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Showing posts from December, 2015

blog # 973 : Cockroach Theory

At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew from somewhere and sat on a lady. She started screaming out of fear. With a panic stricken face and trembling voice, she started jumping, with both her hands desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach. Her reaction was contagious, as everyone in her group also got panicky. The lady finally managed to push the cockroach away but ...it landed on another lady in the group. Now, it was the turn of the other lady in the group to continue the drama. The waiter rushed forward to their rescue. In the relay of throwing, the cockroach next fell upon the waiter. The waiter stood firm, composed himself and observed the behavior of the cockroach on his shirt. When he was confident enough, he grabbed it with his fingers and threw it out of the restaurant. Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, the antenna of my mind picked up a few thoughts and started wondering, was the cockroach responsible for their histrionic behavior?

Blog # 972 : Consumers Least Benefitted from $47 Billion Oil Windfall

India has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the dramatic collapse in crude oil prices, which hit an 11-year low of $36 per barrel this week. Global crude prices have crashed nearly 70 per cent from their peak of $115 per barrel in June 2014, leading to windfall gains for the government. Morgan Stanley on Tuesday put out a report to show how the domestic economy has benefitted from the fall in global crude prices. 1) India's annual oil import bill has fallen from $108 billion in 2012 to $61 billion in 2015, leading to savings of $47 billion, according to Morgan Stanley. In local currency, the total savings so far is a little over Rs 3 lakh crore (at 65 rupees per dollar). 2) The central government is the biggest beneficiary with total savings estimated at $27 billion, the investment bank says. Oil subsidy payments are likely to be just 0.2 per cent of GDP in 2015-16 as compared to 1 per cent in 2012-13, leading to savings of $14 billion for the central government, acco

Blog 971 : Decision at Right time is Essential for Sucess

Put a frog into a vessel filled with water and start heating the water. As the temperature of the water begins to rise, the frog adjusts its body temperature accordingly. The frog keeps adjusting its body temperature with the increasing temperature of the water. Just when the water is about to reach boiling point, the frog cannot adjust anymore. At this point the frog decides to jump out. /> The frog tries to jump but it is unable to do so because it has lost all its strength in adjusting with the rising water temperature. Very soon the frog dies. What killed the frog? Think about it! I know many of us will say the boiling water. But the truth about what killed the frog was its own inability to decide when to jump out. We all need to adjust with people & situations, but we need to be sure when we need to adjust & when we need to move on. There are times when we need to face the situation and take appropriate actions. If we allow people to exploit us physically, emotional

Blog # 970 Anarchy or Fascism

One bull in a china shop is bad enough, but two is a recipe for disaster, quipped a wag this week as Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “coward and a psychopath” and followed it up with a frontal attack on his Union finance minister and the Delhi & District Cricket Association (DDCA) at whose helm Arun Jaitley was till he resigned in December 2013. The instigation, of course, had been the CBI raid on Kej­ri­wal’s principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, ostensibly for a corruption case. Having reached a breaking point, a point of no return, it is difficult to see how the Centre and the Delhi government can return to a normal, working relationship. With both the BJP and the AAP having won massive popular mandates, ideally their governments should complete their five-year terms. But with the BJP hell-bent on hobbling the working of the AAP government at every step, could it be that the central government is, slowly but surely, building up a case

Blog #969

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2015 | RABEA AL AWWAL 4, 1437 Sections Video Favourites Search BANKING  A question of liquidity as UAE banks ‘creak’ amid low oil  People queuing to use the ATMs in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki during the recent Greek crisis. UAE bank liquidity is ‘not at Greek levels, but maybe it could go to Italian or Spanish levels at the height of the euro crisis’. Giannis Papanikos / AP Photo Frank Kane Dec 13, 2015 In delivering a particularly candid view of the UAE financial situation, the regional investment banking head of one of the biggest banks in the world does not want to be named. “The big issue now is liquidity. After a year of low oil prices, the banking system is creaking. It is not at 2009 levels yet, but the alarm bells are ringing,” he says. “It could be that we are only one black swan event away from a repetition of the financial crisis back then, when Dubai was a hair’s breadth away from insolvency.” The two possible events that migh

blog #968

Reason for Air Asia Crash Indonesian investigators said today a chronically faulty component and the crew's attempt to fix the problem were among the factors that contributed to the crash of an AirAsia passenger jet last year, killing all 162 aboard. The plane's flight control computer had a cracked solder joint that malfunctioned repeatedly, including four times during the flight, and 23 times the previous year. "Subsequent flight crew action resulted in inability to control the aircraft ... causing the aircraft to depart from the normal flight envelope and enter a prolonged stall condition that was beyond the capability of the flight crew to recover," the national transport safety committee said in a statement. The Airbus A320 aircraft crashed less than halfway into a two-hour flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore on December 28 last year.