Niranjan Rajadhyaksha - Livemint.com
ABOUT RECENT POSTS
Member since 05-14-2008
Last visited 09-02-2009
Timezone 5.00 GMT
Total Posts 71
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  • Wednesday, September 02, 2009
    Posted at 1:16:00 PM
    Do you remember the singer Rahul Saxena? He made it to the last ten in the first season of Indian Idol --- the year that Abhijit Sawant eventually won --- but was voted out. Farah Khan was in tears and promised him a song in her next movie. And sure enough, Rahul was one of the singers of the title track of Om Shanti Om. So I was shocked to see him on TV last night --- as a participant in yet another talent search. Looks like he's back to square one, trying his luck all over again. But what is interesting is that the Hindi-speaking Saxena is.
  • Thursday, August 27, 2009
    Posted at 11:32:00 AM
    Mumbai's greatest religious festival never lacks enthusiasm and entertainment. But there are some nifty management ideas as well --- from fund raising to crowd control. Here's one incredibly simple and smart idea. The Goud Saraswat Brahmin community has a huge Ganeshotsav --- one of the city's biggest --- at Matunga in central Mumbai. Ravi Gadiyar, a corporate executive who takes five days off to volunteer, tells me that around 10,000 people eat every day at the site. Around 900 kilogrammes of rice are cooked every day. The way this.
  • Tuesday, August 18, 2009
    Posted at 4:58:00 PM
    Our fondest cricketing moments are stored in an unusual brew of nostalgia and statistics. It is hard to remember every detail of a cricket match watched many years ago: the perfect arc of an outswinger or the faultless beauty of a cover drive. There are a few rare moments of lucid recollection but memory usually fails us till old scorecards come to our help. Reading one of these scorecards is a pleasure that a cricket lover cannot quite explain. This is why I rate my accidental discovery of an online cricket archive as one of the best things that.
  • Thursday, May 21, 2009
    Posted at 7:16:00 PM
    I remember that many years ago one of the major soft drinks multinationals was test marketing a new dispensing machine that would charge according to the weather --- more for a can on a hot day and less on a cold day. This machine reportedly had an inbuilt system to measure the outside temperature. In theory, prices could fluctuate every minute and in every market. Now a baseball team is trying out a variant of this idea according to this story in the New York Times . "... because teams set their prices months before opening day and resist.
  • Monday, May 18, 2009
    Posted at 6:46:00 PM
    As the new UPA government prepares to start work, we can expect a fresh round of debates on urban versus rural growth. This paragraph from a recent essay by Robert C Allen, professor of economic history at Oxford University, provides food for thought. He is writing about the Industrial Revolution in Europe. "... the growth of cities and the high wage economy stimulated agriculture. The strong demand for food and particularly meat, butter, and cheese led to the conversion of arable to pasture, convertible husbandry, and the production of fodder.
  • Thursday, May 14, 2009
    Posted at 1:40:00 PM
    Who will lead India? Two days before the actual results of the Lok Sabha elections are made public, it is clear that the race is going to be a very close one. The numbers will decide who will be the next PM. But who should be the next PM? That is an entirely different question and depends on what each Indian seeks in his new national leader. One way to put things in perspective is to use a tool that management consultants have unleashed on an unsuspecting world --- the 2X2 matrix. Here, I have tried to position various national leaders according.
  • Wednesday, May 13, 2009
    Posted at 8:48:00 PM
    What exactly did Europe's top central banker mean when he said this? "We are, as far as growth is concerned, around the inflection point in the cycle," European Central Bank president Jean Clause Trichet told journalists on Monday after a meeting of central bankers in Basel. The world's top two financial newspapers have interpreted this as a sign of optimism. Here are their headlines: Wall Street Journal : Global central bankers see turning point near Financial Times : Downturn 'bottomed out' says ECB head. Is that really.
