The last week saw the reopening of schools after the summer break in the part of the world I live and was surprised at the back to school offers. Newspapers carried entire supplements screaming offers on all the wares a school kid needs.
There were sections dedicated to Pens, Pencils, sharpeners, erasers (rubbers for less initiated ones like me), style statements and gadgets. Why was there a back to school offer on cars by a leading car maker I wonder.
A leading writing instrument manufacturer was promoting a pencil and promising you ‘unbreakable creativity’ with an ABS on their pencils. They call it Anti Break System. I was given to believe that their lead breaking was controlled thanks to a protective coating. Pencils were made out of wood from PEFC certified sustainably managed forests. God knows what it means. The only time I felt a pencil was more complicated than rocket science. Pens were competing with each other on low friction and the meters of writing it produced. One even compensated the flow of ink for the rapid changes in air around, which was some fluid dynamics I thought. They came in shades, sporty, casual, bright and pop style. After analysing a few, the clear winner was a Xylene and toluene free pen that did a cool 1200M of writing and also came in even cooler colours. Whattay design!!!
Another was selling a pen that was fade proof, fraud proof, and time proof. I wonder why they did not think about all these when I was younger but I almost got the answer immediately. Our passions never faded, we were too innocent to indulge in fraudulent activities and some of our memories were timeless.
The correction pens entered the fray as the saviour, after all the low friction, air adjusting smooth writing pens and more importantly your grey cells had failed you. Even these were competing with each other on their inbuilt evaporation system efficiencies.
Now the lead might not break but it sure does abrade away. So don’t we need a sharpener? The sharpener for me was my dad who never let me touch the blade when I was a kid. Well my kids are fortunate because my dad did not teach me how to sharpen a pencil with a blade so I had to buy my kids a sharpener. A sharpener with a built in option to adjust the degree of sharpness and point angle was on offer too.
Well there were offers for designer bags, school wear with ink resistant pocket, anti-bacterial socks and here I sense a small inter industry rivalry. When the pen makers are busy making anti leak pens the shirt makers are designing anti stain and ink resistant fabrics.
We as kids carried nice little bags made of khaki coloured ruck sack material and our back to school wares consisted of a black coloured fountain pen though the more fortunate ones carried a ‘HERO’ pen which had those nice shiny golden caps that sported a built-in filler. The lesser mortals carried the above mentioned fountain pens filled with ink from Bril ink bottles using a filler at home and exactly knew the quantity of ink required for a Maths, Science, English or a History paper. We also had a standby pen in case of any force majeure event. Additionally we carried a Nataraj pencil for all our drawings and a Red pencil that was our highlighter along with an eraser that could only erase pencils markings. So you actually had a small tolerance for error when using your pen and that was the perfection we were in pursuit of. There were shops that could replace nibs, clean feeders and other components of our pen and refurbish the same.
In the same back to school week, I had the privilege of attending a seminar by Mr Anand Kumar of the famed Super 30 Training institute of Bihar which churns out IITians year after year from the lower strata of the society. After his speech and his methodologies I realised, all that a child needed was a good teacher and not the best of infrastructure or instruments.
I wish to conclude by drawing your attention to a reply by a kid when asked what he considered his best talent was that I came across recently. The reply went thus ‘I’m trying to master the art of being good with people’ he said. I’m not sure if he was taught this by his parents which in my opinion was a bad piece of mentoring. But sad to see the world reach a state when 11 year olds think being good with people has become an art that needs to be mastered.
Friday, September 13, 2013
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Eerie Economics
I was taught that economics combines both Art and Science. Over the last few weeks the horror that is unfolding in the Indian economy is posing a threat to The Conjuring at the box offices. Theatrical it has been, to say the least… ah! so it’s more of an art. The Sensex was running around like a headless chicken and the rupee staggered down the forex corridors singing a melancholic requiem, occasionally doing a rare celebratory jig. Economics turned eerie.
As a layman who was short changed by Lehman not so long ago I do not know if I should be sceptical at all the happenings around me. Domestic financial planning has become such a conundrum these days that make me miss those sparrows from the TNSC Bank ads of the past.
Fearing a nervous breakdown I tried to stay away from the idiot box where the ‘experts’ analyse the rise and fall of the rupee and diagnose the health of Indian economy. These experts keep referring to the fall out of the global financial crisis triggered by unregulated monetary policies that needs to be corrected by bringing about major changes in fiscal policies which in turn could call for injecting the much needed stimulus in the form of quantitative easing in countries the world over. I have no clue about the words in Italics above. But this was a set script of these analysts irrespective of the organisation they represented. And recently when the rupee touched 68 to a dollar they were wise enough to ‘predict’ it would touch 70. Wonder where they were when the rupee was at 50. You ask them that and they come up with a whole lot of stuff on market dynamics, current account deficits and blame it on Black Swans. Just that, these days the Black Swan events are so common that the time has come to change the colour or rename the metaphor for game changing events. I even refrained from pages devoted to Business, Finance and Economics in newspapers and stopped subscribing to business journals. The unfortunate fact is that Economic news is no longer confined to the inner pages of the newspaper or is a supplement that could be left untouched, but manages to DOLLAR its way to the front pages every other day.
Added to this are the rating agencies whose general ‘standards’ are pretty ‘poor’ keep ringing the downgrade / upgrade bells at regular intervals analogous to school periods. The rupee, stocks, bonds, GDP, funds and the King Khan were all in frenzy to head south. The only ones that ended up north were inflation and Khan’s earnings. Crashes, tumbles, tanks and bloodbaths were the words that did the rounds. You could play and win a depression bingo with these. The antonyms of these words did show up once in a while too but that was mostly during the intraday trading sessions. But what surprised me was the sensitivity of the Sensex, it was behaving like an adolescent with bad mood swings. One tweet from the Finance Minister propels it and almost immediately a moment of nothingness from the PM makes it nose dive, wonder why this happens though, by now the market must have also got used to his silence. The fundamentals that we are so proud of, are they really strong is what I wonder?
