liquidity

Educating at scale

You can’t run a high-quality business school with 20 faculty members

In the course of a twitter discussion yesterday, journalist Mathang Seshagiri quoted numbers from a parliamentary reply by the ministry of HRD (on the 24th of November 2014) on the sanctioned faculty strength and vacancies in “institutes of national importance”. While his purpose was to primarily show that even the older IITs and IIMs have massive vacancies, what struck me was the sanctioned faculty strength of the newer IIMs. Here is the picture posted by Mathang:

Source: Parliamentary Proceedings (Rajya Sabha). November 24th 2014. Reply by MHRD

Look at the second column which shows the sanctioned faculty strength in each IIM. Once you go beyond the six older IIMs, the drop is stark. The seven newer IIMs have a sanctioned faculty strength of about 20! The question is how one can run a business school with such a small faculty base.

About ten years back, when I was a student at IIM Bangalore, I had gone for an event where I met someone from another business school in Bangalore whose name I can’t remember now. During the course of the conversation he asked me how many electives he had. I replied that we had about 80-100 courses from which we had to pick about 15. This he found shocking for in his college (from what I remember) there were only three or four electives!

The purpose of an MBA is to provide broad-based education and broaden one’s horizons. Thus, after a set of core courses in the first year (usually about fifteen courses), one is exposed to a wide variety of electives in the second year. It is a standard practice among most top B-schools to fill the entire second year with electives. In fact, in IIM Bangalore, electives start towards the end of the first year itself.

With 20 faculty members, there are only so many electives that can be offered each year. For example, in the coming trimester, IIM Bangalore is offering students (about 400 in the batch) a choice of about 40-50 electives, of which each student can pick four to six. This gives students massive choice, and a good chance to tailor the second year of their MBA and mould themselves as per their requirements.

By having 20 faculty members, the number of electives that can be theoretically offered itself is smaller (given research requirements, most IIM professors have a requirement to teach no more than three courses a year, and they have core and graduate courses to teach, too), which gives students an extremely tiny bouquet of choices – if there is any choice at all. This significantly limits the scope of what a student in such a school can do. And the student has no option but to accept the straitjacket offered by the lack of choice in the school.

In the ensuing twitter conversation this morning, Mathang contended that it is okay to have a faculty strength of 20 in schools with 60 students per batch. While this points to an extremely healthy faculty-student ratio, the point is that for broad-based education such as MBA, faculty-student ratio is not a good metric. What makes sense is the choice that the student is offered and that comes only at scale.

Thus, the new IIMs (Shillong “onwards”) are flawed in their fundamental design. It is impossible to run a quality business school with only 20 faculty. One way to supplement this is by using visiting faculty and guest lectures, but some of the new IIMs are located in such obscure places (where there is little local business, and which are not easily accessible by flight) that this is also not an option.

Merging some of these smaller IIMs (a very hard decision politically) might be the only way to make them work.

PS: Here is the sanctioned faculty strength and actual faculty strength numbers for IITs (same source as above). I might comment upon that at a later date.

Source: Parliamentary reply by Ministry of HRD; November 24th 2014

Guest post on payment mechanisms

I don’t normally do guest posts on other blogs – the problem with that is that you lose track of the fact that you’ve written it and you have no control over record-keeping of these posts. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done guest posts in the past – I used to guest-blog for this blog called Sportsnob, but would faithfully cross-post every post here (or in the Livejournal predecessor). I also used to guest-blog on the Indian Economy Blog, but then again I would cross-post here.

I remember that Madman Aadisht had taken a break from blogging during placements at IIMB, and because he wanted to keep the blog going, he offered to attend some pre-placement talks on my behalf (IIMB had a complex system of compulsory attendance for pre-placement talks so that companies got a favourable impression of the batch). So I ended up writing some blog posts on his blog (after a revamp, they all appear as if he’s written). I can identify that I wrote this one and possibly this one (Madman was kind of my guru on all things online, which includes blogging and Orkut – he sent me an invite to join Orkut long before it was cool. So I kinda ended up writing like him so it’s hard to distinguish the posts now) and this one for sure and perhaps this one .

I remember writing a few posts on some of Takshashila’s group blogs such as The Broad Mind and Logos, but with no documentation of what I wrote, I stopped writing for those, especially since I have my own blog there now. So it’s been a while since I wrote one.