  • Tuesday, May 12, 2009
    Posted at 1:14:00 PM
    A colleague walked up to me yesterday and asked: "What is the secret of a successful marriage?" This was not the begining of some existential discussion on the battle of the sexes but rather some very primary research for something she was working on. I gave a typically facetious answer: "The secret to a successful marriage is a patient husband." But I promised to come up with something better soon. I still do not have an answer, even though I have been happily married for close to 15 years. But I did later stumble upon this.
  • Wednesday, April 15, 2009
    Posted at 2:33:00 PM
    The government agencies and the interim board that managed to sell Satyam Computer Services to Tech Mahindra deserve credit for a job well done. Read Mint's editorials on this here and here . But what do these last three months tell us about the nature of Indian public policy? The question popped into my mind when I read this piece by Ashoak Upadhyaya in Hindu Business Line. (Disclosure: Ashoak was my boss many years ago.) In 1983, the Government of India passed legislation taking over sick textile mills in the then Bombay a year after the workers.
  • Monday, April 13, 2009
    Posted at 5:36:00 PM
    "Only in the US and India do searches on Rand beat searches on Marx." That's Eric Crampton on whether people around the world are searching the Internet more frequently for Ayn Rand or Karl Marx --- and what this means. His message to libertarians: "So, Randians, be a bit careful about calling this a Randian moment. Economic crisis seems to intensify interest in alternatives at both poles, at least as evidenced by Google search trends." Read more here . (Hat Tip: Marginal Revolution ) I am not sure how much to read into data.
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  • Monday, April 06, 2009
    Posted at 3:18:00 PM
    1. Should nurses treating a burn patient rip out bandages assuming he prefers intense pain over a short period time? Or should they take off the bandages slowly assuming that the patient prefers low-intensity pain over a long period of time? 2. Is a person less likely to cheat when he is reminded of an honour code or a religious text? 3. Is there any link between stealing pencils from office and selling complicated mortgage-backed securities? The answers are to be found in a brilliant TED Talk given by behavioural economist Daniel Ariely . He blogs.
  • Wednesday, April 01, 2009
    Posted at 3:03:00 PM
    The latest fashionable idea that has grabbed the attention of desperate policy makers is cash for clunkers --- or the proposal that governments in recession-hit countries should pay consumers to trade it their old vehicles and buy new, fuel-efficient cars. The underlying belief is that demand for new cars will rise and give recession-stricken economies a much-needed boost. France, Italy, Spain and Germany have already been bribing citizens to do the trade. Barack Obama is a new convert as well. Princeton economist Alan Blinder calls it "the.
  • Thursday, March 26, 2009
    Posted at 12:33:00 PM
    I recently had lunch with a few British civil servants and asked them whether they have given up on the possibility that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will further open up the Indian banking sector this April, as promised in its famous road map. They claimed to be mildly optimistic that financial sector reform is not a dead cause in India. TCA Srinivasa Raghavan makes a sharp and relevant point in a recent article in the Hindu Businessline. "And, if I may respectfully suggest, this knocks the Mistry Committee Report and, to a lesser extent.
  • Thursday, March 19, 2009
    Posted at 5:51:00 PM
    The tenant of this Awkward Corner is taking a break from economics and straying into an area he knows even less about --- politics. Let me start with a story, as far as I can remember it. An acquaintance who now heads a private sector bank, and was a journalist and economist in previous lives, had recounted this to me a few years ago. He was then employed as an economist with the Planning Commission. His boss had sent him to the parliament library sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s to check out some facts. He had his head buried in some suitably.
  • Monday, March 16, 2009
    Posted at 4:23:00 PM
    It is by now widely accepted that the economic crisis has blown away the comfortable consensus that ruled academic and policy economics for maybe at least two decades. It is now introspection time. Willem Buiter posted a typically sharp and caustic attack on contemporary monetary economics , which he has called "useless". "Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s (the New Classical rational expectations revolution associated with such names as Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Robert.
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