Alone

Very alone. Sitting. Waiting. Wishing.

The Key To Success -

This key is a small one but opens all doors provided you turn it the right way. Just one word - PASSION.

What are you passionate about?

Why I think Facebook isn't worth US$100,000,000,000 (Part I)

I don't see any reason why Facebook should be worth 100 billion USD. Yes, it has brought people closer and in the words of Time magazine "mapped human relations", but in the big bad world of business, it's an investor's nightmare. How does fb make money? Through ads. How much of the area on the screen can fb monetize? Very little compared to Google that can practically monetize every square inch. For fb to increase revenues, it needs more advertising - which will only happen if users keep increasing - which seems less likely as the membership is already around a billion users - which means fb needs to increase what I call the utilization factor per user.

How can fb increase utilization factor per user? Through more 3rd party apps and services using the existing platform.

Now, when fb started making financial results public, the first one - just days before the IPO - showing doubling costs startled smart investors who fell short of calling the whole thing a sham perpetrated by investment banks. It's not difficult to see how VCs and hedge funds who bought fb stock in pre-IPO stages reaped the mother of all windfalls once fb started trading. Once they dumped their stock and got out of the position, the stock tanked and has been ambling along ever since. At this time, the market cap pf fb is around US$70,000,000,000 (around 30% lower than the IPO valuation) and a P/E of a whopping 104!

Also, it is paying obscene amounts of money for acquisitions of companies making no money - case in point being Instagram. Another thing, what is the underlying need fb serves? None. It thrives on people spending time on it entertaining themselves. Which inherently means that it's a means of entertainment. And things that entertain today or rather entertainment platforms today (to be more accurate) may not remain amusing for a long time.

Now, Google and Facebook both make money using targeted ads. However, users are happier seeing targeted ads on Google than Facebook, simply because Google is meant to search and find stuff, whatever it may be. Fb is not meant for finding stuff, it is meant for social interaction and sharing photos, music, articles, or whatever. Seeing ads is a distraction! Do you really want some guy to come and try to sell you something when you are talking to an old friend or a cute girl you just met?

Google offers the right advertising at the right time whereas Facebook offers the right advertising at the wrong time!

More rants to follow when I think up something.....

Random reading in full swing!

I've been reading a lot lately and trying to indulge the smallest part of my body, i.e., my brain, in the least laborious task. So curling up in my bed with a book in hand is the closest I can get to being 'ruthlessly' lazy. So the 3 books I have read so far are:
(1) The Quants - A run of the mill book about the mathematical wizardry of hedge funds and the impact of the financial crisis on their money machine. The book fell ridiculously short on explaning what really caused the crisis and was high on rhetoric and muted glorification of the so called 'quants'.

(2) Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Brilliant book!!! Left me shaken and completely disillusioned about the lady and her philosophy. Really made me look at the entire concept of individuality from a different perspective and made me realise the limitations of her philosophy. Ayn Rand is losing her charm now, atleast for me!

(3) The Big Short - Brilliant book!!! Love Michael Lewis' style of writing. Extremely entertaining and very very educative regarding the financial crisis. But recommended only if you have a background of this stuff already.

Besides that, got a call from the TAS office regarding my feedback from the Director's round. Disappointed with the fact that I fell short on a personality trait even I never realized in all these years; according to the panel, I tend to argue with confidence even when I don't have factually correct information and don't back down. Clearly attributable to my debating background!!! Can't believe that something I did for a 'living', eventually got me down!

Might go to London for an onsite in September! 'Yay!' to that.

Attended a fab lecture by Dr. Raghuram G. Rajan at IISc and fell into an inferiority complex after seeing Mr. Nilekani, Mr. Narayanamurthy, Mr. Ramachandra Guha, Capt. G.R. Gopinath and Mr. Jerry Rao, all under one roof! And yes, I have the dubious distinction of being the only guy who attended that lecture in a pair of shorts!!!

