Evergrande’s liquidation is a new low in China’s property crisis

As Tommy Wu of Commerzbank, a German lender, has written, a full liquidation of Evergrande’s Chinese assets would probably send a shockwave through the Chinese economy.

This feels like Lehman Brother moment for US during the 2008 financial crisis. But now sure if China will respond in similar manner like what US did in 2009. So far we have seen some interest rate cuts but not as low as US did back then. And there are some stimulus packages but still not as big as the market excepts it to be. We have to wait & see how China is going to deal with this crisis.

Ram Mandir

Big & Beautiful Ram Mandir is opened in Ayodhya. It has got the interest of many millions of peoples heart. It good in that sense. But Modi, India’s Prime Minster going there for opening may not be a good idea. He has rights to follow his religion, but as an India’s Prime Minister, he could have excused himself out of the opening ceremony & visited it during normal times without hyping it in the media. He has duty to serve all Indian’s irrespective of the religions.

Personal Updates

Turned 40

Turned 40 this year! They say life begins at 40, have to see that :-)

We celebrated as usual by going for a dinner date & brunch with kids. Also guys took me out for two weekends. My wife started asking how long I am planning to celebrate my 40th? :-) I am grateful to have these friends! And Thank You, to all the friends & family who sent their wishes!

Hope everyone had a good holiday break and getting back to routine. Our holiday season was busy with family/friends visiting us from other cities and hosting parties. And took a trip to a resort in San Antonio, turned off my mobile, read half of a book & had some good time off.

Reflect on 2023

I try to reflect on some of the major events from the last year at the end of the year. Below are some of the highlights of 2023

Moving to TX

Moving is hard! This year we actually pulled the trigger to move from MN to TX. It’s an emotional roller coaster ride! We experienced excitement, nervousness, upset, and exhaustion at various times. We were excited to move to a larger space, nervous about how everything would work out in the new place, and upset that some of the things were not up to our expectations in the new home. And of course, we were exhausted with all the moving, making so many decisions in furnishing the home, and making new friends. We knew this year going to be hard on us on many fronts, so we took it easy on us overall. Is it worth going over all this, is moving to TX a good decision? these are some of the questions that come to our mind too. So far life is good here, social life is better here as friends are close by. Our plan is to stay here for the coming decades, so this one-time investment is worth it I guess.

Major Tech

Generative AI has taken over the tech industry. I tried some hands-on applications with RAG and I am very bullish on how it can help us in increased productivity. So many open LLM models are released including Meta’s Llama 2. OpenAI released GPT 4. Many hardware players introduced AI-specific chips, especially for LLM workloads. All major cloud providers released features around LLM.

Cybertruck was finally released, it is in a way pushing the car tech forward by using a steer-by-wire, 48v system, ethernet cable & bus architecture for cabling. At the same time, Tesla had a setback on FSD and had to limit its usage on local roads. I feel like so many accidents could have been avoided by proper marketing from Tesla & with additional hardware like radar & camera inside the car to detect the driver's drowsiness like many other manufacturers do.

Major Political events

Time’s video was good in summarizing the 2023 political events including the Chinese spy balloon, the Speaker election, Ukraine funding, Israel-Gaza war, Biden running for 2024 president, George Santos & Trump Indictments.

Simplified my financial portfolio

After seeing the tech layoffs in 2022, my investment priorities changed. I started thinking in a pyramid-like structure, first setting aside emergency funds, then I like to have a portfolio that can take care of my home expenses & then focus on pure growth.

Based on that thinking I leaned towards dividend-focused ETFs. After several iterations, I came to this final portfolio

1. Income & Growth - 90%

   1. SCHD - 45%

   2. VIG - 45%

2. Growth - 10%

   1. VGT - 5%

   2. SCHG - 5%

This roughly gets ~2.5% dividend income annually, and also the asset grows at ~10%. I feel confident in doing Dollar Cost Investing into this portfolio anytime & any amount. Every year I am thinking of increasing the “Growth” by 10% & reducing the “Income & Growth” by 10%. And probably in the next decade, my focus will shift more towards growth once basic needs are satisfied.

Looking forward to 2024

I like to look forward to things to keep life interesting. I am looking forward to some of these major things.

More time to explore

Now that we feel we are mostly settled in this new place, we will have more time for other activities. Looking forward to exploring more locally & exploring TX via road.

India Vacation

We booked our tickets to India for this summer along with our friends. Hope traveling with friends will help bear these brutal long flights :-). Also planning to visit Madurai & other southern cities. Looking forward to that.

More Generative AI

I think Generative AI will pick mainstream this year. More enterprises will adopt office copilot as their starting point, and develop RAG applications. And this should increase productivity. Going to be interesting to watch the trends here.

2024 Elections

Two major democracies have elections this year. The US election is more interesting to follow, going to test so many constitutional laws. I may get overwhelmed sometimes, as I have a vested interest in the US now. Need to meditate to accept whatever the outcome is.

Fitness

Fitness took a backseat in 2023, hoping to get back to my routines in 2024. I like the idea of getting into some sports like Tennis, badminton, or cricket, as it increases social connections too. Also planning to do 50-mile biking along the Trinity River in the spring/fall.

Reading

Reading also took a back seat last year. This year I am planning to read more. Below are some of the books I like to read this year.

Writing

I was not consistent in writing this year, as my social life got busy. Most Saturdays either we invite guests or we are invited to our friend’s home. Sunday morning seems to be the time for me to write down this. Going to start writing my blogs on Sunday morning & try to publish them before evening. Let’s see how this goes & tweak my strategies as it goes. Also planning to start a blog dedicated to tech this year.

If you have reached this far in the blog, have a fabulous Happy New Year :-)

Holiday Season Begins

It got busy over the last few weeks with the holiday season. We had Halloween, then Deepavali, and Thanksgiving.

The Halloween celebration was pretty much the same as in MN, kids got dressed up in costumes and went for trick or treat in the neighborhood.

Deepavali got busy in TX, and many Indian friends stopped by to give us sweets which was something new we experienced here. We invited a few neighbors and had a lunch feast.

And 20+ families in the neighborhood celebrated Deepavali again the next weekend in our Amenity center with kids’ dance, ladies’ dance, and other singing performances. Getting kids for dance practices was also very convenient as we were all living close by. In MN, we had to drive kids 30 minutes for dance practices. We felt like being part of a community.

