Inside Putin’s circle — the real Russian elite
The great & the good are the objects of public interest in any country. When that country happens to be Russia – a nuclear superpower with a notoriously wealthy and powerful elite – the great & the good become objects of global intrigue: “The western media employ the term “oligarch” to describe super-wealthy Russians in general, […]
Signalling as a service
Julian is a 34-year old who lives in Berlin and works for Stripe. He also writes a very interesting blog. In this blog he explains that much of what we, as humans, do is driven by “signalling”. This is not a novel idea of course but Julian’s blog develops the idea very cleverly. The central […]
Volkswagen and China: the risks of relying on authoritarian states
As Western companies begin to count the cost of writing off thirty years of investments in Russia, some of them have already begun thinking about the prospect of doing the same in China. The only difference is that after cosying upto the Chinese Communist state over the past forty years, Western companies’ investments in China […]
History Repeats Itself as KCP’s Fundamentals Race Ahead
If the stock prices of our portfolio companies would not have been quoting daily, as part business owners of these firms, the only way we would have judged the health of these businesses would have been by looking at their underlying fundamentals. The underlying fundamentals of Financial Services companies can be assessed by looking at […]
Resilience in a Volatile World
In continuation of the trends witnessed over FY16-21, the Rising Giants (RG) companies continued to post healthy performance in 9MFY22 (revenues and PBT up 46% and 28% respectively for the portfolio) driven by continued market share gains and addition of growth drivers through capital allocation initiatives. The investee companies’ acceleration in investments in products, distribution […]
Sahir Ludhianvi: a romantic and a revolutionary
As we rediscover “normal life” in the post-Covid world, we also realise that the extended lockdown had given us time to discover treasures of India’s cultural heritage which are being forgotten in the daily grind of earning a living. One such treasured discovery for us is the legendary Bollywood lyricist of 1950s & 60s, Sahir […]
The mystery of an ancient Hindu-Buddhist kingdom in Malay Peninsula
One of the joys of travelling across South East Asia is to discover vast temple complexes – much bigger than the biggest temples in south India – which are clearly and heavily influenced by Indian architecture. For example, the sprawling Angkor Vat in Cambodia and the massive temple complexes in Borobodur and Prambhanan in Bali, […]
How America became a nation of the woke and the wary, walking on eggshells
This opinion piece from the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post makes a counter-intuitive point, namely the more a democracy seeks to legislate against letting people voice opinions which might hurt the sentiments of minorities, the more such divisions (between the majority and the minorities) get entrenched. Whilst the piece focuses on the US, the subject […]
Mass starvation, extinctions, disasters: the new IPCC report’s grim predictions, and why adaptation efforts are falling behind
Given the epic scale on which climate change is playing out, it is likely to become one of the defining investment opportunities of this century. The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report is useful because it chalks out not only the scale of change but also the wide range of adaptations that will […]
‘The end of an era’: Ikea, Russia’s middle class and the new cold war
Those of us who grew up in the socialist India of the 1980s will remember how the choice of brands you consume can be a marker not just of your social status but of your political choices. So, drinking a can of Coke smuggled into India in the 1980s indicated both that your family had […]
Review of Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China” by Ezra Vogel
As China and its growing economic and military might becomes ever more salient in a world where Western muscle diminishes by the passing month, those trying to develop a better understanding of China would be well advised to start with Ezra Vogel’s masterly biography of the architect of China’s ascendancy, Deng Xiaoping. The book portrays […]
In praise of Shane Warne, cricketing genius
Those of us who came of age in the 1990s grew up idolising Shane Warne. He was everything we longed to be – outrageously talented, immensely successful, shrewd & outspoken, constantly smoking and drinking when not on the cricket field and a bit of a ‘ladies man’ – but couldn’t be given our middle class […]
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