While Alan Turing, the “enigma man” of the Second World War, might have provided the logical foundation for the present day ubiquitous computer, it was Arthur C Clarke who in 1968 conceived of the fictitious computer called HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithm),  in his celebrated science fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL was sentient and could…

Inflation, interest rates, Investments and taxation. These are some of the variables that policy wonks assiduously keep tracking, while those in authority try to manipulate them to get the economy to behave. But such actions by the government and bureaucrats, more often than not, fly on a wing and a prayer. One might as well…

Every year, the ritual of celebrating International Women’s day goes on with a lot of fanfare! And we see , mainly men, waxing eloquent about empowering women! Celebrations for the day are generally organized by men and we also hear of awards specially reserved for women, like outstanding woman leader or outstanding business woman of…

It is a moot point if the Finance Minister is subscribing to Hegelian dialectics of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But in Budget 2023, she has given us the old tax regime with tax breaks and the new (default) tax regime without tax breaks, with likely eventual synthesis being the new tax regime with a few…

Union Budget is almost on us with the mandarins in the finance ministry and sundry politicians along with policy wonks of various hues looking forward to their day under the arc lights, while they sanctimoniously offer their expert opinion for what it is worth. The fact, however is that the State Budgets and GST, which…

Mughal Emperor Babur is popularly credited with introducing canons in the Battle of Panipat in 1526. He had then decisively used gunpowder firearms and field artillery to defeat the much larger army of Ibrahim Lodhi. In fact, the once impregnable forts that had safeguarded many a kingdom for centuries were easily conquered with might of…

As in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the climate pilgrimage from Glasgow to Sharm el Sheik, that is from COP26 to COP27, has made little progress. As the gavel went down on Sunday, 20th November, 2022, to mark the end of COP27, the closing spectacle evoked the picture of siblings quibbling even as their ancestral home…

The then prevailing medieval cocktail of moral vigilantism and the rising specter of Marxism prompted Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher to call economics a “dismal science”. Most people agreed with the philosopher, particularly in the wake of, monk turned economist, Thomas Malthus predicting that humanity is doomed in a world where population growth would always…

Biases insidiously control the world and more often than not, we are not even aware of them. In the world of investments, being aware of one’s biases is essential to succeed over time. A well known but not easily recognized bias is the boundary bias which inhibits thinking “out of the box” because of an…

A big question mark hangs over the prospects for fossil fuel industry given its adverse environmental impact. Consider the following: EV adoption is accelerating, solar panels are getting cheaper (at a faster rate than the most optimistic estimate), battery cost has decreased by 89% from 2010 to 2021 and renewable energy’s contribution to the global…