As in every story, there needs to be a Hero and so be it in our drama called Indian Economy. Enter the Messiah, Dr Raghuram Rajan, acclaimed of Nostradamical powers of predicting THE crash, now that’s a rare breed among the economist tribe. Most of them I know or heard are skilful in dissecting the cadaver. But I’m not sure if he has used up all his powers of prediction in 2008. He however safely acknowledged he is not a magician nor does he have a wand. What we need, is not a magician Dr. Rajan, but an exorcist who can put an end to this demon that played spoil sport in the India-growth-story fairy tale. Within 24 hours of assuming office and quoting from IF by Rudyard Kipling among other things that I did not understand, the stock market propels and the rupee stabilises….for a day. Communication is the key he said, wish I could communicate in a similar fashion to my bankers and ask them to waive a few EMI’s. Not sure what works in the market, Sentiments or Fundamentals. We keep harping on our strong fundamentals whenever we have an Economic crisis the same way we talk about resilience after each terrorist attack on Indian soil.
For the risk averse financially naïve common man these are hard times. Fixed deposit returns do not counter inflationary trends, aurum throws up tantrums, Equity markets are volatile, stocks are drunk, forex market is on marijuana, bonds are not bonding, real estate is a bubble, and the government is in a huddle, with such a bouquet of misbehaved, ill brought up financial instruments, Can someone out there tell me what to do? Demand daily wages from your employer spend for your food and clothing on a daily basis and get yourself a nice little piggy bank (not a swan shaped one) the ones made out of tin with little lock and key that the good old SBI distributed to school kids of yore and drop in whatever is left at the end of the day.
As a layman who was short changed by Lehman not so long ago I do not know if I should be sceptical at all the happenings around me. Domestic financial planning has become such a conundrum these days that make me miss those sparrows from the TNSC Bank ads of the past.
Fearing a nervous breakdown I tried to stay away from the idiot box where the ‘experts’ analyse the rise and fall of the rupee and diagnose the health of Indian economy. These experts keep referring to the fall out of the global financial crisis triggered by unregulated monetary policies that needs to be corrected by bringing about major changes in fiscal policies which in turn could call for injecting the much needed stimulus in the form of quantitative easing in countries the world over. I have no clue about the words in Italics above. But this was a set script of these analysts irrespective of the organisation they represented. And recently when the rupee touched 68 to a dollar they were wise enough to ‘predict’ it would touch 70. Wonder where they were when the rupee was at 50. You ask them that and they come up with a whole lot of stuff on market dynamics, current account deficits and blame it on Black Swans. Just that, these days the Black Swan events are so common that the time has come to change the colour or rename the metaphor for game changing events. I even refrained from pages devoted to Business, Finance and Economics in newspapers and stopped subscribing to business journals. The unfortunate fact is that Economic news is no longer confined to the inner pages of the newspaper or is a supplement that could be left untouched, but manages to DOLLAR its way to the front pages every other day.
Added to this are the rating agencies whose general ‘standards’ are pretty ‘poor’ keep ringing the downgrade / upgrade bells at regular intervals analogous to school periods. The rupee, stocks, bonds, GDP, funds and the King Khan were all in frenzy to head south. The only ones that ended up north were inflation and Khan’s earnings. Crashes, tumbles, tanks and bloodbaths were the words that did the rounds. You could play and win a depression bingo with these. The antonyms of these words did show up once in a while too but that was mostly during the intraday trading sessions. But what surprised me was the sensitivity of the Sensex, it was behaving like an adolescent with bad mood swings. One tweet from the Finance Minister propels it and almost immediately a moment of nothingness from the PM makes it nose dive, wonder why this happens though, by now the market must have also got used to his silence. The fundamentals that we are so proud of, are they really strong is what I wonder?
As in every story, there needs to be a Hero and so be it in our drama called Indian Economy. Enter the Messiah, Dr Raghuram Rajan, acclaimed of Nostradamical powers of predicting THE crash, now that’s a rare breed among the economist tribe. Most of them I know or heard are skilful in dissecting the cadaver. But I’m not sure if he has used up all his powers of prediction in 2008. He however safely acknowledged he is not a magician nor does he have a wand. What we need, is not a magician Dr. Rajan, but an exorcist who can put an end to this demon that played spoil sport in the India-growth-story fairy tale. Within 24 hours of assuming office and quoting from IF by Rudyard Kipling among other things that I did not understand, the stock market propels and the rupee stabilises….for a day. Communication is the key he said, wish I could communicate in a similar fashion to my bankers and ask them to waive a few EMI’s. Not sure what works in the market, Sentiments or Fundamentals. We keep harping on our strong fundamentals whenever we have an Economic crisis the same way we talk about resilience after each terrorist attack on Indian soil.
For the risk averse financially naïve common man these are hard times. Fixed deposit returns do not counter inflationary trends, aurum throws up tantrums, Equity markets are volatile, stocks are drunk, forex market is on marijuana, bonds are not bonding, real estate is a bubble, and the government is in a huddle, with such a bouquet of misbehaved, ill brought up financial instruments, Can someone out there tell me what to do? Demand daily wages from your employer spend for your food and clothing on a daily basis and get yourself a nice little piggy bank (not a swan shaped one) the ones made out of tin with little lock and key that the good old SBI distributed to school kids of yore and drop in whatever is left at the end of the day.
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