Nikhil > Recent Status Updates

The part that I like, which confuses me like the “one flew over cukoo’s nest” scenes are when she is in this mental asylum. Here you can’t track the linearity of her story. Things which she tells us may or may not be true. So one has to keep reading what’s happening.

I also dislike the transition that the novel takes from being poisoned to transitioning into a new reject life.

Esther has come back to Boston and is disintegrating. She is meeting doctor Gordon but has these fascinating observations. This comes after she didn’t get through the course and didn’t have a plan B. I can so relate to her abnormality that it seems almost normal to me.

The book is progressing in a weird way. I hear her say things which are conventional to the times the novel is written, the main character is recollecting her teenish adventures about sex and life.

The novel is progressing beautifully, but now I am curious to see where it is leading. It isn't leading anywhere yet. It's just conversations about what she is going through in her daily lives. She (Esther) also has an interesting way of linking the past to the present where she gives us the background associated with the character which is relevant to the current without needlessly digressing.

Very easy to start. It was so nice to just blend into her world and witness her social life and her interactions.

The dog and the Hindu Muslim tension part is nice. It caricatures the tension into a very nice scene and places the issues bare.

The book ebbs and flows from bright dairy back to teetarbani. The characters take an altruistic turn which takes the story forward. I get the whole narrative drive. The character arc isn’t linear, and neither is it pieced together according to themes or plot lines.

Let’s see how the book gets closed.

So the story is gone into a backstory. The book starts with a first person narrative of the murder. So the author outrightly says this isn’t one of those books where you chase the crime. She sets this up differently for us to enjoy the setting.

After the initial setting, the book moves to backstory in Delhi. That’s where I am right now.

Chapter 2 talks about how Friedman teased a formidable intellectual position in macro policy. How that has led to the growing position of monetarism and how it has fluctuated between controlling of M and targeting r.

The views about fiscal policy are historically not true as was established in the second chapter here. He discussed the 1964 tax cuts which had a lot of discussion about the use of fiscal policy. The expectation was that a tax cut is the right thing to do now rather than a tax reform. The counter argument was due to the inflationary nature of such spending.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—GEORGE SANTAYANA

After setting the stage and a lot of back and forth, the plot twist reveals itself. The first half was just setting the stage for us to get into the head of the main character Millie, but then there is information about the family that keeps cropping up which makes it seem more like a tool for writing than actually a character development.

This is my first of the series.

The plot is that this family has shifted into this new house in Long Island. It’s a neighbourhood with few big houses. So far there are weird neighbours, eccentric relationships. And this normal middle class family is getting into this new set up. Something weird is around the corner.

The writing is not deep. It feels more chore descriptive rather than character deep.

I've also learned that patterns of attention— what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time.

Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.

Regulation on public sector banks are too much and often counterproductive. He shows how and he says that it does not make sense to keep them regulated and expect them to be competitive to private banks.

Project management needs to be at the center of bank’s performance. To improve profitability, banks need to integrate IT database with their traditional business processes.

Banking competition ideas and how to make public sector banks more competitive. There aren’t overarching questions but detailed ideas which sound right. How would they play out, whether there are things which we miss in simplistic theory , only time will tell.

Now he makes an argument that high interest rate charged by borrowers is not only because of policy rate. It is because that individual borrower is risky so the bank charges a premium. His speeches have this statement again and again. He seems to be irritated by high borrowing cost and the argument that this would hurt the growth potential of the economy..

Is higher inflation more variable. So the idea is that level of inflation affects it’s standard deviation. This is the relation between first and second moments for inflation. Is this empirically valid?

What is the optimal inflation level?