Lessons from failure

Below is the text of an e-mail I wrote to my brother-in-law after I got dinged by TAS:

Hi Jiju,

I'm sorry I couldn't talk much yesterday over the phone. You were the first person I called after I came to know the result. Now that I am back to square one, I need to figure out everything once again. Honestly, TAS was my dream job, it was an opportunity I had been waiting for. While I am very disappointed after missing it by a whisker, I have taken away a lot from this failure. Maybe my success would not have taught me as much as this failure. While I will not dwell over my interview round and what went wrong, during my spare time, I have realized a lot of things about life and these 3 months of deep focus have given me a new perspective in life. I can safely say that I am much more mature than I was earlier. If I look back at the whole thing, I realize that this was the first true failure of my life. I never wanted something so bad and worked so hard to achieve it, all this while surprising myself with my own abilities. My mind still wanders in Bombay House and I am thinking of the days when I would have got the opportunity to meet Mr. Tata (I appeared for TAS partly because I wanted to shake hands with him). I had always dreamed of going there once at least and meet the titans of Indian industry. I'm sorry I couldn't measure up to what they wanted. Maybe it was my verbosity that sealed my fate.While I will take a little while to get over the feeling of disappointment, I have the following to share with you as the lessons I have learned:

1) It takes a lifetime to achieve something of significance. While Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg might have achieved extraordinary success very early, these people come from different environments and have probably spent all their lives chasing one thing. Even if I look at someone like your boss, the guy put his entire life into pursuing his dreams!

2) When I was strolling in Bombay House reading the names of the distinguished people on the nameplates, I realized the importance of hard work. To be honest with you, I never realized what hard work meant until I found something that I could put my heart into. I hated engineering to the core. I hate nagging and forcibly doing something I don't care about. I want my own space and freedom to do what I want. For a long time all this has been denied to me. I thought that maybe TAS will give me that opportunity. I have now realized that even I have the capacity for extraordinary amount of hard work. I may not be inherently brilliant like these IIT toppers, but I can work hard to be like any of them.

3) My real passion is business. You won't believe this, but I have spent my time in college doing projects in nanotechnology and high precision engineering and none of them interested me forever. I have learned more by knowing what I don't want in life than vice-versa. To prepare for my interview, I went through at least 200 magazines that I have accumulated over the years and I don't miss even a single issue of any of the top biz mags in the market. That is partly the reason why I knew what to do when I got the case study in my hands. I have read books on PE, i-banking and the works in my spare time for the past 2 years, just to understand how all of this works and I will continue to do so. I haven't slept properly for the past 3 months and all my waking hours (sometimes even in my dreams!!!), all that went through my mind was TAS. I thought that this will be my redemption and I will finally live a normal life, do what I really like and work with a bunch of smart and experienced people. None of this materialized.

4) I have leaned to accept failure. Maybe it's important for us to fail more than succeed. To tell you the truth, while I was going though the TAS process, I had this feeling in my mind that this may not materialize simply because it means unprecedented success at such an early age and what have I done all my life to deserve this??? I have never tasted failure, how can I taste so much success??? Maybe it was god's way of making sure that I become a mature individual first and a manager afterward. I have never slogged my ass off for my acads, it was more of a torture for me, I spent most of my time time in college attending international debate tournaments 'coz I love it. I realized that even hard work doesn't guarantee success. Now, I am ready to try again, more than that, I am ready to fail again. Whatever opportunity I will pursue next, I will put double the effort I put into my TAS prep. And if I fail again, I'll work thrice as hard to pursue the next opportunity. I don't mind stretching myself to the limits now 'coz I have realized that I am as capable as any other guy.

5) It's not about money. It's never ever about money. It's about passion and the willingness to go beyond the realm of the ordinary. TAS does pay 20 lacs a year, but even if it was 6 lacs, I would still work for it simply for the exposure I will get. Thanks to my Baniya genes, I always had that narrow approach to look at any career from a monetary perspective. I now realize that money is always a by-product of what you do, what matters is the work you do, that is the reason why I don't care about going to London.

6) I have always wanted to pursue brilliance. For me, it is not about money, it is not about position or power or anything. When I look back at my life, I realize that I always wanted to be counted as someone brilliant, someone who defines the field he chooses to enter. I now realize that it takes an entire lifetime of hard work and dedication to accomplish this and I am ready to do this, I just need direction.

7) I am not afraid of competition anymore, but I am trying to be realistic. Now u'll say write CAT!!!! I stay away from CAT because of 2 reasons:a) All my IIM friends have brilliant acads, mine are very average.b) What will I do at an IIM??? My friend at IIMB tells me about the level of competition inside the IIM for even the job you want! And needless to say, the top jobs are taken away by these IIT guys. You will know better as u have been there, done that.

8) In the long term, I do wish to be an entrepreneur. I guess if I had got through TAS, I would have been charmed into the comfort of the TATA group and the prestige that comes with it. This would have made it even more harder for me in the future to go and do my own thing. Maybe this is God's way of making sure I don't give in to such temptations easily by making sure that I fail innumerable times before finally succeeding.

9) The worse thing I can do to myself right now is to get dejected and give up. I know that the days ahead are not easy and my managers will make my life hell because they know I can't go anywhere now.

