Wednesday , 3 pm , Dinesh Khanija , Investment Analyst on CNBC
‘ The market is testing these levels and it could probably hit the 11200 to 11500 levels in the next 2 trading sessions ., said the analyst confidently .’.. in fact from now there would be a market correction of upto a 500 points and it will face resistance only around the 9500 levels . That’s a 20% downside . From now on the retail investors would jump into the market , the foreign institutional investors have run out of steam and even local institutional investors have dropped volumes . The number of rising stocks has reached a plateau .’
Friday , 12 pm
The market crossed 12000 points and some stocks hit their lifetime highs . Foreign inflows continued unabated . Confident analyst , Dinesh Khanija was not available for comment .
A month earlier the market had crossed the 10000 levels when every analyst worth his salt said that the market would crash post this level and caution was advised , but the market broke the 11000 number in a week and then crossed the 12000 level baffling everyone in the stock trade . We are now bigger than the Dow as an index number . Where is the market headed , why is it crossing level after remarkable level rapidly ? Right now , in the summer of 2006 , there are no answers , just a couple of stock pickings to make a killing .
Stock market money making has been a subject of enormous discussions and since the free trade policies of the government , spearheaded by Narsimha rao and Manmohan singh in 1991 , just as I has passed out of college , the stock market had created a new set of millionaires who create wealth trading stocks . While the handful of Kolkatta’s super rich have created enormous wealth and kept it through the stock market , Mumbai has phenomenal number of stock market millionaires . Delhi doesn’t trade in stocks as much so their stock pages are pretty unanalytical and colourless , they make money through raw trade .
My first stock buy , am the first entry in the State Bank of India’s register for stock Invest scheme in December 1991 at their office in Broadway in Chennai , was the auto anciallary company India Piston Rings , a subsidiary of the local Murugappa group . Hundred shares were allotted to me from the Initial Public Offering worth a thousand bucks , whose value today is around twelve thousand bucks .A thousand percent appreciation .
I understood the meaning of real wealth when at the end of the stock scam in 1992 , the Central Bureau of Investigation ordered the scamster Harshad Mehta to pay Six hundred and forty five crores as fine for his stock manipulations and insider trading . And Harshad Mehta agreed to pay back the amount in six cheques from Monday thru Saturday . I wondered about it for over a month . What kind of money was that .
Dhirubhai Ambani understood the meaning of the stock market when he periodically used the market to fund his industrial expansions instead of borrowing money from the banks . His issues were mega scale , just like his projects and he must be accredited to singlehandedly teach India equity investment strategies . Reliance Petroleum is the issue I remember created such an impact for its size when it was listed .His sons still do the same .
The World is truly flat and we can feel it in the billions of dollars chasing the Indian stock market , they say at five billion dollars we are a ten percent of the investment made in the Chinese economy .
Services stand where agriculture once stood , towering over the contribution to GDP with a fifty five percent share . The other forty percent is shared between the agriculture and manufacturing . Service industry has seen categories like Cable TV and radio , part of the media and entertainment industry hitting 55000 crores today from 3000cr in 1990 and Telecom becoming a $15 billion industry and Retailing with $100 billion in sales employs 8% of the country’s workforce with banking and real estate growing rapidly , India is moving rapidly to becoming a developed country Also, globalization has meant that the Indian economy is intergrated to the word economy is some very complex ways . For instance , experts say that much of the sensex’s current rise is due to an appreciation in the dollar, which has inturn spurred Indian software stocks, and three-fourths of such companies’ revenues come from exports to the US market.
Though we may be the same as the Dow Jones industrial average at 11000 points each , in terms of market cap, the Dow obviously wins hands down. The market cap of the world’s largest economy is estimated to be about $30 trillion approximately (a trillion is a thousand billion), while the sensex’s market cap stands at about $500bn. The US is a mature economy, growing at a much slower rate than India’s. Ours is an emerging market where the economy is expanding at over 8% and is currently viewed as a darling of investors,” said Edelweiss Capital MD, Rashesh Shah. While everyday crores of investor wealth is created , we’ll get to be a developed economy in another fourteen years or so .
In the meantime , I presume , one keeps busy making his moolah !
Sunday, May 07, 2006
A ticket to the movies
The queue was bloody long . It reached till the empty patch of land outside . The movie Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak had just released at the theatre and was greeted with an enormous response . the reviews were good and we all landed to see the movie , fifteen of us straight from the college at five pm for the six pm show . Fifteen engineering students armed with a strategy to see the movie on its' first day of release and it's second show in town .
