Gandhigiri and Bangalore Driving

Bangalore Roads and atrociousness are no new entry to a blog. I always thought I can refrain from writing about it. But, I guess it was important. This morning as I was driving an auto-rickshaw suddenly cut into my straight path from the side without giving any indication of its negotiating a left turn. In total bewildered state I bumped into it. As luck could have it I left my vehicle and jumped away and had a perfect landing with a very minor scratch on my thumb. The driver got down and approached towards me. A normal me would have made a noise and god knows what. For a change, I asked him - "Are you ok?"

I do not know if that was a valid question to ask and walked towards him. I saw him speechless he picked up my scooter and brought it to standing. I could see a guilty feel in his eyes and a look that was downwards. A large group of passers by gathered around me. I just asked them to leave as there was nothing serious there. They were equally confused. A morning entertainment was averted.

A couple of weeks back a similar thing happened with a car. And just to avoid a collision I just switched off the engine and jumped out and my scooter fell on a side and no harm was done neither to the car nor my scooter collided with it. I saw a fuming car driver parking his car 15 meters ahead and giving me tips as how I was reckless and how could his car could have damaged beyond repair and how worried he was for me without helping me with my getting my scooter straight. I gave him a disgusted dirty look and told him how needless his tips were and started my scooter and left. I saw him cursing and making a noise for no good reason.

What was the basic difference between the two incident. It's the approach. One constructive and the other blame game. A simple question of "Are you ok?" did the trick. The simple act of helping someone in distress versus giving lectures as what a genius we have been and how the rest of the world was wrong.

In a world of competition we tend to find our competitor everywhere we go. Even when they do not exist. Showing that upmanship is too inherent to us. The bigger goal is what we are missing in life. The pathetic Bangalore roads is a menace. Rather than helping our fellow travelers we tend to show how a great driver we are in negotiating our way through. That makes our travel more of a competition. Similarly, in life we create unnecessary hierarchies and play power games. Many a times we do not see the real problem which is an inanimate project as we call it as our true enemy and get it straight. Accepting one's mistake and correct it if needed, is that so hard? I still believe the world provides ample opportunity to everyone to compete with oneself and be a better person in your own metric than comparing with the whole world or the person next to you.

I guess Gandhigiri is just a first step to that direction.

Financial Ratios

Interestingly, after a long two and half years of studying for MBA program has not made any better understanding of the financial ratios. Most interesting thing I saw was every finance course we keep doing ratios to land up into the same discussion in the subsequent classes. Here was the classic one. The ratios on returns. RoI, RoA, RoCE, RoE and god knows what all. I use a very common sense approach to ratio determination as such.

There are stakeholders who have put in money or provided infrastructure for a company to operate and they expect some tangible gains from the company. Whatever they gain is basically return. That being said who are the stakeholders to a company?

1. Equity holders (Both preferential and common stocks)
2. Debt holders
3. Government

There are 3 kinds of basic gains for each of the stakeholders

Equity holders get residual profits, Debt holders interest and Government Taxes.

Hence return on asset should consider total returns on the complete asset so return definition here is PBIT. While for Return on Equity it should just be the PAT. Returns are worked on accrual basis and never on expensed basis.

In any case, after all we are MBAs and we will democratize the process of finding the obvious as well and will not know but think it might be something or in the end say well then everything is right. After all the world was there before accounting standards came into being.