10) The IT industry work experience is not valued anywhere abroad, so all my dreams of INSEAD and HBS just go down the drain forever.I hope I din bore you with my mail. There is no one to guide me and hence I feel that I can share this with you. There are no mentors here in TCS. My supervisor thinks that Moscow is in New York!!! This is the level of dumbness we have here and the same supervisor threatened to screw my ratings so that I don get though TAS if I din follow her wishes. My greatest fear is that I will end up living a mediocre life, I don want this to happen.Could you please let me know if it is possible for you to speak to me to help me figure out what I should do next?

Regards,

Siddharth.

Life, Death and Resurrection

Hi guys! I hope my invisible readers have been doing good in the past few that I wasn't around blogging and sharing my ill-informed views with the rest of the cognoscenti. Well, to be honest, the past 4 months have been the most grilling months of my life and I was too scared to blog anything as I was too focussed on something I wanted to achieve. To summarize my activities in the past 4 months, I will use a very objective approach and quickly update the reader through bullet points. So, here goes:

(1) 10th March, 2010 - Wrote GMAT. Score: 720/800, AWA 5.5/6

(2) 11th March, 2010 - Registered for the TATA Administrative Services In-House Selections 2010. My dream job so to speak!!! (Yes yes yes, I have dream job(s) too!!!)

(3) 21st March, 2010 - Clear the initial cut-off ( a measly 650) and download the 10 page long form with 5 essays and the kind of details even my dad won't know!

(4) 24th March, 2010 - After numerous copies, the final copy of the form goes to the HR for forwarding to the TAS office in Mumbai.

(5) 12th April, 2010 - Get shortlisted among 216 candidates out of 782 applicants. Time to get nervous about the Chairman's GD and Case Study rounds.

(6) 19th April, 2010 - A brilliantly conducted workshop on TAS gets me completely hooked. Met the head of TAS, Mr. Rahul Krishna at The Gateway Hotel in Bangalore.

(7) 23rd April, 2010 - Case Study given out to the participants. The next 2 weeks leading upto 11th May, 2010 are the most tense moments of my life. If I had that kind of focus in school, I could have made it to freakin IIT!!!

(8) 11th May, 2010 - The day arrives without a bang. After 2 weeks of mental torture, I finish my ppt at 4 in the morning, don't get any sleep (usual practise for me before any exam) and down one can of Red Bull before leaving for the hotel.

Get past the GD round after a few initial hiccups. Too nervous before the case-study, almost cracked-up under the pressure. Frantic calls to dad and my friend from IIMB, get some assurance on my preparation and manage to stay cool.

Enter the meeting room for my case study presentation, the next 20 minutes are 'the performance of a lifetime'! Make it to the Director's Round in Mumbai!!! Among the top 29 candidates out of 782 applicants this year! Yippppppppeeeeeeeeeee..................!!!!!

(9) 8th June, 2010 - The D-Day arriveth. Director's Round in Bombay House, the HQs of the TATA Group. Don't sleep the previous night. Catch a morning flight to Bombay wearing a stuffy suit. Reach Bombay House at 2 in the afternoon amidst sweltering heat.

Bombay House is a time warp!!!

Wait till 8 in the evening for my turn to get interviewed. Interview panel consists of Mr. Satish Pradhan, HR Head of the TATA Group and Mr. R. Mukundan, MD of TATA Chemicals!!!

Screw up the interview. Ended up having a debate on geo-politics. Totally dead by the time I come out. Take a cab to my sister's place in Khar and have a nice dinner conversation with my brother-in-law. He got dinged by TAS in 1997 at IIMA! But that's history and he is at the top today!

(10) 9th June, 2010 - REJECTED.

The Chinese Endgame - Part I

Hi! I am back to blogging after a small period of writer's block and to begin, I am going to do something that an amateur blogger should never do; I am going to make a predicition!!! That too about China, and I will tell you why I believe my prediction will be true eventually. Being a regular reader of two of the top selling business newpapers in the country, I am exposed almost daily to hundreds of words written about everything Chinese, from government policy to manufacturing, from censorship to currency manipulation. I find that there is an equal number of subscribers in either camps - those who buy the Chinese growth story and those who don't - while unanimously agreeing over its aggressive foreign policy.

I have reached the conclusion that the entire Chinese strategy is of challenging the might of the US as the sole super power post Cold War era!!! Now, you would say that I deserve to be booed away for stating the obvious. Before you boo me away I would like you to take a look at the deeper meaning of the statement - which is about China's strategy to create a dominating and self-contained economic black-hole which sucks everything the rest of the world has, while spewing out very little. Though outsourced manufacturing to the Chinese makes them spew out a lot more currently to the Western world, this will gradually reduce though not entirely as consumption increases in China over the years.

