Published on 04 May, 2022
We call it anda bhurji’: How the Indian subcontinent...
Whilst the team at Marcellus hails from various parts of India and obviously has representatives from all of India’s...
May 2022
- Week 1
Short Read
Published on 04 May, 2022
Dhoni’s last-ball four, Miandad’s six and the stilln...
Those of us who grew up in the 1980s hated Javed Miandad for traumatising us with insanely well calculated knocks in...
Published on 04 May, 2022
Von der Leyen seeks to deepen military and tech ties...
As we explained in our piece three weeks ago, China & Russia’s menacing attitude towards democratic nations, is...
Long Read
Published on 04 May, 2022
CSIS warns Canadian universities to be on alert for ...
Three weeks ago we wrote a piece on how the onset of Cold War II will reshape the world and give India an opportunity...
Published on 04 May, 2022
Where the Fed went wrong on inflation
Until Lehman Brothers blew up it was fashionable to say that independent central banks are somehow better than central...
Published on 04 May, 2022
Conviction, Confidence, and Courage – An Allegory
This is an outstanding paper written by two analysts at S&P Global – Anu Ganti & Craig Lazarra. Although the...
Apr 2022
- Week 4
- Week 3
- Week 1
Short Read
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
An undebatable political decision’: Why China refuse...
Exactly a year ago the world’s media was falling over itself to cover the ravaging of India by the second Covid wave....
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
There are good reasons why Elon wants Twitter
Twenty years ago mega rich people who had risen to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would buy a newspaper or...
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
Nobody sells their child’ — Story of MDH, an origina...
At Marcellus we have written books on and built a business around the consolidation of various sectors of the Indian...
Long Read
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
You have to do things perfectly . . . but it’s so se...
There was a time when the rich purchased private jets. However, such has been the explosion in prosperity over the past...
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
How People Think
At the beginning of this piece Morgan Housel says that “This article describes 17 of what I think are the most common...
Published on 25 Apr, 2022
Five Things I Know about Investing
Forty years ago, Eugene Fama and Kenneth French revolutionised Finance by casting doubt on the CAPM theory: “They...
Short Read
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
Mother pushes vegetable cart on Lucknow street, daug...
Inspite of how the Indian state functions, the remaking of India lives on due to the aspirations of ordinary people and...
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
This Year, 12 States Reduced Education Funding In Pe...
Whilst people like us who work in the stockmarket are busy cheering the booming economy, some of India’s largest...
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
ROC Investments Launches the World’s First ‘Return O...
At Marcellus, we have spend most of the past decade writing books about and investing in clean, well-managed Indian...
Long Read
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors
As per his Wikipedia page Ivan Krastev is “is a political scientist, the chairman of the Centre for Liberal...
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Her...
For most of us in Marcellus, this is our second go at managing a business. We got our first chance to run a business...
Published on 17 Apr, 2022
Have Chinese Spies Infiltrated American Campuses?
Last week we wrote a detailed piece of how the world is splitting down the middle as Cold War II kicks off –...
Long Read
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
Review of Amartya Sen’s “Home in the World”
Those of us who grew up in India in the 1980s and 90s used be stunned by the quality of students that the schools of...
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
The man known as ‘Putin’s brain’ envisions the split...
Vladimir Putin’s recent ramblings during his long televised speeches have allowed Putin watchers to figure out who...
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
From gaon to Golf Links — Modern India is still unde...
By all conventional measures India’s formal economy is booming (thanks to 32 mn jobs created in the past 3 years, a...
Short Read
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
Moats Are Not That Hard To Calculate
In a recent interview Prof Bruce Greenwald of Columbia University (whose book “Competition Demystified” is...
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
A specialty coffee wave is brewing in India
Since we usually compile 3 Longs & 3 Shorts over the weekend whilst drinking large amounts of filter coffee...
Published on 03 Apr, 2022
Saudi Arabian comedy breaks new ground in portrayal ...
