DeansMusings

In an earlier article, I had written about the problem with delivery apps. https://rpdeans.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-problem-with-delivery-app-business.html My contention was that the market size was limited (less than what was projected by VCs) and growth would be limited. Margins from restaurants would reduce as competition offered them lower fees, or a subscription model. Delivery costs would rise, given that gig workers were inadequately compensated. This created a conundrum of falling growth, reducing margins and higher costs. Blinkit was a way to continue growth and kick the can down the road as far as profitability was concerned. So too, I believe is the company founder’s announcement that he wants to get into the airline space (running it like a bus service) and more recently, consider manufacturing jet engines. What I wrote in 2023, appears to hold good today, despite a lot of effort by Zomato (eternal) to be  profitable. I was called a sceptic when Zomato (Eternal) posted ...

Western accounts of the fight against the Taliban are mostly Hollywood style - Rambo type figures fighting the Taliban. The Afghan army – which did most of the fighting, is hardly mentioned. This is the story of an officer from the Afghan special forces. Four years ago, they were abandoned, when the US pulled out of Afghanistan. He had to flee to Iran and now faces possible deportation to Afghanistan and an uncertain future. This is his story of service in the Afghan army and being abandoned before the Taliban takeover. His identity has to be hidden for fear of his safety, but he has kindly shared his story for this blog. ( he is not fluent in English) My story : I proudly served in the Afghan national army for seven years and four months. During my service, I worked in joint operations units, as well as in an aerial surveillance section. The world sees the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan mostly through a Western lens, with analysis often disconnected from the reality on the grou...

Background ( Rahul Deans) : I used to do business in Afghanistan some 25 years ago. At the time, `business’ in Afghanistan consisted of importing goods from Dubai, into Afghanistan, at zero duty and smuggling it into Iran and Pakistan, which taxed those imports heavily. Control of the border crossings and the smuggling business was heavily contested, between various warlords, as was the other business in Afghanistan – opium cultivation and smuggling out of Afghanistan. To me, that was what much of Afghanistan’s civil war was about.    In more recent times, I found that every account of the situation in Afghanistan was by reporters who had never been to Afghanistan and were relying on old cliches to describe the situation. To give a first-person view, as I did in my recent blogpost on Myanmar, I had invited an old contact, a person from the Afghan army, who had been in intelligence and was unable to leave he country after the Taliban takeover. Unfortunately, he and his social...