Favourite app on phone:

uber

What he reads:

Biographies, economics and historical books— no time for pulp fiction

Where he writes:

On flights

Ruchir Sharma likes to travel, and he does a fair bit of it. For several years now, the author and fund manager has spent about a week each month in an emerging market, travelling from the sprawling farmhouses on the outskirts of New Delhi to the streets of Bhagalpur in Bihar, and from the corridors of wealth and power in Moscow to the more sedate surroundings of Warsaw.

These experiences are in focus in his bestselling book, Breakout Nations, published in 2012. Travelling within these countries, he believes, is essential to discovering signs of growth in them. This kind of nation-watching, however, isn’t an exact science.

“No one can pinpoint the precise mix of reasons why nations grow, or fail to grow. There is no magic formula, only a long list of known ingredients,” he writes.

Four years after he wrote Breakout Nations, Sharma, who is head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, is out with another book that revisits those words: The Rise and Fall of Nation is, simply put, a well-researched, anecdote filled “list of known ingredients”.

We met Sharma, 42, on a rainy morning in his plush suite at a South Mumbai hotel. While this may be only his second book, Sharma has been a prolific writer for years now. He developed an interest in writing—and economics—when he was barely 14. In fact, at just 18, barely out of school, Sharma, born in the town of Wellington in Tamil Nadu to a navy family, was writing columns for various publications.