The Future Of Indian Cities
July 14, 2012 10 Comments
Sudhir Hasija-The Upwardly Mobile Entrepreneur
June 26, 2011 24 Comments
Sudhir Hasija is the chairman of the Rs 1200 crore homegrown handset maker Karbonn Mobiles.Here is a link to the company’s website:http://www.karbonnmobiles.com/.
His story will tell you how a person with few means can get into wholesaling and then into manufacturing.So for all would- be industrialists here is his story:
55 year old Sudhir Hasija, is the son of a government clerk. He left his home in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, after clearing his Class 10 exams. He then moved to Hyderabad where he spent three years in a machine tools company and saved around Rs 3,000. He used this money to set up a business selling TV accessories such as antennas and trolleys in Chennai. It was a difficult struggle. He would climb to the rooftops of buildings bare footed in the scorching heat to install antennas. He used to wash at railway stations and stay in low-cost lodges. However he persisted and managed to built a thriving business that he expanded across other southern cities. Read more of this post
Currencies of Antiquity
April 12, 2011 8 Comments
The Reichsmark was never an international currency.So studying inflation in the Weimar Republic is not enough.This post traces the history of the Drachma,Denarius,Bezant and Dinar–the international currencies of antiquity.I think knowing this history will help us see the parallels and understand our world better.If macro-economics is not really your thing,atleast knowing about the coins should give a rough idea of which ones would be more collectable for their bullion content!
The Drachma
The Greeks minted stunningly beautiful coins.Non-Greeks thousands of miles away treasured these coins and so they became the first “international currency”.Archeologists have found Greek coins as far away as China, India and Northern Europe. In fact, even though Rome soon rose to eclipse Greece, most Asians kept using Greek money for centuries.
The main currency of Greece was the Athenian Drachma (pic on the left). It was a silver coin, and its weight and quality stayed amazingly consistent through the centuries. From Solon, around 600 BC, to Alexander the Great, around 300 years later, it stayed exactly 67 grains of fine silver. This was the money Alexander brought to India, and from there it traded yet further East becoming the monetary standard of all Asia. And even as Greece declined and was finally absorbed into Rome, its value did not fall much. By the end of the Drachma’s life, it had only declined to 65 grains of fine silver. This is an extraordinary achievement. No other civilization has ever had an international currency that stayed the same value —or pretty much so, since a fall from 67 to 65 grains of silver is a loss of less than 3%. And this was not only during the period of its greatest influence, but even as it declined in power over a period of six centuries.Whatever the secret of the Greeks was, no international currency since then has ever been able to keep its value, even as the government issuing it started on its seemingly inevitable decline.Certainly the conquering Romans were astounded at how the Greeks had mastered money. They paid Greece the ultimate monetary compliment by fashioning their own money, the Roman Denarius, as an exact copy of the Drachma right down to the size and weight. Read more of this post
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