Why the fuck does every single article that talks about this describe insider trader Rajat Gupta as a “former Goldman director”? Why not ex-McKinsey CEO? Or current P&G Board Member? And especially given that his insider trading was partly at Goldman’s expense?
Media is crazy
This is yet another of those things which I’ve been thinking about and have been intending to write about for a long time but have never gotten down to it. Pinky wrote this excellent post on the topic today and that has got me thinking. To quote her,
A bad teacher makes a bad student. A teacher who looks at teaching as just another job is doing no good to anyone. She neither grows in her life nor contributes to the positive growth of a kid.There have been a few teachers in my life who i have tremendous respect for, not because they taught me effectively enough to pass in their subjects but because they taught me to listen, think and speak!
I don’t have any solutions yet but I thought I should just put some bullet points here, just to try and give a structure to the problem. Let me know your thoughts
Any thoughts on this? Any possible solutions? Of course it’s not possible to implement any macro-level solution. All I’m looking at is a school-level solution. How do you plan to run one school (of size I mentioned in my bullets) sustainably while ensuring teachers are paid adequately enough to not scare away interested people?
this is yet another “lazy post”. One for which I don’t really need to do too much work. Harithekid recently brought out a list of search terms that have resulted in people hitting his blog. Looking through my google analytics statistics, I find quite a few funny/unusual phrases that have led to people reaching my blog, so I thought I should share it with you.
I don’t want to make this list too long, since some good stuff might get lost in that case. So if you think you reached my blog by searching for a phrase that you thought was interesting and you don’t find that in this list, my apologies. Maybe next time I’ll include the phrase that you searched for in order to land up here.
The top spot of course goes for “pertinent observations”. This is closely followed by people searching for “noenthuda”. Maybe because I’ve never put my real name anywhere on this site, there aren’t many searches for “karthik” either as a word or in combination with other words that lead up to here.
Ok so getting to the gems:
So I think this is a good time to ask you how you stumbled across my blog. Did you reach here by way of searching for something unusual? Or did you find link to blog on someone else’s blog? Or is it through twitter? Or facebook? Or through a friend’s google reader shared items? Do leave a comment and let me know.
It is fairly well established that Tirupati Venkataramana (it is Venkataramana and not Venkateshwara – remember that it is a Vaishnavite temple) took a loan from Kubera in order to finance his wedding to Padmavati. And till date, Venkatarmana has been soliciting contributions from visitors to his shrine in order to help him pay off this loan. Given that the loan was for the purpose of getting married, I think we can quickly establish that it was a Personal Loan. What I’m trying to figure out, however, is what rate of interst did Kubera charge Venkataramana.
For starters, I think somewhere in our scriptures, we can find out the amount that Venkataramana borrowed. Rupees didn’t exist in that era, but I’m sure we can find some figures in terms of gold, or other commodities. And we should be able to estimate the rupee value of this loan by suitable backward extrapolation.
What might be slightly tougher is the time period. When did Kubera exist? When did Venkataramana exist? When did he get married to Padmavati? The date is important, for we should know how many years to discount for when we do the IRR calculations. However, I’m sure that with sufficient effort, we should be able to find the date of this particular transaction to the nearest millenium.
Then, there are the loan repayments. Let us assume that Venkataramana is in general a poor man, and his repayments can be approximated to the amount of offerings he receives from visitors to his shrine. Catch a few people sitting for McKinsey interviews, and estimating this amount is also not going to be very tough. We should be able to get fairly accurate figures for the last few years, and then we should be able to appropriately extrapolate backwards accounting for various regime changes (I’m assuming here that the temple, for whatever reason, will refuse to cooperate in this noble endeavour – else we can get the repayment amounts from the temple books).
We also need to remember that the repayment is not complete. People still contribute generously to the Venkataramana Personal Loan Repayment Fund. However, if we assume that the loan has already been repaid, we can get a floor on the rate of interest that Kubera charged. It is intuitive right – that if more money pours in, the interest rate would’ve been higher? Let us also assume that there were no repayments till about five hundred years ago, which was approximately when the temple was built. Assuming zero repayments till then, it again gives a floor on the interest rate.
Obviously, I don’t already have any of the data that I’ve mentioned here, so I can’t actually do the calculations. However, if McKinsey decides to solve this problem, they can do so in March during their interviews at IIMs. My prediction, however, is that the rate of interest will come out to be a number which, in normal circumstances, would be found to be usurious. Thus, we might probably be able to show that people are contributing to funding a greedy usurious rich moneylender when they contribute to the Venkataramana Personal Loan Repayment Fund. I don’t know what further use this might be put to, but I think the process will be an end in itself.
On a closing note, I would like to point out the greatness of our culture – which, even in mythological times, could boast of complicated financial products such as Personal Loans. This one factor, I think, is enough to show that our Indian culture is superior to all other cultures.
PS: Sometime back, I was wondering if the Venkataramana Personal Loan Repayment Fund could be the largest money-laundering operation in India. However, a little thinking revealed that our political parties are definitely far far ahead when it comes to that.