Short Read: How British Abolition of Slavery led to India’s Indentured Labour System
In Holland, in the West Indies, in Fiji, in Malaysia and in Mauritius, we have met people of Indian descent whose ancestors left India around 150 years ago. Given that the rest of the world wasn’t exactly embracing Indian talent at that point of time, how did these Indians migrate such vast distances and build […]
Long Read: Beat your Bot: Building your Moat against AI
Plenty has been written about the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing humans at many jobs. Here’s a perspective from someone who has already faced with the threat and has thought deeply about how to protect himself. Professor Aswath Damodaran, widely known for his work on valuations, thanks to his freely available books, blogs […]
Long Read: Indigenous, Affordable, How Robot-Assisted Surgeries are Finding Takers in Smaller Indian Cities
Whilst rural India is struggling, small town India is flourishing. Amongst other things, as affluent Indians abandon the public health infrastructure and migrate to well-managed private sector hospitals, robotic assisted surgeries (RAS) are all the rage in smaller Indian cities. Indeed when you get off the flight in these cities, the first advertisement that usually […]
Long Read: “I am Seething with Anger”: A Decade of Stagnation in Rural Wages
If you ask an Economics graduate “What will happen to real rural wages in a democratic country where real GDP growth is consistently north of 6% and where the rural economy suffers from endemic labour shortages?”, chances are that no Economics graduate will answer that “real rural wages will stagnate in such an economy”. And […]
MeritorQ: CAPE Fear
In this newsletter, we look at current market valuation levels implied by the cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio (CAPE). Going by past history, our analysis suggests that at current CAPE levels, Indian investors should be more cautious on forward-looking market returns. Irrespective of market valuation, we believe MeritorQ’s low-risk approach of picking profitable, low-debt […]
Short read: The Book Bag That Binds Japanese Society
The Japanese are known for their customs followed religiously like unwritten rules not imposed by any authority but societal norms and peer pressure. “During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, the government never mandated masks or lockdowns, yet the majority of residents wore face coverings in public and refrained from going out to crowded venues. Japanese […]
Short read: Why do Australians Live so Long?
Thanks to progress in the medical field, life expectancy across the world is rising. But is this rise uniform across the world or are some societies doing better than others. Here’s a paper that got published earlier this month comparing English speaking countries on life expectancy. “THE AVERAGE Australian will live around two years longer […]
Short read: Angry Young Men Review: Salim-Javed Documentary Coasts on Full-Blown Nostalgia and a Dizzying Array of Stars
Did you know that the of the 24 Bollywood movies that the duo of Salim Khan & Javed Akhtar (screen name “Salim-Javed”) scripted, 22 were blockbuster hits eg. Deewar, Don, Sholay, Zanjeer, etc. No scriptwriter before or since has managed a strike rate remotely close to this. And did you know that they were the […]
Long read: History is in the Making
Our history curriculum in school largely involved learning about major political events such as kingdoms, wars, revolutions, etc. As this brilliant article points out, the Wikipedia pages for specific calendar years in history also primarily highlight political events and figures in those years. This piece talks about what’s wrong with that view of our history […]
Long Read: The Lonely Death of a Jailed Russian Pianist who Opposed War
Most of us who earn a living by investing in this and that tend to have a cavalier attitude towards people who agonise about human rights. Why, we ask, can’t these jholawalas also live lives whose main focus is to make as much money as possible? A minority of the truth tellers tend to get publicity (eg. […]
Long Read: Snakebites Kill More Indians Than Malaria, Dengue. Blame the Urban-Rural Divide
Over the past month, as part of our research into the healthcare sector, we have travelled to several Tier 2 & 3 towns in northern India. There, to our surprise, we found not just crumbling public health infrastructure (which creates obvious opportunities for competent vendors from the private sector) but also a massive market for […]
Short read: Hidden Figures: Giving History’s Most Overlooked Mathematicians their Due
Growing up in Indian schools, we were taught to look at history as a matter of fact. But as we realise, history has many accounts depending on what version you want to believe. This is about a new book about the less known history of mathematics and mathematicians, The Secret Lives of Numbers by Kate Kitagawa and […]
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