Answering inane questions is an unfortunate fact of life these days. Especially since security has taken centre stage in life, you are constantly asked useless questions at any place which has a security check. I was subject to a special dose of inane questions recently and hence this post.The occasion was the renewal of my US visa which was expiring. In my line of business, a US visa is one of the...
Sunday, 30 May 2010
Monday, 24 May 2010
Is the right to strike unfettered ?
The right to strike work is one the basic rights of workers and is recognised in law in most countries. But should this right be unfettered – and is the right to strike as valid now as it was when the principle was first enshrined ?The right to strike was first recognised when the balance of power between employers and employees was heavily tilted towards the employer. The company could basically...
Sunday, 23 May 2010
How do you say Net Nanny in Urdu ?
Pakistan seems to have caught the China disease. It has banned Facebook, YouTube, et al. Because some idiot somewhere in the world launched a Facebook campaign “Everybody draw Muhammad day”. As is well known, any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is considered blasphemy in Islam. People who volubly deny the holocaust, draw cartoons of the Prophet, etc must be quartered – they are deliberately inciting...
Monday, 17 May 2010
Get the priorities right
There is a time and place for everything. Many of the players in the oil spill drama in the Gulf of Mexico need to consider this truism.If you haven’t been following the events, here’s a quick synopsis of what happened. An explosion happened in the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform, in the Gulf of Mexico, some 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. 11 workers are feared dead. Oil is now gushing out...
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Did you feel the earth shake yesterday
The earth shook yesterday. If you are a sports fan, you would have felt it. And if you are a badminton fan, it measured 10 on the Richter scale.
The Thomas Cup and Uber Cup tournaments are going on in Kuala Lumpur. These are the Men's and Women's badminton world team championships. The Uber Cup , for women, is the private property of China. For the last 12 years they have been invincible. They usually...
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Las Vegas is passe; bet on the Exchanges
Last Thursday, something peculiar happened in the US stock markets. The markets were jittery due to the unfolding crisis in Greece. The market was down by some 1.5% or so , but nothing extraordinary. Then at 2.32 PM something happened. It started falling steeply. By 2.42 PM it had fallen by 3.9%. By 2.47 the bottom had fallen out; in 5 minutes the index fell another 5.5%.By 2.49 it went back up by...
Monday, 10 May 2010
An atom bomb goes off
An atom bomb was set off yesterday. Only nobody noticed it. Because it was high economics that nobody but the geeks understand. But an atom bomb, it surely was. I am referring to the nearly € 1 trillion “bailout” package for the Euro zone members that was announced yesterday.Even if you have only a passing interest in economics, you would have heard of the travails of Greece over the last few months....
Sunday, 9 May 2010
To "cool" or "not to cool"
I am confused. You may be forgiven for the retort of “what’s new? ” but tell me, should I aspire to be “cool” ? Or “warm”. Or else “hot” ; Or what ?
Over the last few weeks, I was given to understand that I wasn’t “cool”. It all started with a stupid question I asked – Who is Tamannaah ? Then I compounded the problem by asking a series of questions – Who is Asin ? Who is Vijay ? And so on … I was...
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Fairer trade or freer trade ?
“This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer” – this is the current live debate hosted by The Economist here. This blogger is a complete and unabashed fan of The Economist and subscribes to the view that it is the best publication in the world. The Economist debates are a fascinating discussion of very relevant issues and it would be difficult to find as interesting...
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Risk avoidance vs Risk spreading
By now there is every chance that you have heard of credit default swaps, the instruments at the heart of the financial crisis of a year and a bit ago. Unless you are like me and the Tamil movie scene, that is – surely I must be the only Tamil in the world who hadn’t heard of Asin (for non Indian readers, this lady seems to be the Tamil equivalent of Zhang Ziyi/ J Lo (?) ). So I can’t say that there...
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Where is the modern day Rosetta Stone ?
But for the chance discovery of the Rosetta Stone, we may have never learnt about the wonders of the ancient Egyptian civilization. The tombs and the monuments had, of course, been known for a long time. But nobody could understand the hieroglyphics, for the language had died long long ago. So we knew very little about this wonderful civilisation, until by sheer accident , a stone was discovered in...
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