9 Comments
Dec 5, 2021Liked by Pranay Kotasthane

This was one of the more insightful editions for me.

RSJ's piece clarified why unicorn valuations and daily dose of bigotry co-exist in headlines. The very perceptive party machinery fine-tunes its messaging to cater to both Indias, hence the strange cocktail of fintech and vigilantism.

PK's piece about the enemy put into words, what I felt for so long. Fahmida Riyaz's poem 'tum to bilkul hum jaise nikle' comes to mind. It's strange that the de-hyphening and pivot towards China are accompanied by a weird and growing determination to emulate the worst features of our Western neighbour. If it goes on unchecked, it doesn't bode well for our future.

A request: Schnabel's talk in the Homework section raises questions about Central Banks' role in growth-inequality debate with their assets purchase programs/QE. I would love your take on central banks' post-2008 presence in the financial markets.

Regards,

Sunil

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For all the hype around startups, their potential market is only 40-50 million people. Its impossible to generate enough revenues and profits from such a tiny base to support these billion dollar valuations. Maybe we are heading towards a dotcom bubble like crash in the near future.

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I love every time Xi is 11 in podcast and no one corrects it :D

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Is there a simplified layman readable pie-chart available showing the annual expense of the government? I want to get an idea about how the government is spending my tax contribution.

In other words, I want something like what my enthusiastic Resident-Welfare-association(RWA) treasurer sends during the annual general body meeting. I get non-trivial insights like 30% of my RWA contribution paid for water tankers, etc.

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author

of course, there is. For the union government, check this: https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/doc/Budget_at_Glance/budget_at_a_glance.pdf

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Thanks Pranay. If you have ever written a commentary on this document (or somebody you know has), can you please point me to that as well.

The presentation looks great.

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author

Most budget analyses pieces use this document as a starting point. Open Budgets folks do a great job of visualising this data. https://union.openbudgetsindia.org/en/

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Thanks once again. I am also looking for opinions and debates and name-callings and trolling and passionate-arguments on the topic of what expense should be reduced and what should be more. Just like it happens in my RWA chat boards.

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