This Thanksgiving is special to us, this was the first time we hosted a Thanksgiving dinner ever, with our decade-long friends from MN. We had 4 families from MN who drove to TX and stayed with us for the whole week. The whole week was super fun & very memorable first Thanksgiving in TX.

Happy Holidays everyone! May this holiday bring joy to you & family!

House Elects Mike Johnson as Speaker, Embracing a Hard-Right Conservative

Finally, after three weeks of chaos, the house has elected a speaker. And this speaker is also one of those who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Looks like the GOP is leaning toward the far right.

Mitt Romney on today's Republican Party

Character Counts, character of our leaders makes a difference and it shapes the charcter of our country, thats the party I come from & I don’t recognize that in the great majority of our party today and that for me is very troubling.

It is indeed troubling for me too. We need two food parties to debate important topics and get better outcomes. Lately, I feel we are not having productive debates, it’s just pointing fingers & creating conspiracies.

I don’t think I heard a sinlge member of my caucus Republicans in senate say “you know Donald Trump is great, aren’t we luncky to have him as our leader”. Donald Trump represents a failure of character which is changing I think in many respects the pysche of our nation and heart of our nation. And that’s something which takes a long time if ever to repiar.

It is sad to see what the US is going through. Hope it will come out stronger.

It’s very hard to stand for the values & stand against the majority of your own party members. I am glad at least very few Republicans stand for the values & characters and I am sure they will be remembered for this in history.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

It's a lengthy interview but goes back all the way to 1993 when the company was started, and how took big bets on Riva 128 & AI which has paid off big time.

Position yourself closer to the opportunities, you don’t have to be perfect.

We need to be closer to the apple tree so that when the apple falls we can catch it or at least pick it up from the ground.

He tries to skim through important research papers & often in touch with researchers who are thinking decades ahead and that helps him position Nvidia closer to future opportunities.

Prioratize your time carefully, don’t let outlook control you, then you have plenty of time to achieve anything you want. \

It’s something like “You can get anything you want but not everything”. Prioritization is the key here.

And btw, I happened to get a pic with Jensen last week after our company meeting in Austin. He’s kind enough to take pics with like 100+ employees there.

Maine shooting suspect found dead in cargo trailer, motive still a mystery

It is sad to see this keep repeating and no one takes action on this. Our prayers are with the victim's family. I believe common sense gun laws will help prevent these.

Israel-Hamas war

I admit I am not an expert here and don’t know much of the history. I have been trying to learn some history in the last few weeks. But if I see the event without any historical context, it looks like barbarism. And it is sad to see Innocent Palestinians suffering from this conflict. I pray for these wars & misunderstandings to end soon & pray for all families on both sides who lost their friends & families.

Here’s a good interview with Joe Biden on this topic.

Q: Is it too much for America to take on two wars at the same time?
A (Joe Biden): We are united States of America for God’s sake. We can take of both of this.

All I can do is appreciate his confidence in the US & thank him for his service to the US under these extreme conditions (two wars, dysfunctional Congress). Wish him all the best & luck to see all these through.

House Speaker Election

The House Speaker Election is in chaos from midterm. It all stems from dividend country & which led to the GOP’s mediocre midterm & winning the House with a thin margin. Also like Joe Biden said in the above video, the new GOP is 30% MAGA Republicans and has a different view of the world. Wish House Republicans could come together & sort this out sooner & start focusing on other pressing issues for the US government.

Good interview from Sen. Mitt Romney about the topic.

The more outrageous things you say, the more followers you get. People Increasingly coming to Washington who’s objective in staying office is to make more noise not to make law.

I do see this pattern & it is sad. It is the responsibility of the citizens to focus on the accomplishments & eligibility of the public official to do the job rather than the noise they make.

Sidney Powell pleads guilty over efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia and agrees to cooperate

This is big news, Sidney Powell is in a close circle with Trump & associates involved on Jan 6. Now she can testify against other co-conspirators including Trump. We will have to wait & watch how this unfolds.

AI

I couldn’t write this last week, I was traveling back from SFO & my flight got delayed. Anyway for the past two weeks, I couldn’t get to follow much of the news in detail, my thoughts were around the AI. One, I was attending the Ray Summit in SFO, it’s an MLOPS platform tool used by top tech companies at various levels to train or deploy AI models. And after attending talks from top tech companies, my mind is fully absorbed in it. Second, I was doing a POC at work to use LLM to try to answer questions on our internal docs. After seeing some of the preliminary results I am stunned at how good these things really are. They are going to be a massive productivity booster for the US economy & rest of the world. If you are interested in knowing more about why productivity matters for the economy, watch the great video - How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio.

To show you a quick glimpse I developed a small chatbot that understands all my previous 23 blogs & tries to answer questions about me & my opinions. Here are some snippets from that.

The answers are very good and definitely much easier to understand my opinions by asking questions rather than reading through all the past 23 blogs & trying to reflect on them to form an opinion. Think about how useful this can be in a typical enterprise where information is spread across various channels and how easy it will be for the employees to just ask the question & get a concise answer, rather than searching & reading through pages of documents or asking a college. This is going to be a productivity booster for sure.

By the way, you can play with my chatbot here - https://huggingface.co/spaces/sara4dev/rag-iblog-qa and tell me if you find anything interesting :-)

Meta AI Announcements

@metaai is going to be integrated into all meta apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. And billions of people are going to start interacting with it. AI boom is real.

Microsoft AI (Copilot) Announcements

Similar announcements from Microsoft a week ago, that AI copilot will be available on Windows.

Amazon steps up AI race with up to $4 billion deal to invest in Anthropic

The news represents perhaps Amazon's biggest answer yet to challenges from Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google, smaller cloud rivals that have marketed or developed powerful AI this year. The deal also shows ongoing maneuvering by the cloud companies to secure ties with AI startups reshaping their industry.

All the Big cloud providers are competing to get their AI story better. “Follow the money” mantra, shows that AI is going to have huge growth in the coming decade.

OpenAI could see its secondary-market valuation soar to $90B

OpenAI is in discussions to possibly sell shares in a move that would boost the company’s valuation from $29 billion to somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the talks.

In April, OpenAI picked up just over $300 million in funding from backers such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global at a valuation of $29 billion. That was separate to a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, which closed in January. The size of Microsoft’s investment was believed to be around $10 billion.

