The Infernal Diurnal Journal

 Japan’s Bubble Proves Markets Needs Rules- Singapore did it Right As I dabble in matters of economics, purportedly to get a deeper perspective of happenings in the world, I have just come across the sovereign nation of Japan- and the baffling situation it finds itself in today- and actually has been in for several decades.  As is well-understood, the 70s and 80s were the salad years for this nation. Manufacturing, particularly automotive and electronics, were dominating the world and it was a powerhouse economy that the world was dying to engage with. Anecdotally for me, I was struck by how every rock band of every fringe genre always played at the Budokan in Tokyo or in other venues in Osaka. Deep Purple came up with a seminal piece of work called "Made in Japan", which had the punchy arena tune  "Woman from Tokyo" on it. Similarly, in the early 80s the American band Styx wrote an enigmatic and somewhat dystopian tune based on the proliferation of Japanese technol...

 I have been reading up a bit on Uzbekistan and thus thought I will pen down some of the notions that are coming into my mind as I consider this ex-Soviet republic. After all, it is not a bad day to consider a republic, given it is my own nation's Republic Day today. One can certainly ask why I am inclined not to consider my own republic and instead to divert my gaze nominally from New Delhi to Tashkent.  One reason is that we are a1.4B strong nation- there will be many who will no doubt spare no effort to interrogate my country on multifarious fronts - with intellectual probity and without.  My efforts here are bound to be superfluous. Another reason is that like India, the CIS countries in general have been clocking a reasonably high GDP growth rate over the last decade. And amongst the CIS countries, Kazhakstan is already a moderately high income economy. In fact, it may well be the highest income economy with the highest GDP growth rate- well on its way to become a hi...

Why We Don’t Fight (Too Much): A Thought on Central Banks and Peace I have sometimes wondered how this world actually functions day to day—what kind of rule-based order, beyond everyday whims, keeps it running. Because something must be holding us back from destroying everything. Human history, after all, does not read very well when it comes to peaceful coexistence. One often hears the argument that people today are more peaceful because standards of living have improved relative to times past. This strikes me as a shallow explanation. All one needs to do is look around: unless you live in some exceptional corner of the world, you will find extraordinarily wealthy people striving relentlessly for more. Contentment, as has been shown empirically and anecdotally, is asymptotic. It approaches infinity without ever quite arriving. So that’s not it. I suspect that what relative peace we do enjoy has far more to do with certain institutions that keep money flowing in ways that do not d...

The first letter that I typed today- after exactly 6 months of being underground, was met with hostility. The letter appeared in Arabic script. After fiddling around with several buttons, I see I have now managed to bring back the alphabet. But it is difficult, nevertheless, to start writing. I was chugging along, not that smoothly, when we last connected. But in early June- I think it was a Monday- on the fourth of June to be exact, I was called in to the standing CEO's office. He had the blinds in his office pulled in so no one could see what was going on inside. Whence I entered, I noticed our man from HR seated next to the CEO- a sight that immediately told me what this was going to be about. Funnily, I had to do something like this to a colleague with an HR manager seated next to me- this was way back in 2003 I think- in Fort Wayne. The lady I had to let go was in her late forties, very pleasant to work with, however she had to go because of cost cutting. It was really awkward...

A lot of time has passed since I made an entry. My writing trajectory is veerting towards an off-ramp similar to the previous year. I am not sure why I had stopped writing this time around. There was no dearth of things to write about. There still isnt. In chronological order, I guess it is important to consider a number of events. The first is my health, which seems to be holding up well, but I have not had my check up for a long time, nor a blood test. So my bloodsugar situation is still an unknown- although I don’t feel anything off in particular. My exercise regimen is stable but at a lower level. I have had a bout of  cold towards the end of April, attributable to the sudden temperature dip for a few days. Fortunately, the cold was shortlived and so was the nice weather. Nice weather increasing seems to cause more pain than hot weather, healthwise. The scalding 50 degree heat makes for no outings, but atleast you can feel healthy while indoors. The use of the Ayurvedic tonic, ...

