The 1% rule
How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time. Sounds like plain common sense. If forgotten, failure is inevitable
Charles Assisi
Co-founder and Director
Founding Fuel
Charles Assisi is an award-winning journalist with two decades of experience to back him. He is co-founder and director at Founding Fuel, and co-author of the book The Aadhaar Effect. He is a columnist for Hindustan Times, one of India's most influential English newspaper. He is vocal in his views on journalism and what shape it ought to take in India. He speaks on the theme at various forums and is often invited by various organizations to teach their teams how to write.
In his last assignment, he wore two hats: That of Managing Editor at Forbes India and Editor at ForbesLife India. As part of the leadership team, his mandate was to create a distinctive business title in a market many thought was saturated. When Forbes India was finally launched after much brainstorming and thinking through, it broke through the ranks and got to be recognized as the most influential business magazine in the country. He did much the same thing with ForbesLife India where he broke from convention and launched the title to critical acclaim.
Before that, he was National Technology Editor and National Business Editor at the Times of India, during the great newspaper wars of 2005. He was part of the team that ensured Times of India maintained top dog status in Mumbai on the face of assaults by DNA and Hindustan Times.
His first big gig came in his late twenties when German media house Vogel Burda marked its India debut with CHIP a wildly popular technology magazine. He was appointed Editor and given a free run to create what he wanted. During this stint, he worked and interacted with all of Vogel Burda's various newsrooms across Europe and Asia.
Charles holds a Masters in Economics from Mumbai Universtity and an MBA in Finance. Along the way he earned the Madhu Valluri Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Polestar Award for Excellence in Business Journalism.
In his spare time, he reads voraciously across the board, but is biased towards psychology and the social sciences. He dabbles in various things that catch his fancy at various points. But as fancies go, many evaporate as often as they fall on him.
My contributions
106 articles written
Tulip mania versus bitcoin ideology
Apparently, bitcoins are worth investing in. But is it an ideology or a bubble? What lens do we look at it from? And would you bet your money on either?
Man versus machine: The humanity of intelligence
While artificial intelligence is a force for good, there are times it ought to be deliberately dissed. Else, we run the risk of losing our humanity
The absence of fragility
Notes on being anti-fragile from the middle of nowhere, a former Catholic priest and a private equity investor
Aadhaar and the Arnab Monologues
Pointers to contemporary politics, different kinds of critics, media narratives and why writing is a bad idea from a literature festival
Into the mind of the Indian politician
Corruption is a clichéd narrative to woo voters. What alternative narrative can politicians sell to the world’s largest democracy?
AlphaGo versus Kasparov, Puchu and Champu
That artificial intelligence is here to stay seems a given. But Garry Kasparov and I believe we aren’t going any place. My little girls need us
Opinion is free. But is it trustworthy?
That those in the media are toast is now part of popular opinion. But the fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd
Performance monkeys on the TED stage
What started out as an intellectually stimulating event has degenerated into a series of shallow performances
How may Einstein have thought of God and Aadhaar?
Does God exist? Is eating meat ethical? What about systems like Aadhaar? What about questions like these? A century after Einstein thought a hypothesis to explain the nature of space and time, it stands proven, and has been awarded the Nobel Prize. How may he take these questions on?