In super-conservative Saudi Arabia winds of change are blowing as “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the day to day...
Mar 2022
- Week 4
- Week 3
- Week 2
- Week 1
Short Read
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
40 years of tapes, 30,000 DVDs, one cricket superfan...
If you are a cricket geek – like many of us in Marcellus are – you will often wake up on Sunday morning asking...
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
Path to US via YouTube, Insta— How Indian influencer...
From the 1960s through to the turn of the century, the sons & daughters of well-educated middle class Indians made...
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
How to prepare for a recession
It is commonplace these days for so called “investment experts” to assert that we are heading towards trouble after...
Long Read
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
Inside Putin’s circle — the real Russian elite
The great & the good are the objects of public interest in any country. When that country happens to be Russia –...
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
Signalling as a service
Julian is a 34-year old who lives in Berlin and works for Stripe. He also writes a very interesting blog. In this blog...
Published on 27 Mar, 2022
Volkswagen and China: the risks of relying on author...
As Western companies begin to count the cost of writing off thirty years of investments in Russia, some of them have...
Short Read
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
Sahir Ludhianvi: a romantic and a revolutionary
As we rediscover “normal life” in the post-Covid world, we also realise that the extended lockdown had given us...
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
The mystery of an ancient Hindu-Buddhist kingdom in ...
One of the joys of travelling across South East Asia is to discover vast temple complexes – much bigger than the...
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
How America became a nation of the woke and the wary...
This opinion piece from the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post makes a counter-intuitive point, namely the more a...
Long Read
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
Mass starvation, extinctions, disasters: the new IPC...
Given the epic scale on which climate change is playing out, it is likely to become one of the defining investment...
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
‘The end of an era’: Ikea, Russia’s middle class and...
Those of us who grew up in the socialist India of the 1980s will remember how the choice of brands you consume can be a...
Published on 20 Mar, 2022
Review of Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of Ch...
As China and its growing economic and military might becomes ever more salient in a world where Western muscle...
Short Read
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
In praise of Shane Warne, cricketing genius
Those of us who came of age in the 1990s grew up idolising Shane Warne. He was everything we longed to be –...
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
How ‘Pasoori’ dancer Sheema Kermani resisted Gen Zia...
This piece from The Print highlights an iconoclast from across the border. The unlikely star of the piece is Sheema...
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
If not for Kamalini Dutt, Doordarshan would have los...
In this era of digital overload, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that some of India’s greatest cultural...
Long Read
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
Sanctions and the spectre of deglobalisation
This piece by Shakkar Aiyar underscores the ineffectual nature of the sanctions that are being enforced by the West on...
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
This is the reason Demis Hassabis started DeepMind
This piece focuses on a specific application of AI – the use of AI by Dennis Hassabis (the man who in 2016 used AI to...
Published on 13 Mar, 2022
Talking War and Market Volatility With a Giant of Ec...
This is an exceptionally good interview conducted by Jeff Sommer with the Nobel Laureate, Eugene Fama, who demonstrated...
Short Read
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
An extract from Anirudh Kanisetti’s book, ‘Lords of ...
Many of us in Marcellus are fans of the young Indian historian, Manu Pillai, who has done much to make Indian history...
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
How Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Pulls Off a Sh...
Over the past two decades we have watched Christopher Nolan’s riveting movies (eg. Inception, Dunkirk, Interstallar,...
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
Why Buddha would be frowning at Ukraine today, and w...
The West’s feeble response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted Shekhar Gupta to write this piece the sum of...
Long Read
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
‘Women Are The Best Borrowers And The Best Rep...
As India’s economy and society has changed rapidly over the past decade, one straightforward source of competitive...
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
How Bots and Fake Accounts Push China’s Vision of Wi...
We have highlighted before the sort of Orwellian propaganda the Chinese Communist party likes to use to keep its vast...