To elaborate my point of view, I would like to highlight how China is pursuing a strategy of self-containment at both the economic and political levels and why comparatively, India seems to get left behind in this race. At the economic level, there are 2 things: facts and arguments.

Facts:

1) The Chinese have an underdeveloped banking system which is completely blocked out from world view due to regulatory opacity in China.

2) They have a whopping inventory of US Dollars which they can utilise wherever they want.

3) Chinese manufacturers remain the biggest suppliers to the Western world.

4) Artifical devaluation on Yuan leads to a small competitive advantage for the Chinese firms against their Asian counterparts which leads to manufacturing job transfers to China and not India.

5) The availability of reliable financial information regarding companies is almost zilch.

6) The Chinese are investing heavily in the acquisition of natural resource assets all over the world.

Arguments:

1) The Chinese want a secure future, one that is not marred by the shortage of raw materials to feed the industry of the most populous country in the world as well as the population whose energy needs will only go up as development takes place. To this effect, the Chinese government is aggressively acquiring assets all over the world, often working with corrupt and dictatorial regimes such as Angola to secure oil assets for the future. The Chinese government owned sovereign wealth fund is actively making investments in the resources sector as a part of this strategy, a point that has been raised in the US Senate as well about China's increasing economic intervention in resource rich countries.

2) The Chinese government for many years has purused aggressive and forward looking policies to give a boost to the manufacturing sector. While hugely successful due to outsourcing of manufacturing activities by US firms, they have acquired something that a lot of people ignore at times, which is capability. While Nike, Adidas, Apple and almost every known American brand is renowned for it's product quality, remember that all of this comes from China. This in turn has taught the Chinese how to manufacture high quality products at low cost. This capability itself is a stepping stone to innovation that will be a decisive factor in the crowning of the new superpower many years later. Hence, the Chinese economy will be fed by high quality, low-cost products that will be made in China and hence, foreign firms will find it very difficult to get a toehold in the Chinese market. Just sit back for a while and think why long known American MNCs have been so successful??? Simply because they went to those markets where their superior products were needed or where a market for such products did not exist at all because no domestic firm produced them. The US corporations also benefitted from an aggressive US foreign policy that used political muscle to invade the markets of smaller countries (a point I will higlight later about China as well). Thus, the Chinese economy will become self-sustained due to strong domestic consumption and the surplus goods will either be exported to the West or dumped in the neighbouring weak Asian countries.

3) To oppose the above argument, sceptics would say that the opacity of the Chinese economy often hides the fact that the banking sector in China has for long been saddled with bad loans that were given to sick government owned companies and that involved a lot of political maneuvering. Sooner or later the loans should take their toll on the banking system, choking it to the extent of a collapse that would impact the rest of the economy. I say that while this may be true, the Chinese are not fools! The CCP might be pursuing an agenda of growth at all costs, but it does understand the impact of a bad financial system on the overall health of the economy and that is why it is making investments in infastructre and taking a capitalistic point of view towards enterprise to foster entrepreneurship and in turn, high profitability of private firms which will find it easier to pay back debts if they make profits.

4) The Chinese foreign policy helps in drafting free trade agreements with smaller Asian counterparts that heavily favour the Chinese while edging out India. This gives China the advantage of dictating the rules of trade in the region and none of the smaller nations are able to oppose the Chinese dominance.

5) Whatever the Chinese may be doing with the manipulation of it's currency, one thing is clear, the CCP is very efficient when it comes to policy implementation and single minded pursuit of growth. One needs to understand that growth is never a win-win situation for all sections of the society, certain structures need to be demolished to build new ones and somewhere someone always feels cheated no matter how much inclusivity is taken into account.

The above facts and arguments in my opinion may not give a real picture of the situation in China, but what they accomplish is that they clearly illustrate how China is trying to create an economy that is open to foreign investment, yet slowly closing in so that it sucks the best the rest of the world has to offer while giving back little in terms of superior economic value as it progresses.

My next post will talk about how China is pursuing its policy of self containment using its political arm-twisting at the global level.

A Fleeting Moment of Clarity

Hi folks! Some good news has come my way and I'd like to share it with you: I finally cleared my CFA Level I exam.........yay!!! Though this development has come after one miserable year, it still is a development and I have some clarity about my future now. Next on the cards is GMAT on 5th March that i'll be writing the 2nd time as well, so I hope I do well this time.

