It’s the end of the year and the holiday mood needs a light irreverent post. Its not a holiday around here, but since the rest of the world has caught holiday fever, we have “embraced” it as well.
Airlines are notorious for doing fairly dumb things – I think the rarified air in which they fly does some things to the brain cells. I had blogged about Ryanair’s idea of charging to use the toilets. But...
Thursday, 31 December 2009
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Being an expat
What’s it like being a foreigner ? An expat living outside his or her home country ? I am an expat myself- an Indian living in China. Many readers of this blog are expats themselves. Most of us are expats because our jobs, or the jobs of our spouses, took us away from our native land.
The Economist has a beautiful article on “being foreign”. A superb and stimulating article I strongly recommend....
Monday, 28 December 2009
The fastest train in the world
China is a very competitive country. It likes to make a competition of everything it can win ! So its not surprising that last week it unveiled the “fastest train in the world”.
The train in question is the bullet train between Guangzhou and Wuhan. Guangzhou is where I live – the southern China city, known earlier as Canton and close to Hong Kong. You can be forgiven for not knowing anything about...
Sunday, 27 December 2009
Zaijian, Ni hao (Goodbye & Hello)
It is customary at this time of the year to look back and reminisce about the year gone by. This year, its also the end of the decade – the “noughties” as they are curiously called. The media, traditional and new, is dominated by the recounting of events of the past decade –the horror of September 11, the tsunami, the Sichuan earthquake, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wonder of the Beijing...
Friday, 25 December 2009
Holidays is a cultural thing
Today is Christmas day – virtually everywhere in the world, today is a holiday. And here I am , at my desk, pretending to be working. For its not a holiday in atheist China. Despite the best efforts of companies to tempt the Chinese into “Christmas shopping”, the day remains stubbornly irrelevant here.
I have a stream of people walking up to my desk today. They are all asking me to approve carrying...
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Pay a tax if you tan
The US healthcare bill that is doing the final rounds in the Senate today is a landmark piece of legislation, if passed. It has aroused intense emotions and divided America. But an obscure part of the bill, buried in the thousands of pages of legalese is illustrative of the way lobby and pressure groups have come to influence economic policy.
In the first draft of the bill, a tax was proposed on...
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
Who can you trust now ?
Conventional wisdom has been that a sovereign guarantee is the best form of security you can have when you lend money. You can be pretty much sure that your money is safe if you buy government debt. Doesn’t matter which government, if you leave aside rogue states like North Korea or Myanmar. Conventional wisdom that is.
That was before the financial crisis. As the crisis spread, Iceland was the first...
Monday, 21 December 2009
In defence of business
The word business is nowadays accompanied by a metaphorical holding of the nose. Post the financial crisis, businessmen would probably rank just above bankers and below more traditional last placers like real estate agents, in the list of reputable professions. Readers of this blog would know that the author is a staunch defender of business and advocates the view that the profession is unfairly...
Sunday, 20 December 2009
The low point
This week has been the low point in my infancy in the blogging world. A combination of traveling, ridiculous working hours and the difficulty of actually getting access to the internet when traveling overseas without paying up a complete fortune, has made this a barren week. No posts at all and unforgivable delays in responding to comments. Sorry.
There are, of course, periods in business life, which...
Sunday, 13 December 2009
Its time to leave the village
You may have followed the travails of our city bred yuppie here and here. He survived the attentions of the peacock. He managed to escape being hitched. He got over the close association with bovine sex life. He even learnt to ignore the ever present gun. But , at last, the time came for him to leave the village and go back to the city – back to normal business, back to the life he was used...
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Is small scale more desirable than large scale ?
Why is the Government of India so fixated about small scale ? For some reason, the thinking seems to be that small scale is ethically more acceptable than large scale. This is nonsense – both economically and morally.
I am reacting to the news that the government is considering stipulating that public sector enterprises would be required to source 20% of their purchases from micro, small and medium...
Sunday, 6 December 2009
A great organisation
The house of the Tatas has been synonymous with values which are unique in the annals of business history. This post is about why they more than deserve their illustrious reputation.
This is from an e mail doing the rounds – these are apparently notes taken by Dilip Ranjekar , CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation. I haven’t requested permission from Dilip, or the persons who forwarded me this mail,...
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Bhopal happens and nobody is prosecuted
This week marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the worst industrial disaster in history – the leak of the deadly methyl isocyanate from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Thousands of people died and the horrors have been well documented.
This post focuses on one notable aspect of what happened after the disaster. Or rather what didn’t happen. Nobody has yet been prosecuted in a court of law for...
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