBC article is about the Watmull family from Sindh (now in Pakistan) who moved to Hawaii in 1915 and now dominate business life in Hawaii. It is a remarkable story of industry and intelligence spanning several generations and a century: […]
Over the past few weeks, we have featured a few pieces on the sheer strength of Chinese manufacturing and how the world’s lack of relative competitiveness and hence dependence on it will define geo-politics as well. Here’s another piece which endorses that view, except it also focuses on China’s weaknesses which if fixed will likely […]
This long article in The Wire is a critique of how regulation impacts the lives of the most vulnerable sections of Indian society. The first stage of this drama unfolds during the first wave of Covid in April-June 2020: “When the COVID-19 pandemic began, microfinance operations came to a complete standstill in India. The state […]
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