We stood in the queue impatiently , as usual , we wanted to see the movie and wouldn’t go back without seeing it . Come hell or highwater . Getting the tickets was the issue as always , but we were armed with strategies , a sum total of our experience from buying bulk movie tickets many times in the past . To return without seeing the movie was definedly shame and akin to flunking an exam .. The queue was quite well behaved till about fifteen minutes before the movie . Then suddenly all hell broke loose , as everyone wondered if they would get the tickets at all and why the queue wasn’t inching ahead at all . A typical reaction to a stationary queue anywhere in India .As everyone started shouting , we broke into three teams , one that would attack the counter straight breaking the queue and adding to the confusion , the other would break the middle of the line so that the middle of the queue din’t protest the commotion at the counter when team1 landed there and the last five at the back would hold their positions in case the first team didn’t manage to get the tickets . The hefty musclemen standing guard sprung into action , brandishing their lathis . The first hit managed to send no message as the two guys who bore the brunt of the lathi swore back and engaged him in a verbal duel.
‘Look at the counter , there’s absolute confusion . If you have balls, get them in line ‘
‘First you get into the queue , b* ’
‘Am standing where I was standing , m* ’
The thing with dirty abuses is that ; if a stranger does it , you revolt . If your friend voices them , they are part of a seemless conversation with no malintent . Anyone unknown using the b or m word to you is cause for a fight .
That’s exactly what happened .
The guy in the queue shouted back , ‘ Go and tell this to your dad . You m* ’
The dhoti clad six foot hefty guard brandished his bamboo stick and hit him harder .
Three man broke queue and punched the guard .
There was utter chaos .meanwhile at the counter window , there was some success . I pushed in my hand with the money . Some three hundred bucks . Twenty bucks was a balcony ticket , and we saw balcony all the time .
Just the hand thrust in was not enough , you needed to shout for attention and your hand was part of a set of ten hands being thrust at the same time .The guy at the counterwindow would engage with you only when he took the money from your hands .
Just as the burly man at the counter took money from my hand , a powerful force grabbed me back . Another guard had got to me . Bargi and Khot had held him back for some time , but he managed to reach the counter through brute force and a thick bamboo stick .
‘Get back . You broke the queue , get back , get back ‘
‘My money is inside , ‘ said me , just managing to tell the guy at the counter for fifteen tickets .
The guard let go of me and I emerged unscathed through the mass of flesh of people at the counter , sweating profusely .
We had a good laugh , the movie was fun and memorable .
And most movie tickets , we bought this way till one day ,Maheswary had an idea . He suggested that we tie-up with the manager for tickets . Some kind of a pre-booking everytime a movie would be released , blocking fifteen tickets with payment in advance . No theatre manager bought the concept . Trade practice demanded that they block the tickets themselves and sell it in ‘black ‘ at five to ten times the value of the ticket . This was dynamic pricing at its best . Each blockbuster movie guaranteed that the demand for tickets went high and prices shot through the roof , making a parallel booking system with select vendors selling the tickets at this unauthorized premium . It would always force us to make a choice – to see the movie with this high premium , skip it for another day or negotiate it down to a mutually acceptable price ?
Yesterday , seeking relief from a tiring work day in Bangalore , I wanted to see a movie ‘Gangster’ .The movie released just a day back , with rave reviews for Shiny Ahuja , the star of the movie . I logged onto the net , checked the theatres it ran in , only to find one single ticket available in PVR at Forum in Koramangla . Netizens in Bangalore generally don’t leave a ticket free . All theatres , all shows were booked , except for this one . I clicked on it , paid for it by the credit card , and got a confirmation number .
Later in the evening , I glided upto the ticket counter on the fifth floor through its four escalators at the swanky mall, Forum .
There was a small queue of five people buying different movies . A slim , meek and small girl no more than eighteen or nineteen , was manning the counter .
On my turn , I gave her the confirmation number .
The screen showed the seat I had bought in a sort of position chart of all seats in the theatre .
Sitting in great airconditioning , with a well mannered crowd , she probably doesn't know what it was like to see a movie years back .
She punched out a ticket and gave it to me with a smile.
