fundaes – Page 2 – Karthik Shashidhar

arbit, business, food, fundaes alcohol, conce, crowds, dirty glass, exorbitant price, fava, glorious tradition, hypothesis, india, intrigues, lifetime, liquor licenses, lounges, notion, novice, peak hour, pubs, segments, spectrum, wine shop

The City Lacks Bars

July 25, 2010

Yeah you might think I’m crazy to be cribbing like this about Bangalore, supposed to be India’s pub city and all that jazz. But I stick to my statements. Yeah we might have lots of good pubs and lounges but we don’t have lots of good bars. I was on my way to dinner at…

arbit, business, economics, fundaes apartment, b1, bedroom houses, bedrooms, combinations, landlord, neighbours, orientation, own a car, parking space, profitable trade, provision, seven cars, shape, slots, spoils

Valuation of Parking Space

July 23, 2010

There’s a unique problem in my apartment building – the building has been built with provision for only seven parking slots in the basement but each of the nine houses here has been allotted a slot, which means there are two obstructing slots. Unfortunately, my slot is at a location where I get blocked by…

business, economics, finance, football, fundaes, randomness, sport analogy, attacker, crosses, defending team, flank, game one, honduras, jesus navas, kabaddi, opposition, second half, spain, stat, switzerland, touchline

Kabaddi and Jesus Navas

July 3, 2010

I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where…

business, fundaes, media ajay shah, alternate channels, alternate sources, amount of money, articles on china, asset management companies, broadsheet, broadsheets, brokerages, business sense, chinese government, financial institutions, insurance companies, mainstream media, neutrality, newsprint, opinion pieces, rea, shenoy, yahoo sidebar

The Importance of Online News

May 27, 2010

Reading Deepak Shenoy’s excellent article on insurance this afternoon the first thing I wondered was about why I had never read anything like it before. It was so intuitive and insightful, and so obvious, yet I didn’t recall reading anything like it elsewhere in the “mainstream media” (quotes because that implicitly implies Yahoo! is not…

bangalore, business, fundaes, general, media, politics advent, audience, deccan herald, election results, funda, generality, geographical area, karnataka assembly elections, new channels, new indian express, niches, polls, popularity of the internet, studs

The other side of the long tail

April 6, 2010

There are several people who talk about how the advent and the popularity of the internet has resulted in markets in many a long tail. Without loss of generality, let us just take the market for writing here. Several niches which were earlier not served since there wasn’t enough of a dedicated audience in a…

bangalore, business, food, fundaes bangalore, composition, crowd management, ctr 2, different animal, hurry, intention, job, malleswaram, masala dosa, point of view, quiz, regard, restaurants, sunday morning, tiffin, time reports, vidyarthi, waiter

CTR

April 4, 2010

Ok this is a post that has been delayed by about a couple of weeks. One of those things that has been in my head now for a while so writing it. So some two or three Sundays back (more likely to be two) I went to the famous CTR in Malleswaram for breakfast. For…

arbit, business, fundaes apartments, bangalore, bda, cantonment, clue, drains, farmland, first fifty years, immigrants, india, localities, natives, observation, office buildings, private parties, slum, slums, tent

Immigrants

March 31, 2010

One thing I have noticed in Bangalore – and I’m not sure if it is true in other cities in India but I have a feeling that it is – is that immigrants inhabit parts of the city which natives wouldn’t really want to live in. I’m making this observation based primarily on one data…

business, economics, food, fundaes, politics, randomness, retail competitor, crude oil prices, deregulation, favour, fears, fruit juice, funda, minor adjustments, neighbourhood, occasions, oil companies, oranges, petroleum products, price of orange juice, price shocks, proportion, retail prices, sri ganesh, terms of statistics, volatility

Orange Juice and Petrol

February 8, 2010

So I was reading this article by Ajay Shah about administered pricing for petroleum. He does an excellent (though it gets a bit technical in terms of statistics) analysis about what could go wrong if the government were to free pricing of petroleum products. He mostly argues in favour of deregulation, and that is a…

business, economics, food, fundaes 1980s, boundaries, business sense, consumption, desolate area, dosa, fact that some people, falafel sandwich, fence sitters, food market, fridge, handful, hummus, inr, liquidity, positive externalities, restaurant food, snacks, urban living, virtuous cycle

Urban living and restaurants and liquidity

January 5, 2010

Last night I had dinner at Alfanoose, a small Mediterranean joint off Broadway. I had hummus and salad with pita bread, and had also brought along a falafel sandwich which is now sitting in my fridge and is likely to get consumed today for breakfast. Excellent stuff. Absolutely brilliant. And not expensive at all –…

arbit, business, entertainment, fundaes, music aadi, aata, alaap, blends, classmate, constraints, contexts, creative thinking, degrees of freedom, domain knowledge, funda, improvisation, music competitions, raaga, scales, simplicity, strict rules, sundae, vanilla ice, vanilla ice cream

Simplicity and improvisation

December 28, 2009

While writing my previous post on the film game, I was thinking about simplicity and improvisation. About how if you seek to improvise, in order to improvise well, you would rather choose a simple base. Like how the simplicity of film aata allows you to improvise so much and create so much fun. I was…

arbit, business, economics, finance, fundaes, randomness, relationships accounting statements, aggregate, amp, balance sheet, bryan caplan, corporates, domination, headache, incremental change, interpersonal relationships, intervals, judgment, loser, major components, occasions, randomness, taleb, time period, volatility

