Arvind's Newsletter

1.Committed to making India a regional MRO hub: Boeing Defence India MD

Global aviation and defence major Boeing has had an engineering presence in India since 2009. In the past 15 years, it has secured orders for major military platforms and aligned itself with the "Make in India" initiative.

“Our annual sourcing from India has risen over a decade from $250 million to $1.25 billion annually, of which close to 70 per cent is contributed by manufacturing. At the same time, our supplier network has expanded by two times to over 300 today -- making us the largest foreign original equipment manufacturer (OEM) exporter from India. Notably, over a quarter of these partners are micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which are integral to our global supply chain.” said Boeing Defence India Managing Director Nikhil Joshi, in an interview with Bhaswar Kumar of Business Standard,

“Boeing India Repair Development and Sustainment (BIRDS) programme, we have partnered with customers and local industry to establish maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facilities, supporting India's aspiration to become an MRO hub for the region. Today, Boeing has the most MRO partners in the country working on defence and civil aviation. We have built world-class MRO facilities at Nagpur for Air India and at Hindon for the C-17.” Read on.

2.Gautam Adani’s succession plan: Sons Karan and Jeet, nephews Pranav and Sagar to be in saddle; all about the 4 heirs

Gautam Adani, India’s second richest man, delved into his retirement and business succession plans in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, August 5. The 62-year-old Adani is currently the second richest man after Mukesh Ambani according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. He plans to step down from the business at 70.

According to a Bloomberg report, Adani plans to retire at age 70 and there are four successors to the business. This includes Gautam Adani’s sons Karan and Jeet Adani and their cousins Pranav and Sagar Adani. Pranav Adani is the son of Vinod Adani whereas Sagar Adani is the son of Rajesh Adani. All four of them are named heirs through a family trust, the report said.

3.Kamala Harris picks Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as running mate

Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, betting that he can appeal to working-class voters in swing states to deliver a Democratic victory in November’s presidential election.

Walz, 60, is expected to appear with Harris at a campaign rally in Philadelphia this evening, before going to Las Vegas, Phoenix, Detroit, Savannah, Raleigh and western Wisconsin.

Walz is serving his second gubernatorial term after being first elected to the office in 2018. He has the potential to appeal to moderate, working-class and rural voters who could put Harris over the top in battleground states.

4.Google Loses Antitrust Case

A US federal judge, Amit Mehta, yesterday ruled Google violated antitrust laws by illegally holding a monopoly on online search and text advertising. The verdict comes in the first and biggest tech antitrust trial in over two decades and could alter how technology giants conduct business in the modern internet era. 

 The US Justice Department, along with over 30 state attorneys general, had sued Google in 2020 for allegedly paying more than $10B per year to web browsers and phone manufacturers to become the default search engine across those platforms. Yesterday's ruling found Google paid over $26B in 2021 alone to secure such agreements. The ruling also found Google controls nearly 90% of the world's general search services market on desktop devices and 95% on mobile devices. In 2023, Google's advertising unit generated roughly $238B—triple the revenue in 2016.  

It is unclear what penalties or limitations Google will face to restore competition. Google is expected to file an appeal.

5.The Unseen Fallout: Chernobyl’s Deadly Air Pollution Legacy

The biggest safety effect of the decline in nuclear power plants was the increase in air pollution according to a new paper  The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at the NBER Pol.

The authors use satellite date on ambient particles to show that when a new nuclear plant comes online pollution in nearby cities declines significantly. Second, they use the decline in pollution to create preliminary estimates of the effect of pollution on health.

According to their calculations, the construction of an additional Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), by reducing the total suspended particles (TSP) in the ambient environment, could on average save 816,058 additional life years.

According to our baseline estimates , over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies. Their calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.

6.Wall Street stocks stabilise after Japanese market rebounds

Japanese stocks surged on Tuesday, leading markets higher across Asia in a reversal of the previous day’s global sell-off, while Wall Street also staged a modest comeback.

Indian markets also stabilised relatively. Equity benchmark indices, the BSE Sensex and the NSE Nifty50, pared early gains to settle in the red on Tuesday. The BSE Sensex ended at 78,593, down 166 points or 0.21 per cent. The index had jumped 1.38 per cent to hit the day's high of 79,852.08 during the intraday trade. 

