To change the Rules.. I am Here !!

With the markets rising leaps and bounds, you need to keep your calm and find ways to benefit while keeping a check on volatilities. In a book by Zurich Axioms, he talks about 12 strategies that can help you make the most of stock market investments. Reviewer's Note: The author (Max) son of a very wealthy Swiss citizen by name, Franz Heinrich, (whom Americans preferred to call Frank Henry), jotted down all the principles of speculation strategies, particularly in stocks, adopted by his father and his father's several other Swiss friends to make large fortunes on the Wall Street in USA in roaring Eighties. Principles perfected by these Swiss gentlemen have therefore been called 'Zurich Axioms' by Max.
Enumerated below are twelve major principles and sixteen minor ones with brief comments

First Major Axiom: On Risk "Worry is not a sickness but sign of health. If you are not worried, you are not risking enough." Adventure is what makes life worth living. Every occupation has its aches and pains. The rich have to worry about their wealth. But, if there is a choice between remaining poor and worry-free, the selection is obvious. It is better to be wealthy and worried than to be worry-free and poor.
Minor Axiom I: "Always play for Meaningful Stakes."If you invest Rs. 1000 and your investment doubles, you have only Rs. 2000 and are still poor! So if you want to be rich, you must increase your stakes.
Minor Axiom II: "Resist the allure of diversification". Firstly, diversification negates the earlier principle of playing for meaningful stakes. Secondly, it may keep you where you began so that your gains on few will cancel out the losses on the other few. Thirdly, it entails keeping track of many more items leading to confusion and occasional panic.

Second Major Axiom: On Greed "Always take your profit too soon."Lay investors having made the investment tend to stay too long on it out of greed for higher profits. But, one must conquer this weakness and book profits soon. If one is less greedy for more profits one will take in more. Don't stretch your luck. In effect, it suggests, SELL sooner than later.
Minor Axiom III: "Decide in advance what gain you want from the venture, and when you get it, get out. Decide where the finish line is before you start the race".
This is self explanatory and hence needs no comment.

Third Major Axiom: On Hope "When the ship starts to sink, don't pray, jump" This axiom is about what to do when things go wrong. Learn how to accept a loss. One should accept small losses to protect oneself from big ones. When the market starts falling, sell, take your money and run!
Minor Axiom IV: "Accept small losses cheerfully as a fact of life." Expect to experience several smaller losses while awaiting a large gain.

Fourth Major Axiom: On Forecasts"Human behavior cannot be predicted. Distrust anyone who claims to know the future, however dimly." The story of a monkey throwing darts on the stock exchange page of a newspaper, to select the companies to buy, and coming out a winner is too well known to be recited. Recent news from London, further proves the truth, when an untrained chemist's stock selections, in a widely publicised contest open to all and sundry, registered higher appreciation over several full time highly qualified fund managers' well researched selections. Human events cannot be predicted by any method by anyone and, hence, don't trust anybody's predictions.

Fifth Major Axiom: On Patterns"Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly." The truth is that the world of money is a world of patternless disorder and utter chaos. This axiom is a commentary on Technical Analysis - a branch of investment strategies based on charts and patterns. The fact is, no formula that ignores own intuition's dominant role can ever be trusted.
Minor Axiom V: "Beware the Historian's Trap". This is based on the age old but entirely unwarranted belief that history repeats itself.
Minor Axiom VI: "Beware the Chartist's Illusion". Life is never a straight line. Let us not be hypnotised by a line on a chart.
Minor Axiom VII: "Beware the Co-relation and Causality Delusions." Don't be taken in by coincidences in the market.
Minor Axiom VIII: "Beware the Gambler's Fallacy." There is a gambling theory which suggests that one should put small stakes initially and test their luck, and if these turn out well one should go for big stakes on the dice table. But this is not correct. It only shows that winning streaks happen. But nothing is orderly about it. You can't know how long it will last or when it will strike.

Sixth Major Axiom: On Mobility "Stay away from putting down roots. They impede motion". You may feel socially comforting to have roots. But in financial life, roots can cost a lot of money. Have a flexible approach while investing. This axiom implies a state of mind.
Minor Axiom IX: "Do not become trapped in a souring venture because of sentiments like loyalty and nostalgia." Do not develop emotional attachment to your investment. You should feel free to sell when desired.
Minor Axiom X: "Never hesitate to abandon a venture if something more attractive comes into view." Never get attached to things, but only to people. Otherwise it hits your mobility. Never get rooted in an investment. You should remain footloose, ready to jump away from trouble or into a profitable opportunity as and when circumstances demand.

Seventh Major Axiom: On Intuition 'A hunch can be trusted if it can be explained.' A good hunch is something that you know but you don't know how to recognise it. When a hunch hits you, try to locate some data in your mind for any familiarity. Then only should you act on it.
Minor Axiom XI: 'Never confuse a hunch with a hope'. Be highly skeptical. Examine every hunch with extra care.

