Never a dull moment

Yesterday ( 20/05/2011 ) Kanimozhi and Sarat Kumar turned up at Patiala Court at 10 am only to be told by the judge that the judgement would be ready only in the afternoon and that they may be at the court after 1 pm. Both were a bit relieved with the (unfounded ) feeling that their bail pleas would be accepted. But the bail plea was rejected and both were sent to the upcoming posh locality in Delhi- Tihar Jail. A bird tells me that judge had the judgement ready in the morning itself but was trying to master the "zhi" part of Kanimozhi so that he could read out her name properly and hence the delay ! This judge has informally sounded out perennial petitioners like Subramaniam Swamy, Swamy Agnivesh and Prashant Bhushan that if they were planning petitions against likes of Azhagiri and others with kuzha puzha Allapuzha sort of names ( Azhagappan, pynthamizhselvi, thenmozhi, kuzhandaivelu, ilam vazhuthi, pazhaniappan...)they should do it quickly before he lost his mastery over p...

We have some baffling statistics. The number of people living below poverty line in India is a matter of endless debate. There seems to be a general agreement ( or to be more precise, no disagreement ) over the poverty figure of 45 %. The population of India as per Census 2011 is estimated to be 1210 million. 45 % of this works out to 540 million and those above poverty line works out to 670 million. If we form country formed of only those below poverty line in India, it will the third biggest in world after China and India and way ahead of the third highest populated country in the world USA with around 300 million people. Now comes another interesting statistics - there are 830 million mobile phone connections in India. How is this possible ? There has to be more than two SIM cards registered with a lot of people to achieve this figure.Also one to keep in mind that the population below 10 years of age do not need a specifically assigned mobile phone. May be the mobile phone companies...

Process ! Process !! Process !!! This is the new credo in every office. It makes it look as though everybody was working ( since Indian Independence ) without a process and got to where we are today without a care for systematic work. Frankly the way people and organisations go about their work today and the results achieved do not indicate any marked change in terms of quality of output and quantum of output. Orders continue to be difficult to track, outstanding difficult to obtain and deliveries happen haphazardly. But the English has changed. Process has become a good smokescreen to hide behind. If somebody asks why his or her salary is delayed, the response is that process is being followed and not an apology for the delay in paying the salary. When somebody questions the delay in execution of some work in office, pat comes the reply that the employees are sticking to a process. To me , it appears as though the meaning of the word "process" these days is "no". P...

When we ask somebody to be a sport, we want him/ her to be accommodating forgiving and forgetting an unsavoury incident or mishap. The term sportsman spirit also conveys a similar meaning of accommodation - let the bygones be bygones and let us continue our journey. But the game of cricket seems to be different in some aspects as a sport. Where else do you find visiting teams being pushed into Test matches with only perfunctory three day match thrown in for acclimatisation after the visiting team lands on a foreign soil ? The visiting team is also made to follow a punishing itinerary pushing it from one far off corner of the country to another with different climatic conditions with short intervals between matches. Added to that, the pitches are doctored to favour the hosts. Normally a host does his/ her best to accommodate the guest and fulfill the guest's needs. But the home association hosting a visiting Test / One day cricket team does not behave the way English dictionary defi...

As responsible parents, with the load of information available on what is good for health and what is not, we tend to provide wholesome food and beverages to our children. This results in good habits in children but also creates piquant situation at times. Both our daughters do not drink coffee and tea as we have always fed them hot milk in the morning and evening. The younger one , once in a way ,drinks small quantities of tea but the elder one has never tried out both coffee and tea. Both are in school and the elder one will go to college in 2012-2013 academic session. The elder one has a serious issue now. She says that when she goes with her friends to places like Cafe Coffee Day or Barista while in college, what would she drink ? This reminds me of what she used to do as a kid. We had ingrained in her that she had to drink milk at 4 pm in the evening without fail. She went on a two day trip with her uncle and family. They had gone by road from Delhi to a hill station which was a s...

Economists have not been able to predict the economic whammy which hit the South eastern Tiger economies in 1998. Reviews by World Bank and leading private analysts painted a very rosy picture a week before these economies tanked. The currencies of Thailand, Indonesia , south Korea and Indonesia dived to half their values overnight. How could this have happened with all the tools and prescience economics and analysts are supposed to have ? A similar thing happened again in USA and developed world in 2008. The housing sub prime crisis exploded. Now everybody says that this was waiting to happen but nobody cautioned for preventive action until the bubble burst. A few economists warned of the impending disaster waiting to happen due to poor quality housing loans being given to all and sundry with little or no income. But they were very few and theirs was a cry in wilderness. The vast majority were going gaga over the blooming economy brought on by the housing boom. When the borrowers defa...

I am not a great fan of Hindi movies. Since we have chosen to settle down in Delhi and kids are keen on Hindi movies, I have been a few movies with them in the last three years. I had been with them for the first show on the day of release of "tare Zameen Par". Recently, I had a colleague of mine visiting for a meeting and the meeting was postponed for a day. For want of anything better to do, we roamed around for some time and decided to visit a theatre which is a landmark in grandeur. But the film on show was "Dabangg". My colleague, an ex IAS officer nearing golden age was keen to see the theatre and we went to watch the movie. Salman Khan had us in splits of laughter from the word go. It was a hilarious movie where Salman Khan's deliberate non acting acting stood out. He has been cast in Rajnikanth mould and I should say Salman outshone Rajni style in "Dabangg". Every action of Salman is exaggerated. When his mother dies, he cries as though half th...