Competitive consumption, Indian ishtyle…
Indian weddings are now by far the biggest social industry, conceived, planned and executed as mammoth entertainments to beat any plaster-and-plywood epic that the film industry can imagine. The age of guilt (with government restrictions on the number of guests or consumption of liquor) has been replaced by pure unabashed gilt.
[..] [...]
Ok, it’s bizarro time. Kenichi Ohmae, a “management guru” who is apparently known as “Mr Strategy,” tells Business Standard:
Indians are not good at manufacturing. Even if they do what we tell them to do, they always need to understand why they are doing it that way. They are more inquisitive than the Chinese. Maybe it’s [...]
{The first part of this series is here.}
Reading Lee Kuan Yew’s lecture is edifying at various levels. As an observer, he is incomparable. But he did not merely observe; he hinted at solutions and did so without being rude. You know the Hindi saying, samajhdar ko eshara kafi hota hai (to the intelligent, a mere [...]
The Indian government is planning to further disincentivise Indian industry.
Lee Kuan Yew was invited to deliver the 37th Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture on 21st Nov 2005 in New Delhi. He called it “India in an Asian Renaissance.” I am an unabashed admirer of Lee Kuan Yew and I should also add that I am a very severe critic of Jawaharlal Nehru. So I decided to [...]
Gautam Chikermane writes in the Indian Express:
The villager in Nu, about 100 km off Delhi, is unconcerned with anything beyond his crop and capital. As and when he generates a surplus, if it is large enough, he buys land; if it is smaller, gold. Now, there are more than 150,000 post offices, four out of [...]
The government will be spending Rs 2500 crores (apprx. US$ 5.4 billion US$ 540 million) of taxpayers’ money — our money — into breaking down dilapidated buildings in Mumbai and building new ones in their place. So why is the rent-control act to blame? Well, consider why the owners of these buildings have no incentive [...]
Nitin Pai directs me to an Op-Ed in the Washington Post by Sebastian Mallaby in which he writes:
The next wave of globalization is swelling here, in this southern Indian city that was battered by a real wave during last year’s tsunami. This new wave is not about Gap T-shirts or Dell laptops, the poster children [...]
PublicGyan got that one right
Analysts like JP Morgan did not get it right. But PublicGyan did. IN-GDP-805 (Indian Economy will grow over 8% in Q2/FY05) was trading at 90 moolers on the PublicGyan Exchange; implying that traders were 90% confident that it would grow at 8% or higher. Even with a small number of traders, [...]
Sanjeev Naik points me to a piece by Amelia Gentleman in the International Herald Tribune that speaks about the plans of the West Bengal government to ban hand-pulled rickshaws. Gentleman writes:
The mayor describes the job as “despicable”; the chief minister of the state of West Bengal, a Marxist, says it is “barbaric.” City officials point [...]
In response to my post on airports, reader Ila Bhatt writes in:
The next time i read an article/blog/column/whatever on improving pax. facilities at airports i am going to scream! I have spent a week travelling on a mix of old and new carriers in india and quite frankly, flying is now infinitely more dangerous [...]
Barry Ritholtz culls some interesting China numbers from a WSJ story.
• China has about $1 trillion in personal savings and a savings rate of close to 50%. The U.S. has about $158 billion in personal savings and an average savings rate of only about 2%.
• Shanghai boasts 4,000 skyscrapers — double the number in [...]
Sudheendra Kulkarni writes in the Indian Express:
[T]he neglect of Indian languages, and the unstoppable dominance of English, is not limited to literature. It can also be seen in education, administration, judiciary, and commerce. The decline and slow decay of our native languages is one of the most worrisome socio-cultural phenomena in contemporary India. It has [...]
Celebrity isn’t wisdom. And yet, newspapers run after celebs and get them to pontificate grandly on all kinds of subjects. Check out this piece in DNA in which Raveena Tandon expresses the view that Mumbai should have a cap to its population, and it should not “accept or absorb” any more people after that limit [...]
Consider this experiment: you are a punter, and you get a letter from me saying that I have the ability to forecast the result of all cricket matches, and if you pay me Rs. 10,000, I shall tell you what will happen in the next game so that you can make a killing — perhaps [...]
In an article in the Wall Street Journal on Asia’s graying populations, Nicholas Eberstadt writes on India:
The overall population profile [of India] will remain relatively youthful, with a median age projected at just over 30 in 2025. But this is an arithmetic expression averaging diverse components of a vast nation. Closer examination reveals two demographically [...]
DNA speaks to Prakash Karat and comes away with the conclusion that the left is going to continue pushing the policies that have failed India for the last 58 years: redistributing wealth instead of generating it.
A version of this piece was first published today in the Wall Street Journal as “Self-Delusion.” (Free link this week, but subscription from the next.) It was written a couple of weeks back, and has its genesis in this post of mine.
Organized slavery ended decades ago, but to go by the criticism of some leftist [...]
A friend who just returned from a visit to China tells us
The Indian Economy Blog site wasn’t accessible in China.
Oddly enough the NYT and virtually every Indian paper was available. As was the WSJ and the FT. I tried the IEB site repeatedly along with BBC – which I knew was persona non grata [...]
With exceptions, of course.
Do read TN Ninan’s fine piece in Business Standard, “Our ‘new class’“
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