Utopia

There's something about travelling to a South Indian City like Chennai, complicated by our stereotypical belief  -of an alienating language, and of food assumed to have been cooked only with  rice and coconut. The city to a cursory traveler, gives an impression of a metropolis stuck halfway through a time travel portal with some parts of it having been carried to the next millennium, and other parts still waking up to the discovery of fire. My anxiety about negotiating this city of nine million people, evaporated as I allowed Chennai to take me in....in a proper Chennai styla(e). 1)         Vaddakam - To every Rascala you meet in Chennai(a), greet. Chennaites are generally a hospitable race and a Vaddakam is sure shot way to get invited for a quick Kapi. Coffee is to Chennai what Vodka is to Russia, and Mind it you are not know by the amount of kapi you drink, but the amount of Chicory you drink. More the chicory, stronger the coffee,...

Flipping through pages of house keeping/ interior magazines, while waiting for my turn at salon, i have always desired to posses one of those swanky homes, done to every detail. Rich, fashionable and very contemperory.But if there was only one way to decorate your home....n that is the best part about decorating your own home. It does not have to be like any of those magazine houses, but still can be equally fashionable and personal. A home is where your heart is...n all u need to put in a little mind to what your heart says and lo you get a tastefully decorated living space. You can give the professiobal designers a run for their money if you just keep few simple things in mind. 1) Dont kill it :- never over do. Remember you are decorating a house and not designing  a film set. Keep it Clutter free. DO NOT ever buy things that you will not require in future. They will just add to junk that you pile in that "small room" under the stair case. Sometimes just rearranging th...

Mumbai is a great city.. A complex city, of simple people. The greatest luxury in the life of an average Mumbaikar is the prized ‘Window Seat” in the local. No sooner is the train in sight; half the population of octogenarian present on platform and nearly all the middle aged men are in air in anticipation of landing into the local, even before it comes to a halt, just for that prized window seat. The precise calculation of the velocity of jump and the angle of propulsion is so complex that it would make a neat research paper involving the most complex mathematical formulation. But then it is Mumbai, and mark you no one perfects the act as well as a Mumbaikar who tries this gravity defying stunt several times a day. For the less fortunate ones, less said the better. No other group of humans, except the 1.8 million mumbaikars, will ever agree to mutually continue living in as infrastructur-ally challenging conditions as prevalent here. The vestiges of the roads, found scatter...

Don’t know where to start. Onkar Date’s   letter seems horridly wrong, not only in its idea and execution   but also in its self righteous reproach. He begins by saying, “usually I wouldn’t have been affected much by what I read in the newspaper. Scandals, murders,explosions etc, So I can usually go back to my study after some time”. Now what sort of 16yr old boy finds all other “murders, explosions” but for this case, as USUAL? He goes on to lament on India’s economic progress, trying to render the toils of millions of us useless, just because a certain incident. Where else does an entire nation, it billion plus people or its hardworking population are all painted as criminal, only, and only because a certain gruesome crime happened in one of its cities? He generalizes what rapist say as TRADITION of INDIA. I would want to ask Mr Date parents, is this they have taught their son?   Does he believes in a stray remark of a rapist and understands it as the Tradition...

Was Lord Keynes Right or Wrong? Keynesian Economics, is used to represent a classic view that argues, that private sector activity sometimes leads to distortion of macro economic conditions. Years of economic turmoil have re-ignited the debate about Keynesianism. As the financial crisis caused mass unemployment, Keynes appeared to have been proven right. But even after years of financial stimulus(read Keynesian-inspired deficit spending) high unemployment persists and public confidence in Keynesian policy is shaken. As the United States is stagnating and as Europe is crashing down, critics of the Keynesian theory feel vindicated. This presents one of the most daunting paradoxes of modern   day economics. Is Keynes right or is he proven wrong. The answer probably lies in dissecting the Keynesian thought and removing the diagnosis from the treatment. While all modern economists will agree   “ free market will periodically fail to utilize all the capacity in the ...

While Shailaja Bajpai may be a good journalist, but Logic does not seem to be her forte. She rates Rahul Gandhis interview as tough. As a representative of Congress he was cornered on 84. Just to make things easier for her to understand, can an interviewer corner Ms Shailaja on 26/11? While my question may sound bizarre, but logic is plain and simple, one can be CORNERED only on things that he/she is PART off and not on issues that one is not remotely associated with. So Shailaja in a way admits that party that RaGa represents has some role to play in 84 riots and hence he was cornered.  The basic flaw in her arguments lies in Assuming Rahul Gandhi as the PM candidate of the Congress party. A decision that even Congress party has not taken. So what prompts Ms Bajpai to assume that RaGa is the PM candidate of congress and UPA? Is she endorsing the fact that no one apart from the dynasty can assume the position? If not, then RaGa appeared for an interview as a representativ...