One can’t fight any longer for first day first shows , as there are neither first day first shows nor fights for tickets , atleast in urban India . We have moved from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance . While theatres then showed four shows a day , multiplexes show upwards of fourteen a day . There's a movie after every half hour that you land in a multiplex .The concept is to hold movie premieres where the actors would watch the movie with you and you could quiz the actors , directors and producers on key aspects of the movie, mostly a day or two before it opens to public. Also ,there are paid previews , you can pay and see it earlier than its public release .
Great seats , some like Fame adlabs in Andheri have 180 degree seats that become beds , smaller plots , shorter movies and swanky multiplexes .
No sweating , swearing , scuttling or strategy . And no black !
We stood in the queue impatiently , as usual , we wanted to see the movie and wouldn’t go back without seeing it . Come hell or highwater . Getting the tickets was the issue as always , but we were armed with strategies , a sum total of our experience from buying bulk movie tickets many times in the past . To return without seeing the movie was definedly shame and akin to flunking an exam .. The queue was quite well behaved till about fifteen minutes before the movie . Then suddenly all hell broke loose , as everyone wondered if they would get the tickets at all and why the queue wasn’t inching ahead at all . A typical reaction to a stationary queue anywhere in India .As everyone started shouting , we broke into three teams , one that would attack the counter straight breaking the queue and adding to the confusion , the other would break the middle of the line so that the middle of the queue din’t protest the commotion at the counter when team1 landed there and the last five at the back would hold their positions in case the first team didn’t manage to get the tickets . The hefty musclemen standing guard sprung into action , brandishing their lathis . The first hit managed to send no message as the two guys who bore the brunt of the lathi swore back and engaged him in a verbal duel.
‘Look at the counter , there’s absolute confusion . If you have balls, get them in line ‘
‘First you get into the queue , b* ’
‘Am standing where I was standing , m* ’
The thing with dirty abuses is that ; if a stranger does it , you revolt . If your friend voices them , they are part of a seemless conversation with no malintent . Anyone unknown using the b or m word to you is cause for a fight .
That’s exactly what happened .
The guy in the queue shouted back , ‘ Go and tell this to your dad . You m* ’
The dhoti clad six foot hefty guard brandished his bamboo stick and hit him harder .
Three man broke queue and punched the guard .
There was utter chaos .meanwhile at the counter window , there was some success . I pushed in my hand with the money . Some three hundred bucks . Twenty bucks was a balcony ticket , and we saw balcony all the time .
Just the hand thrust in was not enough , you needed to shout for attention and your hand was part of a set of ten hands being thrust at the same time .The guy at the counterwindow would engage with you only when he took the money from your hands .
Just as the burly man at the counter took money from my hand , a powerful force grabbed me back . Another guard had got to me . Bargi and Khot had held him back for some time , but he managed to reach the counter through brute force and a thick bamboo stick .
‘Get back . You broke the queue , get back , get back ‘
‘My money is inside , ‘ said me , just managing to tell the guy at the counter for fifteen tickets .
The guard let go of me and I emerged unscathed through the mass of flesh of people at the counter , sweating profusely .
We had a good laugh , the movie was fun and memorable .
And most movie tickets , we bought this way till one day ,Maheswary had an idea . He suggested that we tie-up with the manager for tickets . Some kind of a pre-booking everytime a movie would be released , blocking fifteen tickets with payment in advance . No theatre manager bought the concept . Trade practice demanded that they block the tickets themselves and sell it in ‘black ‘ at five to ten times the value of the ticket . This was dynamic pricing at its best . Each blockbuster movie guaranteed that the demand for tickets went high and prices shot through the roof , making a parallel booking system with select vendors selling the tickets at this unauthorized premium . It would always force us to make a choice – to see the movie with this high premium , skip it for another day or negotiate it down to a mutually acceptable price ?
Yesterday , seeking relief from a tiring work day in Bangalore , I wanted to see a movie ‘Gangster’ .The movie released just a day back , with rave reviews for Shiny Ahuja , the star of the movie . I logged onto the net , checked the theatres it ran in , only to find one single ticket available in PVR at Forum in Koramangla . Netizens in Bangalore generally don’t leave a ticket free . All theatres , all shows were booked , except for this one . I clicked on it , paid for it by the credit card , and got a confirmation number .
Later in the evening , I glided upto the ticket counter on the fifth floor through its four escalators at the swanky mall, Forum .
There was a small queue of five people buying different movies . A slim , meek and small girl no more than eighteen or nineteen , was manning the counter .
On my turn , I gave her the confirmation number .
The screen showed the seat I had bought in a sort of position chart of all seats in the theatre .