In six months the valuation is more than doubled! There is an AI boom for sure, but still nervous to see this kind of sky-high valuation in a short period of time. Is it a repeat of Dot Com boom & bust stories? I hope it’s not.

Phew! There’s so much of an AI story that happened in just the last two weeks.

At the G20, Biden joins forces with India and the Middle East, sidelining China

President Biden announced plans for a new rail and shipping corridor that will connect India, the Middle East and Europe — a long-term push to improve the way goods, energy and information moves across borders, that notably does not involve China.

Finally West is doing something to counter China’s Belt & Road initiative. And it’s good for India in the long run.

Leaders from China, the world's second-largest economy, and Russia — a long-time partner of India — opted not to attend.

Xi not attending is not good. Looks like China is alienating itself from the rest of the world.

Also, there are criticisms that G20 nations went soft in criticizing Russia for the war. This is expected as India & Russia have a good relationship & the G20 is happening in India this time.

You’re talented and hardworking in what is the most innovative platform in history: America.

For decades, America has predicted — arrogantly and repeatedly — the imminent fall of a nation. The doomed nation, according to Americans? A: America.

I too have this doubt based on political divisions and Congress's inaction on gun reforms, increased national debt, and immigration reform. The US collapsing is something that worries me sometimes, as we live here & most of my assets are invested in the US.

The stat dedollarists point to is that the dollar has fallen from 70% share of the world’s currency reserves to 60% in the past 20 years. That may sound significant, but the scope is comically small. When you zoom out you find that in the ’80s our share was 50%, and 30 years before it was 40%. The only accurate description of the dollar’s reserve status over the past 75 years is … unwaveringly dominant. At 20%, the next-best option (the euro) is not within striking distance.

Another catastrophist go-to: the debt-to-GDP ratio. Currently, our national debt amounts to 120% of our GDP. In other words, we’re borrowing more money than we’re making. Sounds bad. Until you look at other nations and realize it’s, wait for it, less bad. Singapore is at 130%, Italy, at 150%, and Japan, at 260%.

Though this number looks relatively better, it still makes me nervous. I am not an economist but I wouldn't run my home with 120% debt of the annual income.

Last year, U.S. startups received $245 billion in venture funding — roughly equal to the rest of the world combined.

The schadenfreude we feel for our own country when it stumbles is nothing new. In fact, I would argue that in a democracy this is a feature not a bug. Things appear brighter when our favored political party is at the helm, and vice versa when it isn’t.

This is true, the sentiment is low with my right-wing friends.

If you are healthy, have someone who loves you, and enjoy a household income greater than $34,000, then you are in the top 1% globally. Think about this — you are 1 in 100. Why? Yes, you’re talented and hardworking. But more than that, you’re talented and hardworking in what is the most innovative platform in history: America.

Lately, I have a strong conviction that where we position ourselves matters the most. Working hard in a losing country may not help us, but doing the same in a great country like the US propels us further.

Good to see some optimistic articles on the US outlook.

Books:

“The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman

Chapter 1: Develop a Competitive Advantage

At nearly every point of your career you will have to distinguish yourself from people who share your goals. Put simply, if you want something specific out of life, there are probably others seeking the same thing. For anything desirable, there’s competition: a ticket to a championship game, the arm of an attractive person, admission to a good college, and especially every good professional opportunity. And amid today’s decentralized workforce, your competition has multiplied, because now you aren’t just competing with others who live within commuting distance of your dream job; you’re competing with people all over the world.

This is so true today, same work can be done across the world. The competition is more.

If you want to chart a course that differentiates you from other professionals in the marketplace, the first step is being able to complete the sentence “A company would hire me over other professionals because…” How are you faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by?

Begin by competing in local contests—local referring to specific industry segments and skill sets. Don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small to midsize companies that compete in the health-care industry. Don’t just try to be the highest-paid hospitality operations person in the world; establish yourself as the best hospitality leader in the ski lodge market. In other words, determine which (smaller) niche allows you to develop a competitive advantage.

Being an expert in a niche area seems like a great idea. This is something I try in my career too, but not there yet.

Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you—as entrepreneurs do. The most brilliant business idea is often the one that builds on the founder’s existing assets in the most brilliant way.

Hard assets are undoubtedly important. But they also have a hard ceiling. There are only so many things you can do for your career with money. And money compounds in an index fund only so fast. With soft assets, on the other hand, the only limits are your own imagination for how to apply them and your appetite for learning. In fact, the right combination of soft assets can 10x your earning power in hard asset terms—and sometimes at lightning speed. So, if you adopt an investing mindset, where do you put your time? Developing hard or soft assets?

Our advice is to go all-in on soft assets. Learn new skills, make new connections, and work on building your brand. Because these soft assets are more difficult to tally than cash in a bank account, people tend to underestimate their value.

In the long run, a person with a foundation of knowledge and skills will make more money and likely live a more meaningful life than the person who optimized too early for a better salary. There’s a similar view in VC-backed startups: Technology companies focus on learning over profitability in the early years to maximize revenue in the later years. So, ask yourself: “Which career options will grow my soft assets the fastest?” Even simpler: “Which offers the most learning potential?”

It’s on you to develop your skills and aspirations in the direction of market demand.

The amazing thing about momentum is that it can make up for a lot of other weaknesses. Some startups deliver a mediocre product developed by a mediocre team (we won’t name names) but they do so in a white-hot market—and achieve great success. The market pulls success out of them. A strong market can overcome almost any deficiency in a startup, at least for a time. This is why we sometimes tell people, “Pick an industry, not a job.” Which is to say, focus on working in a sector that’s hot. Then, once you get to know that industry a bit, pick a company. And from there pick whatever job inside that company is available and roughly in line with your skills and aspirations. Your specific job doesn’t matter nearly as much as the company growth trajectory. Working at a hot company can extend your personal brand and endow you with legitimacy, or just increase the odds of strategic serendipity. And even a modestly impressive company that operates in a hot industry is going to be a source of opportunity.

I strongly agree with this, one of the reasons I joined Nvidia is to be part of the AI wave and it does seem to be helping.

A good career plan accounts for the interplay of the three gears—your assets, your aspirations, and the market realities. The gears need to fit and rotate together.

As Silicon Valley VCs, Ben and I love to invest in internet franchises that possess strong “growth loops.” What the hell is a growth loop? It’s a feature of a business that yields compounding value—value that multiplies over time—rather than one-off gains. Think of a flywheel: The faster you turn it, the faster it spins. Momentum builds and compounds.

