Tuesday, October 16, 2007

ETF portfolio



WSJ posted a portfolio that closely resembles mine. In a previous post, I blogged about having direct investment in a business (and not its stock) as a means of diversifying just because earnings( esp of small businesses) tend to be more stable than stocks. In a crude way, this can be achieved through private equity. You guessed it, there are ETFs for private equity too. Here is a snapshot of the portfolio -

Also, I made a mindmap of all the top level ETF categories that you need to consider to make it diversified. You can make it weighted more towards one level or the other depending on various factors (which is for another blog).

Monday, October 8, 2007

Subprime crisis in India is going to happen !

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/oct/08spec.htm

The logic is simple. Low dollar value with not-so-increasing prices - less revenue for indian companies - less salaries for employees - not being able to pay mortgages (which are probably 50% of the salaries) - investors not being able to charge as much rent - defaults

Classic subprime cycle that happened in US is going to happen in India.

Retail in India did'nt think about land !

http://ia.rediff.com/money/2007/oct/08guest.htm

I blogged about the importance of selecting a land and calculating the project's ROI with land prices. As this blog is about mind boggling things that appear trivial to grasp for you but others would not get it. Retail sector in India apparently made a blunder of underestimating the difficulty of grabbing land proximity to the city !

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Good decisions have nothing to do with the result

Each minute in our life is made of decisions. All we can do is analyze the situation, take into account all the data and all the decision choices, assess the risks and rewards of each decision and take one. If you do all that, it is a GOOD decision, IRRESPECTIVE of what the result is. Now comes my book recommendation.

Book Recommendation - Hard Call: Great Decisions and Extraordinary
People Who Made Them by John McCain and Mark Slater. Not all the
stories are good, but some of the stories are great enough to make the
book a good read, especially the story that the book starts with.

Life and Happiness

I have two recommendations for ya'all people - Goes back to a few us who are on constant search for meaning of life and such. Each of the videos tell a lot of gripping lessons about "leading life:

Movie Recommendation - The Pursuit of Happiness:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0454921/. I somehow missed the movie when it
was released but it is a very good movie and it has some very good
subtle messages about happiness told in an interesting way.

Video Recommendation - The last lecture of Randy Pausch, a CMU professor
and pioneer of vision and virtual reality who is going to die in a few
months :http://youtube.com/watch?v=4HqdnjgkExY

Friday, August 3, 2007

Looking for land

I was looking for land for a specific project and looking for the right set of land is not as trivial as it looks like. Here are some factors that you need to look at -

Size of the land

The size of the land should be inline with the potential future expansion of the project. The questions you need to answer are 1) what are the adjacent technologies or markets that you might enter ?

Resources

1. Water: The questions you need to look for answers are 1) what is the type of bores are present in the land ? 2) how well it had fared over the drought years ?
2. Availability of labor: How much labor is needed for the project ? What type of skill set does the project need ?

Proximity

What are the proximity needs of your project ? How much near to the city does it need to be ? What are the expenses that you might incur (or save) depending on the land being nearer to a city ? Does the land need to be accessed by a road ? How frequently do things need to go back and forth from the land and what size transportation do those things need ?

Quality of soil
Weather
Proximity of supporting industries
Price
Price is the most trickiest. People forget that you should not spend more money on land than you can make out of the project that you are going to put on the land. Do not include the potential increment of real estate prices into the project ROI calculations. Treat the land price and the corresponding spend as an expense.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Strategies for diversified portfolio

Having researched about it quite a bit, I think a good strategy for building a diversified portfolio is real estate (either REITs or apartments of condos or commercial) in foreign countries.

Stock markets in various countries tend to move together, but not their real estate markets. One reason for it is that real estate is not as liquid as the stock market and it has much harder accessibility. In the long run, the real estate is the definitive index to the prosperity of a country, but in real estate you can find local markets (such as NY) where the market has nothing to do with over all real estate or the economy or vacation/university markets.

The only watchout factor is a) you have to find a way to access those markets b) you have to find a way to reliably get back the investment :)

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Democracy and cognitive myopia

I thought for a while now that democracy would work in a country only if people of that country are educated. Thats my justification for democracy not working in a few countries (free electricity or a film star or an extremist organization would win an election).