As far as the world around me is concerned, the latest on the block is The World Economic Forum at Davos and all business newpapers seem to have acquired a very Davosian twang to their usual tone. I don't really understand what purpose does the WEF serve except for lavish receptions serving expensive champagne and caviar. To common men like us, it seems to be nothing more than a congregation of the rich and powerful who gather to blow the trumpet of capitalism and exchange visting cards to sniff for business opportunities. I don't care about the fruitless discussions anyways but wouldn't mind an invitation just to have a taste of the expensive wine and food in one of the most picturesque Swiss ski resorts.

Of late, I have been reading a lot about inflation in the Indian economy. Today's The Mint also had an article suggesting the urgent need for RBI to raise interest rates. I guess they are right in their claim that raising interest rates should set things right for the economy which has been seeing an encouraging outlook due to the increase in corporate earnings.

Besides that I have finished reading quite a few books lately; The King of Oil by Daniel Ammann, The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckermann and Inside the Iron Triangle: A Secret History of the Carlyle Group by Dan Briody. The first 2 were quite amazing actually. I read a book by Haruki Murakami too, it was called A Wild Sheep Chase. The book had an interesting supernatural plot that slowly unfolds but I hate the extreme use of metaphor at times.

I have not been regular with my blogs lately and I think the trend shall continue until I get over with GMAT and TAS.

The Faustian Bargain

I recently finished reading a very interesting book called 'The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich' by Daniel Ammann. The book, as the title clearly mentions, is the biography of the most infamous and most powerful white-collar criminal in the history of the USA, March Rich, who was accused of evading $48 million in taxes and trading commodities with enemies of the USA while circumventing all embargoes and was at large from the US since 1983. After getting a very controversial last minute pardon by the then US President Bill Clinton in his last day in office, Marc Rich has still remained in Switzerland, his adopted country. The book also chronicles his lesser known achievements such as the invention of the spot market for oil trading in the 1970s and breaking the virtual oligopoly of the 7 giant oil companies. While the book showed that Marc Rich did not exactly stick to a very moralistic stance in his business dealings with all the countries he traded with, a lot of his vilification in front of the US public seemed to be the handiwork of people such as Rudi Guiliani, the former mayor of New York, who championed the cause of the American public against corporate greed. I have already read about his expolits in another book called 'The Den of Thieves' which was an account of how the Junk Bond king Michael Milken was caught by the US attorneys on charges of insider trading and indicted.

More importantly, the book was an eye opener for me with regards to global politics and the double standards practised by almost every major state involved in the production/consumption of some of the world's most precious resources such as oil. I was stunned to read that while Ayotollah Khomeini's Iran did not recognise the existence of Israel along with the rest of Arab nations, there existed a secret pipeline that supplied Iranian oil to Israel for a long long time and the transportation of oil was authorised by none other than the Iranian state owned oil company!!! I was shocked to read how most of the world's most important commodites come from countries that have been war torn and ruled by the most corrupt governments for decades while the liberal democracies have turned a blind eye to all of this while looking for fulfilling their own needs. On one hand, we see embargoes and sanctions against nations that refuse to accord the basic human rights to their citizens and are ruled by oppressive governements, on the other hand, the same liberal democracies made secret deals through middlemen to acquire those resources they most coveted paying top dollar to those same oppressive and corrupt governments.

I want to ask why this sham of self-righteousness even exists???? What purpose does it fulfil except global summits that make media headlines and ultimately lead to no concrete resolutions whatsoever???? As far as my understanding goes, it's a simple case of 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours'. While developed and developing democracies need commodities for their survival, the corrupt regimes that hold control over these resources need a lot of cash to sustain their rule and fill their coffers with this cash, whether any of this trickles down to the poor is a different matter altogether.

Now comes the question of morality. While no one wants to know that the material making up their mobile phones is coltan that comes Congo which is one of the most war torn places in the world and the bauxite used to make aluminum is mined in Guinea which is a terrible dictatorship, people are more comfortable resting in ignorance and choose to turn a blind eye to these events that tend to disturb their lifestyle that has become accustomed to these things.

Chronicling a Very Forgettable Year

Happy New Year folks!!! I hope it's a new year with new hopes and new beginnings yada yada yada......I am happy that a new year has begun, it gives me a chance to forget the worst year of my life. It was a very eventful year, bringing me lots of emotional stress, misery, anger and sadness with almost no progress on the professional front. I am happy it's behind me now, and I wish I could erase this year of my life from my time line forever. Though I must say that I learned a lot about life in this 1 year. I learned how inconsiderate and insensitive people are, how easy it is for them to leave someone smarting while they go out and squeeze every moment's worth of fun. I also learned a few good lessons about love and friendship. I learned to distrust people and I realized that I was once again out into the open, looking for my lost self, trying to find my identity and individuality. I realized that my naivete caused me a world of trouble and I began questioning the very principles I grew up to believe.

