Expense AccountMoneyPersonal FinanceUncategorizedFebruary 24, 2015by Monika Halan0See the pointing finger. In the mirror
India's stretched moral fiber makes the move away from corruption difficult.
Expense Account, Mint I’m watching Jolly LLB (and if you write columns as a profession, you can’t just watch anything without the brain firing away and looking for raw material to chew on for future work) and as the movie me-lords its way to the end, where the small town guy wins against the corrupt five-star lawyer...
Expense Account, Mint Imagine this: there is a large hospital chain of national scale. Doctors are salaried employees and they’re found to be prescribing medical products that are harmful to their patients. They recommend these products as they carry higher kick-backs from the drug companies. For example, they prescribe drugs that are known to cause...
Expense Account, Mint If you drive down from Chennai to Pondicherry, it is not unusual to see a furry, beaked head poking out over a high wall, looking quizzically at the world go by the yard in which it lives. The six-feet bird came as an import from Australia and, unknowingly, became a part of...
Expense AccountDecember 28, 2011by Monika Halan0What the stalled US escalators and banned clotheslines point to
Expense Account, Mint If Hollywood movies and interactions as tourists make us believe that all Americans speak like Californians and live in Manhattan, then the urban mass affluent Indians who reach US shores confuse them about who the real Indian is—the poor child with a tear in one eye they see in the ad asking...
Expense Account, Mint Why aren’t people out there on the street, burning a bus or something?” I’ve been asking this question for almost as long as it took me to absorb the fact that the generation going to be worse off than their parents, for the first time since the 1930s depression, seemed to be...
Expense AccountSeptember 7, 2011by Monika Halan0Do you have an investment tip?
Expense Account, Mint It’s been three weeks since I left home. Three weeks since I stitched together another reality in a different country, with different people using Skype and Gtalk as a way to keep the thread of my other reality going. Three weeks that saw two natural disaster events in the US—an earthquake that...
Expense Account, Mint I wonder why the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has got its head buried in sand over the extent of lies that bankers tell their customers in their attempt to hit them with inappropriate financial products to earn their bonuses and meet their targets. And I wonder how banks can calmly tell...
Expense AccountJuly 28, 2010by Monika Halan0SKS Microfinance: giant squid, ‘devta’ or just a business?
Expense Account, Mint ’ve written in this space before asking why my BlackBerry stayed on the grid in a remote mountain village where basic banking was missing. A few years earlier I had argued for a model that would make financial services as ubiquitous as paan masala, glucose biscuits and shampoo sachets in remote rural India....
Expense Account, Mint Why has cost become so central to the insurance product? Nobody talked about costs for decades when we all bought endowment and money-back plans. Those of us who are old enough to have these in our portfolio remember how they were sold—the promise was of a certain sum that would come back,...