The Real Rate Of Interest On Deposits
February 13, 2013 Leave a comment
Small wonder that gold prices shot up and gold investment became popular between 2008-2011,huh?Ditto for real estate.
Household Debt In India
February 13, 2013 4 Comments
Financial liabilities of Indian households have gone up sharply from Rs 31,779 crore in FY01 to Rs 2.74 lakh crore in FY12. The decade saw two major trends leading to a sharp rise in consumption expenditure. Home loans have now become popular with no stigma attached any more.The age bar of people opting for home loans has come down from those in mid forties to early thirties.Moreover, the very young have got addicted to credit card spending, leaving them with very little to save. Read more of this post
The Agarwals
February 13, 2013 6 Comments
Mythologically, the Agarwals trace their origin to Agroha, a small town in Haryana,in North India and regard King Agrasena as their progenitor. A Bania subcaste, the Agarwals are made up of 18 clans, among them the Gargs, Goyals, Bansals, Mittals, Singhals and Jindals. As traders and entrepreneurs,in India, the Agarwal community,like the Chettiars of Tamil Nadu and the Moplahs of Kerala, have no mean reputation — the community is prosperous and has proven its mercantile mettle over the centuries. Businessmen from Agarwal clans are among the wealthiest in India and include the Bharti Group’s Sunil Bharti Mittal, Vedanta Resources’ Anil Aggarwal, Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways and ArcelorMittal’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer LN Mittal.
In traditional business families from such communities, members are used to having strategy for breakfast, accounts for lunch and operations for dinner from an early age. Even so, the extent of domination by the Agarwal community in the virtual world is astonishing.Even among trading communities, the Agarwals have proven to be especially prolific at launching e-commerce ventures.Even those with a distinguished academic record end up starting their own ventures.The who’s who of e-commerce entrepreneurs is drawn mostly from the ranks of the Agarwals. Companies run by young Agarwal businessmen, among them Flipkart, Snapdeal, Yebhi, and Myntra, account for the majority of sales by Indian e-commerce companies. And last year, for every $100 in funding for e-commerce companies, $40 went to firms founded by an Agarwal. Read more of this post
The Contributions Of Our Mothers
February 12, 2013 Leave a comment
Reminiscing with my best friend about our childhood – her’s in a small company township in Bengal and mine alternately in India and abroad,we realised that our so-called middle class lives were pretty dismal , saved only by the hard work, thrift and ingenuity of our mothers.Yet, this subsistence existence of the Socialist Seventies has gone largely un chronicled and, I dare say, unappreciated. The roles of those women – like our mothers – who were supposedly non-working because they had no formal salary-paying ‘jobs’, was nothing short of heroic.
If my friend and I look back at our childhood today with any degree of fond nostalgia, it is because these women heroically strove to ensure that their offspring never grew up feeling deprived – ironically, an all-too common plaint of the pampered post-reforms generation. My best friend aptly describes our childhoods as genteel poverty. It was genteel because, as the middle class, we had to keep up appearances, smile and socialise instead of whinging about our lot. But poverty it certainly was, by today’s standards, with meagre salaries, hand-me-down clothes, no vacations and no bought indulgences.Everything that was not consumed got put away for a rainy day or was recycled, from aluminium milk bottle caps to brown paper bags. Nothing was in abundance except love, chores, studies and relatives. Read more of this post
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