Restart Quotes

“The name ‘JSW’, you will note, is not particularly imaginative. Nor is it the kind of thing you would imagine is incredible intellectual property. Yet, in 2014, JSW Steel told shareholders that it would pay Rs 125 crore a year to a firm entirely owned by Sajjan Jindal’s wife, Sangita. In return, Sangita Jindal would graciously permit her husband to use the ‘JSW’ acronym, which JSW Steel insists her company, JSW Investments, owns.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“At some point, economists must study the Business Family Wedding Gift Economy. It is an extraordinary, closed bubble. What happens is this: a woman marries into a conservative Indian business family. She may well be energetic and bright, but there’s no place for her at work, nor can she work elsewhere. So, instead, she’s urged to ‘take up something’. Scented candles, usually. Sometimes kurta design. Or necklaces, or faux-Rajasthani coffee tables. She then becomes a ‘success’, because every other woman in the family buys her candles as wedding presents, at hideously inflated prices. In return, she buys their kurtas as wedding presents. Eventually, everyone is buying everyone else’s hideous creations at hideously high prices, and nobody can ever tell anyone else their stuff sucks, and that nobody really likes the smell of lavender anyway. The most amazing thing is, this is not a very different economy from the one their husbands are in.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren’t good. Here’s why: in the years from 1972 to 1983—not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity—the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year—almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won’t find one.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Better people are possible to create, even in Delhi.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Somehow, India needs to make Indians think Rocket Singh is more likely than Guru.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“The CAG chose to indict Manmohan Singh by starting its study of coal mine allocations from 2004, the year he took over. Why? Because that is when the government first mused that coal block auctions might be a good idea. So Dr Singh gets indicted—for having the right idea in the first place. Talk about perverse incentives. He should have just kept quiet—not something that’s often said about Manmohan Singh.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Economic theory is an art more than a science. It fails at prediction half the time—or at just under half the time, which it feels is a defensible definition of ‘success’. It is a particular joy, therefore, when economic theory gets things right.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Well, there are ways and ways of getting your hands on the small shareholder’s cash. Consider Suzuki’s way: it takes a large amount of money out of Maruti Suzuki and sends it to itself in Japan—but not as a dividend, which all the minority shareholders would have to examine and agree with, but as ‘royalty’ for using the Suzuki name. You think anyone still buys a Maruti car because of the Suzuki name? Maybe one or two people—enough to justify Rs 2454 crore going off to Japan in 2012–13? Thought not. Just to rub it in, do note that the amount that Suzuki ‘earned’ from the rights to its storied name in India was more than the conglomerate’s entire profits for that year in Japan, Rs 2402 crore. For that matter, the royalty was also higher than Maruti’s own profits, of Rs 2392 crore. One begins to suspect that the company is overpaying.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“The private sector, meanwhile, had treated requirements and contracts as an initial negotiating position, not a strict requirement.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“a watershed for Indian society was the success of 2001’s Dil Chahta Hai—a story about three rich young slackers trying very hard not to grow up, and eventually failing. That was the first movie, he insisted, in which the heroes were rich—and untroubled by their wealth.”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Giving up halfway’ could be our national sport. (In fact, it is—except we call it ‘Indian cricket’.)”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“Look at us! Everybody else used an industrial sector to get rich, but we are so brilliant and ancient and everything that we have jumped an entire stage, and gone straight to a services-dominated economy, like the US is today! Double Promotion! Service–Led Growth!”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

“having”
― Mihir S. Sharma, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy