(Relative) old-time readers of this blog might recall that in 2013-14 I wrote a column called “Election Metrics” for Mint, where I used data to analyse elections and everything else related to that. This being the election where Narendra Modi suddenly emerged as a spectacular winner, the hype was high. And I think a lot…
Offshored
Two of the four full-time jobs that I’ve done have been “offshored”. They’ve both involved working for the Bangalore office of American firms, with both jobs having been described as being “front end” and “high quality”, while in both cases it became clear in the course of time that it was anything but front end,…
Successful IPOs
Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read the headline. Does this sound right to you? MakeMyTrip Opens Up 57% Post-IPO; May Be Year’s Best Deal It doesn’t, to me. How in the world is the IPO successful if it has opened 57% higher in the first hour (it ended the first day…
The City Lacks Bars
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…
Immigrants
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…
Why is Ten Sports sitting on so many rights?
I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to stay up and watch the WI-Eng match till the very end. Waking up this morning and checking the scorecard, it seems like it was a really good match. And Fidel Edwards seems to have become a last-day-shutdown specialist. This is the second time this series…
Recession notes
Over the weekend I spoke to a few friends, over phone and GTalk. And enquired about their business. Some interesting insights: On Saturday, I spoke to this guy who is a banker in the City of London. He says that one major fallout of the global economic crisis is that the financial markets have become…
Thank God for the economic crisis
This post is based on my discussion with Baada yesterday. I hereby acknowledge his contribution to this post. One of the hundred thousand random headlines that The HIndustan Times put on their front page during the last couple of weeks was a statement that China won’t hesitate to help out Pakistan in case India were…