I can still feel the strain while writing this post and I think I need to stop this here. It's all coming back to me again and I don't want that to happen anymore...............bye!

Capitalism on Steroids

I, a common man, can only stand at the sidelines watching the chaos in the global capitalist arena. I, like many others, have seen the rise of the i-banks, the roaring pay days of Wall Street, the wave of rapid modernization of the emerging markets bringing them together with the developed Western markets, the massive industrial expansion plans that are roiling in dust now, then the impending gloom ensued by the irrationality and hubris practised during the hay days of capitalism and then the downfall of the goliaths of high-finance and the begging cries of those corporations that had aimed to reach for the stars but unfortunately landed in gutters. I have seen it all, all that a common man can see through his innocent eyes and unmanipulative mind, about the ways of the world. And as every common man would wonder, when will this vicious cycle end???

Pick up any news magazine or wire service and bright are the chances of seeing some big corporation being rescued by the government of the country it belongs to. Companies given lifelines, bridge loans, bankruptcy protection and what not. Isn't this what you can call capitalism on steroids? There are side effects that are being ignored in a mad scramble to survive, the consequences can come later. In an ideal (read steroidal) world, a corporation big enough would never fail, which essentially means that no matter what you do, no matter how much you screw-up, Uncle Sam or his counterparts will save you. In short, it's a license to screw-up as much as you want.

I feel capitalists through the ages have not only become more perverted but also have become equally good at hiding their perversion when it suits their end. On one hand, capitalism argues for no government intervention in the markets, in Greenspan-speak laissez faire capitalism. On the other hand, the same government becomes an object of worship when the free ways of free markets don't seem to work. The hypocratic stance is compounded by the fact that governments are criticised for not taking an interest in saving the companies from failing and when it demands for more regulation in return to save the markets from further upheavels, the capitalists cry foul for too much government interference in business.

Agreed that we vote a government into power in liberal democracies to make sure that they serve our common interests, that the interests of all sections are taken into account and appropriate provisions be made in government policies to take care of demands, but, there is a simply a limit to the amount of concessions that can be extracted from policymakers in the name of free markets or bailouts. The inherent flaw in the entire capitalistic mindset is the extereme subservience it demands out of government. The government is supposed to relax the rules when we want them to be relaxed to suit our needs and then we expect the government to pull us out of doom by using its monetary muscle when we blow up and then the government is supposed to stand back in a corner and watch us go about our business in the laissez-faire way. I think this is blatantly unfair. It simply shows how easy it is for a bunch of rich capitalists to hold the economy to ransom and then do what they please expecting no intereference from the government whose job is to not just serve the capitalists but also the common man.

I find myself grumbling: "Down with capitalist pigs!"

Securitizing Poverty

Yesterday i read an article in The Mint about the securitization of microfinance loans by Deutsche Bank AG. The article was upbeat about the prospects of microfinance being linked with the world of mainstream capitalism and the possibility of using this to alleviate poverty. However, the piece also gave a very cautious note about the perils of modern day finance and how it can possibly lead to the takeover of microfinance by greedy i-bankers.

In a report published by the BusinessWeek magazine many months ago, in Latin American countries such as Venezuela, microfinance has failed to make the planned impact because of the collusion between consumer good companies such as LG, Samsung and microfinance firms. In a very disturbing example, the loans are shelled out by microfinance firms to the poor people who are lured by these producers into buying high-end LCD screen TVs that are practically useless given the cost incurred. When the debtors default, local goons are hired by the finance firms to force the debtors into repaying the debt.

While microfinance moves from an NGO based model to a for-profit model, financiers need to keep in mind the basic principle behind the foundation of this industry. People need to understand that while the US housing crisis was more or less due to the misuse of government policies and lax monitoring of Wall Street dons, a crisis of this sort in microfinance will not just impact the capitalists again but the intensity of it will be exponentially ampilified for the poor helpless people who find it hard to eke out 2 square meals a day without some assistance.

While pursuit of profit is indeed a noble goal in itself, the pursuit of inclusive prosperity with the less fortunate is nobler.

The importance of being Nobel: Why Indians need to!

