Mother of all crashes

It’s been a couple of days to remember (or forget) for the stock markets. It takes me back almost 10 years to 1998, when the Asian financial crisis unfolded. I clearly remember that I was in Chennai at that time and was watching the live quotes of the Indonesian Rupaiah on CNBC and watching the freefall of the currencies and the stock indices. The feeling was similar yesterday and today. There was no other topic of conversation throughout the day in the office.

Luckily for me and my group of friends, we never did venture into the market when it was playing at the 20K+ levels, our investments were made at much lower levels. Of course, we've seen our profits vanish, but it's nothing compared to the thousands who were seduced by the media to begin investing, misled into thinking that the market could only go up and up and are now left without the shirt on their backs. It's happened before in 92, 95, 2000 and will happen again in the future.

One silver lining is that many stocks are so far off their highs that they make very sensible investment decisions. Take IT for instance, you've now got Infosys and TCS available for 15-16x FY08 earnings and 12-13 times FY09 earnings. These are extremely profitable companies generating 1000s of crores of cash each year and yet the market is totally ignoring them. I think it is a very smart decision to buy into them right now. I would, if only I hadn't fallen for the hype and put so much money into the Reliance Power IPO:-(

Best pictures of 2007

I've come across quite a few best pictures lists, from National Geographic, various newsmagazines etc. Here is one more, which spans a number of subjects

What Indian cricket must do

All this talk of boycott and calling back the Indian team is bull. Even if it were the right thing to do, one doubts if BCCI has the capacity or the guts to take such a hard stand. It would also not be right, as it would cause irreparable damage to Indian cricket and we would forever be tagged as whingeing losers who could not take the heat. The right thing to do is for the country to get behind our players as one and support them through the rest of the series. This includes the fan, media, TV and BCCI. Let's not forget that the team really fought well in Sydney and with a bit of luck could have held off for a draw.

We should also show the Australians where they get off. Write to the newspaper editors and TV channels to stop taking any comments or articles from the members of the Australian team. Boycott any products endorsed by any of their team members and ensure that they drop them.
Revoke any contracts signed by the Aussie players with the IPL. Hit them where it hurts and I'm sure that they will change their rotten ways.

Long trip home

We went on a long trip to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur and Ahmedabad. 10 days, 2 flights, 4 train journeys, countless rickshaw and traffic rides. I ended up 2 kg heavier but 25K rupees lighter. That's not including the train + airfare. Whoever said India is a cheap place to travel.

Despite the large number of great places we visited, I have to say that the main highlight of the trip was the food. We had the best samosas that I had ever eaten at Gopaldas Pethe wale near the Jama Masjid in Agra. And the best jalebis ever, cooked in pure desi ghee at Dilli Haat. This was followed by a traditional Rajasthani feast at Lakshmi Mishthan Bhandhar in Jaipur and an amazing Gujrati thali at Pakwan in Ahmedabad. When I think back, I count myself lucky to have got away with just a 2 kg increase.

I was also really impressed with the cities that I visited, especially Jaipur and Ahmedabad. They both have seen a lot of development, but it seems to be a lot more planned than Bangalore. Ahmedabad, in particular really impressed with its wide and good roads, lush greenery and the general prosperity that I saw there.

It was a good end to 2007 and I feel happy that I am starting 2008 on a happy note.

Computer Woes etc

It has been rough over the past few days. I came down with cold and fever on Thursday, which continues till today. Though it was mild, it totally wrecked my plans to take part in the half marathon this year.

To top it off, the new computer that I built had been behaving very badly since Wednesday. It would start up fine, but if I left it running for more than a couple of hours or did anything memory intensive, it would almost always end in a Blue Screen of Death. I tried a number of things likr refixing the RAM, removing the video card and uninstalling software that could have caused the error, but it was all in vain. Finally, as all indications were pointing to memory errors, I decided to run a memory test on the RAM modules, and voila, came up with almost 2 million errors!!! I then did a check on each module individually and identified the culprit, a bad RAM stick. I removed it and have been running Vista with 1 GB since this morning and no lockups. Funnily enough, despite all the stories I've read about Vista being a dog on 1GB, it isn't all that unusable.

Upgraded PC

My old pc, an AMD Athlon 2000XP was getting on in years, it was the slowest processor available in 2004 and though I had no problems with mundane stuff like browsing etc, it was struggling to run anything more processor intensive. I'd considered upgrading for many months, but somehow it was always the lowest priority and I never did. Finally, I got to it last weekend and took the plunge.

I went for the high end this time. For the CPU, I was torn between Intel and AMD. I've been an AMD fan for many years and have been rooting for them to come back strong over the last year or so, ever since Intel came out with the Core2Duo. The prices are that much better on the AMD as well, but the performance difference is significant. I finally decided to go for the Core2Duo E6750, which is the fastest non-Extreme dual core processor available today. To it, I added 2 GB RAM and a mid-range graphics card (Nvidia 8600GT based) and I got one hell of a beast.

Last year, I had made a resolution not to run any pirated software on my pc. I'd gone out and bought an original WindowsXP license and wanted to transfer it to this PC from the old one.
That's when I realised a) I'd bought an OEM version which was non-transferable and b) I'd kept the certificate of authenticity in such a safe place that I couldn't find it at all!! I decided to go with Windows Vista, as I felt that it would be more future proof, despite all the negative press and my previous bad experience with it.

The OS installation went off very smoothly and I was done in a little over an hour. I was amazed by how sweet Vista runs on this machine as compared to my laptop, which is also a dual core with 2 GB of RAM. Must be the faster processor, RAM and hard disk. I'm really excited because now I'll finally be able to play the Orange Box games that I bought recently:-)

Connectivity to Bangalore Airport

The new airport in Bangalore is almost complete, but the connectivity to the city is a total mess. The proposed expressway is mired in litigation. There is no rail link to the airport. The existing highway (Bellary Road) is already a mess and will only get worse when the airport opens.

BMTC is planning to launch a Volvo service from various points in the city. They plan 40 buses in total, which I think will be inadequate. Here's my reasoning. The buses will only run at hourly intervals. I think they will find it difficult to live up to, considering that they only have 5 buses from each location and the round trip to the airport may easily exceed that during peak hours, but . Assuming a 4 hour round trip, each bus carrying out 6 trips per day and a capacity of 50 passengers per bus, this just works out to 24000 people who will be able to use the service (40 buses x 6 trips x 50 passengers x 2) at peak capacity. With a projected 50000 passengers per day expected to use the airport daily, that's just half the number. The problem gets worse when you consider that the traffic will not be uniform, the peak hours traffic (6-9 am and 5-9pm) could easily double.

BMTC has also taken a stupid decision to have multiple stops for each service. I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with this brainwave. Not only will the stops increase the travel time tremendously (remember we are talking about passengers with a lot of luggage here), but very likely the buses are going to be full at the starting point itself, making the stops meaningless.

Despite these issues, I still think this is the best solution, both for the short and long term. Let's hope they fine tune this, increase the number of buses to 100 and price it competitively (around 250 per passenger).