Sitting in great airconditioning , with a well mannered crowd , she probably doesn't know what it was like to see a movie years back .
She punched out a ticket and gave it to me with a smile.
One can’t fight any longer for first day first shows , as there are neither first day first shows nor fights for tickets , atleast in urban India . We have moved from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance . While theatres then showed four shows a day , multiplexes show upwards of fourteen a day . There's a movie after every half hour that you land in a multiplex .The concept is to hold movie premieres where the actors would watch the movie with you and you could quiz the actors , directors and producers on key aspects of the movie, mostly a day or two before it opens to public. Also ,there are paid previews , you can pay and see it earlier than its public release .
Great seats , some like Fame adlabs in Andheri have 180 degree seats that become beds , smaller plots , shorter movies and swanky multiplexes .
No sweating , swearing , scuttling or strategy . And no black !
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Missing veerapan
Last year , Veerapan , the notorious sandalwood smuggler , was shot dead in cold blood after a twenty year chase through dense forests on the borders of Karnataka and Tamil nadu .
I vividly remember a newly wedded me driving down those very roads cutting through two wildlife sanctuaries Bandipur Tiger reserve and Madhumalai elephant sanctuary on my way from Mysore to Ooty on the state highway . My cool as cucumber 150cc Kinetic Honda automatic bike served me well through those adventure years as it never broke down , never needed servicing , and would give me thirty kilometers to a litre without fail .
In the age of hundred-kilometers-a-litre bikes , the Kiney was a little anachronistic , but was a part of many of my driving expeditions . Had driven it earlier through the thick forests in Dandeli , the forest reserves west of Dharwad . There were bad roads , uneven terrain , heavy rains , strange forest sounds and plenty of monkeys . The forest was so thick that one couldn’t see the sun in broad daylight . We had driven one complete day through the forest chasing the monsoon . We would find an occasional pit stop in the form of a shack with water dripping through it , serving tea and deep fried onions bhajjias. The bike stood through thick and thin with me .
That 160km journey from Mysore to ooty through Madhumalai and Bandipur was one such . From Mysore , the winding road breaks through the shallow vegetation and into the thick green cover quite dramatically . It was rare to see people on the roads , some said it was because of the tigers of Bandipur , some said it was because of the elephants of Madhumalai and some said it was because of Veerapan ,the bandit .
We took the bike journey without much care , no tool kit , no medicines , had no mobile phones then , no maps , no nothing , just the two of us , me and Nal and a small bag stuffed with some clothes and books . Passing Madhumalai was scary – there were three hunting preserves within the sanctuary – Kargudi , Masinagudi and theppakkadu . The road skimmed its borders and cut though Kargudi . We hits the ghats with a stunning hairpin bend that took us about fifteen metres vertically straight above the road we just crossed by .And then another that put us up by another twenty metres , making it a great breathtaking journey for us . There were 56 hairpin bends along the way taking us two thousand two hundred metres above mean sea level , a third of Mount Everest ! Driving through landslide signs , hurriedly erected army bridges and utter greenery was sheer ecstacy . The bike rode the hills like breeze and we took a good part of six hours to climb upto Ooty .From there we chased the toy train down to Coonoor , which with its lush green tea-plantation hillsides was quite a spectacle .
People in Ooty scared us with Veerapan tales , warning us against venturing out at night . He had killed over a thousand elephants , hundreds of police men and presided over the forests of these sanctuaries like a reining deity . Newspapers would talk about beheaded soldiers of the Special task force from tamil nadu trying to nab him , there would be hushed tales of a Veerapan sighting on some side of the hills , some dead tigers , some skins recovered in a truck driving out of the wilds .Then Veerapan kidnapped Rajkumar , the superhero of kannada cinema following it up with the abduction and killing of a former Karnataka minister . It sent shivers down the sides of many a cop who braved all of these to capture and kill him after a fifteen year long chase .
Those days , late in 1994 , the sanctuaries had very few tourists and fewer jungle lodges making it a brilliant experience . It was not even on the 1000 places-to-see-before-you-die list of local Mysoreeans too.
Today , the economy has boomed , people love going to wildlife sanctuaries as tour package deals , partly because they need a breather from the rising heat , stock markets , realty prices , gold prices , capitalistic rat races and partly because Veerapan is no more . There is unabated construction , jungles resorts are coming up by the dozen , there’s a lot of crowds and tourists are coming in droves . There’s a lot of pit-stops on the highway where many shops have come up . Traffic is beginning to get denser than the wilds , there are traffic jams on the state highways . Hair pin bends no longer seem so , as the buses after buses make you inch up , missing out the thrill of the turn . The thriving IT BPO industry in bangalore and Mysore is in need of a weekend break . The forests beckon .
