Numbers in Perspective - I: Capital Markets

The stock market in USA tanked a few days ago after Elon Musk finally decided to take over Twitter. 

While it is the dharma of markets to swing and sway wildly to various sentiments, one data-point stood out - the loss of market-cap suffered by seven top companies of USA was bigger than the entire capitalisation of the Indian market!

Only a few months ago the newspaper headlines had announced that India's equity market had broken into the Top Five Club in terms of capitalisation for the first time. At  $3.21 trillion, India was now UK ($3.19 trillion), Saudi Arabia ($3.18 trillion), and Canada ($3.18 trillion). 

All is is small change compared to the total market-cap of USA which is over $47 trillion...We have a long, long way to go!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* (12 March 2022) - India breaks into world's top five club in terms of market capitalisation - https://www.business-standard.com/article/markets/india-breaks-into-world-s-top-five-club-in-terms-of-market-capitalisation-122031200004_1.html

* Visualising market capitalisation - https://howmuch.net/articles/all-stocks-capitalization-around-the-world

* Pearls of wisdom on investing in India - mostly from Mohandas Pai at a @TheRepublic event - https://youtu.be/Vtitg-o-8FI 

Books of the World

 

Every now and then the great circus of Whatsapp forwards comes up with a gem, and this is one of them. A beautifully illustrated poster on the "Most Translated Books of the World" by Preply.

A closer look at this tells you that some non-empirical method has been chosen for the selections here.  Perhaps they have excluded books of religious nature, or those that may may be categorised as 'adult literature'. How else can one explain the fact that Paramahamsa Yogananda's "The Autobiography of a Yogi" is listed as the most translated book from India over "The Bhagawad Gita" or "Kamasutra"?   

At least according to the referenced list compiled by Wikipedia, the most translated book from India is the Gita, followed by Isha Upanishad and Yogananda's book in the third place. 

The list has its surprises too. For instance I was surprised to learn that a book we studied at school, "My Name is Aram" by William Saroyan the top book from Armenia. Also Arthur Hailey's "Hotel" is listed as the most translated book from... the Bahamas! 

Minor quibbles aside this remains a beautiful piece of work. The books I have not yet read from this list should keep me busy for a while! :)

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NB: This is also the first time I am seeing a digital image presented in the <webP> format. At just over 600kB this seems to pack in a much more scalable image compared to JPEG or TIFF.  Seems to be an innovation from Google that uses a technique called predictive coding.