But then I wrote one today. I have mentioned a fair number of times on this blog that liquidity is a much underappreciated concept in economics (apart from financial economics) and I would like it to be talked about more. So I’ve been doing my bit evangelising the concept of liquidity.

Sangeet is a management guru who runs a rather well-read blog on Platform Thinking, which is basically about putting the concept of liquidity into practice. We’ve been talking a fair bit recently since both of us started eschewing formal full-time jobs around the same time and generally have conversations on a lot of random things, including things on our blogs, which includes platforms.

So after one such conversation on platforms and payment mechanisms, Sangeet asked if I could write a guest post for him. And I’ve obliged. Here is an extract:

So how can a new payment mechanism (such as m-Pesa or Apple Pay) gain traction? There are essentially two ways – one is the Paypal route, where you enter with so big a bang that you quickly have a large chunk of the market, and network effects make it necessary for the rest of the market to adapt to you. Given the plethora of payment options that are present now, it is unlikely that any player will be able to establish this kind of domination without significant investment.

The other option is to make it interoperable. Apple Pay, for example, could introduce an Android App (which might cannibalise on Apple iPhone sales, but increase traction of Apple Pay itself). This could potentially increase the number of devices that can pay using this mechanism, and it thus gives incentive for merchants to install the mechanism that allows them to accept payments using Apple Pay. There is a parallel to this within Apple itself – when the iconic iPod was first introduced, it was only interoperable with Apple computers. After much internal debate, Apple finally introduced iTunes for Windows, and made the iPod interoperable with Windows, in 2003, and that year iPods saw a 235% growth in sales

Perhaps because Sangeet mostly writes long blog posts, or perhaps because I was fairly jobless writing this in the IESE Cafeteria the other day (remember I’m a B-school WAG now), I ended up writing a rather long post. Still I’d encourage you to read the whole thing there.

Bakeries

One thing that I’ve fallen in love with in my last one week in Europe is the concept of the breakfast bakery. Every few hundred metres both in Barcelona and Amsterdam you have bakeries. These bakeries offer a large variety of bread products that are to be consumed as breakfast. Apart from this, the bakeries also offer coffee and tea so that one can have a complete breakfast in some of them.

And I say “breakfast” only figuratively – I’ve had lunch on three days of my trip so far in such bakeries – again it’s with bakery products such as pizza slices or sandwiches, followed by coffee (which I must say hasn’t been bad for most of the trip). If I’ve to move to Europe, the presence of such bakeries would be one very strong reason to do so!

I was wondering why we don’t have such bakeries in India. The problem is one of liquidity – a very small portion of India’s population wants to have croissants and doughnuts for breakfast – most people in Bangalore, for example, prefer idli-vada and dosa instead. And so you still have the “fast food” places in Bangalore (lots of them) that offer such foods and coffee. And you have plenty of them – all of which are very reasonably priced and offer excellent quality!

As I try to write more and more about economic concepts, I get further drawn to this whole concept of liquidity. And each time I write about it I claim that it’s an underappreciated concept in economics outside of financial economics!

Perhaps I should make a better effort in changing that!

Derivatives trading in football players

I love it! It’s a dream come true!! It’s official!!!

Football clubs have finally wisened up to trading in derivatives on players’ contracts, it is apparent based on the transfer deadline news of yesterday. Alvaro Negredo has been loaned out by Manchester City to Valencia, but at the end of the year Valencia have an obligation to make the deal permanent. The same article mentions Fiorentina taking Micah Richards on loan, also from Manchester City. In this case, however, Fiorentina has the option to make the deal permanent after a year.

In fact, thinking about it, this kind of option trading in football contracts is not all that new. When Brendan Rodgers was initially appointed by Liverpool in 2012, he was given a three year deal, with the club having an option of extending it by a year (the deal has since been revised).

It’s all very interesting. I’ve constantly lamented that some of the great concepts in finance which are well applicable to everyday life are not applied to the extent that is required. Option valuation is one such concept, for example. I wrote to a friend just now asking why I should join a club he is exhorting me to join, given it’s not doing much now. His reply can be condensed to “option value”.

Option valuation is not the only thing. There is the concept of liquidity. A very commonly used concept within financial markets, it is surprisingly absent in general economic literature. For example, in finance it is a well understood concept that the more the number of active market participants the less is the transaction cost (measured as the bid-ask spread). The same concept can be used to analyze markets for taxis, housing, cooks (why a cook costs much more in Rajajinagar where demand is much lower than in Jayanagar), etc. You never see too many economists talking about it, though.