In retrospect, I think democracy itself is a problem. It has nothing to do with the literacy of the people. It has everything to do with short term popularity - It has striking relations to stock market. People would not vote on long term thoughtful position on an issue, but on what the news snippet is that week, the same way most people would not buy a stock on long term but on a short term news snippet.

At the end of the day, both free elections and stock market are like a popuilarity contest. Whoever lines in with the most popular trend of the day wins for the day, however they lose it in the long run.

Semi dictator ship in China, Singapore and Malaysia worked well. I am not sure there is any other way to determine a stock price than let the populus to determine it.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Buffett gives nod to index funds over ETFs

Its official, buffet gives a nod to index funds.

He does not have anything against ETFs either, he thinks that ETFs would impose greater temptation to trade, which is a very very valid concern.

Investing has been split into people supporting indexing (ETFs) and cherry-picking stocks (aka buffet style), now buffet seems to acknowledge the advantages of index funds. The 2% management fund in index funds is huge that you have to hold a lot longer to get the desired %, the low fee ETFs therefore offer a good alternative, one disadvantage is the temptation to sell, that depends on you. Another disadvantage is ETFs are not cherry picked, but thats the point, it is proved to be hard to beat the index by cherry picking in the long run.

So, if you can resist the temptation to get swayed based on recent past, you would do good with ETFs. If you are a person who gets into ST buying and selling, you are screwed anyway :)

Friday, April 27, 2007

Business Decision Frameworks

Finally, I got around to what I wanted to do since my MBA days - start putting my business framework flowcharts in a single PDF, book like format. I cleaned up about half of them.

Here it is -Business Decision Frameworks (Version 1)

People (I include myself in that) have found them useful for varying purposes such as preparing for interviews to evaluating and analyzing business problems.

Drop me a line, if you want to give feedback. If you like it a lot or hate it a lot, please subscribe yourself at businessframeworks@googlegroups.com. That kind of feedback helps me !. Also pass it on to your freinds whom you think might love it or hate it as you do. Also, let me know if you want to contribute.

Enjoy reading and have a nice weekend folks !

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

New products need R&D teams in super hitech areas (hehe)

My experience today reminded me again why new products are often created by frustrated users and how there are inadequate products even in dumb daily activities.

I just wanted an alarm clock to wake up at 6AM on Mon/Wed/Fri. I just want to set that up once and forget about it for the next quarter (no I forgot to turn it up/down business).

After searching for 3 hours in retail stores and online, I had to find an obscure xmms based alarm, add some morning songs to it, connect my PC to my music system through wireless devices, and hold onto the remote of the music system to stop the alarm. xmms-alarm has cool features such as fade out the sound after a few minutes and stuff but wanted a button at hand to stop the alarm.

How cool it would be to have a standard alarm form factor device doing all the above ?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Chasing Life - Book Review

This book is about things that you can do starting now (or things you should stop doing now) to live a healthier, happier, longer and funcational life. I would recommend this book to anybody who is not into regular exersices and not conciously eating healthier food.

The strenghts of the book:

- Sanjay Gupta explains medical lingua in a way that common people can understand.

- He has a bullteized to-do items at the end of each chapter, which make you come back to what he is trying to tell you after all the medical slang.

- He touches each and every aspect of leading a healthy life from basics, such as vitamins and antioxidants to stress to HGH, stem cells to exersices. He not only explains the medical reasons why or why not each of those topics contribute to healthy functional life, but he also boils them down to the ten things you can/should do.

Here are a few things that I learnt myself to do (including the medical reasons behind them) and have already started working for me

Diet

1. Push away the food when you are 80% full
2. Eat a breakfast, it helps you eat less calories through out the day
3. Add a fish, a glass of wine a bar of brown choclate a week

Exersice

1. Add upper body weight resistance to cardiovascular
2. Be more active, have more movement during the day
3. Surprise your body with newer activities

Stress

1. Learn how to reduce or manage/enjoy stress
2. How optimistic attitude can help you live happy, longer life

Monday, April 16, 2007

Mr. Market - Sanest investment advice, made simple

You should imagine the market quotations coming from a remarkably accomodating fellow named Mr. Market, who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, he appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell your interest.

Even though the business that you two own may have economic characterestics that are stable, Mr. market's quotations are not. The poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only favorable conditions affecting the business. WHen in that mood he names a very high buy price because he fears you will rob him of his interest. At other times, he feels nothing but trouble ahead and sees the end of the world. On those accations, he names a very low sell price since he is afraid you will unload your interest on him.

