Joining The Dots: Leadership Lessons, With a Side of Cockroaches | Tamanna's Take

The week has been one of eye-openers and lessons. It kicked off with lessons in leadership at the NDTV Profit Business Leadership Awards, where the best and brightest of Indian entrepreneurs were feted. Across the board, acceptance speeches from India Inc's leaders talked unfailingly about their teams, about pushing the envelope and making a difference. The air was electric, the atmosphere candid.

Chief guest Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addressed the elephant in the room with no hesitation, saying the Government must learn how to speak with Gen Z, a lesson quickly adopted after protests at Jantar Mantar in Delhi culminated in the education minister stepping down. She also spoke about her own days of protesting as a student.

AI Stocks Hand Down Some Harsh Investing Lessons

The meltdown in AI stocks over the week may seem like a distant occurrence that doesn't impact Indian investors too much, but that is hardly the case. As more Indians think of themselves as global citizens with exposure to AI stocks, the dizzying volatility of this trade is going to hurt closer to home. The rout in SK Hynix, despite an over 500% jump in profits, has handed down some important investing lessons, the biggest being that leveraged trades hurt hard once they go wrong. As Korean retail investors find themselves caught on the wrong end of margin calls, the government has had to launch suicide hotlines.

For 25-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner, the wipeout was a hard lesson too. His hedge fund Situational Awareness, named after his own viral essay and built on the thesis that AI would need a massive build-out of chips, power and data centres, ballooned to around $45 billion in assets before a leveraged, concentrated bet on AI infrastructure names came apart.

Facing margin calls from prime brokers, the fund was forced to offload its entire public portfolio in a block trade to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount, a rescue that has become emblematic of how quickly conviction can turn into forced selling when leverage is involved. Assets at the fund have since slumped to about $10 billion, though it retains its prized private stake in Anthropic. It is, perhaps, the most high-profile casualty yet of the AI trade's volatility.

How Many Bugs Are Enough?

The Bombay High Court has put on hold a Maharashtra FDA order that suspended the licence of Park Inn by Radisson in Navi Mumbai after two insects were found in its kitchen. Quashing the suspension, the court noted that this solitary finding, set against an otherwise satisfactory hygiene and compliance report, did not justify keeping the licence suspended. "We are in India. We have to take a realistic stand," the court said.

As Tukaram Mundhe, the Commissioner of the FDA, turns his lens on eateries of all sizes and price ranges across Maharashtra, a debate has broken out on whether this is the bare minimum citizens deserve or overreach by an officer looking for glory. For most people, simply having a port of call, a helpline for poor standards in eateries, is enough. There is a renewed faith that things can change. Even if it is just one cockroach at a time.