The problem might be that practitioners of financial economics concepts find finance too lucrative to apply their concepts elsewhere, while mainstream or left-leaning economists might find finance (especially complex derivative finance) abhorrent, and thus are loathe to borrow concepts from that (generally speculating)!

In terms of liquidity, though, things seem to be changing. My old friend Sangeet has been practically making a living over the last couple of years evangelizing the concept of liquidity, through his excellent blog on platform economics. Check out his recent post on Uber, for example. Platform economics is nothing but the economics of liquidity. The success of Sangeet’s blog shows that people are finally beginning to take the concept seriously. Still not mainstream economists, though!

Levi’s Price Discrimination

So I’ve never managed to buy jeans on discount. Let me explain. Unlike most other people (if you go by what the store assistants tell you), I don’t like to wear faded jeans. It is perhaps an inherited hangover since my father used to consider jeans to be inherently dirty and would make me discard jeans as soon as they faded a little bit. It could also be more practical – since I sometimes like to wear jeans to official meetings, I want to wear jeans that look neat.

Now I’ve managed to drive my wife crazy with my shopping (and we’ve known each other for barely four years, shopped together for three maybe). She thinks I’m way too fussy about clothes, and can’t make up my mind easily. I’ve explained earlier on this blog why I take a long time over shoes (my sandals are now wearing out, so I’m getting ready for another ordeal). But the more fundamental differences that my wife and I have is with respect to jeans.

The problem is that we fundamentally disagree on what purpose jeans serve. I have traditionally looked at jeans as comfort wear. Trousers I’m absolutely comfortable in (I sometimes even sleep in my jeans), which I don’t need to wash too frequently, and which can be worn even after they get torn in non-strategic places. I’ve always bought “comfort fit” jeans, and after I graduated to branded jeans towards the end of my teens, my staple had been the comfort-fit Lee Chicago.

The problem is that my wife thinks of jeans as fashion-wear – things you need to necessarily look good in. Some of the jeans she owns are so skinny that sometimes she takes a really long time to change. She looks great in them, no doubt, but the problem is that she expects that I too wear such jeans. And so after some ten years, I have given up my loyalty towards Lee Chicago, and instead have to try out various skinny fits (as things stand now, I own only one pair of Lee Chicago, bought in 2009).

Ok all this is besides the point of this post (and the point of another post which I never wrote). Coming back to the point of this post, the deal is that nowadays I find it extremely hard to shop for jeans. Of course it doesn’t help that I don’t live in Kathriguppe (with its dozens of factory outlets) any more, and that in my part of town (Malleswaram-Rajajinagar) the only place you can find decent branded clothes is in malls, which are a pain. The bigger problem, though, is that it is very hard to find stores that stock my kind of jeans.

In the last couple of years, our strategy for shopping clothes has been to visit a multi-brand outlet in one of the two malls near our place, so that we have a wide variety of choice. Except that I have no choice. Because stores such as Lifestyle or Shopper’s Stop or Westside (which now mostly stocks private labels) or Central don’t stock my kind of jeans. At all. If you happen to locate a store clerk and ask him for “mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans” he will look at you as if you have just landed from another planet. He can be excused for giving you those looks, for his store simply doesn’t stock non-faded jeans, because of which he has never sold them!

So I happened to be on Brigade road over the weekend, and I had a small gap of about half an hour between two meetings, and thought I should visit the Levi’s flagship store there. I must mention that the salespeople there were definitely significantly more polite than I’ve ever seen at a multi=brand store. However, as soon as I repeated my mantra (mid blue straight cut non-faded jeans), the first thing the salesperson who approached me told me was “oh Sir, but there’s not discount on that!”.

It’s clever price discrimination by Levi’s, to not sell non-faded jeans on discount. For they know that people who buy non-faded jeans tend to be older (hey I’m only thirty), or will be buying them for office wear, and they are less price elastic than the typical college kid who buys faded stuff. So while the college kid needs discounts to be attracted during the “discount season”, the “formal jeans” buyer needs no such attractions, and will pay full price for his stuff.