Mr. Market has another characterestic. He does not ming being ignored. He will come back again and again if you are not interested in his quote today.

Here is the advice.

In those conditions, the more depressed and maniacal Mr. market is, the beter for you. Mr. Market is there TO SERVE YOU AND NOT TO GUIDE YOU. Its is good to take advantage of him when he is in a foolish mood, but it will be DISASTROUS IF YOU FALL UNDER HIS INFLUENCE.

As they say in poker - "if you've been in the game for 30 mins and you dont know who the patsy is, YOU ARE the patsy.

Thanks to Ben Graham for this.

Progress paradox

I was looking more seriously at a chart pasted in our breakroom called "is it depression ?". It has a series of tests such as "cant sleep" "feeling sad" "feel like hittin somebody" "gettin angry at your manager" to see whether you have depression and recommends to see a doctor.

I am like what? Arent we the among the best paid employees in the US market ? Arent we able to feed our families ? Why should then we get depressed ? It reminded me of a book called "progress paradox".

Its all related to being psychologically happy ?

That book has some interesting stats like

* the disabled and chronically ill people are more happy than healthy people because of the appreciation they have developed for life
* the old people are generally more happy than young people because of the appreciation they have for forgiveness and non-material things
* lack of money makes you unhappy for sure, but having money does not make you happy
* depression is a 50 billion market and there are less people who get treated for depression as you pass down the class chain

For people who are suffering with depression, I have one pill - have gratitude. Count your blessings than inventorying your complaints. Trust me, even if you get all those complaints sorted out and solved, you would still get unhappy. Have a "just let it go" attitude. Beleive me, there is research area called forgiveness, which says people who forgive more tend to have a more cardiovascular diseases and lower immune system functions.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Book review - Blue ocean strategy

This is the book from 2005, I am cathing up :).

This book definetely goes into my strategy favorites. Blue ocean strategy is all about how to create products which make the competition irrelevant. There are many examples - starbucks made their fellow coffee retailers irrelevant when they launched (their competition is not relevant to coffee at all). SouthWest made competition irrelevant since it did not compete with airlines when it was launched.


I liked the book because of two reasons -

The first is its analytical tool kit. In every chapter the authors present an analytical tool to practically follow their advise. Their strategy map is much better than the position map, it just not show where you are with respect to competition, but it also shows what are the factors relevant in the industry and how you are doing with respect to your competitors along those factors. The beauty of the map is that you can just say whether your strategy is good or not by looking at the map. The authors present a tool for pricing models as well.

The second is the completeness. It starts right from the question of why/how to create a blue ocean strategy and ends with execution and sustaining the strategy. It talks about almost all facets of management, lauching, pricing, leadership etc.

A must read for all managers, hey who does not have competition and who does not want to get away from them ?. A must high tech entrepreneurs since they never set their foot into red oceans.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Chasing Life

You know the community which lives longer and functional than most other people in rich countries ? Ranching people in Costarica !. Their 80 year old can work like an American 40 year old.

CNN's Sanjay Gupta has been an OK guy for me to watch, but his new book, chasing life seems to be very interesting and right on the line. I am going to read this book over the weekend but the things that he found out that we can do daily which will contribute to over all body function and longevity are things that we do not do normally - managing stress, eat healthy, working with a purpose (straight from Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start !), maining good active relationships with family, maintaining an active life style etc.

Look out for the book review over the next week !

Monday, April 9, 2007

You want to invest in a person ? Ask his freinds and relatives !

The chinese government officials have a cool way of deciding on promotions. They will interview your freinds, collegues, parents and see whether you have been a good man or not. Your drinking and gambling habbits will receive a very bright red flag.

Actually, thats the exact process in which arranged marriage evaluation process works in India. Those exact same things receive serious red flags. Interestingly, that is close to what VCs do when they are investing in a project - they would interview all sorts of people who can tell what sort of a person you are. Businesses use a flawed version of this - its called the 360 degree evaluation !

In my investing demystified article, I make a comment about how the person you want to invest in should be a person to which you should be willing to marry your daughter to. I think thats the way you should select life partners, business and work partners !

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Want innovation ? Do not hire the 10% people !!

If you want innovation, do not hire the top 10% of a class.


