Archive for June, 2005

Microfinance : What can we do?

By Surya ⋅ June 30, 2005 ⋅ 11 comments

As the G8 summit looms near and the publicity for more aid and grants reverberate more than ever, I am reminded of the unassuming yet important cousin in the developmental policy family that everyone tends to forget - microfinance (mF).
2005 is the year of microcredit, but one will be hard pressed to find many large-scale [...]

Viennese Memories 2

By Surya ⋅ June 28, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

This is the second of the series. The first part is here.
Schönbrunn Palace
Early on Friday morning, we headed off to the Schönbrunn palace. We were planning to spend only a couple of hours there, but the palace was so impressive and the palace grounds so huge and beautiful, it was nearly 2pm by the time [...]

The white tears of the rubber tree

By Surya ⋅ June 27, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

The Kerala Tourism board is slowly opening up its beautiful rubber plantations to eco-tourists. The quiet, thick rubber plantations, the tappers who toil almost camouflaged among the trees and even the queer smell of the drying rubber sheets are part and parcel of Kerala’s evergreen beauty. If you are ever in God’s own country, do [...]

Viennese Memories 1

By Surya ⋅ June 24, 2005 ⋅ 11 comments

I finally got around to editing my travel notes about Vienna and putting it into a more readable format. Here is the first of a three part series.
Srijith and I started on our journey on a Wednesday evening. After a rather uncomfortable flight (Austrian airways is the only non-budget airline I know where they charge [...]

What women want - they never get it right, do they?

By Surya ⋅ June 19, 2005 ⋅ 7 comments

A recent article in the Economist,”Sex changes” claims that glass ceilings are giving way to glass partitions. That is, women are indeed making inroads into careers that were traditionally male dominated, but they are choosing to do so only in certain areas of these professions. And they are choosing the lower paying areas.
Maybe people are [...]

8.3 million millionaires and growing!

By Surya ⋅ June 19, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

According to the World Wealth Report 2005, there are 8.3 million millionaires worldwide. So, the next time you you blow out your birthday candles and make a wish, remember ~ being a millionaire is no big deal, you will just one among the many millions!
More on the world wealth distribution can be found here [PDF [...]

Calculator Woes

By Surya ⋅ June 17, 2005 ⋅ 4 comments

Just one of those days when the world definitely doesn’t seem to be on my side. After surviving with a scientific calculator (legacy of my engineering degree), I decided it is time I graduated to a professional financial calculator. After I decided on a particular Texas model,I discoverd its not available in Duesseldorf (or at [...]

Credibility of threats in negotiations - don’t forget to make the threat!

By Surya ⋅ June 15, 2005 ⋅ 3 comments

In my endless moving watching spree, today I watched an exemplary movie from the sixties: Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. My favourite scene in the movie is when the Russian ambassador to the US acknowledges that they had indeed made a doomsday machine and that the announcement was [...]

Adieu

By Surya ⋅ June 14, 2005 ⋅ 3 comments

Today morning, I woke up to the unusually loud cries of Tweety.
Tweety is a fellow resident in my apartment building and has her nest just outside my bedroom. Because she reminds me of Tweety in Jamba’s ringtone ad and because I am rather unimaginative when it comes to christening birds, shes called Tweety. Tweety [...]

Apathy

By Surya ⋅ June 13, 2005 ⋅ 8 comments

I had my doctor’s appointment today and much against my better judgement, I decided to leave the safety of my house. Srijith had repeatedly assured me that “he would kick anyone’s ass” if they stared at my rather ghastly scarred face. I needn’t have worried at all, no one we met on the way so [...]

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