On the Road

I have set off on a road trip again.

Blogging about it here

Drop in there, if you fancy a travelogue.

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Wallowing in Nostalgia

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This blogger has reached a stage in life where he often turns nostalgic. Ahhh - the good old days ... Sigh ... Today it was nostalgia in ads. All from about 40 years ago. Colour television had not yet come to India (it came with the Asian Games of 1982). Black & White TVs were few and far between and it was perfectly OK to go to your neighbour's house to watch TV because they had a set and you didn't. Of course, there was only one channel - Doordarshan, the state TV.  Ads were primarily through cinema. Before the movie started, there would be a series of ads shown in full colour. Those days, you eagerly looked forward to the ads as much as you looked forward to the movie itself And then when TV came, these ads morphed to TV, but the largest reach was through cinemas for a long time. Of all the ads, there were  3 or 4  that almost everybody knew by heart. We could hum along, skip along to each of them. First Gold Spot. When Coca Coal exited India in 1977, a local entre...
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Make in India

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India is an outlier in terms of economic development. Traditional economic theory suggests that in the beginning all economies are dominated by agriculture. As the economy develops, manufacturing becomes the predominant sector. Further up in the stage of development comes services. The linear development is the model for all countries, including China. The one exception is India. India has never been a manufacturing economy and has leapfrogged to becoming a service economy. A full 55% of India's economy is the service sector. This is all fine, but for one problem. Where are the jobs for the teeming millions of Indians going to come from ? You need a big manufacturing base to absorb the youth coming into the job market every year. India has to create 12 m new jobs every year. Hence the Make in India need. India actually has a huge competitive advantage now - it is actually cheaper as a manufacturing destination than China. China has become expensive, but retains its predominan...
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Xi who must be obeyed (with apologies to The Economist)

The title of this post is directly stolen from The Economist which ran a cover story by this name a year or so ago. They themselves were punning the quote from here . The much awaited China's People Congress ended today with the expected climax - the unveiling of the new Politburo Standing Committee ; the men who will run China for the next five years. More of this in just a little while. This ended a week of speechifying and staged events. First, the two things that stood out during the days preceding the event today.  Xi Jinping opened the Congress with a speech lasting an incredible three and a half hours, reaching new heights of torture and boredom. It was a hugely self confident China strutting about as a world power, with Xi vigorously patting his own back. He outlined some of the directions for the next five years which were typically broad motherhoods, but gave some clues on where they are heading. The most important outcome was the enshrining of "Xi Jinping Thought...
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