Melinda Gates

The 64 Arts Of The Kama Sutra

May 31, 2012 8 Comments

At the outset let me assure you this is a child safe article.So please don’t navigate away on that account.I was inspired to writ it after reading about The Beijing Moral Education Center for Women here : http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/us-china-billionaires-idUSTRE76E0QP20110715

I suppose that advancing oneself by marrying well is a time honoured way to make one’s fortune, no matter how politically incorrect it might be today.In a bygone era girls’ schools offered home science or home economics courses.There were Womens’ Academys and Finishing Schools and at the pinnacle the Swiss Finishing schools like the one here :http://www.ivpworld.com/EN.html .Mostly the idea was to equip young girls with the skills to attract well- to- do partners and to skillfully manage their husbands’ households. Read more of this post

Filed under Tool Kit Tagged with Anne Wojcicki, finishing school, good match, home economics, home science, Institut Villa Pierrefeu in Glion-sur-Montreux., Kama Sutra, Marrying up, marryng well, Melinda Gates, postaday, Priscilla Chan, rich husband, Swiss Finishing School, The Beijing Moral Education Center for Women, Vatsayana, well to do husband, Wendi Deng Murdoch

Bill Gates Biography

September 11, 2011 Leave a comment

wealthymatters.com This is a documentary I found yesterday while searching for ‘World’s Greatest Money Maker’ . Personally I have never been drawn towards Bill Gates .In fact I’ve been repelled.Or it would be more correct to say that I have found his fans incompatible.I find hyper competitive people irritating.My own way is to compete to win if its absolutely necessary and if the game is truly a zero sum game.For the rest of the time I’m happy as long as I can cruise along on the world’s abundance.I really don’t need to win every scrabble game to feel happy.And speed tests are really not my thing.

Given my antipathy it’s no surprise I have never read Bill’s books.Watching this documentary is the first time I’ve spent studying Bill Gates.So far I just knew of him as a geek.I suppose if I’d ever bothered to think,it would have been obvious that he had to have some financial and strategic skills.But I’m sorry to say I was so put off him I didn’t bother.And it was my loss.I was surprised to find out from the documentary just how good a sales person he was.After watching the movie I can’t say I’m a fan but I can see where his competitiveness,ideas on family and philanthropy etc. come from.I’d recommend the movie on any Sunday afternoon.Here are the links: Read more of this post

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Theory Tagged with Bill Gates, Entrepreneurship, Henry Gates, Mary Gates, Melinda Gates, Microsoft, postaday2011, RandomBlog2011

Indian Philanthropy

March 29, 2011 1 Comment

Here are some major features of Indian Philanthropy as enumerated by eminent Indian businesspeople.They are perspectives that were articulated in response to the Gates-Buffett ‘the Giving Pledge’

1.”India has a very old culture of giving, since the time of Buddha. The concept of philanthropy is not new to us.”—-Rahul Bajaj, chairman, Bajaj Group.

2.”Philanthropy in the first world and in the third world are two different things. In the first world people donate to build a baseball stadium. In India, we have to decide for ourselves what we want out of philanthropy. It is not for the Americans to tell us.”

“shareholders have done more charity than Gates and Buffett put together. How? By allowing Cipla to export drugs for $100 million to Africa, which could have fetched $4 billion if they were exported to the US”—-Yusuf Hamied, chairman & managing director, Cipla Read more of this post

Filed under Philanthropy Tagged with Africa, Ajay Piramal, Anu Aga, arts, Arun Bharat Ram, Ashok Soota, Azim Premji, Bajaj Group, Bill Gates, Biocon, Buffett, CavinKare, charitable, Charity, cipla, CK Ranganathan, corporates, create wealth, Devi Shetty, dividend income, DLF, donate, earning, Education, export drugs, family ties, Gates-Buffett, Giving Pledge, giving to the community, GM Rao, GMR Group, GMR Varalakshmi Foundation, GVK Foundation, GVK Group, Harsh Goenka, HCL Infosystems, HCL Technologies, healthcare, Hemendra Kothari, Income, Indian, Indian businesspeople, individuals, Infosys, inheritance culture, inheritance tax, Kalpana Morparia, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, KP singh, Melinda Gates, MindTree, model, music, Narayana Hrudayalaya, Narayana Murthy, patriarch, Philanthropy, philanthropy evolution, postaday2011, publicity, Rahul Bajaj, Rana kapoor, RandomBlog2011, RPG Enterprises, Shiv Nadar, sports, SRF Limited, T.V. Mohandas Pai, Thermax India, Vineet Nayar, Warren Buffett, YES Bank, Yusuf Hamied