The S&P 500 climbed 1.5 per cent in morning trading in New York, after losing 3 per cent on Monday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 0.9 per cent. European stocks swung between small gains and losses, with the region-wide Stoxx Europe 600 index up 0.1 per cent by mid-afternoon.

7.Why mosquitos bite some people more than others, explained

Qualified nurse Miki Rai, posted a video to Instagram explaining the science behind your likelihood of getting bitten.

“Mosquitos actually like Type O [blood] best. So if you have Type O blood, congratulations, you're in the lucky group,” says Miki. One study found that the likelihood of mosquitos landing on people with O blood types was 83.3% versus the likelihood of them choosing a person with Type A blood, which was 46.5%. So while your blood type won't stop you from being bitten, having Type O makes it more likely.”

“You exhale more carbon diozide. This is supposedly how the mosquitos find us. The bigger you are, the more carbon dioxide you're releasing, putting you at risk. You also exhale more carbon dioxide after a workout, or when you're pregnant, so you may be more susceptible to bug bites,” says Miki.

“Studies show that mosquitos are actually more attracted to dark-coloured clothing – especially red, orange and black, so wearing light-coloured clothing can help,” Miki explained.

8.What and how to read
Janan Ganesh in Financial Times

The golden rule is to read as few contemporary books as possible
“The reading lists that newspapers patch together each summer are a win-win-win. You, impressionable audience, get a sense of which of the year’s books to be seen with on the beach. Our downgraded profession gets a brief veneer of cultural leadership. Publishers, ever-alert to the sound of bailiffs, cherish the fractional sales boost. There is no loser.

Except, that is, common sense. Given our finite lives, and the centuries-deep canon of literature, what logic is there in reading something current? More than 120mn unique titles have been published since the dawn of the printing press. What are the odds that one written in 2024 deserves our limited time?

Setting aside “You just pretend to like Dubai, don’t you?”, the question I most often field now concerns the books I read. Well, instead of a list, here is a rule: avoid the contemporary. If a novel has worth, it will still have it in a decade or two. If not, the filtering effect of time — which is imperfect in its judgment, but still the best thing we have — will remove the book from consideration by then. (If you didn’t read Vernon God Little in 2003, how tempted are you now?). In either case, there is something rash, something of the royal food taster, in going first. Let others take the hit.

This is just as true of nonfiction. If the content is topical — quantum computing, US-China relations — it will age at speed. The proper vessel for those subjects is journalism or a ChatGPT gut of the academic literature. If the book is grander in scope and register, all very well, but the question isn’t whether there is some worthwhile new stuff out there. Of course there is. The question is whether it should edge out Chateaubriand’s memoirs or Abraham Pais on Einstein in the war for your time.

If pragmatic exceptions are made here and there, Schopenhauer’s reading advice (avoid whatever is “making a great commotion”) is right. To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive. Looking at a painting made last week does not preclude looking at a Poussin. The opportunity cost is a minute or so. If a new book turns out to be a piece of zeitgeist-y ephemera, that is seven-to-10 hours you can’t spend with Barbara Tuchman.

I have argued as a dry utilitarian so far, but there is a more human case for sticking to the past. Reading is hailed as a mental health salve: it slows a racing mind, it puts distance between one and the world. But this is only true, or at least much truer, of a book with some decades behind it. “This thing pre-dates my troubles,” is the sentiment the reader ultimately craves, “and will see them out too.” You needn’t go full Montaigne, who communed with Ovid as the religious wars burned, but don’t count on much solace from another up-to-the-minute treatise on autocracy from someone who uses “dynamic” as a noun.

There are other rules. Don’t read fewer than 50 pages in a sitting. The cost of pecking at a book here and there is a lost sense of its narrative wholeness. (“If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel” — Philip Roth.) And avoid general histories. The last way to learn about China is a book called something like China. As with fiction, the universal is in the particular. 

But the highest rule is to privilege the old. When he doubted Shakespeare’s greatness on probabilistic grounds — how could someone born in 1564 trump all the billions of literate people who have lived since? — Sam Bankman-Fried got things exactly wrong. The question is how something as untested as recent writing can rival work that has survived the sieve of time.

The newspapers are half-right. Looking back from life’s midpoint, I do associate each sunshine break with a book. Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in Lisbon. John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration in Amalfi, whose sexual detail had even this broad-minded reader mumbling, at intervals, “Mate.” The Leopard in Southeast Asia. Each is more evocative of the trip than a photo. Not one was published in this century.