    I remember this day every year. It happens to be Tata Founder's Day- and it reminds me of my roots in a very direct way. Often, I reflect as to which place I call home. And while I have lived in different places right through childhood and subsequently adulthood, the town I call my own is Jamshedpur. My folks live there still and so I get to visit often enough. The lack of an airport makes it a trek, but it's all good. When I am home, I am home. Of course, living as I do in Dubai, the desire to visit India is not nearly as strong as when I lived, say, in the US. Not only is it not far to India from here, but culturally Dubai has all the trappings of India- and then some. Jamshedpur, for me, is not just India though. And today is the day when it was formed. There is a delicate fondness and a funny feeling when I think about going there. There really is nothing much to do- in any case, every waking hour is spent online anymore. Each location has little to offer that is so co...

 It is just as well that the year did not even really start so far, particularly at work. I was wondering what was going on because clearly something was up. Many members of the executive team were missing and there had been no formal meetings for two months into the new year. Well, now it is becoming clear. There seems to have been an investigation on some of the senior executives in the company and the outcome of this is now playing out. It is also opportune, as all of this had to be dealt with prior to the onset of Ramadan- which happens to be today. There were some cryptic emails sent yesterday by the boss regarding a couple of executives going on leave and a naming of the substitutes. Why they are going on leave is not clear. What is clear is that their IT credentials do not exist as of yesterday. We can make of that what we will for now. For my own part, I still don't know what will be the end game here and whether I will be impacted as well. But for the moment, I have receiv...

  I don't know what it is about February, but I end up not writing much. It seems as if there are things that weigh on me during this period, right after the new year has started with some gusto. Last year, I was ill for most of this month. This year, I have felt a flu coming on a number of times, but did not really get palpably sick. So one would I expect that I wrote regularly this month. I didn't. One of the reasons is that I cannot get the Electric Utilities installed in my new premises. DEWA- the utilities monopoly in the UAE is usually a remarkably efficient outfit. However, if you make a small mistake in how you apply for a new connection, I am learning that there is pain. Much pain. And this is true for almost all things in the UAE. Resilience, Plan Bs and alternatives- are a weakness. Consider what happens when you miss an exit on any highway. You can be delayed by up to an hour- which seems ridiculous, but it is patently true. Highways are not designed for you to make...

There is information misalignment and assymetry everywhere. I hear from every SaaS provider that they are going to create "one source of truth". Really. Even with all our data eventually being housed in SAP, we have the balance sheet reflecting something about inventory which is different from what is on the ground. The issue is not usually an IT system. Sure it helps to put something from paper into a computer but this hardly solves the information alignment issue. Many memes in Supply Chain make this point eloquently, so I am not saying anything new. But it is an important point to make far more elaborately than throwing a few soundbites. Let us first try and understand if everyone in an eco-system actually wants or desires to have one source of truth. An organisation is a power-oriented hierarchy and information is power. There is information that is not for everyone's knowledge. There is also information that can be claimed to be proprietary and that is somehow "...

  A few things are occupying my mind at the moment. The return of my boss from his vacation is at the forefront of it all. As expected, we had a board room meeting immediately upon his return to discuss something about Succession Planning. And as I have now come to expect, these meetings very quickly become confusing, circumlocutory brawls where it is best to stay silent and get it over with. There will be much more of this in the new year, this much is clear. I felt somewhat sorry for the two new additions to our team, an American of Korean origin and a Brazilian who was formerly a resident of Chile. The two looked rather hapless as the somewhat argumentative meeting went rambling on. I am sure I had a similar expression in the first few months when I started. Aside of work, I happened to serendipitously bump into a group of eclectic musicians from India who happen to be a well-established International Touring Band, based in Delhi. They call themselves Peter Cat Recording Co., ...

    Today one of my colleagues gave me some feedback. He said, “you need to work on your branding”. To paraphrase, he was disappointed with my lack of presence or activity on LinkedIn. I agreed with his observation but I was not sure about his conclusion. There is so much fluff on LinkedIn, as we all know and privately acknowledge- and yet we still jump on this bandwagon for fear of being left out of some sort of race for talent that is being observed on this forum. This particular colleague of mine, posts something every other day and has divulged to me his modus operandi in doing so. Basically, he thinks of a topic to write about and then uses a prompt on Gemini AI by Google to get some text which he then re-formats or edits- adds the odd picture from google and off he goes. Now, there is very little chance that there is any content worthy of note is these type of repeated posts that come at you at 90 miles an hour. It does improve visibiilty because the moment you get on ...