Innovation requires you to be radical, not follow the rules, not afraid of failure, not afraid of taking risks. IMHO, The top 10% of a school are not innovators, they are followers. They got excellent grades because they chose to follow the rules of the game. The bottom 10%, though they are in par with the rest of the class when they entered it (meaning they can perform if they want to or passionate about it), but chose to not follow the rules (or cannot follow the rules).

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Complacency, attitude and reasonable people

I am watching Bangladesh and SA cricket match - Mortaza was so mad at himself for so long for failing to stop a ball surely going towards the boundary when SA was down 6 wickets for a score below 100. I thought hey its reasonable that he did not stop the ball, it was so hard, almost impossible to stop it. Freakishly, it reminded me of a question that my smart, hardworking 8th grade cousin asked when I went to India last time - why not take engineering track, there are so many engineering colleges and there are so many jobs for engineering graduates that I will get a very decent job.

If theres one thing that kills businesses and people its complacency, attitude and all those reasonable people. The business is going alright, why worry ? I will get an alright job, why worry ? Everything works this way, why should I worry ?

Its not that if you have a chalta attitude, you wont a decent tomorrow, you wont have customers for your business tomorrow or you wont survive if you are a reasonable person or you team will lose if you fail to stop one four. But you or your business would be killed over time because the world around you is constantly improving. I have had many businesses cases where complacency killed a product (BMCs flagship product ..) and excessive paranoia kept a company alive (Samsung CEO attitude).

So my answer to my cousin was its not like you wont get a job. Because of your attitude, you would be always complacent and because of that you would be always sliding downwards, if you are lucky in your life. I think that is what Chappel was trying to say to Tendulkar. I am not saying you are not great, I am saying you are not constantly improving. And progress wont happen with reasonable people - A Reasonable Person Adapts Themselves to Their Environment. An Unreasonable Person Endeavors to Adapt the Environment to Their Vision Therefore, All Progress Depends on Unreasonable People (and thanks to JD and JBS for introducing me to this quote).

Guess who won the match today and who got killed :)

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

One more reason not to take VC money (if possible I mean)

Today, WSJ ran a very good article on dilemma that tech startups face when they dream big (aka Google) but end up OK (with stable cash flows).

The case here is a company called Odeo, which does podcasting service. The start up ended up OK, making breakeven cash flows with ad money (and thanks to decreasing costs of running a web service compan) but because the founder took VC money, he is forced to search for strategies which would make a home run. The founder previously sold Blogger to Google so, he has enough money to pay off the VCs and keep the company as it was. But if you are not that guy, you would be forced to either hit big or die, not run with decent cash flows.

Mini Book Review: How Countries Compete

"How Countries Compete" (ISBN-13: 978-1422110355, Author: Richard Vietor) in a nut shell is about how globalization has mde countries compete with each other for a given amout of money ("compete for market share of investments") and what should governments of countries do to make themselves competetive.

A manager's view of Globalization has both internal and external perspective. Internal perspective deals with the analysing the reasons to globalize and putting the internal structures in place to globalize. For internal perspective, I like Pankaj Ghemawat's articles, including the latest (HBR March 2007) article, "Managing Differences: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy". Books such as world is flat and mirage of global markets are mostly about those internal perspectives. The how countries compete book gives the external perspective of tools that a managers can use to analyze which countries are the best to invest. Make no mistake (i hate that phrase, but have no time to think about a better one), this book talks about what a government can do to make itself more competitive but the same logic and tools can be used by managers to analyze what countries to invest in. This book basically expands the "Role of Government" section in Porter's Competetive Advantage of Nations article.

The book starts with the strategy a country should choose to compete. That strategy depends on the context, its resources, its policital structure, the clusters etc. etc. Then it talks about the tools that the government has at hand (fiscal, monetary, trade, wage, infrastructure, legal, regulatory etc etc) to use to execute on its strategy.

The book then talks about half a dozen countries (Japan, Sigapore, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Italy), their history of competitiveness and how they got to the present stage (good and bad) with (or without) using the tools mentioned above.

