Poetry & prose by Alex Hickman
In Dar es Salaam we boarded the bus and then just sat there, waiting to go, the engine idling while through the open windows passed a fine dust and raised by unseen hands, aluminum trays of over-ripe bananas and bags of cashews, the banana smell and the hawkers crying for their money, the hawkers’ smell […]
Read More…Last week I listened to a 34 year old former banker talk about building a business in Africa. Zain Latif runs a private equity fund investing in sub-Saharan Africa called TLG. He is a smart American (he was a Vice President at Merrill Lynch at 23); polite and self assured and fascinated by his subject, […]
Read More…It is bad news that the Government of India (GoI) looks set to buy its new generation combat aircraft from Dassault Aviation of France and not EADS, which makes the Typhoon (mainly in the UK and Germany). This was some prize, which positions the winning firm and its government as a strategic partner for India […]
Read More…Yesterday I went along to a showing of Deepak Verma’s Mumbai Charlie in Somerset House. A young businessman, uncomfortably thrust into a senior role in the family business, has a car crash en route to a make-or-break business meeting. Dazed and confused, he is rescued by a cult of Charlie Chaplin worshippers who help him find his […]
Read More…On my (empty’ish) British Airways flight out to Mumbai, I read a worrying piece in the Financial Times (“Lack of aviation ties to emerging world expected to cost (UK) £14bn”). New research commissioned by BAA, the UK airport operator, has shown that Heathrow operates 22 daily flights to growth markets like China and India, less than Paris (25) […]
Read More…I’ve learnt a little about India since 2006; enough to understand the size of the opportunity, and the problem, its complexity, the talent of its people and how little I really know about them. My first proper look at India was through the prism of UK policy. Organising David Cameron’s visit here in 2006 gave me an […]
Read More…I am in Goa, at a week-end meeting of the British Business Group in India (my firm has just opened an office in Mumbai). I had wanted to start the morning with a swim in the Arabian Sea, which is blood warm, but I was warned about the high levels of raw sewage, and the […]
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