It is interesting to note, however, that companies that make formal clothes (not Levi’s) also offer massive discounts during the “discount seassons” (one of which is on now). That, though, can be explained by the fact that most people need a few sets of formal clothes (even those that normally wear faded jeans), and discounts are necessary to attract customers.

Now I’m beginning to think that the market for “formal jeans” in India is extremely niche, and if I”m acting above my age because I prefer such jeans. I half-expect my wife to call me an “uncle” be cause of this.

In economic theory, outside of capital markets, “liquidity” is a topic that isn’t spoken about as much as it should. While I’m no academician to set this right in theoretical circles, I’ll make an attempt to help my readers what the fuss is all about.

Well past midnight, when you exit a mall after having just watched the “second show” of a movie, you will find a bunch of auto rickshaw drivers who accost you. Without exception, each of them is likely to quote an exorbitant price to take you home. As the night goes on, there is a reasonable chance that some of these drivers will have to move away from the mall, unable to have found a customer for the night.

Two months back, I was looking to purchase a high end laptop. I walked the high streets of Bangalore, going to every big and small computer store I came across. Each brand had a maximum of one laptop that fit my requirements. I ended up purchasing the laptop I’m typing this post on in the US (got a cousin to bring it in for me).

In London in 2005, a sandwich at Subway cost less than two pounds, while a Masala Dosa at a half-decent restaurant cost at least seven or eight pounds. In Bangalore today, a first rate Masala dosa won’t set you back by more than thirty rupees, while a standard unexceptional “sub of the day” at a subway costs over twice that amount.

All the above cases of pricing anomalies or market failures can be ascribed to “lack of liquidity”. In financial literature, liquidity is defined as an asset‘s ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value (source: Wikipedia). From a practitioner’s standpoint, liquidity is positively correlated with the amount of activity that is happening in the market – the more the buyers and sellers for a particular security, the less the “transaction cost” you incur in selling it.

Auto rickshaws in the middle of the night, dosas in London, subs in Bangalore and high end laptops in India – they are all examples of markets that (by the above definition) are highly illiquid. In each of the above markets, the number of buyers and sellers at any point of time is low (relative to other comparable markets – such as auto rickshaws in the evening or dosas in Bangalore). Thanks to that, the “bid ask spread” (my apologies for continuing to use financial jargon. Bid ask spread refers to the price between the highest price a buyer is willing to pay and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept) is high, and consequently, buyers end up paying a high price, or in some cases, sellers end up not realizing a high enough price for their good.

Now, why should this happen? Doesn’t it sound counterintuitive if I say that “there isn’t much demand for subs in Bangalore, hence the price is high”? The fact is that when I say that “there isn’t much demand” I omit saying that there isn’t much supply also. This calls for further explanation.

Let us imagine a world where it is impossible for a buyer and a seller to interact directly to conduct a sale (this sounds like dystopia, but let us imagine a situation like that). In this world, there are a bunch of “specialists” called “market makers”, whose only job is to buy and sell goods. So if you are the seller of a particular good, instead of finding a buyer, you sell it to a market maker, who takes the risk of holding on to your good (carrying cost, possible damage, risk of sudden fall in value of that class of goods, etc.) until he has found a seller. Similarly, if you want to buy something, you only contact a market maker.

When there are a large number of buyers and a large number of sellers for a particular good, the costs of making markets is low. Due to the number of buyers, the average length of time a market maker has to hold on to the good is low, which automatically reduces the risk of making markets in this particular good. Since the cost of making markets in this good is low, more market makers will want to make markets for this particular good. Their competition lowers the bid-ask spread (refer to definition above), and thus both buyers and sellers will realize a price that is close to the true market clearing price.

Now what happens when there are few buyers and sellers for a good? Very few market makers will want to trade in this good, since the risk of holding on to these goods is significantly higher. Consequently, there is less competition among market makers and the bid ask spread remains high (while it is a fact that the cost of market making is also high for these goods, the lack of competition in market makers further pushes up the spread). As a seller, you now have much less choice in terms of buyers for your good, so you end up accepting a rate much lower than true market clearing price. Similarly, as a buyer, you end up paying exorbitant prices.