February 4, 2011 3 Comments

I have never really been much of a fan of the Gateses.I have heard of their philanthrophy and it’s done on a truly gargantuan scale.The beneficiaries are in poor countries.The causes are important to countries like India.Obviously urgent problems are getting addressed.Normally this should get me interested.However I have never been able to find a connection with the Gates.I normally avoid reading or watching them in the news.It’s not so much any particular thing they say that is a turnoff as I can’t really relate to where they are coming from.

But while hunting around for the story of how Bill and Melinda met each other , today, I stumbled on an article from Fortune Magazine focussed on Melinda.It filled me in on the details of Melinda’s background and helped me get where she might be coming from.Thought I’d put it up here.

BTW I just figured that the real turn-off comes from her view of the world as a place of finite wealth which needs to be allocated in the best possible manner.I guess I believe that assets are infinite in nature.It just needs imagination and human ingenuity to literally create assets.So sand or silica has been known for just about forever, it’s just when we learnt to use it to make ever smarter computer chips that we humans started creating assets out of materials nobody considered as useful before.Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouths but there is not that much variation in the mental faculties of humans.In fact necessity is the mother of creation and people who grow up facing more constraints are naturally more adept at being creative and seizing opportunity.So I believe it better to get all people to see wealth with their mind’s eye rather than battle to distribute existing wealth.Existing wealth is really puny if you think about it….The richest person in the world has not above US$60 .And there are 6 billion people in the world.So just redistributing the US$60 billion amongst all the people of the world will give each person only US$10……guess that’s not all that much.Don’t you think it’s better to learn how to be wealthy?

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Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair – with an Apple computer. She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda’s dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. “That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns,” Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. “We would help him run the business and keep the books,” she says. “We saw money coming in and money going out.” Read more of this post

Filed under Philanthropy Tagged with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Bill Gates Melinda Gates, Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett

Office Romance : How Bill Met Melinda

February 3, 2011 2 Comments

Since some visitors to my blog have been searching for details of how Bill and Melinda Gates got together,I thought I’d put up this article from the Guardian newspaper of the UK.

Office romance: how Bill met Melinda

Friday, 27 June 2008

In summer 1986, freshly graduated from Duke University with a degree in computer science and economics, Melinda Ann French was working as an intern for IBM. She told a recruiter she had one more interview – with a new company called Microsoft. The recruiter was keen. “If you get a job offer from them,” she said, “take it, because the chance for advancement there is terrific.”

Indeed. Six-and-a-half years later, Melinda Ann had advanced through the company, from software marketing tyro to general manager of information products such as Expedia and Encarta; more significantly, she had advanced to a senior role in the heart of the chief executive, Bill Gates, soon to become the world’s richest man. Today, she is one half of the world’s top charity foundation, with personal jurisdiction over the spending of $80bn (£40bn). Clever, raven-haired, strong-featured and tough as nails, she brings equal amounts of compassion, common sense and business nous to the small matter of alleviating world sickness and poverty.

Born in 1964, she grew up in Dallas, Texas, the daughter of Ray French, an engineer and house-rentals agent. At school, Melinda was earnest, driven and goal-orientated. Her introduction to the cyber-world came at 14, when her father brought home an Apple II, one of the first consumer computers available. She was soon playing computer games, and learning the Basic programming language.

It has always amused Bill Gates that his wife is better educated than him – he is America’s most famous college drop-out. They met in 1987, four months into her job at Microsoft, when they sat next to each other at an Expo trade-fair dinner in New York. “He was funnier than I expected him to be,” she reported, neutrally. Months went by before, meeting her in the Microsoft car park, he asked her out – in two weeks’ time. She said, “ask me nearer the time.” He had to explain to her the ceaseless daily flood of meetings. Read more of this post