It is not truly wild anymore .
Veerapan smuggled , poached , murdered , and so deserved to be shot . But , he also made sure that the drive through the great forests was thrilling , refreshing , breathtaking and that the wilds stayed uninhabited by man .
I vividly remember a newly wedded me driving down those very roads cutting through two wildlife sanctuaries Bandipur Tiger reserve and Madhumalai elephant sanctuary on my way from Mysore to Ooty on the state highway . My cool as cucumber 150cc Kinetic Honda automatic bike served me well through those adventure years as it never broke down , never needed servicing , and would give me thirty kilometers to a litre without fail .
In the age of hundred-kilometers-a-litre bikes , the Kiney was a little anachronistic , but was a part of many of my driving expeditions . Had driven it earlier through the thick forests in Dandeli , the forest reserves west of Dharwad . There were bad roads , uneven terrain , heavy rains , strange forest sounds and plenty of monkeys . The forest was so thick that one couldn’t see the sun in broad daylight . We had driven one complete day through the forest chasing the monsoon . We would find an occasional pit stop in the form of a shack with water dripping through it , serving tea and deep fried onions bhajjias. The bike stood through thick and thin with me .
That 160km journey from Mysore to ooty through Madhumalai and Bandipur was one such . From Mysore , the winding road breaks through the shallow vegetation and into the thick green cover quite dramatically . It was rare to see people on the roads , some said it was because of the tigers of Bandipur , some said it was because of the elephants of Madhumalai and some said it was because of Veerapan ,the bandit .
We took the bike journey without much care , no tool kit , no medicines , had no mobile phones then , no maps , no nothing , just the two of us , me and Nal and a small bag stuffed with some clothes and books . Passing Madhumalai was scary – there were three hunting preserves within the sanctuary – Kargudi , Masinagudi and theppakkadu . The road skimmed its borders and cut though Kargudi . We hits the ghats with a stunning hairpin bend that took us about fifteen metres vertically straight above the road we just crossed by .And then another that put us up by another twenty metres , making it a great breathtaking journey for us . There were 56 hairpin bends along the way taking us two thousand two hundred metres above mean sea level , a third of Mount Everest ! Driving through landslide signs , hurriedly erected army bridges and utter greenery was sheer ecstacy . The bike rode the hills like breeze and we took a good part of six hours to climb upto Ooty .From there we chased the toy train down to Coonoor , which with its lush green tea-plantation hillsides was quite a spectacle .
People in Ooty scared us with Veerapan tales , warning us against venturing out at night . He had killed over a thousand elephants , hundreds of police men and presided over the forests of these sanctuaries like a reining deity . Newspapers would talk about beheaded soldiers of the Special task force from tamil nadu trying to nab him , there would be hushed tales of a Veerapan sighting on some side of the hills , some dead tigers , some skins recovered in a truck driving out of the wilds .Then Veerapan kidnapped Rajkumar , the superhero of kannada cinema following it up with the abduction and killing of a former Karnataka minister . It sent shivers down the sides of many a cop who braved all of these to capture and kill him after a fifteen year long chase .
Those days , late in 1994 , the sanctuaries had very few tourists and fewer jungle lodges making it a brilliant experience . It was not even on the 1000 places-to-see-before-you-die list of local Mysoreeans too.
Today , the economy has boomed , people love going to wildlife sanctuaries as tour package deals , partly because they need a breather from the rising heat , stock markets , realty prices , gold prices , capitalistic rat races and partly because Veerapan is no more . There is unabated construction , jungles resorts are coming up by the dozen , there’s a lot of crowds and tourists are coming in droves . There’s a lot of pit-stops on the highway where many shops have come up . Traffic is beginning to get denser than the wilds , there are traffic jams on the state highways . Hair pin bends no longer seem so , as the buses after buses make you inch up , missing out the thrill of the turn . The thriving IT BPO industry in bangalore and Mysore is in need of a weekend break . The forests beckon .
It is not truly wild anymore .
Veerapan smuggled , poached , murdered , and so deserved to be shot . But , he also made sure that the drive through the great forests was thrilling , refreshing , breathtaking and that the wilds stayed uninhabited by man .
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