The most important tool that I got out of this book is something called "trajectory". Based on how the government is using the above mentioned tools now, the author says, the managers can predict the trajectory of how the country is going to shape atleast in the near future (ofcourse there are always wars and such which can displace the trajectory) and the managers should make investment decisions accordingly.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Right way to make good decisions

'Good decisions are made by gut feeling'

'Good decisions are made by thorough analysis of the problem and consequences of each decision made'

There has been war between the two thoughts. Both make sense. In the book 'Blink', Malcom Gladwell makes a compelling argument to make decisions through gut feeling; he proves that gut feeling is a decision actually made by inner mind which has processed all the data over the years. The first gut feeling is right, but once you try to rationalize your gut feeling, your inner mind cannot give you all the details that it used to make the decision.

Game theory argues otherwise, that you have to have a flow chart of the decision alternatives and their consequences.

Now there seems to be a consensus, at least for me. Usually you won't be pressed to take a decision through gut feeling or you would not have time to do a thorough analysis. Here is the right way to make decision - put the problem at the back of your mind for a couple of days. Do not conciously think about the problem, let your inner brain work on it. The best decision is what your gut/first feeling says after those two days.

Framing Business Problems

Business decision making is a practice, but there is more science to it than most people think. Here, I give frameworks of issues to consider for common business problems.

1. How to increase profits


2. What to consider when increasing prices ?
3. Ways to reduce costs

Reduce funtional costs

Reduce income sheet costs
4. How can we sell more units ?


5. New market entry - considerations



6. Financial Analysis of a Project

ROI Analysis
7. Merger considerations
8. Silver bullets

How to evaluate synergy ?

How to evaluate an opprtunity ?

Business Frameworks

Business frameworks are useful for a quick analysis of a busienss problem, helpful to narrow on to specifics to concentrate.

1. Porters Five Forces
Porters five forces is used to analyze the attractiveness of an industry.





2. BCG's Product Matrix




3. 3Cs4Ps
Useful when analyzing a product

4. Value chain
Useful when analyzing the value of internal operations of a company

Saturday, March 3, 2007

Investing Books

These are my favorite books on investing. These books give you solid foundation and a broad perspective on investing, they do not make you a over night prince.

The intelligent asset allocator (william bernstein)
A random walk down the wall street ((burton malkeil)
The intelligent investor (benjimin graham)
The four pillars of investing (william bernstein)
The essays of warren buffet (cunningham)

Friday, March 2, 2007

What is a good career for me ?

Parts of the book "what color is your parachute" are truly revealing to me. This is what you need to know for a successful career - What do you love to do most ?

Think about what would you do love to do now if you don't have any worries about getting paid. Think about what makes you exiciting, think about what your freinds or mother or wife has to drag you to stop doing. Continue doing that and money (enough for a comfortable living) will come.

Sounds too good to be true ? It is true. It follows these simple principles - There is some money for any job in this world. There is good money if you excel and are the expert in any particular job. They key to excel in a job is to love doing it all the time.

Now it might not work some situations. You are in the mid point of your career and cannot just stop what you are doing now, you have a family. Well you are lucky, you can use the comfortness (hey you are getting money now) of the existing platform to jump on to what you love to do most.

For people like me, there is another problem - I don't know what I love or I love too many things. For those, first write down what skills/work_sets you would love to do - Writing, giving speaches, kicking somebody, gossiping, photography, cooking, watching TV etc. Now go find careers which involves those skill sets.

Trust me, there are people who make lot of money running celebrity blogs and writing movie reviews !

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Cognitive Myopia

Cognitive myopia is the concept of recent past playing a unpropotionally significant role in making judgments.

Remember the last time you were pretty angry about someone close to you about something they did. Did you think about all other good things that he or she did over the years or you just are consumed about the last thing that he or she did that made you angry ?

Remember the last time you thought stock market would be going up and up and did not sell stock. I bet its right after you have seen the stock market going up. Remember the last time you thought the stock market will never end going down and sold stock - its the time after it went down and down. You actually bought high and sold low. Even if you knew the stock market was up long ago before it went down recently or viceversa that did not enter into your judgmental analysis ?

Remember the last time when you ate a lot even though when you are diet. The recent past of happiness played way significant role in your judgement !. We will all be happy when we recognize and control cognitive myopia don't we ;)

Investing - Demystified

Investing principles are very simple and yet following them requires the will and determination of a rock, yes a ROCK, sit where you like, stay there and not be a smart ass.

First, Definitions.

