GK Topics for Interviews at B-Schools, Banks, & Civil Services

This is my first post in almost a year. From today I will make it a norm to blog. 

This post is for those who are preparing for Interviews at India's leading b-schools. An interview is, usually, a free-ranging conversation. I am sharing my list of important GK areas to have a better crack at b-school interviews. 

International Issues – Politics, Economics, & Social

• U.S.: American elections, politics and policies of Donald Trump, violence at U.S. Capitol, names of members of Joe Biden administration. 

• China: Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), militarization of South China Sea, political & military muscle-flexing, economic problems in China, aging, repression at home (like crushing of dissent - Jack Ma), Coronavirus related issues. 
  
• West Asia: Recognition of Israel by leading Arab powers; nuclear ambitions of Iran; normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Qatar; Yemen conflict.

• Korean Peninsula: Political contrasts between North Korea and South Korea; North Korean nuclear & missile games; South Korea K-Pop culture.

• Assorted Issues: Brexit and its impact on the UK, elections in Uganda, Swedish strategy in handling COVID, and Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
  
  

National Issues – Politics, Economics, & Social

• Indian Economy: GDP growth pangs, problems facing the Indian economy, important facts and figures.

• Farm bills: Highlights and controversial issues.

• Stimulus packages: Highlights and various measures, especially concerning MSMEs.

• COVID: Spread and impact on people, healthcare, governance, and economy (with focus on Mumbai and Kerala models)

• Assorted Issues: West Bengal politics, environmental issues, and infrastructure problems.

This is not an exhaustive list, but I am sure this will provide you with basic preparation issues for interviews at b-schools. 

Weekend Videos

• Five things ants can teach us about management (3m 11s, BBC Ideas)
• “A First-Class Catastrophe”: Lessons Learned from Black Monday (21m 14s, YouTube)
• The life story of Microsoft founder Paul Allen (1m 16s, Business Today)

Sunday Reads

This post comes after more than two months since the last post. 

General Reads

• Inside the Bubble: Aboard the Air Force One. (BBC)
• China's Mediterranean Odyssey (Diplomat)
• Increase your return on failure (Harvard BR)

Photo Gallery 

• Russia's Flourishing Capital (Der Spiegel)

Controversial Read

• All the People God Kills in the Bible (Vocativ)

Anecdote

"How's your wife and my kids?" asked Rod Marsh (Australia) from behind the stumps.

"The wife's fine," replied the England batsman, Ian Botham, "but the kids are retarded."

GWPI Preparation: Current Affairs

The CAT Results are out. The GWPI (Group Discussion, Written Assessment/Aptitude Test, and Personal Interview) calls are trickling out. 

Current affairs/GK is one area most call-getters are not comfortable with. If you have got a GWPI call, then focus on the issues listed in the space below.

·          Global economics:

o   Slow global economic recovery;

o   eurozone crisis;

o   U.S. economy – jobless recovery and growth pangs;

o   Japan and Abenomics;

o   Economic, military & political power rise of China, and

o   BRICS – why Russia and Brazil are in recession.

·          Indian economy:

o   Current state of the economy;

o   Reasons behind slow GDP growth;

o   Faltering reforms process;

o   Infrastructure bottlenecks, including in railways;

o   FDI (especially in multi-brand retail, insurance);

o   NITI Aayog;

o   SMART Cities plan;

o   Swachh Bharat;

o   Digital India and Startup Ecosystem, and 
     o   Make in India and industrial clusters.

·          Global politics:

o   China - political & military muscle-flexing; 

o   Syrian crisis – Role of the Islamic State;

o   Rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; 

o   Israel-Palestine imbroglio;

o   Rising authoritarianism in Turkey;

o   Korean peninsula – North Korea versus South Korea; 

o   Iranian nuke plans and P+1 deal;

o   Terrorism in Afghanistan & Pakistan;

o   Russia – resurgence; also Russia-Ukraine crisis;

o   Post-Arab Spring situation in Egypt, Libya, & Tunisia; 

o   Ebola crisis in West Asia, and

o   Nigeria - terrorism & Boko Haram. 

