Passionate About India

Ownership through paper (shares) has always been and will always remain the biggest illusion of ownership. Real ownership comes through sweat and hard work and never diminishes in value!!! As I sit down to write this editorial, the selling pressure in the markets have been so intense today that the Sensex broke the 8,000-mark and slumped to a low of 7,697 – down a whopping 63.7% (13,510 points) from its all-time peak of 21,207, touched on January 10 this year. I remember having written the last time on the same subject for the 3rd February, 2008 issue, when the markets had fallen to around 15,000 in an edit titled, “If you can, invest to become an entrepreneur instead of investing in stock markets!!!” As the index falls to almost half of what it was then, there is nothing more important that I feel like sharing again with my readers. Readers of TSI know that over the last few months, I’ve constantly been focussing on the impending global crisis, the subprime crisis and the failure of t...

While the country was engrossed in sticky issues – like that of Indians for the first time being involved in a global terror plot, or our Presidential elections, or even the daily rumbling of our polity – the Sensex quite surreptitiously surpassed the magical figure of 15,000. It was barely one and a half years back that it crossed the 10,000 mark and brought India to the league of nations with the highest market capitalization in the world. Though for any lay Indian, this milestone might not make any sense as stock markets were never a barometer for social performance of any country, the essence of this particular milestone cannot just be ruled out as a mere mindless gambling of punters. One of the most interesting facets of this meteoric rise of the Sensex is a killing dichotomy – while on one hand, India Inc. has gone about in a spectacular manner successfully tapping this boom, on the other, our ‘efficient’ government and ‘more efficient’ public sector enterprises have spectacularl...