I want to make sure you know I am talking about investing and not speculation or betting or arbitrage. Speculation is buying something anticipating some other fool will buy it at a higher price. Betting is trying to beat a random walk market with your data analysis. Arbitrage is trying to cash information/market inefficiencies, buying low at one place, selling high at another place. Money can be made in speculation, betting and arbitrage but I beleive nobody can make that money consistently over long periods of time.

Investing is getting returns in the long run consistent with your risk level.

Now to Principles.

1. What to look for ?
I like Buffet's principle on this one. Its the business, the people and the price. The business prospects should look good in the long run. Here is a crazy thumrule that I use, if that business goes bust, the end of the world is nearing. Softdrinks, clothing, chewing gum, automobile, insurance are all examples. Next the people. I beleive its the people you are investing in, businesses encounter challenging problems all the time and its the people who make decisions to steer it in the right direction. Ofcourse they should be smart, but more importantly they should be honest. The thumb rule on this one - they should be people with whom you want your daughter to get married (not the Indian father, for him having money is one of the top criteria).

2. Diversification.

Sure but what is it ? The goal is to ninimize risk - If you want to diversify business risk (risk for a particular business) then owning a sector or multiple sectors is fine. If you want to diversify for market risk, you have to get into fixed income securities.

For diversification, as academics say, the goal is to select investments which are inversely correlated with each other. Turst me, it is going to be very hard to find such investments in an increasingly global interconnected economy (remember Chinese stock market crash causing US stock market crash ?)

Interestingly, the best investment I found which is has minimum correlation with the whole set financial instruments is investment in a utility (food, medicine etc) company. not stock of that company but as a limited partner, where I would get to take out the cash flows annually.

3. Invest in what you know
If you want to invest in individual stocks or comapanies, invest in what you know. If you know a sector but cannot pick individual stocks, ETFs are there for you.

My Ideal Portfolio

low tens % - ETFs of what I like (Green, Emerging markets, REIT and high yeilds)
low tens % - Stocks (big cap and small cap)
low tens % - Public company stocks that I like and admire
mid tens % - Ownership in a private companies that produce good cash flows
single digit % - Fixed income securities

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Investing in India - Jan 2007

I have one word to say after completing my trip to India (the first after completing my business school) - "irrational exuberance".

I saw irrational exuberance all over the place. I saw it in real estate. A view of Hyderabad area from the air exemplifies it. All you see from the flight when you are landing in Begumpet airport is squares and squares of land. Every empty piece of land you can see is fortified with walls of bricks around the plot to fend off people forcefully claiming the land. My native place, a village in south India is well known for its rice produce, farming has been the occupation of 99% of the people in that area for generations. Now, farming land (err ... real estate) is being treated like a stock market. Land which has been in one hand (the farmer) for decades has changed more than half a dozen hands in the last 2 years. You visit any land in the place and you will be swarmed with real estate brokers all over you !. Here's one more - The AP government announced some land in Anantapur district as a SEZ (Special Economic Zone) and the land basically is acres and acres of desert with no water or infrastructure. The next day, you can see dozens of Sumos and Innovas (the latest Toyota van which you can see all over the place now) filled with real estate brokers trying to buy the land at exorbitant prices.

There is irrational exuberance in the stock market. My brother owns a small stock brokerage (the only one for about 50 villages around), It was dumbstruck to see people who are farmers, probably have stopped their studies at 10th grade (I have known some of them for years) talk about puts and calls. No wonder, the BSE has been going up like crazy, almost 5 times up since July 03.

I saw irrational exuberance in the students there. One of my friends in Tirupati (the town that I live, probably the second tier city in my state) was trying to recruit students with ASP and flash knowledge from about a dozen local MCA (Master of Computer Applications) schools and he would not get a response when he posted 10K rs salary per month. I visited IIT Bombay's research wing for half a day, talking to professors and students. Granted the graduate students there are from second tier schools in India but the research going on there is sub par to the second tier schools in US.

The power cuts have gone worse. I never saw power cuts in the month of December and January in AP, I experienced power cuts for at least couple of hours a day in Visakapatnam and Tirupati. The roads have gotten much better though.

My gut feeling is that India is going towards a hard landing. Granted, I visited there for one month and I visited only couple of states. Granted I am not following all the major economic indicators in India and the underlying currents. Personally, I am scared to death to invest any money in India now. Personally, I am scared that India will remain a BPO center and will fall apart like a pack of cards if something happens to the foreign capital inflow.