Sumir Chadha and KP Balaraj founded Sequoia Capital. In the last 22 months, Sequoia has invested in 10 start-up firms from its $300 mn third India-focused VC fund. No other fund has invested more in this period.
Companies That Sequoia Helped Grow To $100 Million Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s excerpt - the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which a number of economists view as the direct antecedent to our current financial crisis:
“In the 1990s, Asia was ‘hot’: observers were smitten with the Asian ‘miracle’. Exactly why was puzzling. Read the rest of this entry »
A house in South Africa where Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lived in the early 1900s has been put up for sale.
The house’s owner says she has failed to find an institution interested in preserving the building’s legacy, so she is selling it on the open market. Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s excerpt - the concept of a nation, in the modern sense of a place which is a primary source of identity for its inhabitants, is a very recent phenomenon:
“Of the many ways in which we can define ourselves, the nation, at least for the last two centuries, has been one of the most enticing. The idea that we are part of a very large family, or, in Benedict Anderson’s words, an imagined community, has been as powerful a force as Fascism or Communism. Nationalism brought Germany and Italy into being, destroyed Austria-Hungary, and, more recently, broke apart Yugoslavia. People have suffered and died, and have harmed and killed others, for their ‘nation.’ Read the rest of this entry »
By Xavier Augustin
The story of Captain Gopinath and Deccan Air is a story of endurance. Imagine a soldier returning to his home town where he got some land rewarded by the government. Imagine the scene of this youth looking at his patch of barren earth that he dreams of converting into coconut grove. Imagine a man pitching a tent and starting to dig – all alone. Imagine a scene where his prospective bride comes to visit him in his tent in the field and actually loves it. Imagine spending 10 years tilling the land and watering the trees with the help of donkeys. Imagine the glee when Rolex recognizes his contribution in organic farming and rewards him with a watch. Imagine him leaving the farm to Bangalore to start a new company offering corporate chartered flights with helicopters and from there on to start India’ s first low cost airline, Air Deccan.
The moral of the story: What matters is not how much resources you have but how resourceful you are.
Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’ comes to mind :
“I should prefer to have some boy bend them (branches)
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them”
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Contributed by Farah Alladin, London.
10 Jul 2009, 1350 hrs IST
A twenty-four-year-old Indian jumped to his death from the 8th floor of a rooftop hotel in the UK, hours before he was to bring in his 25th birthday. The wiz kid, Anjool Malde of London was a successful banker and businessman but had recently received a reprimand at work for sending out an email relating to his own events management company, from his office computer.
Malde reportedly jumped off the ledge of a posh hotel wearing a Hugo Boss suit and holding a champagne glass in his hand, hours shy of his 25th birthday.
An expat must adapt to the genteel workplace in Singapore, says Bharat Puri, Cadbury’s global chocolate category director.
Click here for complete article
26 Jun 2009, 0110 hrs IST, Roli Srivastava, TNN
MELBOURNE: An estimated 75 per cent the 96,000 Indian students in Australia currently are pursuing “vocational courses” such as hair cutting, hospitality or even cooking in little-known private institutions that have mushroomed in and around Melbourne over the last few years. Most of these students use these courses as a route to apply for Permanent Resident (PR) status. This phenomenon is at the root of the string of attacks on Indian students here over the last couple of months. Read the rest of this entry »