Investment Advisory

I touched upon Mandal I vs. Mandal II briefly and never quite got a chance to elaborate on the significant differences. It does not look like I can add anything to what several bloggers have already written on this (sorry, no time to link to your excellent blogs, will do that as soon as I get some time off, after all unlike TA Abinandan etc. I do not get free lunches).

As an investor, I am quite worried by how this is unraveling. At a superficial level it looked like Mandal II would be confined to the web. On the other hand, the behavior of the little understood myspace generation is quite unpredictable. We do not have a historical precedence on how a massive online protest can get unleashed on the real world. I am willing to bet that the latent anger this time is much more intense. In other words, we have a pressure cooker situation in contrast to the open hearth boiling fury of Mandal I.

I would hold off on increasing my exposure to Indian assets for now and see how it goes. I advise you to do the same. We just do not have a rigorous tested method of assessing the risk of a situation like this, I am not talking about the medium/long term effect of reduction in quality of manpower in a knowledge based economy but something like this: