Arvind’s Newsletter

1.LIC Eyes Health Insurance Foray Via Organic, Inorganic Routes

Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) chairman Siddhartha Mohanty said that the company plans to enter the health insurance. Mohanty said that the company could consider” inorganic options” to enter the segment.

Currently, the Insurance Act, of 1938, prohibits composite licensing, which prevents insurers from offering life, general, and health insurance under one entity. However, in February, a parliamentary panel led by BJP's Jayant Sinha recommended amending the act to allow composite licences. If implemented, it is expected to boost insurance penetration and reduce costs by offering single policies.

2.Adani plans push into Indian ecommerce and payments

India’s Adani Group is in talks to expand into ecommerce and payments, according to four people familiar with the matter, as the conglomerate builds a digital business to compete with the likes of Google and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries in the world’s most populous country.

The plans come as the group’s politically well-connected founder Gautam Adani seeks to move on from damaging scandals and diversify his empire into fast-growing consumer-facing markets. Adani has become Asia’s second-richest man by amassing a vast infrastructure and logistics network of ports, airports and power.

The company was now weighing applying for a licence to operate on India’s ubiquitous public digital payments network, the Unified Payments Interface, and was in talks with banks to finalise previously announced plans for a co-branded Adani credit card, the people said.

Separately, it was in negotiations to offer online shopping through India’s fast-growing, government-backed public ecommerce platform, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, they added. ONDC and UPI make up part of India’s digital public infrastructure “stack”, which attracts hundreds of millions of users a month and has become popular with groups competing to build consumer technology businesses.

3.Delhi hits it highest temperature ever at 52.3 degrees Centigrade

Temperature in Delhi soared to its highest-ever level on Wednesday at 52.3 degrees Celsius, India Meteorological Department (IMD) data showed. The national capital’s Mungeshpur weather office, located on the outskirts, reported this temperature at 2:30 pm.

A severe heatwave alert has been in place for Delhi and other north and central Indian states for the past few days as temperatures reached their highest maximum in multiple districts, IMD data indicated.

The surge in temperature was recorded a day after Delhi nearly reached 50 degrees Celsius at three of its weather stations in the outer areas. Mungeshpur, Narela, and Najafgarh weather offices have been reporting extreme temperatures recently. Earlier, Rajasthan's Churu was reported to be the warmest district of the season at 50.5 degrees Celsius.

4.Amazon to buy MX Player from Times Internet

Almost a year after calling off the deal, Amazon.com, Inc has resumed talks to acquire Times Internet-owned cash-strapped video streaming platform MX Player, two people with direct knowledge of the matter told Mint.

The deal had fallen through last time due to a valuation mismatch after Amazon, the US multinational with interests across e-commerce, streaming, cloud computing to online advertising, conducted due diligence, a process of audit and verification of a potential target company to confirm financial information and all other relevant facts for the OTT service.

Times Internet had asked for over $100 million for MX Player, while Amazon’s internal team had valued it at around ₹500 crore ($60 million). The value has gone down further, one of the persons said.

5.A rediscovered Caravaggio painting goes on public display for the first time in Madrid today.

Ecce Homo, depicting Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns, was almost auctioned off in 2021, when it was misattributed to another painter. But experts at the Prado Museum stepped in to investigate suspicions, later confirmed, that it was an original from the Italian Baroque artist.

The oil painting, available to view until October, “showcases hallmarks of the old master’s style,” Smithsonian Magazine noted, “such as a dramatic contrast of light and shadow, dark realism and an intense charge of emotion on the figure’s faces”

6.Crows can count their own caws, a new study revealed. 

Corvids were already known to be very smart birds, capable of tool use and simple arithmetic. But in an experiment, crows were trained to produce a certain number of calls corresponding to visual cues of the numbers one to four, and they were correct most of the time.

While it wasn’t “true counting,” which involves a symbolic understanding of numbers, one researcher told Nature it could be a precursor of that ability: Human toddlers similarly produce the number of speech sounds that correspond to the number of objects they see — like saying “one, one, one” instead of “three” — before they are able to master symbolic counting, Scientific American noted.

7.Getting a perspective of Nvidia’s market capitalisation

Nvidia’s massive rise in the AI era has been well-documented, but did you know that it’s currently the world’s third most valuable company?

To put the massive market cap of Nvidia into perspective, Visual Capitalist put it side by side with a collection of other major U.S. tech companies.

Putting market cap of Nvidia in perspective; it is 2xMeta, nearly 5xTesla and 17xIBM. Read on.

8.Sinicisation: China removed the dome on the country’s last major Arabic-style mosque and converted its minarets into pagoda towers, completing its campaign to replace features in Muslim places of worship with Chinese attributes.

It’s part of the government-led push toward the “Sinicisation of Islam,” Beijing’s effort to model religion, especially Islam, in the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology, analysts say.

The government is also seeking to rebrand food made by Uyghur Muslim population as generically “Xinjiang” food — the region where it’s from — while training Uyghur chefs in Han Chinese cooking styles, Foreign Policy and ChinaFile wrote.