Bharti Airtel Ltd is one of the better ISPs in India. However their chief problem has been the lot of un-solicited pre-recorded voice calls and SMS spam they generate to annoy their customers in their quest for VAS profits. Advice to them: Get back to basics and fire your fugly marketers, reduce expenses and provide what people want, there is a lot of market in small towns where BSNL is the evil monopoly and your next billion rupee revenue is assured by expanding over there. Quality of service and billing was not an area they were castigated much until now. As a shareholder who holds a puny number of shares I hate to see them annoy paying customers like Balaji and yours truly. My medium term tip for Bharti Airtel stock would be 'SELL' they are going the Vodafone way of growth through acquisitions without worrying about existing customers.

Update May 24, 2008: Bharti has pulled out of the MTN acquisition deal. Good for them and good for its customers.

Large tracking error in index funds.

<quote>
If you invested in an index fund a year ago, to gain almost as much as the Sensex or Nifty did, you may have not have been able to cash in completely on the bull run. That is because many index fund managers do not follow their own investment objectives. CNBC-TV18 highlights these tracking errors.
</quote>

For a while I had given up on Indian media's ability to ask the right questions. But this type of bursts of excellence surprise me.