Penning Vent!

 Watched Pagglet today. Sad movie and more sadly, no one but few women will watch it. The movie doesn't loose its sad background plot throughout. The lead character is not dominating and all the other characters are also quite simple and predictable. I liked the movie but I wished it had some more drama and some more humour to allow inclusion of larger audience. The reason why I felt more people should have watched it was because I realised that there are two types of women in the world: quite ones and the talking ones. I am the talking one. Most women are. Quieter ones are less common and are definitely found in movies/series with serious women as central character.  The family victims? both class of women are victim of families. Victim of broken expectations. Whatever, one does is questioned. If you are poet, why are you a poet? If you are office goer, why is that? if you are housewife, you are insulted daily. If you are capable, why are you so dominating? Men and women of d...

The bad, the ugly... Lending for private sector is one big thing that has been consistently debated as unreasonable in India. There are various charges against it but the summary is that the terms and conditions are most unviable as rates are almost 5% above the feasible point for business viability, specially for the large msme sector of India. We should not be surprised that Jio has decided not to keep any loans in its modern day company. While Startups look for easy wins which are primarily driven by VC funding. Softbank seems to be driving half of this world here, which is helping big time in terms of generating employment. No one can afford 10-20% interest rates while the operating margins are still at 5-20% that Indian Economy allows. The situation has been getting worse every year. Prices of the packed food and fmcg products have remained the same for last 5 years with growing costs, squeezing the overall margins. On top of that, there are too many terms and conditions for cr...

Country Leaders Everyone is talking about one single topic throughout the World right now, so why should I stay behind. Two observations that I want to talk about.  First, one: what China manufactures the World uses - for good or bad. Second observation: Covid has highlighted and magnified the behaviour of the World leaders. Think about the leaders in two broad categories: Nationalists and liberals. Nationalists are clearly extremists in their behaviour in fight against COVID - either they are in or they are completely out in reference to the theory of locking people down. Liberals on the other hand, believe in operating in grey zone - don't completely lock down. There should be some control to maintain order in society but government cannot completely stifle life as usual, because people will not comply voluntarily. Funded start up vs unfunded start up In the low work environment, I have spent a lot of time with my plants. I always fantasise about having lot of flowers in ...

This is a very long story (meaning, I am really sad angry and i need to be grumpy about it) but I will try my best to restrict myself to a few lines. Here is the problem. Processed food and doctors don't go along. Not at all. I think this is very sad and I blame the industry for this. Think about consumption in India vs the world. The supermarket shelves are remarkably different. Let me give you few examples how Indians like to complicate their life. Not a single country in the world eats Roti, but we do. There are multiple excruciating steps in making this thing - which in my opinion should be put in luxury items rather than a must have. Curd can be one big topic of discussion too. I once worked on a project of market researching for a new flavored curd launch. We visited a few house wives and tried to understand their methods with curd. I could not believe how serious in life they were about it. They go lengths and breadth to set curd right. I was so sad to see how much the...

Right now there is too much activity in Delhi and people are out in streets protesting for something or the other. While riots where a common thing when i was kid, it had been less often in a last few years. People had forgotten the songs that remind us that we need to keep together. This time it is new, there are clearly two schools of thought. One that thinks this all is needed. The other school of thought is that all this is a distraction from a bull shit economy, to which the leadership has no answer. Well, cover up the social, control the media, black out internet. It will all fade away. Gradually people will come to terms with the new life. What I keep hearing is that this is all here to stay, not for one or two terms but till they die. So what do the second school of though resolve to? Netflix, prime and hotstar etc., but before watching anything, one is use to checking out the IMDB rating. Now here is the problem with IMDB: it is the most useless nonsense biased indicator fo...

Its been a while but I have been pondering about many things in my life which I can share. I recently discovered that - Newspapers purposefully print awkward faces of leaders, people in limelight. It seems to be reporter's way of having their revenge of the state of matters right now. In fact, it seems to be their only way of expression. Rest is governed by their funding. - Couples no more depend on each other for entertainment. Gone are the days when wives said that I am bored of life. She can watch "Narcos" and "person of interest". Husband, if in good mood, can accompany her. They both can watch together. Kids can join too - quality time of family. - Real estate is no more great business. So, people can live in Oyos of this world and eat food delivered by Swiggy. We don't need to loose hope that everyone will not own a house. We just need to grab the funding geeks offers and enjoy a different life with a broader vision in life. - Tech is making us mo...