Published on 07 Mar, 2022
How to work hard
Paul Graham, the English-American computer programmer, is the legendary founder of the Y Combinator, the seed capital...
Feb 2022
- Week 4
- Week 3
- Week 2
- Week 1
Short Read
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
The charm of Bappi Lahiri
For those of us who went to school in the 1980s, Bappida was the coolest, hippest music composer because he had almost...
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
In Hong Kong, China’s ‘covid zero’ strategy is falli...
In the rest of China, the Government’s approach to dealing with Covid-19 involved brute force and a dodgy...
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
The Calorie Counter: Evolutionary anthropologist Her...
Herman Pontzer, a scientist at Duke University, has conducted research and shown what some of us have long suspected:...
Long Read
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
Do Most Family Businesses Really Fail by the Third G...
Even in the current age of tech & digital, the dominant form taken by private sector enterprise is the family run...
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
They save skiers and hikers in the wilderness. Here’...
Covid-19 and its aftermath has made even the most resilient of us take mental punches as the lives of our nearest &...
Published on 27 Feb, 2022
Archaic laws criminalise entrepreneurs
We have run Financial Services businesses outside India and now in India, we have the good fortune of managing...
Short Read
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
‘There was joy, serenity and absolute security in th...
As tributes continue to pour in for the late, the great Lata Mangeshkar, Sharmila Tagore reminisces about the songs...
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
India was part of medieval arms race stretching from...
Anirudh Kanisetti is part of new generation of scholars who are making Indian history accessible and interesting. He is...
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
Rural women speaking their mind on camera: This is a...
The Indian Express stands head and shoulders above any other mainstream English newspaper in India. The newspaper’s...
Long Read
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
Slow sex, long life
This is a rich, layered piece from Aeon which we would strongly recommend that you read in full. The author “Denis...
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
The death of the department store
Whilst this long read from The Guardian focuses on the closure of the John Lewis’ sixty-year old department store in...
Published on 20 Feb, 2022
Chuck Akre – The Three-Legged Stool
In his now legendary podcast series, Patrick interviews Chuck Akre, “a now widely famous investor who founded Akre...
Short Read
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
Malayalam superhero film ‘Minnal Murali’...
In case you are amongst the few people who haven’t yet watched the superhit Malayali movie, “Minnal Murali” you...
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
Facebook is shrinking
Two weeks ago we published our review of Dr Jonathan Knee’s excellent book, “The Platform Delusion” in which...
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
From Curious to Competent
This is a superb piece written by three headhunters from the executive search firm, Egon Zehnder. The piece focuses on...
Long Read
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
The building blocks of a good IPL auction strategy
In the high stakes world of franchise cricket, owners and head coaches tend to make the same mistakes the company...
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
Reasons to Abandon Spotify That Have Nothing to Do w...
Joe Rogan is a former TV commentator in the USA who now does a podcast on Spotify. He recently said some...
Published on 13 Feb, 2022
Why self-congratulatory balle-balle culture, not Pak...
If you are a Punjabi you might find this biting piece from Shekhar Gupta to be a painful read. If hail from any other...
Short Read
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
Avesh Khan and the maza of bowling fast
Once upon a time, most of Indian cricket’s big stars used to come from the big cities. The remaking of India has...
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
He’s not done yet — Why Kapil Sharma, the mass celeb...
Stand-up comedy has benefited from the pandemic as several of us had more time on our hands to laugh at a good joke. In...
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
After Omicron, some scientists foresee ‘a period of ...
Given the physical and psychological toll of wave after wave of Covid-19, everybody is seeking deliverance from the...
Long Read
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
How Philosophers Think
This essay is an exploration of not just how philosophers think but how laypeople like us think, talk and behave (which...
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
The Worldly Turn
By the time you read this, you would have been through the bizarre ritual which constitutes the Union Budget –...
Published on 06 Feb, 2022
Review of “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Ma...
If a better book on investing is published in 2022, we will open several bottles of something nice to drink. ‘The...