Sukumar Ranganathan - Livemint.com
ABOUT RECENT POSTS
Member since 09-29-2008
Last visited 10-01-2009
Timezone 5.00 GMT
Total Posts 81
Post Rank 0
  • Thursday, October 01, 2009
    Posted at 9:12:00 AM
    As he has grown his family's business from bicycle parts and gelatin capsules to India's largest telco, Sunil Mittal has displayed several interesting traits. One, he has been willing to dilute his family's stake in the company as long as it means they end up with a smaller (but still controlling) holding in a much larger company. Two, he has been quick to walk away from deals that haven't really worked out, including a proposed joint venture with Singapore's Changi Airport for modernising Delhi's airport, a contract that.
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  • Monday, July 27, 2009
    Posted at 1:43:00 PM
    I've been reading a lot about Berlin -- not that I have overcome my well-known distaste for non-fiction and moved away from my staple diet of fiction and comics. I just finished reading Berlin Noir, a compilation of three Philip Kerr novels featuring policeman-turned-detective Bernie Gunther. The books are set in Berlin from just before WWII to soon after it, which, if you come to think of it, is a smart thing to do if you are writing detective fiction. There's a bit of Berlin, and a bit of the great war in the books. A blurb on the back.
  • Thursday, July 16, 2009
    Posted at 1:37:00 PM
    I think the Anil Ambani - Steven Spielberg deal marks the beginning of a trend that could, er, see, say Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie dancing at the sangeet (a sort of pre-wedding song-and-dance thingie) ceremony of an Indian businessman's daughter/son. This isn't a rash prediction but one based on sound logic. Here's how: 1. Indian businessmen love Bollywood and simply must have B-town's actors and actresses grace corporate as well as family functions. 2. Indian businessmen, as evident from the rash of acquisitions they have made.
  • Wednesday, July 15, 2009
    Posted at 6:34:00 PM
    Most people have by now heard of Matthew Robson, the 15-year old who is currently enjoying his 15-minutes under the sun, thanks to his efforts to help the folks at Morgan Stanley and in Big Media to understand how teenagers consume media . While the report and Master Robson's insights have been received with much oohing and aahing by media companies -- making some of us worry about how little everyone seems to know about, say, building a succesful financial model around a twitter feed -- it has also come in for some criticism, most notably,.
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  • Friday, June 26, 2009
    Posted at 10:04:00 AM
    Michael Jackson is dead . When I was in school in 1980s-Chennai, Michael Jackson was the man and Billie Jean was the song. My neignbour, several years older, was supposedly studying engineering at Manipal and he had introduced me to such engineering school staples as Jethro Tull and Deep Purple (and also such oddities such as Tina Charles and Giorgio -- Manipal must have been a strange place in the 1980s) but I was still fascinated by Billie Jean. Michael Jackson can be credited with making music videos more popular than the music itself, and while.
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  • Thursday, June 25, 2009
    Posted at 2:53:00 PM
    News that Nandan Nilekani has been appointed chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India doesn't come as a surprise to me because: 1. It was scooped by Indian Express . 2. It has been evident to anyone following Nandan's progress over the past decade that he would end up in public office, sooner than later. It also seems apt that he has ended up as the head of an organisation that will see the implementation of India's much-touted national ID card project. Part of a chapter of Nandan's book, Imagining India , is on.
  • Tuesday, June 09, 2009
    Posted at 1:35:00 PM
    It is evident that Mint is full of Star Trek junkies . Which probably is a good giveaway of the average age of the organisation. For most of us who grew up in India, our first brush with Star Trek was in the 1980s, when Doordarshan, the state-owned broadcaster aired the original series. I still remember episodes from that series -- such as Mudd's Women for obvious reasons, and Space Seed, in which Khan makes his first appearance. I watched all the subsequent Star Trek series, and all the movies, but to my mind, nothing came close to the original.
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  • Friday, June 05, 2009
    Posted at 9:17:00 AM
    I am, and that feeling of emptiness surely has to be a booklover's purgatory. Since I know the person who used to run India's biggest distribution chain and because I have met with the approval of the man who runs the excellent small bookstore in my neighbourhood -- he only communicates with people whose taste in books he approves of -- I asked around and seem to have uncovered the making of a disaster -- at least for a trigger-happy book buyer like me. Here's what has happened 1. Sometime ago, the ownership of the distribution chain.
  • Wednesday, June 03, 2009
    Posted at 11:42:00 AM
    ... people are eating more chicken. Or chicken nuggets, to be exact. So claims an email from McDonald's India 's external communication agency that found its way into my inbox this morning. The purpose of the mail was to pitch for a story on what the sender of the email termed a "great product." The product in question is Chicken McNuggets which was launched by McDonald's in India recently. The mail says: "Within a week, the Nuggets sales have overshot the projections...so much so that most of the stores ran out of stock.
  • Monday, May 18, 2009
    Posted at 10:48:00 AM
    On Friday, India went to bed preparing itself for days, maybe weeks of uncertainty before the next government was sworn in. On Monday, it came into work, expecting almost the world of the new government whose swearing in is imminent, and merely a matter of form. The events of the intervening days may explain why the stock market breached the upper circuit level and had to be shut for trading soon after opening Monday morning. It may also explain why the coverage of most television stations and newspapers, including this one, are more about hope.
  • Monday, May 11, 2009
    Posted at 12:26:00 PM
    I read this morning that the recovery we are seeing in the Indian economy could be a W-shaped one. That set me thinking -- not about the economy or the recovery, but the alphabet. The thing is, economic cycles are plotted against time, which means that not every letter can be used to describe either a boom or bust. Time is usually plotted on the X-axis. So, the only letters that can be used to describe economic phenomenon are those with progressive (as in going forward and not forward thinking) lettering. 1. L (a sharp fall followed by stagnation.
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