Shame on you Times Now

Happened to catch yesterday’s interview of Sitaram Yechury in Times Now where the anchor had 10 questions for Sitaram.  Now, I am not going to get into the merits of Nuke deal or any other issues being discussed without let across all media outlets.  The questions were great and the answers were diplomatic at best except for a categorical No for walking out on the the day ( 22nd July 2008 ) Dr MMS’s government is scheduled to face a No Confidence Motion.

To me, the most appalling thing was the way the anchor behaved with Sitaram.  He was rude all the way through and would not even let Sitaram finish his answers.  However Sitaram was aplomb personified.  Kudos to Sitaram.  Hope the Left had handled the Nuke deal similarly

Shouldn’t the host have the manners to let the guest of the show atleast answer the question before agreeing/disagreeing moving to the next question?  Journalism at its worst.

 

Carnage4Life is back

Dare Obasanjo’s blog is humming with quite a lot of buzz after a long hiatus.  The redesigned site is pleasing to the eyes.

One thing seems odd – why does clicking on the permalink for an entry does not come up with comments?  One specifically has to click on the comment’s link to get the comments along with Dare’s writeup..

 

As long as it is just my computer..

As long as the damage is not to my income

 

Numbers,please!

Caught this in The Economist.  I have observed that Economist is happy to produce pretty looking graphs for most of the articles.  Would The Economist be willing to put up numbers for what percentage of total shares are held by the top 1% and the rest?

He thinks South Korea is more productive than America, and that “most” investors are among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. (In fact, about half of Americans own shares.)

 

 

What a swipe!

You oughtta love this guy!  He just used the steep hikes in oil prices and its effect on airlines to take a swipe at its competitor.

He not only expects some airlines to disappear, but he believes that the likes of BA, “which is levying surcharges faster than it’s losing bags at Terminal Five”, will end up handing more business to Ryanair.

 

Kudos to SM Krishna!

Wow, the party with a storied history accepting its defeat and admitting to its mistakes.  Well, this must the first time in Indian history.  Correct me if I am wrong!

Would you elaborate?

There was no clarity in the Congress strategy. See, a strategy need not be transparent, but there should be a hidden strategy. However, till today nobody knows what that hidden strategy was or what it exactly achieved for the Congress.

Full article at http://www.indianexpress.com/story/314553.html.  Now, why do I feel this is not going to last long?  How long before some other party loudmouth castigates him for telling the truth as he saw it?

What could BJP have done to carry atleast a simple majority?  Seems like the delay in election took away BJP’s advantage indeed!  If TN hadn’t postponed the hogenekkal project to aid Congress’s electoral prospects in Karnataka, would BJP have carried a simple majority already?

How long before atleast half of JD(S) splits and joins BJP to enjoy power? 

Or,  to the detriment of BJP, how long would it take our erstwhile PM to decide to join BJP or support BJP government to get couple of berths for his wards – Kumaraswamy & Revanna?  What is the odds of such a talk going on right now?  How would it impact BJP’s image?  Hope BJP has learnt its lesson and not go there, but as is well known, politics makes strange bed fellows

Given that Congress hasn’t solved the Cauvery issue even while it has been ruling at centre and in Karnataka many a times, what would BJP do differently to arrive at a lasting solution?

 

Is this for real?

A telling quote from todays Newyork Times about a new rule instituted at Merrill Lynch. The rule says that analysts should have a 20% “underperform” stocks in their portfolio.

“I don’t think that is likely to change any more than you would expect human nature to change,” said Mr. Melcher, president of Balestra Capital.

Merrill Lynch, not surprisingly, disagrees with that view. Candace Browning, president of Merrill Lynch Global Research, says that her analysts’ work “serves an important function in the capital markets” and that the changes would make investing recommendations from the firm even more useful.

“What the new system basically does is it forces analysts to rank their stocks top to bottom,” she said.

I think the “forces analysts to rank” is going to just create a new set of issues. Whenever I have seen that there are rules that “forces” someone to do something, people just invent clever new ideas to comply but just in letter but not spirit. Trading current set of issues for a new set of issues, at best

In my industry, there are managers who just keep the underperformers in their team forever. Just so they do not have to go search for other underperformers come next round of appraisals. So would analysts copy the same trick and keep underperforms consistenly so and thus creating a vicious circle for those stocks?

 

Two long weekends in as many weeks

I am at present in Brussels. Quite a beautiful city with a good public transport network.

However, the most important thing is – holidays are very serious business here In just the last 2 weeks, there were 2 long weekends – one for 4 days and one for 3 days! Just my luck

My primary gripes – For a City that is head quarters for EU & NATO, there is not that much of a English speaking population And not much of a choice in food if you are vegetarian. You just have to make do with Club Tomate Mozza & Potatoes or a salad or falafel.

 

A perfect Black Swan?

Was that really a conspiracy or was it a perfect example of The Black Swan?  Is it time for communication service providers to plan for that once in a lifetime disruption to their services that results in  loss of productivity and associated cascade of events due to uber-connectedness? 

It would be interesting to study the communication service provider’s plans where they assumed the probabilities of such occurrences and their reasoning behind the same!

 

Rajkumar Bharathy on Bharathy, himself & music

Quite a fluent talk, and mostly in chaste Tamil. That was quite welcome after a lot of Tanglish stuff.

Kumudam Alapanai – Rajkumar Bharathy – registration required.

I did not know about Kumudam’s Alapanai section and it was my wife that discovered it. And the thing is, she doesn’t care much about carnatic music inspite of being from a family with some notable carnatic musicians.  She absolutely can’t stand alapanais. “Enna vendirukku, thadarinannannuttu..”