Today we had an invite to a dinner event at a friend's place in the old part of town. These are apartment building that used to be the gold standard 30 years ago in the GCC, until monster developers like EMAAR arrived on the scene and provided ultra-modern apartments in more central areas- these tended to be occupied by more international expatriates while the older part of Dubai still was largely inhabited by South Asians. As a consequence, there were many small grocery stores and Indian cafe restaurants in the neighborhoods which made for a very convenient lifestyle that included just-in-time and inexpensive home deliver for just about anything. On the other hand, there were more posh parts of the city that beckoned to anyone who wanted to feel like they belonged to a "higher-fidelity first class travelling set". Each had it is points. In any case the rooftops of these buildings almost always had a nice sized terrace and a swimming pool and made for excellent party venu...

It was a quiet dinner with P at the Nonya restaurant at the Taj Hotel at Jumeirah Lakes Towers to mark off year 24 of our marriage. The next one is the major milestone- and P has grand plans for a grand celebration. Meanwhile, I was in a reflective mood. Growing up I was particularly close to two cousins, well- one cousin and one technically a niece. The cousin (brother) was three years my senior, while the niece was about a year senior.  In all collective family gatherings, of which there were so many when I was growing up, the three of us would hang out together, exchanging notes, experiences and everything in between. There were occasionally fights within us, but they were ephemeral. All in all, it is a formidable childhood memory that I cannot easily discard. We even got married within a year of each other. My cousin married in 1999, my niece in 2000 and me in 2001. At the turn of the millenium, while everyone was bogged down with the red herring called "Y2K", each of us ...

Elon Musk- what an enigma this person is. On the one hand he has achieved some feats that are truly unprecedented for a single human being. Interplanetary space missions, getting close to building life on Mars, creating an Electric Vehicle that disrupted the US car industry and so many more. Everyone in general is in sheer awe of this superhuman being. And yet sadly, the more superhuman you are the more sub-humane you need to be. Not a soul really likes working for him. The manner in which he overtook Twitter and fired 80% of the staff was staggering. It was probably the right thing to do but he took no prisoners doing it. And now he has been supporting the Trump presidency- has not only overtly campaigned for him but also bankrolled him- in the end Trump won, following which he has somehow become Trump's right hand. He is getting himself involved in all kinds of politics ranging from decisions on Tariffs (presumably to protect his other business interests) to overthrowing foreign ...

 I hope this turns out to be less than a rant post, but I suspect it will be. I participated in a "Journey to Excellence" training program at work. Now I was the one who awarded this contract to a rather suspect individual who was an Arabic speaking man of Lebanese origin that somehow resided in Hungary. It was an expensive contract and I was not sure of the material or the deliverables. After a long discussion, we settled on a discount and the contract was his. What it ended up being was a series of lectures and faux-activities for all employees done in week-long segments across executives, and middle managers. I am not sure if it was jsut me or the facilitator but everything came up to me as so much fluff. I understand it is a leadership course, so we are not expected to be solving differential equations, but still. I guess I have had several of these at INSEAD and then later in Shell and so was amply jaded by the vacuous and banal pronouncements like "Groupthink"...

  This must be the laziest Sunday I have partaken in in a number of years. No walks, no swims- just ensconced under the blankets and watching OTT for the entire day- punctuated only by coffee and bathroom breaks and a small bit of time in the kitchen to fix sandwiches and some khichdi for lunch and dinner respectively. I have to say a strong reason for this is my discovery of this Bengali thriller series called "Chotolok"- which happened to be streaming on this channel called Zee5- and which, via my IPTV subscription, I was able to stream on my TV. I had to search long and hard for it, as the user interface on these things leaves a lot to be desired. But once we started watching it, P and I, there was no stopping. It is always rare to find any well-made series on OTT these days let alone one in Bangla. This was partly the reason I had gotten rid of my separate Netflix subscription and I had resorted to avoiding the TV altogether except for the occasional news or sports. “chot...