Desi Tamasha

• How we say hello in New England: a moue


• The Marshmallow Test for entrepreneurs

According to some, the major problem in today's global financial system is that the rest of the world's households don't spend enough and the American consumers don't save enough. The Alliance of the Willing comes to the rescue. Seems like the first half of the problem is about to be solved... The Brits have got into the act:

Britons have racked up so much debt on loans and credit cards that the total borrowed now exceeds the entire value of the economy, new research shows today. The financial consultant Grant Thornton is forecasting that gross domestic product (GDP) will hit £1.33 trillion this year, less than the £1.35trn which was outstanding on mortgages, credit cards and personal loans in June.

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Rediff reports that Google has been in talks with carriers in US, Europe and India for a simultaneous launch of its phone next month.
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Gail Collins has written a funny OpEd piece in the NY Times today about Hugo Chávez's announcement to move Venezuela’s clocks ahead by half an hour.

The list of countries who use the half-hour system does not inspire much confidence. There’s Burma. And Afghanistan. And then there’s Nepal. When the countries around it are at 3 p.m., Nepal believes it to be 3:45. This may have something to do with the altitude.

Newfoundland is on the half-hour system, defying the rest of Canada to do anything about it. ... They like the fact that the national broadcasters always have to say: “Stay tuned for the news on the hour. On the half-hour in Newfoundland.”

Gail forgot to add India to her list...
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It seems many of the product managers at Google are desi (or have desi names at least). Some examples:

• Shiva Rajaraman, product manager for YouTube


• Bindu Reddy, product manager for Google Video


• Shashi Seth, group product manager at YouTube


• Suman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manger, Trust and Safety

A lot of these people will be the leaders of the next generation of software companies (as Apple and Netscape product managers have been in the last 10-15 years).
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Hilarious explication of a dead-serious topic: the subprime mess.
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The India Cricket League (ICL) with a billion rupees corpus gives cricket-lovers around the world a reason to rejoice. Here, finally, is an alternative league that can create some interest in cricket-lovers who are tired of watching the same 10-20 players who play without any flash, hunger or creativity. It's already having the effect of providing competition to the old boys' club as well. The cricket board in India, for example, has increased the salary of their players.

One would think this would be taken as a positive sign by the people who run Cricinfo, the definitive cricket site. Somehow they don't... Cricinfo is criticising the players joining ICL (calling them, among other things, 'opportunistic', 'discards' and 'disgruntled'), the league organizers and whoever else they can lay their hands on. I am not sure what they have to lose here and why they are taking such a negative attitude towards the fledgling league? Surely they know how tough it is to get something like this off the ground! Why the sniping?
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Mitt Romney seems to have spent a lot of time in the leveraged buyout (LBO)/private-equity world. If the upcoming slowdown in the PE world turns into a bust (probability 90%, if you ask me), his candidacy is pretty much set for failure.
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I'm watching a BBC report where the British Army chief says that because of the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the British military is stretched. How the hell did they manage the Empire?