Warrier's Collage November 5, 2021

Welcome to Warrier's COLLAGE On Friday November 5, 2021 Good Morning Like most of you, I also received and responded to several Diwali Greetings. Many Thanks to all for the kindness, and for keeping in touch. Have a Nice Day M G Warrier "Diwali: Indian festival of lights celebrations – in pictures | Life and style | The Guardian" https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2021/nov/04/diwali-hindu-festival-of-lights-celebrations-in-pictures A Spirituality/Faith charan singh (@CharanSingh60) Tweeted: Unity in Diversity - 60 चिति चितवउ अरदासि कहो परु कहि भि न सको सरब चिंत तुझु पासि साधसंगति हउ तको कीरत, 1395, गुरु ग्रंथ साहिब I keep thinking of making supplement to you but just can't All worries/anxieties are before you Congregation of holy can only help https://twitter.com/CharanSingh60/status/1455999318851162112?s=20 B Purposeful pursuits Social Media as a useful tool Dr G Sreekumar : A Central Banker's Miscellany* Wish you all a Happy Deepavali! A few months short of the pandemic's second anniversary, as life trudges back to normalcy, many might be taking stock of how they spent their time. I greatly improved my cooking abilities, especially traditional Kerala vegetarian cuisine. Building on my early music lessons on the piano and cello was on the agenda, but a return to Trivandrum, where the two instruments are, kept getting postponed. Apart from catching up on reading, I attended numerous online lectures, lectured on governance for the IMF and IIT Madras. I also completed numerous online courses on various subjects of interest. After it crossed thirty, I stopped counting. Only one, on Film Studies, is awaiting completion with a final examination. I also started three blogs, out of a planned six. One covers global central banking and finance, the second focuses on India, and the third on miscellaneous topics ranging from history to music and cinema. These remained private for long and were open only for short intervals. After a friend complained about my articles being distributed across domains, I opened an account with substack, a subscription platform launched in 2017. I will be using this as an aggregator blog as explained below. I took the liberty of adding you to my substack account, which I have named A Central Banker's Miscellany. The title draws inspiration from A Mathematician's Miscellany by Prof John Littlewood, who played a cameo role in the life of Srinivasa Ramanujam. The idea of copying Littlewood was stolen from Prof. Kaushik Basu, who wrote An Economist's Miscellany. Once a week, mostly on Thursdays (because I am starting on one), I will be posting here links to my articles on banking, central banking, and various other topics. I will also be providing short descriptions and links to articles on various subjects that I found interesting. You could also log in to my website to read the full archives and other posts as they are published. Links to my other blogsites are also provided there. I plan to keep the posts short and nonintrusive. I also hope to be able to sustain your interest over time. But, I understand that all mailboxes are swamped with emails. And everyone needs to be selective and prioritise. So, please feel free to unsubscribe whenever you feel like it using the unsubscribe link at the bottom. Warmly, G Sreekumar * Central Banker's Miscellany https://www.gsreekumar.com/ Why this blog Posted on 5 June 2021 by G Sreekumar It was Bertrand Russell (or maybe Bernard Shaw in one of his long introductions) who wondered on what an overthrown official would do thereafter. In ancient Greece, he speculated, the deposed official would round up mercenaries and attack his city state. The unseated Chinese civil servant, he added, would retire to the hills and write poetry. A retired Indian bureaucrat, I believe, would write his memoirs or set up an NGO. One who cannot do any of these things might just start blogging. After my retirement, I opted to continue what I had stopped long ago. And that was writing, on whatever interests. I kept slotting them into different blogs. This was more preferable than a potpourri of assorted stuff. Three blogs are active as on date. Another three are still pending. I worked on these blogs intermittently since mid-2019. They went live only in April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. Initially, I was able to upload at least two posts per blog in a week. Thereafter, I discontinued for certain personal reasons. My attention got diverted to the print media and a few online journals. For someone writing regularly late in life, having to wait for editorial decisions is suicidal. Some issues cease to be topical making the article relevant. Even after an editor approves for publication, there could be delays in search of the right time and suitable space. This is compounded by the fact that many scribes continue to write into their 80s and beyond. At the same