1.Deepak Parekh, who shaped the HDFC group and grew it exponentially over four decades, was recently interviewed Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu of MoneyLife in a wide ranging interview which is worth reading. Some excerpts:
While it was HT Parekh who pioneered the idea of HDFC, it was his nephew Deepak Parekh who executed it to perfection, not only growing HDFC, but also setting up a bank, a mutual fund, two insurance companies, a securities company and India’s largest real-estate private equity firm along the way. But Mr Parekh has been more than just a creator of an outstanding, professionally-run organisation.

 Over the years, his wide networking skills made his office one of two or three stops for top global businessmen and officials visiting India. He has been called several times to handle crises, most recently the fraud at Satyam Computer

“I thought I would do Chartered Accountancy. I didn’t know at that time whether to practise or to work in a company, but I was veering towards working in a company. Seeing how the profession was evolving, I probably took the right decision, because practice has become very complicated. So I went to Sydenham for four years and after my BCom I was fortunate to get an articleship in London to do my CA.” Read on to know more about this remarkable man.

2 ChatGPT on mobile can now surf the web. But only via Microsoft’s Bing, but now only for the premium version.

Today, OpenAI announced that subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, the premium version of the company’s AI-powered chatbot, can use a new feature on the ChatGPT app called Browsing to have ChatGPT search Bing for answers to questions.

Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner uncovers the hidden side of everything in his eponymous podcast which is another one of my favourites. You can subscribe to his podcast Freakonomics Radio on your favourite app - Apple podcasts, Spotify or any other. His recent interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is definitely listening (or you could read the transcript) and covers a wide range of topics from perils and blessings of A.I., Google vs. Bing, the Microsoft succession plan — and why his favourite use of ChatGPT is translating poetry (but unfortunately not cricket).

3. For those who came late and still want to know more about the colourful person at the centre of the coup that wasn’t in Russia: Yevgeny Prigozhin, this long read in the Guardian fills in the blanks. Prigozhin was a petty criminal and hotdog seller who rose to the top of Putin’s war machine
   The article shows his origins as a petty criminal robbing people in St Petersburg and eventually spending ten years in prison. Upon his release around the break up of the Soviet Union, he started as a hot dog salesman before building a successful catering business through which he got exposed to powerful people including Putin himself, whom he refers to as Papa.

   New opportunities arose when Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 and intervened militarily in eastern Ukraine soon after. Putin denied that regular Russian troops had been involved in either case, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

   The Kremlin began to think about how to make the deniability slightly more plausible. Although private military companies were illegal in Russia, several groups appeared that seemed to coordinate their actions with the defence ministry but could operate at arm’s length. Prigozhin’s Wagner would become by far the most prominent of them.
   Another key moment for Prigozhin came in late 2015 when Putin decided to intervene militarily in Syria to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Prigozhin won contracts for food and supplies, and also dispatched his Wagner troops there.

   In Syria, Wagner first established itself as a formidable fighting force, with the group playing a prominent, if unacknowledged, role in Moscow’s intervention. Wagner fighters operated with impunity in Syria and were accused of numerous war crimes.Read on

4.Regardless of whether humans do or don’t have free will, psychological research shows it’s beneficial to act as if you do, writes Kennon Sheldon, author of Freely Determined : What the New Psychology of Self Teaches Us about How to Live, in Psyche. Some excerpts from his article.

“I understand that many philosophers choose to embrace some form of ‘determinism’ – and perhaps you do too. Determinism says that, at a deep level, humans have no real choice in what we do – it’s always our past, or our unknowable brain processes, or our immutable genetics, or some combination of these, that determine our actions; never our psychological selves.

Regardless of who is correct in this debate, my work has led me to a second conclusion that I consider even more important than whether we have free will or not. It’s that a belief in our own capacity to make choices is critical for our mental health. At the very least, this belief lets us function ‘as if’ we have free will, which greatly benefits us.

There are three main reasons why I consider belief in free will to be important and beneficial. The first is that feeling autonomous and self-determined – that you have free will – is a basic psychological need, and satisfying this need is critical for your mental health. This has been shown by decades of research in self-determination theory concerning the causes and sources of human wellness. 

5. China solar module prices fall to record lows

The scale-up of manufacturing in China after the ending of the COVID curbs is yielding surprising results. Prices of chemicals and crop protection products plunged in global markets as manufacturers from China stepped up supplies to clear inventories. A similar story is playing out in the solar equipment industry. Prices of wafers, cells, modules, the key components of solar power plant, have dropped to record lows amid high inventories and slow offtake by buyers.

The scale-up of manufacturing in China after the ending of the COVID curbs is yielding surprising results. Prices of chemicals and crop protection products plunged in global markets as manufacturers from China stepped up supplies to clear inventories. A similar story is playing out in the solar equipment industry. Prices of wafers, cells, modules, the key components of solar power plant, have dropped to record lows amid high inventories and slow offtake by buyers.