I have been quite involved lately in the frenzy surrounding the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. Before I have readers wondering which side I am on, I want to clarify that even I think that the prize was quite premature. However, not getting further into a topic that has been much debated and much written about, I want to appreciate the symbolism that a Nobel Prize carries and why Indians should think more of getting some.I remember that when I was a kid, I wanted to be a physicist, I wanted to discover how the world works, how nature or nurture plays its part and how the mind of God works. I did a lot of digging into the general stuff about physics, read lots of books by some famous authors who wrote for the general audience but could never get myself past a 12th standard physics textbook forget about quantum mechanics and astrophysics. Soon I realised that it was not for me and chucked all of that to think in an old-fashioned way about making money like most of my predecessors have done. I think I fit in that mould and I am comfortable.
However, there is one little quirk that I still have despite my dissociation from all scientific thought and that is my eagerness to know the names of the Nobel Prize winners every year. I do this partly out of curiosity and partly due to my hopes that someday another Indian will win the Nobel Prize. Thankfully I didn't have to wait for long and this year an Indian won a Chemistry Nobel. I was extremely delighted but I was also sad that the winner did not work in an Indian laboratory, he was working in one of the Ivory Towers of Cambridge where he had access to everything and the freedom to do what he wanted.
I still don't understand why Indians have not woken up to the idea of original thought. That is precisely what the Nobel Prize stands for. It is a celebration and appreciation of original thought! Why is it that after 62 years of independence we still think that original thought and scientific pursuits are a ticket to full-fledged madness???? Why is it that Indians survive and do well not because of the system but despite the system????This world is changing and it is changing fast enough to make all that irrelevant which cannot keep pace with it. We risk becoming irrelevant too if we don't start thinking with a mind of our own and start endorsing sincerely the idea of free thought, entrepreneurial spirit and scientific pursuits. If nothing else, a Nobel Prize can atleast act as motivation for future generations of Indian students to go out, into the wild, and do something original!

Sovereign Wealth Funds: The New Imperialist Weapon and Why India Shouldn't Possess One

I have been reading quite a bit about sovereign wealth fund recently. I found that startling amounts of money is being poured into such funds by the governments that own them. For laymen, a sovereign wealth fund is an entity that is funded by the forex reserves of a nation and is directly managed by government appointed fund managers who are entrusted with the task of investing the money on behalf of the government to generate above normal returns. The investment is usually made in global companies in the private sector in the form of debt or equity. In the recent times, a spate of new SWFs (as they are known) owned by governments in Asia have sprung out with ludicrous amounts of money. Some of the owners include Temasek Private Equity and GIC owned by the Gov. of Singapore, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority owned by the Abu Dhabi sulatanate and CIC owned by the Gov. of China. These funds have been equipped with enormous amounts of money, in the range of $100-$200 billion each and have been in the news recently due to their invetsments in beleagured American banks desperately looking for cash to avoid shutting shop. A lot of this money has been lost by the funds as their cash could make little difference to save the misery of these banks. While this is definitely of concern given the amount of forex lost, it is also a weapon of strategic dominance in economic realm. Somehow, it seems that the money these funds have is spent on investment in strategically important companies, such as financial services behemoths, natural resources companies such as oil and gas producers. There have been questions in the US Senate about the growing dominance of SWFs as the US gov suspects ulterior motives of other governments than just pure risk-return play.

It is interesting that while some SWFs such as GIC or Temasek are actually pure risk-return plays, others such as CIC owned by China seem more politically motivated as a means of driving the Chinese agenda of world dominance. While China is developing at breakneck speed, it is still not a developed nation and the government stills has to do much more and spend much more to put China in the league of developed nations. So it's a little fishy out there!

Coming to the question of why India should or should not have it's own SWF given the growing pile of forex reserves, it is easy to answer the question in not just one, but many ways. First, India is far behind China in development and there is a crying need for government investment in providing basic amenities and infrastructure for the whole country. According to recent estimates, India needs an investment of around $350 billion in the next 5 years if it aims to sustain it second fastest growing economy status in the world. Second, the rampant corruption in India and the bureaucracy that is deeply entangled will prove a huge deterrent in meaningful deployment of funds that are entrusted with the managers. Also, the political climate of the country does not seem conducive as it is easy to see that even the fund managers will fall prey to political manouvering and nepotism that hasn't spared even the best run PSUs. Third, it is not the government's business to be in business.

The Return to Innocence

I watched the Walt Disney-Pixar created animated movie UP last Saturday and I was completely blown away by the superb use of computer technology in creating the movie. Even the sunlight coming through the window looked so real! I must say that the animation industry has come of age and everytime its Pixar that leads the race by a million miles. Hats off to Mr. Jobs and the ground-breaking company he created!!!