Now let us get back to the real world where buyers and sellers can actually interact. It can be seen as being similar to the above world, but with the change that buyers and sellers are their own market makers! The cost of making markets comes into play here. As a seller of auto rickshaw services outside a mall past midnight, you know there is a risk of not finding a buyer for your services. You try and price in this risk in the price you quote, and you end up asking for more than the market clearing rate, and there is a good chance there will be no takers for that rate, until you get desperate about finding a customer and quote something below the clearing rate. If you are looking to hail a rickshaw outside a mall past midnight, you are wary of being stranded there without a ride home, so you end up paying much more than the true clearing price.

Several examples of this nature abound. Like how real estate prices are “sticky”, and builders refuse to drop prices in the face of falling demand (note there that real estate brokers are not market makers – they don’t take on the risk of holding on to the asset). Like how I get suboptimal rent for the house that I own in Kathriguppe in Bangalore, only because there aren’t too many people who want to rent a 3BHK independent house. And how apple products are almost a fourth more expensive in India than in the US.

Moving briefly from micro to macro economics, GDP grows when there is more economic activity, or when there is more trade. One way of increasing GDP is to foster trade. However, a large number of goods and services that people need, or that people want to provide, are “illiquid” (that includes Quant consulting – which is what I do. There aren’t too many of my ilk around, and no too many organizations interested in buying these services). One way of fostering internal trade, and thus economic growth, is to reduce the cost of market making. When it comes to goods, VAT, in that sense is a step in the right direction since at each step it is charged only on the marginal value added – and thus the presence of an intermediary doesn’t increase the total cost by too much. Stamp duty on real estate, however, is a bad idea. By charging a full tax on every transaction, it dissuades market makers in the sector, and thus keeps markets illiquid and opaque. The worst of all, though, is Agricultural Marketing, where by law the APMCs have monopoly in making markets in agriculture. Now you know why the farmer continues to suffer even though retail prices of agricultural products have been going through the roof.

Ok I end this post with that digression into macroeconomics. However, I do hope that I’ve been able to explain to you why illiquid products are costlier (if you’re a buyer that is)! Let me know in case you have any questions.

Update

This post came about as a result of a twitter conversation earlier today with Dhiren and Pavan. Giving credit where it’s due

Letting the rupee float

I’m midway through Shankar Acharya’s Op-Ed in today’s Business Standard, and I realize that along with the interest rate, the exchange rate (USD/INR) is another instrument that the RBI could possibly use in order to control money supply and the level of economic activity in India. Let me explain.

Given that mad growth in petroleum prices have been fundamental to growth in inflation, and that high petroleum prices also impact the oil marketing companies and the government negatively, and that we import most of our petroleum needs, letting the rupee rise above its current level is a mechanism of reining in “realized petroleum prices”. If we were to let the rupee rise, inflation would get tamed (due to imports becoming cheaper), the government’s fiscal deficit would come down (subsidy will be reduced), but exporters will get shoved, and that can depress economic activity in the country. So letting the rupee rise is similar to increasing interest rates.

There are people who question whether the RBI should be controlling exchange rates at all, and wonder if it would be better if it were to float freely. I’ve also taken that view on several occasions in the past, but now that I think of it, there are liquidity concerns. USD/INR, EUR/INR, GBP/INR, etc. have no way near the kind of liquidity that exchange rates between two “developed currencies” (USD/EUR or USD/JPY) have. In other words, the amount of trade that happens in USD/INR is much lower than that of say USD/JPY.

Given this lack of liquidity, if let to float fully, there is a danger that the USD/INR rates can fluctuate wildly. Higher volatility in rates means higher hedging costs for both exporters and importers, and given that our foreign trade is fairly high, a wildly fluctuating exchange rate does no good in policy formulation. From this point of view, it is important that short-term volatility in the exchange rates is curbed, and to that extent I support the RBI’s decision to intervene in the FX markets.

However, if there is a sustained pressure on either side (say the exchange rate trades for a sustained period at the edge of the “band” that the RBI is allowing the rupee to float in), the RBI should buckle and shift their bands, and let the markets have their way. While short-term volatility is not great, distorting market signals is worse.

An analogy that comes to mind is circuit breakers in the Indian stock market. Earlier, these circuit breakers were in place for all stocks (basically, they dictate that if the stock price fluctuates by more than a certain amount in a certain time period, trading in the stock will be halted for a certain amount of time). However, recent regulations have removed these circuit breakers for stocks on which derivatives are traded, which are the more liquid stocks. The circuit breakers, however, are still in place for the less liquid stocks

It’s a similar story in the FX markets. Given that USD/INR is still not too liquid (in terms of volumes), it is important that we have circuit breakers (i.e. RBI intervention). Once it reaches a certain “critical mass” (in terms of volumes ), however, the RBI can step away and let the rupee float.

