Rethinking economics, Culture, and work: One observation at a time - Shashi Bellamkonda

The Most Beautiful Roads (and why we still choose to walk them at Christmas) Winding Road to a Goal A dark, winding road illuminated by a bright star at the difficult destination, symbolizing the post's theme. The festive road to a difficult destination. The most beautiful roads lead to the most difficult destinations. — Henri to Sydney (Minka Kelly) Champagne Problems (2025) Some lines arrive gift-wrapped in a movie and still manage to cut straight to the bone. They remind us that the allure of a journey often lies in the challenge, not the ease. Champagne Problems Movie Poster A stylized, dark blue movie poster featuring the title and silhoue...

Age is just a story we choose to believe. Meet Drea Gibson — and the boy from India who learned to rewrite his own script. Drea Gibson is 40. Mother of four. Retired Army First Sergeant after 20 years and five combat tours. And right now? She’s a sophomore on the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor cross-country team — earning all-conference honors and outrunning athletes half her age. When I read her story in the Washington Post , something inside me cracked open. Growing up in India, we were taught a quiet rule: 35 is middle-aged. 50 is old. Dreams have expiration dates. Then I came to America and watched people start companies at 60, run marathons at 70, go back to college at 40 — and suddenly I realized: Age isn’t a fact. It’s a story. Drea didn’t ask permission from the calendar. She just laced up her shoes and rewrote the ending. Today I’m ch...

SB Shashi Bellamkonda Nov 27, 2025 Warren Buffett's Quiet Masterclass in Leadership: What He Really Values in People Warren Buffett's November 10, 2025 letter is not a typical shareholder update. It is a 95-year-old legend passing the baton while quietly teaching the rest of us what actually matters in people and leadership. 1. Temperament first — everything else second "Greg is a great manager, a tireless worker, and an honest communicator… Many of our best managers coincidentally lived for some time in Omaha and developed a balanced outlook on both personal and business matters." No mention of Harvard MBAs or Goldman Sachs pedigrees. Buffett hires for emotional equilibrium and long-term thinking — Omaha just happens to be a reliable filter. 2. "We had differences but never had an argument...

I recently read a fascinating piece by Maham Javaid in the Washington Post analyzing the World Happiness Report . The report, produced by the Wellbeing Research Center at Oxford and the UN, looks beyond GDP to find what actually drives life satisfaction. I've always held the philosophy that happiness should be a state of mind—something that shouldn't depend on others. But I admit, that is difficult to adhere to. It's hard to stay internally happy when you don't receive kudos for extra effort, or when you find yourself analyzing praise to see if it was just an afterthought. While my own philosophy has always been that happiness shouldn't depend on others, the data suggests that for most of the world, happiness is inherently social. Here is what the top-ranking countries teach us: 🇫🇮 Finland: Material Security Finland takes the top spot, but not because they are outwardly the "happiest" people. It's about anxiety reduction. "Researc...

  Do you still read the newspaper comics first, the way you did when you were eight? I do. Every morning, with my coffee, I flip (or scroll) straight to Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, Popeye, and Blondie. In my home outside Washington D.C., these same four-panel worlds still make me chuckle out loud—exactly the way they did when I was a kid growing up in India in the 1980s and early 90s. Back then, the Sunday edition of The Times of India or The Hindu carried a full color comics page dominated by American syndicated strips.  Dennis was forever in the doghouse, Sarge was forever screaming at Beetle, Popeye was forever reaching for that can of spinach, and Dagwood was forever building those impossible sandwiches. Beside them sat the brilliant single-panel Amul ads—the mop-top girl with her utterly Indian topical wit—but almost everything else felt deliciously foreign and, somehow, universal at the same time. I don’t remember a single Indian-produced daily comic strip in those...

  In a country famous for overwork, Sanae Takaichi just set a new standard for political insomnia. At 3 o’clock in the morning on November 20, most of Tokyo was asleep. Most, but not the Prime Minister. Cameras caught Sanae Takaichi, barely three weeks into the job, walking out of her official residence in the pre-dawn darkness to hold what her office delicately called a “study session” with senior aides. Translation: a full-dress cabinet-level meeting while the rest of the country dreamed. This wasn’t a national emergency. There was no missile flying overhead, no earthquake, no market crash. It was, apparently, just Thursday. The timing instantly became legend. Japanese Twitter (still stubbornly calling itself “X” in 2025) exploded with the hashtag #3時閣僚会議 (3 a.m. Cabinet Meeting). Memes of Red Bull cans photoshopped onto the Cabinet table went viral within minutes. A tired salaryman posted a selfie from his morning train with the caption: “If the Prime Minister can do 3 a.m., I g...

  We often view single parenthood through a lens of economic hardship. However, recent data suggests a significant shift that the market has largely ignored: the rise of the intentional single mother. 40% of all births in America are to unmarried women. And two, that America has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. Births to unmarried women aged 30 and up have increased by 140% in the last two decades, a period when teen births have fallen off a cliff. NPR's story on single motherhood spurred these thoughts.  The Shift from Circumstance to Choice Women over 30 are increasingly choosing single motherhood, supported by financial planning and reproductive technology. This isn't a distress category. It is a high-intent consumer segment making precise, high-stakes financial decisions. The Market Gap Despite this shift, our economic infrastructure remains optimized for dual-income households.  Real Estate: Mortgage underwriting and housing st...