·           National political & social issues:

o   Recent Assembly elections – impact on national polity;

o   J&K – elections, Article 370, & Jammu-Valley tussle;

o   Naxalism – origin, ideology, reach, methods;

o   Social Media - freedom of speech & curbs;

o   Black Money - menace of corruption;

o   Gender-related issues, including safety issues, and

o   Religion – conversions & reconversions debate.

Sunday Reads

• The Unbearable Lightness of America's War against the Islamic State. (Foreign Policy)

• Five Key Decisions Made at Paris. (Bloomberg) Also read Has History been made at COP21 (Paris Talks)?

• What proportion of a CEO's Success is down to luck? (Pieria)

Oscar Wilde claimed he could discuss any subject at any time prepared or not. A companion once took him up on this claim, asking that he discourse on the subject of “The Queen”. 

Responded Wilde: “The queen is not a subject.”

Sunday Reads

• Nine things successful people do differently. (Harvard Business Review)

• Who is a better strategist: Obama or Putin? (Foreign Policy)

• Inside Iran's revolutionary courts. (BBC)

• Zaheer Khan: The calm operator and the creator of doubts. (Hindu)

Sunday Reads

Return of the Sunday Reads.

• The rise and fall of Quaaludes. (BBC)

• The lost boys of Mogadishu. (AlJazeera)

• How leaders can remain optimistic during tough times. (Fortune)

• App to the mark. (New Indian Express)

Read The Explainer: Cash Reserve Ratio.

Sunday Reads - Confident Idiots + MBA Education

• Trilokpuri: Once upon a riot. (Indian Express) Also read Ajmer Rode's haunting poem on Trilokpuri riots of 1984. (Outlook)
• When island nations drown, who owns their seas? (Boston Globe)
• We are all confident idiots. (Pacific Standard)
• MBA education and the Pareto of management theories. (Business World)

The One Trait Successful Leaders Share

What is common to Mukesh Ambani, Richard Branson, John Chambers, Satya Nadella, Ajay Banga, and Shantanu Nayaren? Of course, they are hugely successful business leaders. Apart from that, what is the common thing that connects them all?

"Being smart, having capital, getting along with people, buying low, selling high -- these are all important things that every good manager does. But if you want to really be part of that group of successful leaders then you must always be thinking ahead. Way, way head. You must ask yourself all the time what decisions will I be making (or not making) today that will affect my business not next week or next month, but two, three, four years from now?"

Go to Entrepreneur.com to read the complete piece titled, 'The One Trait Successful Leaders Share'. 

Sunday Reads - Entrepreneurship & 5 Must-Have Leadership Traits

Three terrific reads for folks preparing for GDPI at India's leading b-schools.

• What the U.S. Fed stimulus accomplished. (NYT)
• The five must-have leadership traits. (BBC Capital)
• How to reinvent yourself with an entrepreneurial mindset. (FastCompany)

(From the archives - read The Explainer: Inflation)

Sunday Reads - Resume of a Top Executive & a Jihadi meets an Atheist

• The U.S.$750 million man. (FP)
• Could Iran and India be Afghanistan's Plan B? (Diplomat)
• The resume that makes for a top executive. (WaPo)
• An atheist meets a terrorist recruiter. (BBC)

A Big Promise to Keep

I have been very lazy in blogging. From today, there will be at least one post every two days. It is a promise I am sure I will live up to. Let's begin this blog's new year with two interesting reads.

• How India managed to defeat polio. (BBC)

In a vast country of more than a billion people who are culturally, economically, linguistically and socially diverse, "micro-plans" helped because they tossed up precious data about the specifics of a particular place - areas to be covered by each vaccination team on each day of the immunisation campaign, names and designations of the vaccinators, supervisors and community workers assigned to the area along with the vaccine, logistics distribution plan and so on.

• Public sectors units are no milch cows. (Business Line)

Can you imagine the promoter of a listed private sector company arm-twisting it to sell its products below cost to his favourite charity? Or asking it to buy shares in a group firm or demanding big dividends whenever he was short of cash?

You probably can’t, because this would have investors coming down on him like a tonne of bricks and regulators hauling him up for bad corporate governance. Yet, such promoter behaviour is par for the course in listed public sector companies in India.

Video: Bloomberg on why gold prices may rise 12% this year.

The second part of The Explainer: The Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflagration will appear this weekend. Read Part I. 