(I haven’t looked at any data while writing this. All judgments are based on my perception of how certain numbers shape up)

Niche

I always thought it is a good thing to do something niche – like having a set of skills/capabilities which few other people have. However, the problem with that, I have come to believe, is that it can be too niche. In which case, you tend to suffer from lack of liquidity in the market.

Lack of liquidity can mean one of two things – it can be good in a way that it ensures wide spreads, so you get to charge much more than the “fair mid price”. On the other hand (maybe in very extreme cases) it can also mean that there is no deal, and you don’t even make the fair price, leave alone a spread.

I think creating liquidity in the market that you want to place your product in is an art.

Liquidity

We live in an era of unprecedented liquidity. Think about the difference from just about ten years ago. Back then, there was a much larger amount of cash reserve that one had to keep in one’s home, or on one’s person. There were no ATMs. There were no credit cards. All purchases needed to be meticulously planned, and budgeted for.

Now, because we don’t need to carry as much hard cash, there is so much more money in the banking system. While that gives depositors the nominal daily interest rate (at some obscenely low rate), there is much more money available with the banks to lend out, which increases the total amount of economic activity by nearly the same amount.

Just think about it. It’s fantastic, the effect of modern finance. And I don’t disagree with Paul Volcker when he says that the most important contribution of modern finance has been the ATM.

PS: My apologies for the break in blogging. I was in and around Ladakh for a week (yes, I was there when the cloudburst happened) and there were some problems with my laptop when I returned because of which I wasn’t able to blog. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to my one-post-a-day commitment. And I have lots of stories to tell (from my Leh trip) so hope to keep you people busy.

Urban living and restaurants and liquidity

Last night I had dinner at Alfanoose, a small Mediterranean joint off Broadway. I had hummus and salad with pita bread, and had also brought along a falafel sandwich which is now sitting in my fridge and is likely to get consumed today for breakfast. Excellent stuff. Absolutely brilliant. And not expensive at all – ten bucks for the hummus and salad, and six for the sandwich. Considering that USD = 10 INR according to the Idli index, this is extremely reasonable, insane value for money.

I have been intending to write this post for ages, about how one of the best positive externalities of urban living is restaurants. When you are living in a desolate area, with not too many people around, there is no option but to cook your own food. Even if you live in a village ora small town, the number of people who are willing to eat out will be small, which means it makes little business sense for someone to open a restaurant there. You are likely to find a handful of them, but the lack of competition will mean that you can’t really trust quality.

There is a network effect in restaurants. Some people don’t eat anywhere but at home, and some don’t cook at home at all. However, there is the large middle ground of people whose consumption of restaurant food varies directly with quality and liquidity. And these two concepts are inter-related – the bigger the town is, the greater the required supply of restaurants which means more competition and thus higher quality. And higher quality leads to higher demand (more fence-sitters converted) and the virtuous cycle goes on (of course, population and the fact that some people don’t like to eat out limits the boundaries of the cycle).

Another thing is that the larger a town gets, the greater the liquidity of the food market in there, there is more variety. If you remember Bangalore in the 1980s, when I was growing up, there was one standard type of restaurant. Where you would get cheap idli and dosa and a few other standard snacks, and a few “north indian” items at meal times, and every time you wanted to eat out you had to go with one of these. And you would have noticed how with the growth in the restaurant market in the 90s you got more variety.

What makes cities such as London and New York such foodie havens is their size, and also that culturally people here are more inclined towards eating out than in other places such as India. This leads to insane liquidity in the market, and as I explained above that leads to more variety, and so you get more niche food. And when you have cities as large as New York or London, what you get is full-fledged liquid markets in cuisines that are everywhere else considered niche!

So because of liquidity in otherwise niche markets, in each cuisine you will find various kinds of restaurants. Like yesterday I had awesome hummus at this self-service place! While in a place like Bangalore to get any kind of hummus you’ll have to go to a fine dining place and spend a bomb.

Another thing I realized is that when liquidity is thin it usually occupies the top end – like how in Bangalore you get non-Indian stuff only in high end fine dining places. But I suppose I’ll write about that in detail some other day