Welcome home, Viswanathan Anand

Chess Champion, Viswanathan Anand is supposed to have wondered what kind of welcome he would get on his return to India when he won the World Chess Championship at Mexico last month.. He was reacting to the tumultuous reception given to the Indian cricket team at Mumbai after their Twenty 20 Championship victory.

The 37 year old Anand was crowned the World Chess Champion for the second time. The Indian whiz, who is one of only four men to have gone past the 2,800-Elo ratings barrier, won a prize of USD 390,000.

He received a very warm welcome on arriving at Delhi a few days ago. This was followed by another on reaching his home town, Chennai today.

Welcome home, Anand. India is proud of you.

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Quotations

Here are some quotations I liked from Woopidoo. and The Quotationspage.

• Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it. – Gordon R.Dickson
• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. – GK Chesterton
• The average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn’t even wish to have to think.Jesse Livermore
• It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor –Ray Kroc
• The essential question is not, “How busy are you?” but “What are you busy at?” “Are you doing what fulfills you?”Oprah Winfrey

Hope you liked them too.

Staying Cool On The Job

In “Staying Cool On The Job” Maureen Farrell writes of stress and actions people take to combat it.

She writes: Indeed, most scientific research shows job-related stress is most severe when people have high demands and little control, or perceived control, over the forces at play.

According to Peter Schnall, director of the Center for Social Epidemiology at the University of California, Irvine, the greater your feeling of control, the lower your overall work-related stress level will be.

What actually happens in a stress situation? When faced with challenges, real or perceived, the brain prepares the body for defensive action—the fight or flight response by releasing stress hormones, namely, cortisone and adrenaline. These hormones raise the blood pressure and the body prepares to react to the situation.

In the fight response mode, the stress hormones in the blood get used up, resulting in reduced stress effects and symptoms of anxiety. In the flight response, the hormones and chemicals remain unreleased in the blood stream for a long period of time. This results in stress related physical symptoms : tense muscles, unfocused anxiety, dizziness and rapid heartbeats.

All of us come across innumerable causes of stress in day to day life. If not released, stress gets accumulated. Subsequently, it compels the mind and body to be in an almost constant alarm-state in preparation to fight or flee. This state of accumulated stress can increase the risk of both acute and chronic psychosomatic illnesses and weaken the immune system of the human body.

Stress levels were perhaps much less in those days, but long ago Thomas Jefferson did say
” Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”

India: Everything To Play For

“India: Everything To Play For” is a report released by Lehman Brothers regarding the state of the Indian economy and what the future looks like.

Key points:

• The Indian economy can grow by 10 percent a year over the next decade if it liberalises investment rules, deregulates labour markets and keeps government spending under control.
• Many characteristics shown by Asia’s third-largest economy were similar to those in other emerging Asian nations during their early stages of economic take-off. These included rising incomes, an increasingly open economy and stable macroeconomic conditions stimulating demand and investments.
• To lift growth to a higher level, reforms such as easing foreign direct investment rules and labour market deregulation, as well as fiscal consolidation and improved infrastructure, were needed.
• A sharp slowdown in the US has the potential to derail the Indian economy. If the US economic growth rate falls by 1 percentage point, there could be a severe impact on India’s growth rate.

All in all, a “must-read” for all interested in the Indian economy.