However, more than that, I was struck by the underlying theme of the movie. The theme was refreshingly simple: It's never too late to follow your dreams. I could feel that the movie had an undercurrent of childlike innocence in the protagonist of the movie, an old retired man who was living alone in a small home he had built with his now deceased wife while both of them nursed a dream of making it to the mythic Paradise Falls somewhere in South America. The old man pushed to the wall by the modernising world of glass and concrete finally decides to take the plunge of real adventure carrying the dream of his wife and refusing to spend the rest of his years in an old age home.

The whole concept struck me deeply and I couldn't help thinking how much innocence we have lost as we grew up. Innocence here just doesn't mean inability to swindle or lie, but a simple and honest belief in one's dream. I could not help thinking how easily we give up chasing our dreams. A toothless, old, hunched man spending the last solitary years of his life refused to resigned to fate and got where he wanted to simply because it was a dream he had lived to accomplish.

The innocence of single minded dedication and hunger for accomplishment disappears so quickly from within us. Can we not live this life one moment at a time??? Can we not realise that the real purpose of life is to serve that one overarching dream we have nurtured from the bottom of our hearts??? Will the universe not conspire to help us achieve something we truly want???

Why capitalism still works......

In the past few months all media has been flooded with news about casualties of an economic recession touted by some as the worst since the Great Depression of the '30s. The crisis being the worst of its kind has seen millions of people losing their livelihoods while hundreds of corporations scramble for help in all directions to stay afloat. It was easy to see that the hunky-dory era of post dot-com boom was just a house of cards that crashed with the smallest whiff of wind and brought down the entire edifice of capitalism.
It made people question the very fundamentals of a capitalist society and gave fodder to communists ( as I last read in the papers this morning) to brag about their objections to financial reforms in the Indian economy which insulated India to a great extent from the financial downturn in the rest of the world. Being a believer in democracy myself, I find this argument a little disquieting yet a little bit true. All pro-reformists have been asking for easing restrictions on financial entities such as hedge funds so that they can play the Indian markets and play well they should. I am all for the multi-million dollar bonuses of the hedge fund managers who predicted the downturn many years ago and placed huge bets that reaped benefits later.

However, I believe that just because we have a strong lobby of pro-reformists, we should not give into the temptations of opening up an adolescent yet not-so-mature market to the vagaries of global capitalism. From a bull run of 20,000 points to the bear hug of 9000, the Sensex had left little counter evidence against the fact that it was the FIIs who were able to play the Indian markets to their shrewd schemes and left the common investor gaping in surprise when the extraordinary returns simply diminshed overnight. We also forget that in an era of money cheaper than dirt, the Private Equity firms in US and UK were able to take millions of dollars of debt and thrust it on corporations they took under their fold in an excuse of increasing value by leveraging the balance sheet. Little did we know that the Frankenstein monster would devour its own master when several healthy companies went bankrupt after PEs took over because of their inability to service the large amount of debt they took. We must also not forget the billions of dollars of institutional money lost in the Madoff scam, a one of its kind Ponzi scheme that shook the very cauldrons of capitalism and raised a very fundamental question: Is there a limit to man's greed???? We were again shook by the Satyam scandal which became an unerasable blot on the Indian IT landscape. Talk about rubbing salt on wounds!!!! We must also not forget that after all the bloodbath, everyone suddenly thanked Keynes for giving them the golden principle of getting out of such a mess and opened a begging bowl in front of the US government to save them and save the planet! So in comes Obama and the age of multi-billion dollar aid packages to save the industry and the letting go of wayward children after a light spank on the back side.
After so much of capitalism bashing, here are the reasons why capitalism still works:
(1) It goes hand in hand with democracy where people have the fundamental right to pursue wealth and enterprise thereby bringing advancement to society.
(2) Capitalistic thought in itself is a motivator for innovations in industry and all other fields of study as it serves for a perfect risk-reward mechanism.
(3) Despite the late awakening of capitalism to the benefits of investing in the social sector, the only way to integrate the world's poor with the rest of the masses and create widespread poverty is to actually treat them as a part of a capitalistic society with a perfect producer-consumer relationship.
(4) When we looking at communism or its relatives, we need little prodding to actually take a loook at what history has to say about socities built on communist ideals.
(5) While capitalism involves trade-offs between economic protectionism and free-market liberalism, it serves as the only viable mechanism of attaining development and prosperity in the long run.
The only bone in the neck here is the economic hooliganism that seems to repeat itself every few decades. Is this some sort of divine intervention into the ways of a chaotic world??????