Eight Major Axiom: On Religion and The Occult 'It is unlikely that god's plan for the universe includes making you rich'. You can't only pray that you should be made rich. You will have to work at becoming rich. Mere prayers will not suffice.
Minor Axiom XII: 'If Astrology worked, all astrologers would be rich.' This is self explanatory. Don't trust predictions.
Minor Axiom XIII: 'As superstition need not be exorcised, it can be enjoyed provided it is kept in its place.' In your day-to-day financial matters, act rationally. But, when buying a lottery ticket, give it a full play to amuse yourself.

Ninth Major Axiom: On Optimism and Pessimism 'Optimism means expecting the best, but confidence means knowing how you will handle the worst. Never make a move if you are merely optimistic.' In poker and a lot of other speculative worlds, things are never as bad as they seem - most of the times they are WORSE.
Confidence comes not from expecting the best but from knowing how you will handle the worst. Optimism can be treacherous because it makes you feel good.

Tenth Major Axiom: On Consensus 'Disregard the majority opinion. It is probably wrong'. It is likely that the Truth has been found out by a few rather than by many.
Minor Axiom XIV: 'Never follow speculative fads. Often, the best time to buy something is when nobody else wants it.' This is the best way to get a good stock cheaply.

Eleventh Major Axiom: On Stubbornness 'If it doesn't pay off the first time, forget it'. If at first you don't succeed, try and try again and you will succeed in the end. This is good advice for spiders and kings but not for ordinary persons with regard to financial matters. Every trial is a costly error.
Minor Axiom XV: 'Never try to save a bad investment by averaging down.' If the price of the stock goes down after your purchase don't buy more to bring down' the average cost of your total holding. Investigate why the price went down rather than put good money in a bad bargain.

Twelfth Major Axiom: On Planning 'Long-range plans engender the dangerous belief that the future is under control. It is important never to take your own long-range plans, or other people's seriously.' This is self explanatory and hence needs no comment.
Minor Axiom XVI: 'Shun long-term investments.' If possible try to stay away fro long-term investments. The author noticed that the Swiss group never took a long-term view of their stock purchases. They always sold out as soon as their targeted profit was achieved.

A College Education Without Job Prospects

The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
Skip to next paragraph India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India’s 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
“It’s almost literally a matter of life and death for them,” said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that represents many leading employers. “The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something.”
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of undergraduate education. India’s thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on overhauling the education system, said, “The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and bachelor of commerce.”
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. “We have not done this to become salespeople,” she said.
Hinduja is in one of India’s richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience — neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
“What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different,” a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. “The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,” she said. “We might as well not have studied.”
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
“Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya.” So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai — removing depreciation reduces assets — an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20’s. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
“Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!” a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: “Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?” A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: “What is span of management?”
“Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage.” She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons — to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
“When we are raising our children,” said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, “we constantly tell them: ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Stand here, stand there.’ It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don’t cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box.”

I wonder about my childhood. It was the same story with every kid on the block at that time. Probably equality was more that time then now. Home was always the second school for me. After coming back from school, outdoor games were my best exercise. There was no option of passing the evening talking on phone for hours or watching cartoon on TV. How could a kid have watched Krishi darshan, serial that use to come on TV in evening during that time? Now when I see the kids of today, I do believe that somehow the world at that time was much better than now. Yes, we have much better facilities now, convenience of anything on a click of a mouse button, but this all is on the cost of our own health. At least we as kids use to fit, attentive, smart, doing everything in the group thus learning group dynamism and the value of friendship. Today after coming back from school kid is either busy in watching television or doing his homework. The whole attitude has change. With the introduction of Play stations and X boxes the life of the kid has got connected wirelessly with the idiot box.

Things have change so much. Time has gone when I use to be so eager on Monday evening to watch Wagle ki duniya or Wednesday evening to watch Chitrahaar or Friday night for the one feature film Doordarshan use to show in a week. Yes, of course whole Sunday morning was mine with Stone Boy, Sigma and Street hawk pulsating my nerves. But that was all my connection with TV. I was more connected with my cricket bat and ball or my Kite or football, mostly outdoor activities.

These days it’s not the same. Do the kids will ever find their interests in the stories that we use to hear from our grand parents against Archies or Tintin or Harry Porter? Then how will they know about past, our culture, and our traditions? Through books, reading by themselves.. That will hardly give them any knowledge.

With the introduction of cable and Satellite Dishes, technologically we have taken a giant step forward but probably this will put an even more adverse effect on Kids.

Oh.. if that is the case parents must not provide with much means and they should take care of it and they should teach them things which are missing. But are they themselves free. With the tradition of nuclear families and mother father both working and the pressure to perform, there performance in home is getting poorer. Result, what we see in West. 14 Yr. Kid coming to school with a gun and shooting his girl friend just because of the reason she was not ready to go for a date. No sooner this will be a similar story in India.

Everyone says the children are the future of a nation. But if those children only start putting glasses since childhood how will they foresee the future. If these children only start putting on weight, who will work out for the prosperity of nation? According to me, for a better future we will have to start working from today. Every one of us, who realise how beautiful our childhood was, how much perfect it was in terms of our own development must try to help, suggest and push every other kid in our society for the same.