Being in a niche area helps to compound the knowledge.

So play with your assets, aspirations, and the market realities until you see compounding potential in one of the combinations. Sure, being faster, better, or cheaper for a given job will make you more competitive. But if you find a growth loop for the intersection of what you do well, what you value, and what the market wants, then you’ve got something even better. You have a rocket-ship career.

Personal Update

I could not write this for the last 4 weeks, My wife was traveling for work and I had to take care of the kids alone. Then I traveled to India for two weeks to attend a close wedding and check up on my parents’ health.

Now I feel like I am back to routine.

Jan 6th Indictment

Finally the indictment for Jan 6 is here. It’s just the indictment and he is not convicted yet, so he is innocent until proven guilty. Good to hear from the former head of the DOJ who served the Trump administration, about this case. One thing is clear, we don’t want one more Jan 6 and we need to make the people accountable for what they did. We have to wait & see how it all unrolls. Also looks like the DOJ is expecting a speedy trial, and it could be in Jan/Feb 2024. 2024 is going to be law & order series in real life.

Fitch Cuts U.S. Long-Term Ratings From 'AAA' to 'AA+'

Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating due to fiscal concerns, a deterioration in U.S governance, as well as political polarization reflected partly by the Jan. 6 insurrection

Ballooning debts & divided country are not helping Americans. Once the US bond rating is downgraded, investors demand more interest as the risk increases, and this in turn will increase the mortgage rate, car loan rates, etc and bring down the asset prices (home/stocks) and it will hurt every American. People should elect leaders who can unite the country, calm the country & also manage the debts. Hope US can fix this.

Books:

Started reading “The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman

Introduction

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create and take control of our destiny is encoded in human DNA—and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship. As Yunus says, our ancestors in the caves had to feed themselves; they had to invent rules of living. They were founders of their own lives first, and founders of civilizations only later. In the millennia since then we forgot that we are by our very nature entrepreneurs. Instead, we’ve been acting like “labor,” as Yunus puts it. This isn’t the way to create a great career.

One major change has been the disintegration of the long-term pact between employee and employer that used to guarantee lifetime employment and training in exchange for lifelong loyalty. With the death of traditional career paths, you can bid farewell to the kind of traditional professional development previous generations enjoyed.

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself. Companies aren’t inclined to invest in you, in part because you’re not likely to commit years and years of your life to working there. This relentless decaying of the employer-employee relationship is especially true as companies become more geographically distributed and more employees work remotely—those employees can often feel less personally connected to their colleagues and company culture.

Professional loyalty in your career now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your superiors, as Dan Pink has noted. The United States (and its peers) have largely become, as he famously put it, a free agent nation.

The business strategies employed by highly successful startups and the career strategies employed by highly successful individuals are strikingly similar. What I mean is, the principles for successfully scaling a company aren’t so different from the keys to “scaling” a great career—quickly growing one’s skill sets, relationships, and market relevance in the same way that companies quickly grow their products, operating capabilities, and customer base.

Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. We believe it is essential to keep your career in “permanent beta.”

To live in permanent beta is to make a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth—to living according to yet. Approaching your career this way will give you an edge as the world changes, your competition changes, and you change. Professional life, after all, doesn’t take place in a vacuum; it takes place in markets, which are always moving toward new horizons. It’s Day 1. Every single day.

India Launches Lunar Mission With a Shot at Winning This Year’s Moon Race

If the robotic lander and rover aboard Chandrayaan-3 succeed in landing intact, that will be an accomplishment that no country other than China has pulled off this century, adding to the national pride India takes in its homegrown space program

Although the design of the lander is largely the same, changes include stronger landing legs, more propellant, additional solar cells to gather energy from the sun and improved sensors to measure the altitude.

The software was also changed so that the spacecraft could turn faster if needed, and the allowed landing area has been expanded.

Hope we (India) can make it this time, nevertheless we will learn from the mistake & keep progressing.

Meta's Threads, which is basically a Twitter clone, minimizes news and politics

Within a week it crossed 100M+ users, but recently threads app engagement has dropped. Nevertheless it’s a great start for Meta Threads app. My initial opinion is that Threads might look like CNN’s equivalent & Twitter might look like Fox media based on some of the top influencers in both the platform.

Meta learned long ago that if they de-emphasize politics and news, they could make more money. When people share content about influencers, about celebrities or when people are chatting about or sharing photos about friends and family, that's what really keeps people engaged. That's what keeps people scrolling, and that's what keeps the advertising dollars rolling in.

Meta might not push more political content, so twitter will have its own market too but it may not make more money & the size of the company might go down further.

We're told that we make social media, but really the experience is shaped a lot by the companies and their algorithms and which posts they promote or which posts they downgrade.

This is something alarming. I used to be far way from politics, but in the last 5 years so I became more involved in politics & have string opinions, I am mostly certain it’s because of the social medias & their algorithms to push more contents that I like to watch.

SOL MESSING (former top researcher at Facebook): When folks see more political content in their news feeds, they tend to become more interested in politics. They tend to develop more consistent policy preferences. They tend to report voting at higher rates.

This’ a positive note on getting involved in politics, people who are involved show up to vote.

NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress

Mr Zelensky also got more than he initially thought. nato was never going to admit Ukraine while intense fighting is going on, because that would have risked direct fighting between Russia and the West, which could threaten nuclear escalation. But Ukraine has been offered an accelerated process for membership once the war is over. The alliance has agreed to waive the requirement for Ukraine to go through an arduous “membership action plan” before it is admitted. Although a promise that admission will happen quickly after hostilities cease would have been better, this also marks a step forward.

Mr Zelensky is not happy about that it’s not able to join NATO now, but concerns for the west is also valid. Atleast Ukraine got a deal that the process will be accelerated

the fact that Russia knows that nato will not admit Ukraine as long as war rages gives it an incentive to keep fighting. What counts is less the conditions for some hypothetical nato membership in the future, so much as a concrete and lasting programme to defend Ukraine right now. That is where the summit made real progress.

Looks like this war may keep going. Putin know if the war ends Ukraine will join NATO, so that keeps him going. But not sure if Russia has the resources to keep the war going.

Why is India Paying Russia with Chinese Yuan?

India need to export more to Russia to make the Rupee more useful. Though purchasing oil for cheaper helps India & keeps inflation down, it does look like we are supporting the war indirectly by funding Russia & promoting Petroyuan.