Sunday Reads - Cows might fly & In praise of micromanagement

• Why emergency was Fali Nariman's toughest moment. (ET)
• In praise of micromanagement. (BBC Capital)
• Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive. (New Statesman)
• Cows might fly. (Aeon) 

Year-end bonus: Best photos of 2013 from FP.

Sunday Reads - 790 Not Enough for Harvard & Highest Paid CEOs

This edition of Sunday Reads features interesting stuff related to the world of MBA and management. 

• Look who Harvard and Stanford B-Schools just rejected. (Fortune)
• Leadership is about emotion. (Forbes)
• 10 pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. (CEO)
• Highest paid CEOs with MBA. (Businessweek)

Sunday Reads - Tehranimal Farm & Algeria's Frankenstein

A few days back, I had delivered a talk on Iran's nuclear ambitions where I had talked about the atmosphere of fear and misery in the world's largest Shia republic. Foreign Policy has an interesting piece titled Tehranimal Farm on how George Orwell, the author of all-time classics like Animal Farm and 1984, explains today's Iran.

Argentina censured by the IMF for fudging economic data. Bloomberg has more on this.

Algeria's policy of supporting the Islamists has comeback to haunt it. As they say, for Algeria the chickens have come home to roost. Read this NYT piece on this topical issue.

"Why we tell lies at work," asks BusinessWeek. "Most of the lying that happens at work is a simple matter of ass-covering. You forgot to do something or elided some onerous task, and a fib squeaks out: a traffic jam that cost you an hour, a “lost” e-mail, or some other missed connection, all in the interest of buying time to recover."

Sunday Reads - Kill Him Silently & The Myth of Long Working Hours

Food for thought for your Sunday!

• The myth of long working hours. (The Rodin Hoods)
• Kill him silently: The story behind Mossad's bungled bid to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. (AlJazeera) 
• Mali Army, Riding U.S. Hopes, Is Proving No Match for Militants (NY Times)
• The Resource Race: China Dips Toes in Arctic Waters (Der Spiegel)

Check out this slideshow of 20 terrific pictures of the U.S. Air Force.

The Rothschilds Family - Do they own the world?

Conspiracy theories may sound improbable yet they are fascinating, else they would not sustain our interest. 

Let me share yet another major conspiracy theory: that the world is controlled by one major banker family - the Rothschilds! 

A few weeks back, I read this interesting piece on the Business Insider website on how the Rothschilds created modern finance and a vast fortune that has lasted for centuries. In fact, the Rothschilds are considered to be the richest family in all of history.

Seen in the picture above is Emma Georgina Rothschild, an economic historian at Harvard and an honorary professor at Cambridge. She also serves as a trustee to the Rothschild Archive, a London-based center for research into the family. She is married to the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen. 

Also check this photo-show to meet the remaining heirs of the legendary Rothschild family.

Anatomy of a CEO

It is the dream of every MBA (and MBA aspirant) to become the CEO of a leading corporate. Often, in their b-school interviews, aspirants are asked questions like, "what are the qualities of a manager," or /and "what makes for a successful leader". 

While this is not the space for discussion on such issues, I found this interesting infographic at ceo.com that lends some perspective on what makes a CEO tick.

Mid-Week Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

• Job losses stare Wall Street executives. (Reuters)

• Why is Venezuela so violent? (AlJazeera) 

• Government to blame for much of present economic woes. (ET) Also, check out how backward states are fueling India's GDP growth.

• Stalin's deadly railway to nowhere. (BBC Magazine)

Some guards used the insects to inflict merciless punishments.

"They'd undress the prisoner and tie him up for the mosquitoes and that was worse than any torture instrument."

... one young man, enslaved on the railway because of his politically incorrect poetry, was stripped naked and tormented in this way after he refused to give the names of some prisoners who had escaped.

A 16-year-old girl, whose mother had died and whose father returned wounded from the front, was desperate to feed her four younger siblings. When she was caught stealing half a sack of beetroots she too was sent off to build the railway. 

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

• Six reasons why the rupee is falling. (BBC)

• What-if and what-is: The role of Speculation in Science. (NYT)

• Emperor Akbar shares his secrets of power. (ET) Also check out this list of India’s most powerful CEOs. (ET) 

• The God busters. (Telegraph India)

Source: Economic Times