From a finance buff and a corporate lawyer to the founder of a secret club and a policy researcher, Season 3 has seen a rather eclectic mix of guests. The season finale has been equally exciting.

This week we catch up with Vatsal Gaur, a M&A/PE and VC lawyer with over 8 years of experience behind him. After having previously worked with leading law firms such as J. Sagar Associates, Khaitan & Co and Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan in senior roles, Vatsal is currently working with HSA Advocates as an associate partner, looking after the PE and VC practice.

In this week’s episode, we touch upon:

Stayed tuned to LongShorts because there are many more to come.

After a three week hiatus (a bit of summer travel to recharge), we are back with a new episode of LongShorts. Number 47 starts with a chat on the sector which strangely but not surprisingly transformed itself from being the darling of the Indian stock market to its bane within twelve months! Yes, the Indian Auto space! However, the Mahindra-Meru discussion is only deployed as a crafty (real or imagined) segue to a wider commentary on the depressed Indian Economy. 

Plenty of things have transpired over the last few days, be it RBI's gift to the government, mega bank mergers, or FM's non-stop economic tinkering, each event being significant in its own right. We try to look at this through the lens of Irving Fisher's (American Economist who lost most of his wealth during the Great Depression) debt-deflation theory and analyse whether a Keynesian approach of enhanced public spending is the answer. Plus there's a shrewd observation on statues ;) 

We’ve had an eventful few weeks here at LongShorts. We chatted with a long line of guests from various backgrounds with whom we conversed about a wide-ranging portfolio of topics. In this episode, we take a breather and go back to the good ol’ days when it was just us two chatting about the heavy-duty news developments of the week.

 

There’s been a lot in the news, therefore there’s a lot on our minds. Some things we discuss:

Surrounded by "heavy duty" political news and a bit of rain - we take a breather to catch up with Parikshit Chitalkar. 

Parikshit is Co-Founder and head of Tech and Product at StashFin, a digital lending platform offering flexible loan products through their Credit Line Card. 

He shares his story, including formerly building and exiting a business in Canada, the origin of StashFin, the room for innovative use cases in lending, and how they have managed to grow at a pace difficult to crack in the West. 

And in between, we also find room to chat about building teams, deploying products, NBFC stress, regulatory pulls, generalist bureaucrats, big data, privacy debates, and more!

A computer engineer by training, Aneesh Jain briefly dabbled in consulting at McKinsey and TechnoServe before he found his calling in the development sector, leading to the inception of Gram Unnati, a not-for profit set up working for the improvement of farmers' lives.

In yet another gear-shift from the series of guests we have had this season, Aneesh talks about how something that intuitively looked like a brilliant idea, with everyone posed to benefit, was in fact laden with multiple challenges.

Against the background of a lighter monsoon this year, this week's chat adopts a free market-oriented view about:

- The Indian agricultural value chain

- How the Indian Farmer is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea

- The good and evil of intermediated agriculture

- Building risk-free supply chains

- How diversification can help

- Push for Zero Budget Natural Farming in Budget 2019

Vatsal Srivastava has the rare distinction of being a Markets Participant...as well as a Markets Commentator. Between a B.A. Mathematics at St Stephen's and an MBA from INSEAD, he caught the trading bug when he speculated on L&T while interning at a Business TV channel. 

But he's kept writing on Finance close to his heart, frequently publishing columns on major financial papers, aside from recently serving at Reuters as their Asia Markets Correspondent.   

In this mighty interesting chat, Vatsal shares his thoughts on how "momentum with quality" tends to dominate over fundamental narratives when it comes to the Indian markets. He discusses where India's Financial Media goes wrong, shares his concern around policy confusion, the fuss about crypto, among other things.  

Samant Sikka is the Founder and Chief Dreamer at Sqrrl, a new age personal finance platform helping young Indians re-align their experiential lifestyle and consumption focus with the counter-intuitive objective of saving money.

An industry veteran with asset management stints at Axis and Goldman Sachs behind him, Samant is a passionate proponent of the idea that in the age of platforms it is the modern consumer use-case which will emerge as the winner. 

Our chat covers many interesting topics, some of which are:

Aashish Khullar is the first (now former) elected official on our Podcast though he doesn't fit its usual definition. He works with the UN system on global governance for sustainable development, specifically on environmental and economic issues.

He formerly represented the United Nations Major Group for Children and Youth at various intergovernmental and multistakeholder processes.

Extremely passionate for sustainable development, the importance of intergovernmental cooperation, and ecological economics, Aashish believes in multilateralism's power to solve global problems.

In this cross-dimensional conversation, we touch upon (among other things): 

- The Mechanics of United Nations

- Ecological Economics and Why Limits to Growth Isn't Such a Bad Think

- Degrowth

- Stranded Assets and Ecological Risk 

- Inertia and How Political Will Depends on Perspective

- The Future of Climate Change within Global Governance

Land Rights constitute one of the most complex and controversial policy issues afflicting Modern India. And Ankit Bhatia, an alumnus from IIT Kharagpur, from the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) has had a front-row seat while trying to deconstruct the problems at hand to make them part of mainstream discourse. Ankit and folks at CPR Land Rights Initiative started their journey over four years ago by analyzing 1,200 plus historical Land Acquisition-related Supreme Court cases to identify the biggest and most urgent structural problems at bay. 

In a country where 60% of the population directly depend on land for their livelihood, and who find themselves daily at the receiving side of its rapid economic transformation, Ankit walks us through some of the most significant land-related issues out there, including: 

A thoroughly interesting chat to listen through for anyone keen to understand how historical baggage and legal hoops are affecting the contemporary realities of millions.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal and not that of the CPR/ Land Rights Initiative.

When Mayank Kachhwaha initially dabbled with India's credit market as a wannabe entrepreneur (back from a six year stint at Capital One), he was keen to explore peer-2-peer lending. Thus started IndiaLends in March 2015. But soon the realization dawned upon them that India doesn't really have a credit supply problem. Rather, it is the structural issues in the customer cycle itself which need fixing. Be it the high cost of origination or the technological capabilities to adequately price risk. With that as its core mandate, IndiaLends has metamorphosed to become one of the country's rising digital lending platforms. 

In this super interesting chat, Mayank shares an in-depth view of the lending space at-large, especially in light of recent concerns around its stressed dynamic. 

He deconstructs the underlying value sitting in various customer segments, stresses the importance of risk management, and throws light on how data can indeed play a powerful and precise role, if correctly leveraged. 

He also shared his rather optimistic take on the quality of stakeholder engagement within the Indian Fintech space, be it within industry or with the regulator.