If you’ve ever enjoyed playing chess, you know the importance of measuring every move in conjunction with how your opponent’s pieces are placed on the board.
In a 2002 episode of The West Wing—a political drama series set in the United States—President Josiah Bartlet engages in two concurrent chess games with his aides while negotiating with a sabre-rattling Chinese state threatening to turn war games near Taiwan into a full-scale war (sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?
As Bartlet puts navy ships en route to the Taiwan strait, a visibly distressed aide asks him why he would risk a move that could put two superpowers at war. “Are they in the Taiwan strait?” asks Bartlet. “They’re on their way,” the aide replies. “Is that the same thing?” remarks Bartlet. Some swift diplomatic manoeuvring combined with the threat of US involvement ultimately defuses the crises and also delivers a lesson that our team at The MMS holds close to our hearts: the importance of looking at the whole board and not just segments of it. That pursuit was front and centre in the stories we wrote this week.
They looked beyond the noise surrounding business moves and instead, distilled it all to tell us what was really going on. We teamed up with contributor to write about the evolving angel investing landscape in India. In 2021, angel investors poured around US$100 million into the Indian startup ecosystem, turning them into somewhat of a safety net for entrepreneurs who otherwise would be at the mercy of venture capital groups. Even though sustainability is a major buzzword these days, there aren’t enough sustainability executives to guide companies in their pursuit of being more environment-friendly, effectively pursuing sustainability will require paradigm changes that go beyond the band-aid approach taken by firms so far. Inspired by the success of India’s homegrown payments system, UPI, the country now wants to replicate the model for healthcare by minting health IDs under a system called United Health Interface (UHI).
But, as we points out in her deeply reported piece, bettering health care won’t just work by creating IDs. Rather, it will depend on the much taller order of bringing out-of-the-fold doctors, hospitals, and clinics on board the mammoth exercise. This was our free story of the week, you can read it www.multimediastudio.net/blog.
The public market debut of India’s largest insurer Life Insurance Corporation of India is perhaps one of the most anticipated market events of this year—it’s also India’s largest asset manager. As we pointed out in our article, LIC’s assets under management outstrip India’s entire mutual fund industry by 8%. And while this is LIC’s magic potion, it’s also, in a way, the state-owned firm’s Achilles’ heel. Twitter India has been under the spotlight for multiple reasons over the last year or so, but what’s lesser known is how central India is to Twitter’s success in the future. Facing concentration in markets like the US and Japan,
Twitter has a keen desire to grow in the country. But, its revenues from the country have pretty much flat-lined. With its future dependent on success in the country, Twitter can’t really afford to take its eye off the ball in India as it has in the past. Our newsletters this week also worked along similar lines. Ruhi decoded how crypto firms may get away with flimsy narratives but the likes of Zomato need an upgrade; about the need for LIC to up its ESG investing bar in order to be able to rub shoulders with global insurance giants; we delved into the cracking credit card dam in India and the reasons why the country’s capital gains tax regime is such a madhouse. We’ll be back next week with an exciting lineup.
I hope you get to relax a little over the weekend before jumping back into life’s never-ending churn on Monday. And just in case you find yourself in a chess game over some downtime, be sure to remember the enduring advice from The West Wing: look at the whole board.