Why inflation is losing its punch — and why things could get even better

Core inflation in June is 4.8%, lower than 5.3% in the last month. This is a good news, still inflation is way higher than Feds target of 2%. It’s expected that there will be one more 0.25% rate hike in next few weeks and Fed may pause if the core inflation keeps going down.

The data showing easing inflation on Wednesday will likely be greeted as welcome news to the country's inflation fighters, but the battle is probably not over.

Personal Update

Trip to Smoky Mountains

It was gathering of friends & their families who all worked together in Lacrosse, WI during 2011-2012. We got a 9 bedroom cottage & it was great fun for kids & adults. Smoky is a very dense forest with great terrains & very beautiful!

Georgia Aquarium & Coke Center

Major Cricket League in US: TSK vs LAKR

Went to the opening match for the Major Cricket League that happened here in DFW area in TX. Learned that CSK owner is the same for TSK (Texas Super Kings). And TSK won the opening match against LA Knight Riders, it was super exciting to watch this live match in the stadium.

Joe Biden and Narendra Modi are drawing their countries closer

To work, the relationship will have to function like a long-term business partnership: India and America may not like everything about it, but think of the huge upside. It may be the most important transaction of the 21st century.

Modi visited Biden here in the US & the partnership looks positive. India might see a huge growth in the coming decade. It's a difficult partnership of course as India has ties with Russia and it has to balance the relationship between these countries. So far it feels like it's managing it better, hope it stays that way.

Fed chair expects more rate hikes amid inflation fight

Inflation is moderated still it's not coming down as expected. FMOC participants think we need more rate hikes before this year ends. Labor market is tight, so they are comfortable to raise rates further to fight inflation.

Personal Finance

Lately I have been thinking about creating a portfolio which

1. is simple enough for anyone to understand

2. managed passively

3. pays dividends

4. allows me to sleep well

Why do I need a simple enough portfolio?

I don’t want to over complicate it as anyone should be able to understand it if I am not around & make it easy for everyone around me. Also I don’t have to spend time making investment decisions, it frees up my mind for other activities.

Why do I need a passively managed fund?

1. Management fee is less

2. Humans are emotional and make erratic decisions. Whereas computers are not emotional and keep executing the simple strategy again & again & in the long run it gets better return too. Below talk explains why indexing beats active management. I read his book What Works on Wall Street & The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. I am totally convinced indexing is best for me.

Why Dividends are Important?

1. Dividends fluctuate very less compared to the actual stock. As per Jack Bogel we can learn to live with the dividends in retirement rather than worrying about the fluctuating stock price. Below graph shows dividend cuts happened only during major economic crises. Btw, VIG dividends are increased in 2020, 2021 & 2022 where as the VIG stock price fluctuated a lot during the same period.

2. Dividends reinvested, provide a much greater return in the long run. Lately most of the companies do buy back shares that also is a dividend paid to shareholders indirectly.

3. Also companies which consistently grow the dividends is a proxy to the companies earnings growth. Without earnings growing, companies cannot keep increasing the dividends.

Why I need a portfolio which allows me to sleep well?

I am planning to invest a major part of my assets in this portfolio, and planning to live off the dividends from this portfolio in the coming decades. I don’t want to take unnecessary risk in this & lose my sleep over it. I am okay to give up some growth for less stress.

Portfolio Construction

Now I am convinced to look for a Dividend growth ETF due to the above reasons. I looked into top 3 Dividend ETFs based on AUM.

I liked VIG, as it focuses on the dividend growth over the period of 10 years & eliminates top 25% high yield to eliminate companies with financial instabilities. And it’s well diversified with 314 holdings.

Only drawback is the starting yield is low, roughly 1.9%. But dividend growth over the period looks good.

And then I looked at the VYM, and not so inclined on this index as it just looks at the yield alone. Since companies pay high dividends, it doesn’t mean they are good. We need companies which keep increasing dividends in the long term. So I am skipping this ETF.

Then comes SCHD, this one is very interesting. Its starting yield is ~3.5% and asset growth over the decade is also good. And the index methodology is also good, as it focuses on cash flow, debt, return on equity & dividend growth.

Only drawback of this fund is it has only ~100 stocks in the portfolio. It’s less diversified than VIG & has a history of only 10 years. But I like to give a shot on this ETF.

Now that I decided to go with VIG & SCHD, I need to decide on how much to allocate to each. I definitely want to overweight VIG as it's well diversified, and I thought maybe I will go with the allocation based on these ETF’s AUM.

So it comes to roughly VIG - 60% & SCHD - 40% for the equity part of the portfolio, which is 90% of the total portfolio.

Though it’s rare to cut dividends it may happen sometimes, so I like to keep 10% in cash equivalent. I am using BIL ETF for that, a 1-3 month treasury bills which is not susceptible to interest rate risks.

I took this inspiration from Warren Buffet’s portfolio which he created for his wife which is 90% equity & 10% short term bonds.

This’ how my final portfolio looks like. 3 ETFs (VIG, SCHD, BIL), with total expense ratio of 0.07% ($7 per $10,000) & dividend yield of ~2.5%.

You can click around & play with this portfolio here.

Conclusion

1. Focus on the dividends as it fluctuates way less compared to the stock price and this helps to stay invested rather than panicking.

2. Only if you buy right, you can hold tight during the downturns. Buying index based ETFs which focuses on quality companies helps to hold tight & ride the wave.

Let me know what you think about this thought process & hit me with your thoughts & suggestions.

Nvidia’s Trillion Dollar Market Cap

It took 30 years for Nvidia to reach $1 Trillion market cap (for a short time). Jensen’s bet on AI started a decade ago and thats paying off greatly now. Their datacenter business is booming & it’s going to be like that for sometime.

The Trump Classified Documents Indictment

These evidences show Trump doesn’t knows how to handle the top secret documents. But we should assume he is innocent until it’s proven and give him chance to explain all these.

Apple Vision Pro

With the $3500 price tag, limited to 1 person at a time & 2 hr battery life, this is going to be a very niche market. May be in couple of iterations it can get affordable for the majority.

Personal Update

Nila’s finished her 1st grade! And her summer Holidays have started just before the Memorial weekend.

We took a road trip to Austin during memorial weekend & spent time with friends, celebrated Deva’s 2nd birthday.

And we are still exploring the local places in Dallas when we get time.

