Growing up in India, one saw the image of Gandhi everywhere. Gandhi was Mahatma (“great soul”), whose aura soared above the martyrs of struggle for Independence. Gandhi’s bespectacled visage is still a universal presence on rural committees, on non-profit logos, in…
Earlier last fall, walking in San Francisco, from the Caltrain station to Embarcadero, I came across a scene that is now etched in my memory. It was about 430 pm before the rush for evening dinner began. A group of…
I mentioned the news of the author Ursula Le Guin passing away in an earlier post. Here is a note of appreciation. As an Operations Research person, I love hard science fiction (Clarke, Niven, Reynolds, and others). But, it was astounding to…
I learned that Ursula Le Guin passed away, earlier today. I am a bit surprised how much this news has affected me. Le Guin was one of the best writers that I had the pleasure of reading, first as a…
Amazon’s HQ2 selection process has been described as a beauty contest, which misses the point. Amazon is definitely not going to pick a city based on popular opinion or consensus. An excellent theoretical framework to think about Amazon’s choice process…
In my earlier post on the Brief History of Amazon Prime, I had mentioned about the stickiness of Amazon Annual Prime Pricing. An issue with scaling revenues this way is stickiness of prices. It took a whole nine years for Amazon…
A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety A successful presidency may be a function of steadfastness, leadership, decency and intellectual acuity, but it is also a resultant of happy accidents of cosmic confluence and contemporary affections of the citizenry. Presidential historians…