Winning the chance to attend the 2013 Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong with Project Firefly was a truly memorable experience. One of the highlights was getting to know the other winners, Joel Lee from Singapore and Romain Su from France: two standout gents.

“Passing off horse meat as beef”! This probably sounds like a common recounting of a local butcher’s chicanery in a developing country, where “caveat emptor” still prevails. However, recent events suggest otherwise. European consumers are still reeling from the meat adulteration scandal, which initially erupted in the United Kingdom but has now engulfed much of the continent. Not surprisingly, more and more European consumers are now ditching top-notch supermarkets and food companies in the wake of the scandal.

In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised an experiment – if you put a cat together with a flask of poison and a radioactive source and link everything together in a complex and potentially deadly sealed box, the cat is considered both dead and alive. Luckily for the cat, this was a thought experiment. Something similar is happening today in the Venezuelan capital Caracas – the city is both in the top and bottom 10 of the world’s most expensive cities.

I have rotated through approximately 10 roommates in the seven months I’ve been in Mumbai -- young professionals hailing everywhere from Peru to Kenya. As fates would have it, my current roster of roommates includes two fellow Americans, both of whom also work in my office. For us Americans, these past two months in particular were emotionally resonant, as friends and family in the United States celebrated the holiday season and splashed news of their festivities across various social networks.