Girish's Blog

India's bonds had their biggest plunge in seven months yesterday after Reddy unexpectedly raised short-term rates. It isn't additional rate hikes that traders fear -- it's that rapid growth will fuel inflation. The Reserve Bank of India was right to raise its overnight borrowing rate to a three-year high of 5.5 percent from 5.25 percent. Its fourth increase in 15 months proved two things. One, Reddy isn't in the pocket of politicians hoping he'd stop boosting rates. Two, inflation is a bigger threat than many in the markets appreciate. Investors need not panic. By raising its growth forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 8 percent from 7.5 percent, the central bank effectively admitted its rate increases aren't working. Reddy remains on the case, though. In a region in which many central banks are holding borrowing costs too low, India is throwing down the gauntlet. Reddy's balancing act is a pa...

Budget season is approaching in India and I can still remember the annual budget TV broadcast and the talking heads who followed - basically the communists saying that the changes announced were "anti-poor" and the businessmen being "cautiously optimistic". The Finance Ministry has a good website which provides links to the Union Budgets and Economic surveys. "The economy had registered a growth rate of 8.5 per cent in 2003-04, the highest ever except in 1975-76 and 1988-89. .... The year 2004-05, after starting with a point-to-point, annual inflation rate of 4.5 per cent on April 3, 2004 witnessed a peak level of inflation at 8.7 per cent on August 28, 2004 , the highest in the last four years. However, inflation has been on a declining trend and stood at ...

Astronomy My 4 year old may be starting out on new hobby - we read about constellations a few days ago and he had wanted to know more about the constellations. We went to Google to look at the shapes of the constellations of Cassiopeia and Orion. We also looked at Starry Bundle installed on our PC, and then decided to go out to take a look at the eastern skies to see if we could spot Orion the hunter and Sirius the dog and Cassiopeia the W. Unfortunately, the light pollution was so bad that we could only see about half a dozen stars in the entire night sky. Hopefully we'll be able to spot the stars tomorrow from a park. It would be a pity if he grew up without knowing what the night sky looked like.

What I'm reading Just finished Louis Sachar's Holes . Although it is classified as juvenile fiction, it still rates as one of the most satisfying books I've read for a long time. It's got everything a classic should have - hidden treasure, a boy in trouble with the law, deep friendships being formed, and a villianly authority figure. Everything in the story ties up nicely towards the ending, leaving no "holes"behind. I would rate this book as the Treasure Island of this generation.

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer Aparna Sen's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer starts quietly in a bus journey down a meandering hillside that brings together a diverse group of passengers. The camera pans between rows to build up a quick snapshot of the characters and soon (if you're Indian) you see almost every kind of person you have met in the long bus journeys and train journeys that are so common in India - a bunch of college-students, and elderly couple, a newly married couple, a group of friends playing cards and Mrs.Iyer travelling with her one year old child, Santhanam. Mrs.Iyer, whose father has asked Raja, who is travelling to the same destination to help her, soon finds that she needs Raja's help to keep the child occupied when he cries, when she needs to get his food ready. The passenegers are all asleep when the bus is stopped because communal riots have broken out following the murder of a person by a person of another community. Curfew is declared and the passengers are asked t...

India's 57th Independence Day. Went with R & K to the parade and mela in Fremont. The parade was depressingly similar to the many Independence Day events at school.

What I'm Reading Rj has taken a collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories from the library and I read them again after probably 20 years. In retrospect, these stories seemed interesting because of the novel character who was the center-piece of the stories and his eccentricities rather than the who-done-it part of it. Most of the stories do not reveal all the clues to the reader - Holmes often goes on solitary expeditions and the reader, along with Dr.Watson is often left in the dark regarding what Holmes has found. In contrast, almost all the Agatha Christie stories have all the clues laid out, although the most crucial clues are always played down, and after the climactic denouement in the library one can go back and find these clues.

Discussion on death penalty with Rj. Kerry had said that he opposes death penalty except for terrorists. My view is that this is pretty wishy-washy - this has to be a black&white issue and one cannot have positions on both sides of the issue. If you impose the death penalty on an individual, terrorist or otherwise, then you are pro-death penalty. Rj thinks that death-penalty should be decided on a case-case basis - I agree, but then one cannot say that one is against death penalty.  

Recieved my gmail account today - a day after Yahoo upped the storage quota to 100MB on the two accounts I have over there. So now it raises the question of whether I need to change my e-mail address to get an additional 900MB !

What I'm reading I normally have multiple books going on in parallel - some are bathroom reading, some are dining room reading and others are dedicated reading. Execution - by Ram Charan and Larry Cassidy Reiterates what every executive needs to know - strategic planning needs to be follwed by execution of the plan and followup. Has some good examples and case studies. Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks Strictly for reading for at those brain dead times when I need to read someting but don't want to concentrate too much. I find it hard to beleive that this is a NY Times best seller. The language is much too convoluted, the story does not flow freely and the characters speak as thoigh they were in a book or a movie. History of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission - Swami Gambhirananda Inspiring reading on Swami Vivekananda and his efforts in arousing a sleeping nation and the organizational efforts in creating the SRK Math and Mission and setting the path they h...

On the Parliamentary elections in India In May 2004 Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party announced that she would not be accepting the post of the Prime Minister of India and that Manmohan Singh would be the PM. This was greeted by her admirers as a great renounciation on par with that of Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and an expression of her "Indian" character. Let's look at these aspects: can one renounce what was never one's to claim ? I might as well renounce the Presidency of the United States. The legal eligibility of Sonia Gandhi to assume the post of the PM was never clearly established and all that the Congress party has to claim for this position is the "people's mandate". The Congress Party never projected her as the PMerial candidate and while she certainly nursed ambitions of being the PM, the potential roadblocks on the way possibly dissuaded her.  As Swami Vivekakanda said in his lecture on Karma Yoga, " If...