You do not want to invest in risky assets hence you keep money in the bank in ‘safer’ less risky instruments. But the bank keeps the money in risky assets because it wants to make more money. So your money goes to risk assets and you are exposed. #BankingCrisis #BankDefaults
www.tribuneindia.com/news/nati…
Really sad that the procedural delays and bureaucracy further starving climate action that is already struggling for resources. Financial reforms and reimagining the financing ecosystem should be a priority for the governments to make them more effective in dealing with climate crises. #climatecrises #climatefinance
There should be an easy way to consolidate/merge different Mastodon accounts.
Finally found some Palash trees in all their glory. They remind me of my childhood spent in Jharkhand, where these were in abundance. #TreesOfDelhi
Finished reading: The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz 📚
While the mainstream bookshops (the likes of Crosswords, Oxford, Bahrisons) keep ignoring the diversity and range of the books that gets published in Hindi, a visit to the book fair showcases the richness of the Hindi publications. I gathered as many titles as I can carry from the hall to the car. :)
I picked up Victory City by Salman Rushdie and getting closer to reading my first Salman Rushdie novel. His books have been on my reading list forever but never managed to get started and finish one. This time this is going to change. With whatever I have heard of him, he is too good a writer to be missed. #Books
Lifestyle for Environment (LiFE) is getting traction. I was invited to speak on how industry and government can work together to promote sustainable lifestyles. While this is great step in the right direction but we need to make sustainability as core of what we do and not a add-on layer.
Rethinking my productivity flow and the first thing I want to explore is a ToDo list app that is cross-platform. The existing one is Things3 and it is limited to iOS. The possible options are ToDoist and TickTick both of which I have used but did not stick to for long. Evernote, Notion, Outlook.. do not give me the ease of quick data entry the way I want..
Capturing Memories and Growing with ‘Photography’
I bought my first ‘DSLR’ (a Nikon D3200) in 2012 and the trigger was a trip to Germany. Before that I had a point and shoot Sony CyberShot that I had bought in 2005, that too was to capture pictures on internship trip to West Africa. These were simple decisions to buy a camera that I can afford – no considerations of their capabilities or technical specifications. Both these cameras were used occasionally to capture memories- and my then ignorant self had a very narrow definition of memories. The camera got to be packed and used mostly when I was traveling and memories were mostly travel memories.
But it all changed in 2015. The definition of memories changed and my purpose for taking photos changed. We became parents. And, every gaze, stare, smile, movement, gestures.. everything was worth capturing. Every moment became a memory to preserve. A camera became a constant companion. But I also got hooked to not only capturing these memories but learning how I can capture them better. I wanted to do justice to the divine innocence engendering happiness in thousands different ways; I wanted my photography skills to be able to capture them in better way.
This made me go into a rabbit hole, consuming many tutorials on photography, getting in photography gears and photography as an art form. But I have no regrets. It introduced me to Susan Sontag, John Berger, Ansel Adams, Roland Barthes, Henri Cartier Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Steve McCurry, Annie Leibovitz Stephan Shore.. the list is endless. The journey that started with an ambition to getting off the ‘auto mode’ and mastering the manual mode unintentionally meandered into understanding why we take pictures and what makes it an art form. There are many theories and approaches and deviations from these theories that have resulted in mesmerising pictures. Be it Stephan Shore’s approach of taking pictures as we see things naturally or the decisive moment of Bresson – the masters of photographies went deep to put soul into a mundane act of pressing the shutter button. Knowing their work and looking at their pictures was a reward in itself!
My photography journey started with clicking pictures of our daughter and it is growing with her. But more than the pictures and getting better at photography it gave me something immensely valuable that goes beyond the photography or photographs. Out of my crazy schedules and numerous distractions, it makes me shut down all distractions and focus, literally and figuratively, on what matters- people who I love and care about.
(For those, who are keen to explore photography, here are some YouTube links that are good starting points to know more about photography as an art. You can also just search for the master photographers’ name in YouTube and will get enough videos to get better understanding of their work and learn from their work.)
- Learn the Language of Photography Through Critique
- Are You Expressing Your Creativity or Just Pressing Buttons?
- Stephen Shore – How to see
- John Berger – Understanding a photograph
Intense conversation about the climate action with some exceptional people.
Managed to get my bookshelf organised. This time by colors. I also realised that I have bought at least 4 books again as I was not able to see them at home and did manage to read them so picked them again from the bookshop. #books #reading
Finished reading: Long Shadows by David Baldacci 📚
A couple of weeks back I got a chance to stay at the campus for a few days. While many things have changed since I graduated in 2006 from here but it remains one of those places that always triggers nostalgia.
Finally, I did reshuffle my entire portfolio amid all the chaos caused by the Adani-Hindenberg issue. Better to hold cash than to be in the market till we figure out what our regulators are up to. The entire episode has made the retail investors suffer the most.
I hardly recommend music albums and songs but I could not resists recommending Qala. Absolutely brilliant work from Amit Trivedi that must be celebrated. open.spotify.com/album/3yV…
The Power of Written Words
Never underestimate the power of written words. Indian investors can vouch for this now. We lost a lot of money despite having no direct exposure to Adani Group.
This whole episode has shaken the confidence of Indian retail investors and put a question mark on our regulatory framework and loopholes in that.
#HindenbergReport
Surprisingly we are not talking enough about methane problem. It is 30 times more dangerous than CO2.
Do you want to make a career in climate solutions and sustainability space? Figure out which problem you want to solve and what kind of skills it requires. It will take some time to know this but it is absolutely critical.
#climatecareers #Careers #ClimateActionNow
The State of the Carbon Dioxide Removal – No where close to what is needed.
- The current status of Carbon Dioxide Removal is just a fraction of what is needed to achieve our goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees.
- The total CDR is approximately 2 GtCO2 per year compared to 12-16 GtCO2 per year required for meeting Paris Agreement.
- We have put an unsubstantiated hope in ‘Novel’ technologies that would bail us out by removing carbon from the air. Unfortunately, so far these ‘novel’ technologies have remained nascent or emerging and almost all the CDR has been through conventional methods. Out of 2GtCO2 CDR achieved, the novel technologies (BECCS: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, Biochar, and others) have contributed only 0.002 GtCO2.