Kerala’s great KSRTC saga continues unabated. For the past three decades, the beloved people’s transportation corporation has been lurching from crisis to crisis, mostly of the financial nature, facing problems in everything from over staffing to buying diesel and spare parts to paying pensions and salaries. The present problem relates to pensions. There are thousands…
The honorable Minister for Railways Sri. Dinesh Trivedi presented his maiden Railway Budget today on March 14th 2012. This budget was expected to be a landmark one, mainly because of the Railways’ enormous fiscal deficit of and industry watchers and everyone else were watching keenly on what the Minister would do to address this. For…
First impressions of the Bangalore Metro when it opened for the first time in 2011.
They sell their souls and four years of their life hanging on a promise that they will be bestowed with some kind of world-changing ability of technological mastery, only to realize later (when it is too late) that they have been trapped and are left hanging in a vicious limbo for all eternity with a…
Online retail is going from strength to strength and is slowly squeezing the life out of traditional “brick and mortar” book shops, most of which are now hopelessly corporatized anyway, losing their soul and life. Anyway, what are these bookshop businesses doing to counter the onslaught of online e-Commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart among…
I happened to visit an engineering college in south-central Kerala to help a small IT company with their campus placements. I was expecting things to be like they were when I was graduating nearly two decades ago: scores of anxious young people thronging rooms with lots of expectations, apprehensions, questions. But what I found was…
There is no such thing as customer service in India as we all know. All that goes on in this country under the guise of “providing services” is just a sham of organized ripping off of unsuspecting people of all their money under the guise of something or the other, and helped on by the…
There is nothing like smartphone shopping to make you aware of how things are changing in the country. I was doing some heavy-duty research to find a replacement my 3-year old Sony Xperia E3 Dual which with its massive 4 GB internal memory (yes, not RAM) was giving me some problems, to put it mildly….
Human stupidity in all it’s forms must be the most visible aspect around us in our daily life, and Common Sense the most absent. And incredibly, both of these come together when it comes to the usage public spaces. And Elevators (Lifts) rank high among said spaces. While being one of those inventions which made…
The World is full of overbearing and nosy people who believe they exist for the sole reason of poking into others’ affairs and to enforce the standards of what they believe are the “accepted norms” of “society” on how to lead one’s life. Their primary weapon of choice is irritatingly repeated questions, like “What do…
Those who know me will be surprised that I would say this, but I am tired of smartphones. I have run the mobile-phone rat-race in a frenzied pace ever since my first one in 1999, changing some 18 phones (I kept some for only for a few months) over 12 years, always being the first…
Beards were once considered unsavory in Kerala. Today they define the Malayalee male image. How did this come about?