Collin County parents travel to Austin to protest gun violence

The group believes their call to action is the best way to honor the 8 victims who went to the Allen Premium Outlets earlier this month and never came back home.

Most of the Parents feel the same ^^. I wonder how this government is honoring these victims.

I also wanted to do something, and joined this group & took a trip to Austin to talk to the house representatives and see what they are going to do. I am disappointed that these law makers don’t have any sensible bills in front of them to stop this form reoccurring or open to ideas as well.

Disney cancels $1B Florida project

DeSantis seems to be going after Disney for speaking out. Doesn’t sound wise to attack corporates like this.

Personal Update

Went to Ray Roberts State Park with friends & it was a time well spent.

At Least 9 Dead, Including Gunman, in Shooting at Texas Mall

“We all want the victims and their families impacted by this tragedy to know that we will wrap our arms around you and we are here for you,” Ken Fulk, the mayor of Allen, said at a news conference. “We know you are grieving. We are grieving. Rest assured, the nation and the world are also grieving. Allen is a proud and safe city, which makes today’s senseless act of violence even more shocking.”

This is heart breaking for us. We just went to that mall few weeks back & I went there again last Sunday to exchange the shoes. I couldn’t imagine this happening in this nice neighborhood. We still don’t know who is the shooter & whats his motive are. But one thing is sure, he used some form of automatic style weapon. Why do we still allow civilians to get assault weapons? I lost hope in US political system, they are not going to fix this. Who is going to fix this? I don’t know. We will have to learn to live with it I guess. Such a sad state to be in one of the wealthiest counties in the world. It’s beyond shame for failing to act on it. Glad to have friends close by to sit & talk about it over the beers to get it out of my system.

Mr. Fulk added that the police have been trained to not “hesitate to move toward the threat,” which most likely saved more lives.

Glad an officer was there near by & acted quickly. Our prayers are with the affected family.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

This time the non-human source is the AI.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews.

I can see this happening. The text from AI bots are much better, and it can make us believe on something that is not true.

For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

It may be good too, who knows may be AI can dream better ways for us humans to live their lives.

The Amazing AI Super Tutor for Students and Teachers | Sal Khan | TED

Heres one positive side of the AI deployment. Personal tutor for everyone is amazing, it will help kids to understand the topic better.

France protests: More than 100 police hurt in May Day demonstrations

I may not be able to appreciate why such an anger for increasing the retirement for just 2 more years. At least for now my thinking is I don’t want to retire, just keep doing what I like until I can & be useful for the society.

Personal Update

Went to the Stonebriar Centre this Friday and just walked around the mall. We may not be going to malls for sometime I guess with whats happening around.

He & his surprise face :-)

Joe Biden Launches His Campaign For President

Running for US President is not a joke, it’s tremendous amount of hard work. I appreciate Joe Biden for still want to contribute to the society in a very meaningful way at this age. I don’t have any disrespect for his age, still it may be better for US to have younger generations leaders. May be he is forced to run because Trump is running.

Tucker Carlson is out of Fox news

Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.

Looks like this’s ^^ what lead to firing Tucker. Glad he’s out, he feeds to the extremists & aggravates the political divide.

Bed Bath & Beyond Files for Bankruptcy

On Sunday, the 52-year-old retailer said it was filing for bankruptcy protection in United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. It said it would start the process of closing the company’s 360 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 120 Buy Buy Baby locations on Wednesday and seek to sell parts of its business. In its Chapter 11 filing , the company said it expected all stores to close by June 30.

Though economic downturn are tough, hope it forces us to shift the resources to focus on the future.

Big banks asked for final bids on First Republic

U.S. regulators have asked banks for their best and final takeover offers for First Republic by Sunday afternoon, in a move that authorities hope will cap a period of uncertainty for regional lenders.

Sad to see First Republic’s end after 38 year run. The economy is tough out there for many. Hope with the banking crisis stops here.

Personal Update

Went out on Friday to watch the PS2, it was way better than PS1. First time experienced Cinemark XD, it way very good experience to watch these great movies.

Fox Will Pay $787.5 Million to Settle Defamation Suit

“The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, said outside Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday.

I do feel bad when media’s keep lying and causes so much unrest in the society. But they were not held accountable, as they hide behind “freedom of speech”. Fox’s settlement & things uncovered so far in the case are crystal clear on how some of these media just say what we want to hear but not the factual truth. Hope this expense makes the media companies to at least try to say facts.

The settlement spares Fox a trial that would have gone on for weeks and put many of the company’s most prominent figures — from the media mogul Rupert Murdoch to hosts like Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo — on the stand.

I wish they didn’t reach this settlement and went for a full trial to uncover more truth.

Kudos to Dominion Leadership for taking on this challenge & fight for the truth.

Starship Test Launch

Inspiring to see this great progress! Though it didn’t reach orbit, it a huge progress and I confident next iteration will be better than this rocket.

Jensen Describes AI’s Potential Impacts in Podcast Hosted by World’s Largest Investment Fund

Some of the problems are too complex for humans to solve now. Jensen said that the GPU chip R&D is ~$5 billion, it’s somewhat closer to making a rocket. To optimise these billion transistors on a palm size chip is a complex task and he gave an analogy to visualise the size of the problem, imagine a city 1000 times bigger than new york city and imaging if we have to decide where to build roads, offices, houses, retails, etc for such a big city, that's how complex the modern chip design is. And it cannot be done by humans alone, we need help from AI’s to design these.

And Jensen spoke about how he relaxes, and he said work is the relaxation, and he is relaxed almost all the time. He goes to bed around 9.30, says sleep is important for him & wakes up around 5, and starts working from the moment he wakes up. He’s the longest running tech CEO, and he says he's going to continue to do that for the foreseeable future! I have huge respect for guys like him, who have everything and are still contributing to society in a very meaningful way.

You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?

This blog highlights some theories on why we are not able to live closer to friends.

Over-scheduled calendar culture dooms us. When you live in the city or a suburb, it’s not enough to live kinda close, you’ve got to live SUPER CLOSE.

I completely agree on this. We are super busy these days, more closer the friends are located, chances for impromptu meetings are more. This is one of the reasons we moved to TX form MN. And we can see this happening already in a month we moved to TX. We bump into friends while picking kids from bus stop, kids do sleep over just across our home & in next street. These didn’t happen easily when friends were located further apart, we had to plan for it ahead.

