Belated Eid mubarak to those who celebrate it. This week was interesting. Modiji made a claim – India is doing better than many other countries in managing this whole Covid situation. My instinctive reaction was – what is he smoking? But then I tried to analyze. You may be surprised by what I found. Check out this VATSANALYSIS video that I made.
If you don’t want to watch the video, you can also read the same analysis here. Verdict – India is doing average and when you are doing average, you can always claim that you are doing better than many!
By the way, if you are new to my VATSANALYSIS, here is the Youtube link to watch all the 8 episodes. First one came out in Oct 2018.
My weekly Covid death projection is out too. This week the total deaths grew by just a little over 1% by the way (from last week), while total new cases grew by 20%! I wonder if this reflects the reality or with time, the hospitals have just become better at hiding death numbers! The total death toll stands at 36k+ as of yesterday and as per my forecast we would cross 1 lakh deaths anytime in September.
If this whole Covid situation is making you a bit gloomy, here is a short news byte to cheer you up!
Book of the week
I received my copy of Overdraft this Saturday. The book was published last week. Here is an article on what to expect from this book. For those who may not know, Urjit Patel was the RBI Governor who succeeded Rajan but resigned before the end of his term.
Various innovative “smoke-and-mirrors” schemes had been hatched, Patel has said. In 2019, government-owned LIC and State Bank of India (SBI) were directed by the Finance Ministry to “pony up” Rs 15,000 crore for a fund to provide financing to already over-leveraged, problematic real estate projects that were ‘close to completion’.
The Indian Express, 25 Jul 2020 – on Urjit Patel’s Overdraft
Video of the week
Saw this super cool video.
I have no idea how music gets produced from the hair-dryer thing that they have (or is it some bar-code reader)? But whatever it is, it’s just so cool! If I were into EDM, I would have had an orgasm! If anyone has any fundays on how this works, do email me.
Talking about emails, I have this feeling you already saw the below exchange between Mark Zukerberg and his once CFO David Ebersman. But if not, then it’s umm – something!
The last email (in the above tweet snapshot) is just so funny – almost like an afterthought (possibly advised by some lawyer kind of guy). For those who have no context, this Verge article would be a good read. Or may be just check out the below video.
Heard of the Cargo cult?
This week, I discovered a new concept – the Cargo cult. Do read the linked blog-post if the term fascinates you; it’s a weird sad intriguing story that references to WWII and primitive islands. It’s just outright absurd.
Before I sign off, one last thing – it is only for storytelling nerds though. I discovered this one and a half hours long brilliant video on why some movies have amazing endings. The narrator is the writer of this super cute movie – little Miss Sunshine. If you haven’t seen it, do watch – it’s cute and funny (the movie I mean). Watching the ‘explanatory’ video has inspired me to look at some Bollywood movies from a new storytelling lens. I will probably make a video this week on how the ‘story-structure’ for some of these films works (have already taken notes for Gully Boy and 3 Idiots). Anyone looking forward to that?
If you want to ask some of your friends to subscribe to my newsletter, you can share this link with them.
Also, if you are into blogging yourself – do email me your blog-site and I will subscribe. I use Feedly.
That’s it. Bye for now. Will come back next Sunday. Have a great Sunday and then a great week and then a great Saturday. Stay safe.
3 replies on “Vatsap? 2020 Aug 02 Newsletter”
please change the font, it hurts my eyes so bad. I can’t read on my usual pace, sans serif fonts for all puposes are good, you can go to typ.io to find something that works with the flow.
@ronit – have changed the font.
This was a great post! No clue why I hadn’t read it earlier in the week.