The Dog Nawab of Junagarh
"If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it." - Jascha Heifetz (Violinist)
Life is Lived in the Arena: One of the tweets I was going to bring up is exactly that. From June 3rd: “Acquiring knowledge is easy. The hard part is knowing what to apply and when. That’s why all true learning is on the job. Life is lived in the arena.”
Human Stigmergy: The World Is My Task List: Termites and ants have no central planning. There are no architect ants in a nest-building project, no sponsors or supervisors, no instructions. Each worker is unaware and completely uninterested in what form the final mega-structure will take. No blueprints are to be found in any of their minds or outside them. Yet they build them all the time, and very well, too. Their substitute for plans and blueprints is what biologists call stigmergy.
https://aethermug.com/posts/human-stigmergy
The Dog Nawab of Junagarh: Today he is remembered in India mostly as ‘a vaguely ridiculous character’, whose eight hundred pedigree dogs each had a private servant. Every time one of the dogs died, so the story goes, Junagadh State went into mourning, playing Chopin’s Funeral March in the streets. Moreover he is said to have drained the state’s entire treasury in ‘marriage parties’ for his precious pooches, one of which cost £60,000 and was attended by fifty thousand people ‘not counting the dogs’. The most lavish of these apparently saw his favourite dog Roshana ‘scented and jewelled in an ornate coat’ and carried on a silver palanquin to marry a British Labrador called Bobby, who was wearing ‘gold bracelets, gold necklace, and embroidered silk cummerbund’. The two dogs were wed atop elephants in a ceremony conducted by Hindu priests.
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This week, I sat down with Bharat, who has been designing, manufacturing and exporting garments to some of the biggest international fashion brands including Zara, M&S, Next for over two decades.
We sit at his factory in Noida that employs over 2000 workers to discuss:
- Finding International Buyers
- Product Differentiation and Design Process
- Identifying International Trends
- Unit Economics, Cost and Margins
- Capital Investment and Working Capital
- Untapped International Markets & Whitespaces
Check out the full episode on Founder's Office with Sarthak Ahuja.