time, many new journalists are joining the profession. There have been cases of unreturned calls. Not to mention unacknowledged messages and mails. Many cases of payments overlooked, delayed, reduced, or refused. But the most difficult have been editorial rewording or truncation of title and content without any consultation. Sometimes, these are to the detriment of the flow and continuity of the article. All aimed to suit a procrustean bed of editorial rules and space. That was when I decided to be on my own. When I saw myself behind a paywall for my own unpaid article, I decided to put an end to relying on anybody else for publishing my articles. Thereafter, it has been an effort to bring back the blogs which I had put on the backburner. Hence this blog. Please see the About section for details. My writing approach has been dictated by Orwellian principles inculcated in me from a young age. There is also a favourite quote from Coleridge who wrote that Schiller burns a city to create his effect of terror, but Shakespeare drops a handkerchief and freezes our blood. The reference is to the style and effect. Understatement is key. It is not for me to shock and awe. I do not propose to actively “promote” these blogs. After an initial nudge among friends, I hope they will get around by word of mouth. I welcome suggestions from all well-wishers. C Healthcare : Dengue Fever A talk by Dr Ramakrishna Modi Fortis Hospital https://youtu.be/vumBAT_jfoI D Current Affairs 1) Media Response To The Editor The Hindu Business Line Letters November 4, 2021 Public & Private Please refer to the article "Leave the Railway PSUs alone" (November 4). Generally, due to historical reasons, there exists a misunderstanding about resources management in India. Let's not forget that East India Company which became instrumental in perpetuating British rule here for long years was in the private sector. As we have seen in the case of banking sector since 1968, where there's a will, ownership change is a matter of government policy. What is missing in India is a level playing field for private and public sector organisations. Policy shifts to pursue political interests rather than public interest is to be blamed for this. The abuse of policy for political gains has to be minimised. If there's consensus on this, it will be easier to ensure running of public and private sector enterprises professionally. M G WARRIER Mumbai 2) HR Issues in PSUs : M G Warrier 2015 Article "Time to revamp human resource policies at government, PSUs" https://www.moneylife.in/article/time-to-revamp-human-resource-policies-at-government-psus/42956.html Excerpts : "Actually, the private-public sector divide in regard to meeting social responsibility obligations/ commitments and a discriminatory approach between the two sectors, when it comes to government policy support is a legacy of the British Raj. Once it is accepted that the resources of the country are the property of the people and irrespective of ownership (whether government or private individuals/ groups/ families/ organisations), all are handling public funds/ resources in a trusteeship sense, this divide can be bridged to a great extent. Presently, in the above background, Indian public sector is ailing from lack of autonomy, indecent competition arising from a wrong understanding of the unique position of our country and irrelevant comparisons. Unique position because, our per capita geographical area, availability of resources, literacy rate, development needs, system of governance and so on are not amenable to comparison with most of the developed and developing countries of the world. Day in and day out, India is given a rank or rating among the assortment of nations in the world, many of them together can be accommodated in one of the states of India." E Blogs & Links 1) Book Review : The TATAS "Book Review | The TATAS — How a family built a business and a nation" https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/book-review-the-tatas-how-a-family-built-a-business-and-a-nation-6669551.html/amp Excerpts : "Girish Kuber, Editor of Loksatta (the Marathi daily from the Indian Express Group) originally wrote and published this book in Marathi in 2015. The book was translated into English by Vikrant Pande in 2019. Kuber starts the story in Navsari, a town in southern Gujarat, where Nusserwanji Tata, father of Jamsetji Tata, was born in 1822. Although Jamsetji is widely regarded as the founder of the Tata group, the seeds were firmly sown by his father when he decided to not follow his family tradition of priesthood and instead headed off to Bombay with his wife Jeevanbai and their young son Jamsetji who was born by then. The book then follows, almost chronologically, the family's journey of building a business empire." 