It makes me really sad when in the interviews on Independence Day and republic day this Generation X is seen so must negligent about our proud History. Here I recall one of my Discussions with Vice Chancellor of Bremen University. He told me that you Indians have a rich culture, and a beautiful past to boast to the world and hold your head high, and it is one of the important things needed to make a nation “Great”.

It has already started happening in India. This is not the generation about whom Pundit Nehru and Kalam saab have high hopes about. This is not the future they talk about. It is a negligent India with past absconded, future moving to abysmal.

Lots of water has flown under that imaginary bridge reading, watching, hearing and in trying to understand actually what would have happened between 1920 and 1930 in India when the principles of two great freedom fighters were clashing. Is in not again an example of Divide and Rule policy where britishers actually used one against another. Who was right, the ways of Bhagat Singh, Azad or Mahatma Gandhi? Could Gandhi ji have actually saved Bhagat Singh from getting hanged that day? Bhagat Singh actually was emerging as a bigger Hero than any contemporary leader at that time. Congress was threatened by the force which Lala ji was making , today in history books whom we know as Extremists.

All this is past. Writers, Movie makers have tried to put together enough cells from there brain to answer it in their own way.

I will not do that…

I am focusing on this new battle that has come up again in circa 2005-2006 between Mahatma Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. The fight between RANG DE BASANTI and LAGE RAHO MUNNA BHAI as in, which will be the Entry from India in Oscars. One showing the glory for dying for truth and another showing the power of truth upturning every heart.

We as the die hard fans of the Hindi Cinema must feel really lucky that such high class movies have start getting made in India now. The new generation of directors has brought all great ideas and enthusiasm to change the image of Bollywood.

Ok Ok, we moving away from topic. Lets get back, so RDB or LRMB? Hey, but lets see first as what actually must be in a Film to make it a representative of whole India? I think, it must depict the culture of the country, the past glory and current scenario of one's country, must represent what common actually thinks, how he lives, what he goes through, it must show what actually are the ideologies of the youth, because that is what will set the pace of a nation. I think RDB scores over LRMB.

It has all the elements which make it a right entry for India in Oscars. Yes, it does not have a world famous icon like Gandhi ji in it, but isn't time has come to tell the world that Indian independence is much more than it actually has been presented. It is a result of 1000's of martyrs like Bhagat Singh. Azad, Rajguru, Bismil, Sukhdev, Asfaq-ul-llah, Khudiram Bose,Vir Sawarkar who died for the cause of freedom. And I think RDB will do all justice in putting forward the thought across planet Earth.

Ofcourse LRMB says Vande Mathram, but RDB says Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna ab hamare Dil main Hai, this is line which has very much relevance today. Today the youth in India is rising up in every part of India for right for Justice. The movement against reservation bill is a very good example of the power of Youth. Were the youth inspired by RDB? Movie was released around that time only. We never know what actually will ignite the flame inside us.

We are future and all set to take up the responsibility of this nation. We will oppose everything which is wrong and will welcome with open arms everything which is right.

So, Beware minds thinking against India, Youth of India is Rising !!!!!

Our cricketers have indeed traveled a long way from those grilling military camps where we saw our dear cricketers working hard on the monkey paths to shootings to rope climbing to wall climbing. Probably Guru Greg might have thought that climbing all these hurdles will lead to overcome difficult tasks presented on the field too. Was a nice thought but just got busted like a balloon filled with extra air than its actual capacity.
So what Indian team expects from his Die-hard fans like me? We should again forget what ever happened in Malaysia; put all the blame on luck and rain God and cross our fingers to wait till Champions Trophy that something big will definitely happen. So, it means luck plays in cricket field more than players. Rain is more imp than practice in nets? Then, when there is no rain at least practice must speak. One must be able to see the efforts. But we can’t. Because its just not there. Ask any cricket following guy whether it is difficult to make 30 runs with 4 wickets in hand? Yes, against McGrath and Bret Lee, definitely it’s difficult but not impossible. Since time immortal we know that as soon as our 6th wicket is down it actually is equal to getting all out. Whatever last 4 wickets add is put into bonus category. Y? Doesn’t the Indian mgmt ever feel the need of changing this mindset? Of course the answer from the top notches of BCCI will be, “we are definitely working on it!” but my question remains unchanged, WHY CANT I SEE THE CHANGE, THAT EFFORT ON FIELD TOO ?

Like me, I am sure there will be thousands of fans across this nation who really will now question the caliber of my team for winning Champions Trophy this yr. and world Cup next Yr. It has been 23 Yrs now since we have lifted the world cup and 4-5 Yrs. winning any major tournament. We the die-hard followers want to see our team celebrating the victory. This is a game that brings the heart of the whole country to beat together. Every nook and corner of this country celebrates together every victory. The sound of crackers can be heard all night. A win in World cup will bring Diwali for us for next 4 yrs, where we can keep our head high that WE ARE THE WORLD CHAMPIONS.

Team India… DO it.. Just Do it.