India: Shooting A Doctor For Spreading Science. A Falling BRIC

Killing A Doctor To Stop Spread of Scientific Thinking in an Indian Silicon Hub

 Pune, along with Bangalore and Hyderabad, is a center of India's booming information technology business, where operations of major foreign and Indian companies as well as start ups are located. It is also a major center of higher education with numerous colleges and research centers.
   
In this city, the former physician Narendra Dabholkar's "...goal was to drive a scientist’s skepticism into the heart of India, a country still teeming with gurus, babas, astrologers, godmen and other mystical entrepreneurs. That mission ended Tuesday, when two men ran up behind Dr. Dabholkar, 67, as he crossed a bridge, shot him at point-blank range..." the New York Times' Ellen Barry reported.

“Instead of dying of old age, or by surgery, which causes a lot of suffering, the death Mr. Dabholkar got today was a blessing from God,” an editorial by one of Dabholkar's critics, a former hypnotherapist now known as His Holiness Dr. Jayant Athavale, wrote in an editorial in his organization’s publication, Barry reports. 

Here is the link to the full article:

Battling Superstition An Indian Paid With His Life

A Falling Bric: the Rupee collapse and hot money fleeing India:

A) Typically financial markets ignore a growing balance of trade deficit till a crisis brings attention. Then, till strong measures are taken to resolve it - the balance of trade and not other peripheral troubles - the issue will continue to depress currencies and stock markets.

B) Crude oil is India's largest import. It is growing both in volume and total hard currency costs and accounts for a big portion of the ballooning negative balance of trade over the past decade and more. 
While part of oil imports is refined and exported, overall the negative hit from crude oil imports will get worse: 1) given policy measures aimed at growing the domestic auto and truck markets 2) lack, so far, of new major oil deposits in India.

And worse, since oil is priced in dollars, a depreciating Rupee means higher oil import costs.  
C) While not bluntly stated, the policies of most emerging countries is aimed at attracting hot money, in strong competition with one another. Such money helped India raise over $30 billion in hard currency bonds in recent years. Some of this money is now trying to exit, exaggerating the Rupee's decline. So, while hot money boosts capital inflows in the short term it causes much harm over the long term. 

Long term the Rupee will continue to depreciate. And putting in limits to curb foreign currency flows, as taken in the past weeks, without concrete measures to boost exports and reduce imports, ends up having the opposite effect.

Amazon's Media Purchase & Usage Data May Have Led Jeff Bezos to Buy The Washington Post

Jeff Bezos Insights From Amazon Likely Led Him to Pay $250 million for The Washington Post

Citizen Bezos?

The big news in media last week was how perhaps Web billionaires may rescue the shrinking newspaper industry. Headlines, following the August 5 purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, included "Citizen Bezos", a twist on Citizen Kane the 1941 classic Orson Welles movie about media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

In interviews Post Company CEO Don Graham said: “The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this (sale to Bezos) guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

Graham added that Warren Buffett "thought Jeff was the best CEO in the United States". As a Post article on the news noted, "billionaire Warren Buffett, has been a mentor to Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham. Buffett sat on the Post board for (26) years as its largest outside shareholder."

Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns nearly a billion dollar of Washington Post stock, resigned from the Post company board in May 2011 "because of travel commitments linked to Berkshire Hathaway's acquisitions abroad."  He said  "the newspaper business will be tougher and tougher and tougher, and it is already plenty tough." So he may have had some hints that the Graham family, which owns 14% of the Post Company, may decide to sell the Washington Post newspaper.

Why did Buffett not buy the Post? John Cassidy writes in The New Yorker, The Washington Post  "newspaper division lost about a million dollars over the past year, which means its earnings multiple was negative—hardly a buy signal for a value investor like Buffett."

Why then did Bezos, whose Internet retail giant Amazon is quietly destroying numerous businesses including rival booksellers like Barnes & Noble, pay $250 million for The Washington Post? As anyone who has used Amazon knows, the online retailer has the widest range of product offerings, prices that beat most rivals and  good customer service. This plus its refusal so far to collect sales tax has enabled it to cripple its rivals, apparently its primary goal at present.

Then, given its edge in technology and analysis of digital data from traffic and transactions, Amazon must have the best insights into customer purchases of media products, including books as well as through its Kindle e reader, electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers. So, based on such insights, as with Amazon, Bezos likely has a long term strategy of how to profitably expand The Washington Post into a digital platform for news, opinions, videos, coverage of arts, style and people.

Its too bad that since The Washington Post will be privately owned by Bezos personally, the conduct and results of this experiment will not be known publicly.