2) Managing Anger "Anger management" https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/dynamic-skills/anger-management-38790/ Excerpts : "Anger is a normal emotion, but when it gets out of control and turns catastrophic, it can make a big problem. The problem could be in your workplace and also in your personal relationships. it’s a common phenomenon for every individual, it might spoil your career and life also. Anger is a natural process towards threats, it may cause powerful, and aggressive behavior which generates outrage and allow us to fight and also defend ourselves when we are in harmful situations. In some situations a certain amount of anger is necessary for our survival." 3) John Littlewood "J E Littlewood (1885 - 1977) - Biography - MacTutor History of Mathematics" https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Littlewood/ Excerpts : "Almost all of Littlewood's mathematical research was in classical analysis, but in this area he looked at a remarkable range of subjects and he used an even broader range of techniques in proving his results. For 35 years he collaborated with G H Hardy working on the theory of series, the Riemann zeta function, inequalities, and the theory of functions. The collaboration led to a series of papers Partitio numerorum using the Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan analytical method. During the years of this collaboration Littlewood was seldom seen outside Cambridge, in fact there were jokes around that he was the invention of Hardy. The real reason was rather a sad one, namely that Littlewood suffered from depression which we shall discuss more fully below. The rules that Hardy. and Littlewood adopted for their collaboration were spelled out by Herald Bohr in a lecture which he gave in 1947(see for example where there is also an interesting discussion as to how far they stuck to their own rules and how far they ignored them):- When one wrote to the other, it was completely indifferent whether what they wrote was right or wrong. When one received a letter from the other, he was under no obligation to read it, let alone answer it. Although it did not really matter if they both simultaneously thought about the same detail, still it was preferable that they should not do so. It was quite indifferent if one of them had not contributed the least bit to the contents of a paper under their common name. In Cartwright conjectures that these rules were actually agreed on by Littlewood and Hardy. in 1912. We should also comment that if it seems strange that such a prolific mathematician as Littlewood has his collected papers published in only two volumes, this is because the large Hardy-Littlewood collection of papers appears in Hardy's collected works. " 4) Festivals "Significance of celebrations" : M G Warrier https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/warriersviews/significance-of-celebrations-38034/ Excerpts "As pandemic recedes, instead of staying put in the new environment we have created with the help of technology, we should quickly restore the earlier social systems including festivals and other opportunities for social interactions, of course, taking all precautions to ensure health protection and safety." F Leisure Diwali Bonus* HAPPY DIWALI 🙏-What is Diwali Bonus? Initially there was a concept of salary to be paid on a weekly basis to the workers in India, particularly the textile and flour mill workers in Bombay. So you received 52 salaries in a year. But when British started ruling India they came up with concept of Monthly salary which meant you were getting paid for 48 weeks only. So if we have 4 weeks in a month, 13 salaries should have been distributed but as per a monthly structure they were giving only 12 salaries in a year. When people realized that this was a loss to them in terms of one salary many protest rallies were organised in Maharashtra during 1930-1940. The British then came up with a solution to this problem. After discussion with labour leaders about how to distribute this 13th salary and they decided Diwali being the biggest festival of India, they would distribute this 13th salary durring Diwali. Today this is called the Diwali Bonus. This was implemented from 30th June 1940. Many don't know the history behind the Diwali Bonus and hence this post. *As received from S Venugopal via Group mail. Not to reduce happiness on Deepawali Day, Collage is sharing this late by a day 🙏-Warrier G Quotes about Blogging "The 12 Best Quotes On Blogging - Writers Write" https://www.writerswrite.co.za/the-12-best-quotes-on-blogging/ Like : "The first thing you learn when you’re blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you’ve got to get to the point, you can’t waste people’s time, you’ve got to give them some value for their limited attention span." ~Alex Tabarrok (Alexander Taghi Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist. With Tyler Cowen, he co-authors the economics blog Marginal Revolution. Tabarrok and Cowen have also ventured into online education with Marginal Revolution University.)