You're not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard

“Researchers also find that when we develop groups, our friendships are more sustainable than they are with individuals. Because there's multiple touch points now, right? Someone else in the group could reach out to all of us, and then we all keep in touch,” she notes.

This is so true. When we are part of a whatsapp group, someone or other initiates a conversion and makes the whole group active. Being in a group does seem like a good idea to form friends as adults.

Apple's First Store In India Opens In Mumbai

Governments relaxation on the regulations & the growth in India makes Apple to open stores in India. Apple opened its first store in China in 2008, and the growth of China in the last decade is tremendous. We can take Apple as proxy for a countries growth. Hopefully we will tremendous growth in India in coming decades.

Personal Update

Wife had to travel to MN for a week for work. Somehow we survived for a week without mommy, by end of the week we all missed her. Went for a Costco shopping one of the evening and finished our dinner there.

Finland Joins NATO

War in Ukraine makes other countries who share borders with Russia to be proactive and have some allies on their side.

“With receipt of this instrument of accession, we can now declare that Finland is the 31st member of the North Atlantic Treaty,” Mr. Blinken said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/world/europe/finland-nato-russia-ukraine.html

Former Start-Up Founder Charged by Prosecutors for Defrauding JPMorgan Chase

Good to see that SEC police the nonpublic & early-stage companies too.

In fact, according to the government, Ms. Javice oversaw efforts to create a list of fabricated customers by acquiring names, contact information and other data from third-party companies. Frank then passed those names off to JPMorgan as its existing customers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/business/charlie-javice-jpmorgan-fraud.html

Why We’re Going Back to the Moon - NASA’s Artemis II Moon Mission Astronauts

Exciting space explorations happening again! And we can see women & a person of color in the crew! Kids of any gender or color can look up this team & dream big!

Personal Update

We are still settling down in the new place, every day is a progress and better than the previous day 🙂.

It’s been a month in Dallas, we went out to the Grapevine Mills Mall here.

Took off on good Friday & checked out some local places. First we went to the nearby HEB (a famous Texas local superstore), then to Legacy west (a live, work, play & eat concept). Went to a food court Legacy Hall & it was a fun place. Me & Nila tried Velvet Taco & Elizabeth tried an asian.

After almost a month, I finally took my bike for a ride & explored the trail from our community. It’s probably 3-5 miles round trip, a good trail for a weekday ride.

And met almost all of the fellow Tamil families in the Tamil new year celebration in our community. It was a fun filled event with some cultural performances by the kids, food, games & socialising. Happy Easter & Advance Tamil New Year!

Heavily Armed Assailant Kills 6 at Christian School

These are the nightmares any parents don’t want to hear, but it keeps repeating in America. It’s shameful for a developed nation like USA could not act on this for more than a decade. America is so divided on gun control policy & cannot make any action on it, or at least I lost hope here. Though one could argue that mental health is the root cause, better to make it harder to get assault weapons for normal citizen will definitely slow this.

The police received a report of the shooting at 10:13 a.m. and heard gunshots on the second floor when they arrived at the school, a police spokesman, Don Aaron, said. Officers went there, saw the assailant shooting, and two of the officers opened fire, killing the assailant at 10:27 a.m. in a “lobby-type area” on the second floor, Mr. Aaron said.

Within 14 minute from the report, the assailant is killed. Still these guns are fast and it made a damage within that 14 min. If it had been a small gun or knife, I am not sure if it would be the same damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/us/nashville-shooting-covenant-school.html

Prosecuting Donald Trump over Stormy Daniels

I was expecting Trump to get indicted one day on Jan 6 related stuff. But hush money payment to Stormy Daniels seems like a weak case for him. We have to wait and watch. Nevertheless, it's historic to indict a former US president.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/03/30/prosecuting-donald-trump-over-stormy-daniels-looks-like-a-mistake 

Court sentenced Mr Gandhi to two years in prison

Rahul Gandhi got a 2 year sentence and that makes him get removed from the parliament just before the general election.And all this for a defamation charge seems again very politically motivated. India seems to be becoming more like a Dictatorship country, where opponents are thrown into prison.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/03/27/the-worlds-biggest-democracy-is-becoming-less-free

Fed hikes rates by a quarter percentage point

There was a little doubt if the Fed would increase the rate as banks were having liquidity issues, but the Fed went ahead & increased 0.25% to fight the inflation. But from their tone, they are going to slow down in further rate increases. Hope they will give some breathers for the next few cycles.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/22/fed-rate-hike-decision-march-2023.html 

Nvidia GTC

Nvidia’s GTC event happened this week, and Jensen covered how accelerated computing is helping in various domains & scientific research. Here’s the highlight from the keynote.

Jensen had a fireside chat with Sutskever (cofounder of openai), it was interesting to see how they started training Deep Learning models using GPU for the first time & how that changed the whole industry. Also he went deep into how ChatGPT works.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/03/22/sutskever-openai-gtc/ 

Personal Update

I covered why we moved to Dallas, Texas last week - https://sara.iblog.dev/i/108089963/personal-update. This week I will continue on with the story.

Why the Lakewood community?

By looking at the nearby Indian stores we were able to find the Indian communities in the area. And one of the Dallas realtors gave me a good overview on the Dallas highways & where one should buy homes. He suggested getting homes closer to the DNT (Dallas North Tollway), & gave overview on Preston, Coit & Custer roads. Based on that we started looking at the communities near highway 380 & DNT junction. My wife registered her email & phone with all the builders in & around that area, and we made around 400 phone calls. We were just increasing our luck surface area. It was Spring of 2021, peak of the housing market. Luckily (based on some of our effort too) we got a call back from only one builder Shaddock and said they have availability in one of their communities, which is not in our ideal area of interest, but just little outside, so we said yes to it.

Our realtor in Dallas got in touch with the salesperson of that community and in the next few days we came to know that the same sales person is handling one other community too and he has one opening in that community as someone backed out at the last minute. We got a call from our realtor on Friday afternoon about this, and we got in with a zoom call with the builders salesperson that evening itself. I haven’t heard about this community before, but the location is in our area of interest. So I booked a flight for the next morning and came to Dallas and drove around the community and nearby areas. I stayed at my friend's place & took one of his cars as rental cars were scarce that time. I was able to find the flight ticket & couldn’t get a rental car that time, I have never imagined that scenario before. 