A Balance Sheet View of Life

October 31, 2009

The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation. Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual…

business, finance, fundaes, investment banking, personal confidence limits, counterparties, diagnosis, diversification, doctors, hypotheses, last friday, measurement, medical case, medical negligence, medical profession, mind space, point of view, proportion, relatives, schrodinger, spent three, success rate, three months, two and a half years

Collateralized Death Obligations

October 26, 2009

When my mother died last Friday, the doctors at the hospital where she had been for three weeks didn’t have a diagnosis. When my father died two and a half years back, the hospital where he’d spent three months didn’t have a diagnosis. In both cases, there were several hypotheses, but none of them were…

business, fundaes, studs and fighters, work cracking, fighter interviews, fighters, four months, google, high quality, insight, interviewer, interviewing, personal experience, perspective, quality interviews, regard, seth godin, stud, studs and fighters, telephonic, thought process, twelve hours

Interview length

September 15, 2009

When I interviewed for my current job four months back, I was put through over twelve hours of high-quality interviews. This includes both telephonic and face-to-face processes (on one day, I was called to the office and grilled from 1030am to 630pm) and by “high quality”, I’m referring to the standard of questions that I…

books, business, descriptive, fundaes, general, personal, retail binge, book shopping, casual browsers, checkout counters, crowd, footfalls, grand mall, high streets, impulse, landmark, madras, malls, passerby, seven years, spencer, store staff

The Loot

September 13, 2009

So I executed the book binge yesterday. In two phases – first at the “main” Landmark at the Forum and then at the “other” Landmark at Swagath Garuda Mall. Technically the binge is incomplete since I still have another Rs.600 to spend but it’s unlikely I’ll be spending that off soon, so for all practical…

arbit, business, cricket, fundaes, sport, studs and fighters, work backburner, corporate affairs, crap, enthu, google, handful, inclusion, inspiration, last job, mitchell johnson, moments of brilliance, nightmare, occasional moments, office politics, stud, test match, third test, wickets

Studs and Fighters and Form

August 2, 2009

It’s been a long time since I wrote about the Studs and Fighters framework. I had overdosed on it a few months back, when I’d put some 3 posts in 4 days or something, but that was when I was hajaar enthu about corporate affairs. It’s been almost two months since I quit my last…

business, fundaes, personal, studs and fighters, work aggregation, ambition, continuous job, cv, discrete points, frenzy, good game, good job, ledley king, match, musician, performing artist, period of time, points in time, short period, sleep, spectacular performance, sportsman, train, weak knees

Discrete and continuous jobs

June 16, 2009

Earlier today, while contributing to a spectacular discussion about ambition on a mailing list that I’m part of, I realized that my CV basically translates to spectacular performance in entrance exams and certain other competitive exams, and not much otherwise. This made me think of the concept of a “discrete job” – where you are…

arbit, education, finance, fundaes, IIT, work academic life, assignment submission, axis, concave curve, downside, eighty twenty, law of diminishing returns, paragraph, perfectionist, philosophy, rewards, straight line, wokr

The Eighty-Twenty Rule

June 3, 2009

I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours…

arbit, fundaes, work blog, career development, cash flow, comfort zone, expectation, job, jobs, minded folks, monetary terms, money, opponents, rest of your life, sake, salary, several times

Compensation Etc.

May 19, 2009

For a change I’m keeping up a promise that I’ve made on my blog – I’m actually writing a follow-up post that I’d promised. In the past, I’ve guilty several times of promising to continue something in a follow-up post and then conveniently forgetting about it. So I had mentioned in my last post that…

business, economics, fundaes aim, buzzwords, cdos, competitor, dirt, good business, good times, lipstick, loaf of bread, luxuries, market share, marketers, necessities, pespective, rigorous proof, rupees, segment, share of wallet, tranche, tranches

Tranche of wallet

May 7, 2009

One of the buzzwords in marketing in the last few years has been “share of wallet”. “We don’t aim for market share in any particular segment”, they say. “What we are aiming for is a larger portion of the customer’s share of wallet”. Basically what marketers try to do is to design their products such…

business, entertainment, fundaes, general, media, randomness advertisements, advertiser, bad idea, commercial break, crap, cricket, cup of tea, exact length, fag, modi, slots, soap, tata sky, tv channel, two minutes

Randomizing advertisements

April 20, 2009

This 7.5 minute break in the middle of an IPL innings is a bad idea. The biggest problem is that everyone knows the exact length of the break, and can use it to do stuff – like cook, or clean, or crap, or fag, or maybe watch the Everton-Man U shootout. 7.5 minutes is a…

business, economics, food, fundaes bangalore, caste, decades, economies of scale, expert instructions, four meals, fresh food, households, indians, kilo, meal preparation, onion, pressure cooker, professional cooks, rasam, refrigerator, sambar, three times, two ways, vegetables

Cooking

April 11, 2009

I’m in the process of my weekly cooking. I’m making onion and potato sambar which should last me for about four meals – one tonight, and for three meals during the course of this week. I have been on and off the phone to my mother, as she has been giving out expert instructions from…