Posts

16 March / Read
Warning - Spoilers abound If you know nothing about the book, stop reading this review now and go read the book instead. Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir has been on my reading list ever since I read a review of the book on NYTimes, then followed that to an article by him. For a day or two, I went down a rabbithole about his life and around his work and his family in that funny way that the internet does to you where one minute of idle research stretches into two hours of obsession.
12 February / Finance
Quite a bit has changed since I wrote the last post. After more than a decade, the government reintroduced long-term capital gains for equities and equity mutual funds. Does that change anything? Lets see  Are Equity Mutual Funds still worth it? To answer that, we need to look at two factors. What is the rate of return on Equity MFs vs other asset classes? What is the tax treatment on Equity MFs For the first, there’s a lot of articles such as this and this that show that Equities and Real Estate have been the asset classes that have outperformed over the last decade and longer.
22 January / Finance
Personal finance isn’t the most interesting topic to most people but it should be one of the most important ones. To anyone working a job in the private sector in India, your retirement corpus is more or less your responsibility, and that’s where an understanding of investments, asset classes, risk and return is important. There’s a few principles for building an investment corpus Diversification Risk Appetite Age Appropriateness Diversification is all about not putting ones eggs in one basket.
28 December / Read
Mira Grant is the name Seanan McGuire writes her horror under. Her October Daye urban fantasy series is one of my favorites, so I was keen to try this out. Into the Drowning Deep is a good rip-roaring novel in the Michael Crichton vein. It starts with a big idea - what if Mermaids are real - and then backs it up with enough science to make it plausible and wraps it in a voyage of discovery.