Anyways, this community is closer to our friends place and had an option to pick a lot from some of the lots they had. And decided the floor plan that suits us, picked the options on Saturday afternoon and signed the contract on Sunday. I usually don’t like to rush, but I realised this fast market & had to act fast, and so we did. That's how we ended in the Lakewood community. More than we finding the place, the place found us 🙂

I couldn’t get time to write my weekly updates for the last three weeks. We were going through a major life changing event, which I will cover in detail in this weeks update.

Personal Update

We moved to Dallas Suburbs in Texas (TX) from Minnesota (MN). It was a big disruption on our routines. Going cover why & how we moved in this weeks letter

Why Texas?

It was fall 2020 (during covid), interest rates were historically low & everyone was buying home as 30 year mortgage rates were ~2.5%. We were living in a townhome and we are running out of space and some of our friends started shopping in MN for a Single family home. We also started looking around MN and try to buy with friends so we can all live close by. Here in US, as a first generation Immigrant, friends are part of the support system. We were living in a city called Maple Grove but we were open to move to other city as long as all friends agree to it. In my I was like erasing the white board & starting to think from scratch. I was asking myself if I have to start fresh in MN which city would I choose? Some of the criteria are

1. Friends close by in 10-15 min radius

2. Good school system for kids until high school

3. Decent Indian community so kids don’t feel left out

4. All shopping & retail (costco, wholefoods, starbucks, etc) close by to enjoy some of the smaller thing we like.

5. A home that can suit our family for next 20+ years.

With this we narrowed down to Woodbury & even found a new community, but we all couldn’t find a lot that we liked. The sales person said there will be more lots in spring 2021, so we all said we will come back in spring 2021.

When we give time, our mind wanders :-). My mind is like why restrict myself to MN, erase the mental whiteboard again and start from scratch. I was asking the question if I had all the freedom to pick a place in US, where will I go? Some of the criteria remains the same

1. Friends close by in 10-15 min radius

2. Good school system for kids until high school

3. Decent Indian community so kids don’t feel left out

4. All shopping & retail (costco, wholefoods, starbucks, etc) close by to enjoy some of the smaller thing we like.

5. A home that can suit our family for next 20+ years.

6. warm weather, so more outdoor time for kids to play and relief from my cold induced asthma (I cough every winter & only in the winter).

This is when I am reading that Elon Musk is moving to Austin, Telsa HQ is moved to Austin, Oracle HQ is also moved to Austin & Apple’s $1 Billion campus is opening in Austin. I went to Austin in 2017 for Kubernetes conference (kubecon), and realized Austin is a small tech hub, and with recent developments it’s evident that Austin tech hub is booming.

So we friends decided to take a trip to Austin & Dallas & have a look at it. By the time we took the trip its Feb 2021, and we came to know that the market is so crazy in Texas. We went to ~30-40 community in Austin & Dallas combined, but we could not speak to any sales person, all the model homes were closed and had a notice saying “due to unprecedented demand we are all sold out & please go to our website to join the waitlist”. And particularly Austin became very competitive with bay area folks bidding $200-300k extra from the list price. Soon we realized we cannot buy home together in Texas as its very competitive and long wait lines, so some of the friends decided to buy home in MN. For us we thought if we buy a home in MN, its going to be really hard to move out of MN for atleast 4-5 years and Nila will be in middle then and I hear from friends that it gets harder to move when kids are in middle school. So we thought this is the time we can move while kids are still young.

Why Dallas?

Since we are alone now in this cross state move adventure, we wanted to move to a place where we have friends already there, so it’s easy for us to bootstrap our life. We have our college friends, many of my cognizant friends from NJ, WI & MN are settled in Dallas. Also having a good international airport is big plus for us, we can avoid one leg in the India travel, with 3 young kids it matters to us a lot. Also its relatively affordable in Dallas & less competitive than Austin. And closer to Austin, if I wanted to visit sometime for office or any tech conferences. Also there is no bidding wars in Dallas yet. So we decided to start our search in Dallas.

Why Prosper?

Once we decided Dallas, we know where to live in Dallas without any questions. Its North Dallas suburbs. Frisco came to our mind first, but based on the price we can only afford a smaller size home in Frisco, so we deiced to move up north further and found that in Prosper we can afford little bigger home that can suit us for next 20+ years.

I will continue on this topic for next few weeks, stay tuned!

Apologies for late publication for this weeks newsletter. I was traveling & couldn’t get it done on time & going to keep it short this week. Hope everyone had a great week & Happy Valentines day last week!

This week I want to keep it on my personal update as it was a milestone week for us.

Personal Update

We celebrated our 10th wedding Anniversary this week. It was a huge milestone for us personally! Our wedding was not easy, it took us 8+ years to convince our parents to get their blessings for our wedding. I came from a conservative Hindu background and Elizabeth came from a Syrian Orthodox Christian background, so one can imagine how difficult it would be in India to get our families to accept our marriage. Many frowned up on us, and some even openly saying to me that our marriage will end soon. Though I was confident we can lead a decent happy life, I was little nervous when we started our marriage life. After 10 years of being together, seeing ups & downs and bringing up 3 kids in a foreign land, I am confident we will be together for many more decades to come :-). At this moment we are grateful for all the close relatives, family friends, friends & our parents who made our wedding happen. And big thank you for my wife for sticking together with me :-)

Walk with me on the memory lane of our last 10 years of Wedding day.

Feb 14 2013 - Wedding Day photoshoot!

Feb 14 2014 - We went to Duluth for our first anniversary & did dog sledding.

Feb 14 2015 - Went out for Dinner @ Crave, Edina Galleria

Feb 14 2016 - Our 3rd Anniversary & Baby Shower at Edina Condo Party Hall.

Feb 14 2017 - We went out with Nila to Big Bowl in Galleria, Edina

Feb 14 2018 - Ordered a take out from our favorite Indian food. We didn’t crack the code yet on how to have fun with kid :-)

Feb 14 2019 - We started to going out on day time without kids. Swapna’s mom was with us, so we booked a day hotel in InterContinental MSP Airport with the runway view, watched a movie, ordered room dining.

Feb 14 2020 - We went to newly opened Wahlburgers, just before Pandemic shutdowns!

Feb 14 2021 - We were at our Friends place and they bought us a cake to celebrate!

Feb 14 2022 - Took a day off, went to spa & Pittsburgh Blue for lunch

Feb 14 2023 - Took a day off, went to Raag & Mall of America