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Enduring testimonial

Although invariably well-ranked on the parameter of leadership in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings, principals of even most admired schools tend to be deficient in their knowledge of business mantras such as brand building, funds-raising and institution development. This awareness dawned on your correspondent (also editor of India’s first two pioneer business magazines) when […]

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Painful sojourn

A first time holiday excursion to Bali, one of the islands of the Republic of Indonesia (pop. 266 million) last month, transformed into a week of some pain and anguish. Indonesia is a third world country even more notorious for government corruption than India, ranked #96 in Transparency International’s 2018 league table — 15 places […]

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Effete elite

The abrupt resignation and flight to America of Arvind Subramaniam, chief economic advisor to the Central government, so soon after he authored the widely acclaimed Economic Survey 2018-19 on the flimsy ground that he has become a grandfather, highlights one of the great infirmities of post-independence India’s society. It is saddled with an effete elite […]

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Kiss-up-kick-down educator

Some of India’s top-ranked international schools have become the playgrounds of spoilt brats of the country’s noveaux riche, even if not famous. On February 20, social media was abuzz with reports that a class VII student of the Pathways School, Gurgaon sent an outrageous rape threat to his class teacher on Instagram, and added injury […]

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Fake honours

One could blame the Jain brothers of the Times of India — perhaps the richest newspaper and media group worldwide — for the phenomenon of paid news which has become ubiquitous with the market leader ToI openly proclaiming that it is ready, willing and able to publish purchased news. This in your humble editors […]

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Simpletons’ simpleton

Although celebrated as a best-selling writer-intellectual by half-educated youth of the country who according to our cock-eyed politicians are the nation’s demographic dividend, there’s a simpleton quality about popular novelist/columnist Chetan Bhagat. Recently in a television interview, he discerned anti-Hindu bias in the Supreme Court order (October 9) banning the sale of fire crackers in […]

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Playboy’s pale shadow

The recent death on September 27 of Playboy publisher-editor Hugh Hefner in his Los Angeles Playboy Mansion, surrounded by his trade mark bunnies, brings to mind the comparatively modest effort of the unlikely Mumbai businessman Sushil Somani and several editors, including your correspondent, to establish Debonair as India’s answer to Playboy.

The late Vinod Mehta, then […]

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Flamboyant fraud

Less than five years ago, the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM, estb.1973), fronted by its flamboyant pony-tailed promoter-director Arindam Chaudhuri, was one of the biggest advertisers in the mainstream press with a penchant for full-page ads in the Times of India which trumpeted IIPM as one of the Top 10 B-schools in […]

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Limited leaders

The recent demise in Delhi of Brij Mohan Lal Munjal, chairman of Hero MotorCorp Ltd — the country’s largest producer of automotive two wheelers (6.63 million units in the year ended March 31, 2015) — marks the end of an era of the two-wheeler manufacturing industry in India. It’s pertinent to note that right until […]

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Crumbling pillars

Post-independence India’s democratic experiment — its only major achievement of the past 68 years — is slowly unravelling.

Because of the reckless indiscipline and private agendas of the country’s politicians of all ideological hues, the parliamentary democracy system is dissolving before our very eyes. Both houses of Parliament are not being “allowed to function” by opposition […]

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Bad news for jholawalas

It’s official. Economics Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen won’t serve as the chancellor of the ambitious new Nalanda University (NU) slowly taking shape in Rajgir, Bihar, after his first three-year term ends in June. In a letter written to the board of governors of the fledgling varsity, Sen says he believes the 11-month-old BJP-led government […]

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Disturbing innocence

The Supreme Court’s scathing November 20 order passed against Ranjit Sinha, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), while hearing an application filed by the Delhi-based Centre for Public Interest Litigation, directing Sinha to recuse himself and not “interfere in the 2G spectrum investigation and trial”, has confirmed the worst fears of the tax-paying […]

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Media sunset

THE TAKEOVER OF MEDIA conglomerate Network 18 Media & Investments Ltd (NMIL) by Mukesh Ambani, executive chairman of the yarn-to-oil and retail giant Reliance Industries Ltd — India’s largest private sector company (annual revenue: Rs.401,302 crore) — for a reported consideration of Rs.2,692 crore in early July, has sent shivers down the spines of media […]

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Small kindness

ALMOST ANYONE WHO is anyone in the fraternity of scribes has written an obituary of the legendary editor, author and loveable rogue Khushwant Singh who passed away on March 20 at the age of 99. Ergo it’s obligatory for your editor to also opine on the life and times of this iconoclast who shook up […]

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Ecosystem ignorance

The delight which all right-thinking citizens of this benighted republic groaning under the incremental weight of open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption practiced by the Congress-led UPA government for nine long years experienced when the neophyte Aam Aadmi Party trounced the Congress in the Delhi state election of December, is fast turning into disillusionment. With each […]

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Classic fascism

Although the vast majority of the nation’s citizenry which includes captains of industry eagerly awaiting President Pranab Mukherjee’s invitation to Narendra Modi to form the next government in New Delhi, has missed its implications, the sensational exposé of the Modi-led Gujarat government’s stalking of a Bangalore-based woman architect is a chilling preview of things to […]

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Limited actors

Although it’s derisively referred to as the idiot box for the shallow, ephemeral infotainment it provides, the power of television news channels to expose ground realities in some of the country’s hidden areas of darkness cannot be matched by the print media.

A case in point is CNN-IBN’s excellent multi-episode documentary titled No Country for Children […]

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Minority preference

The adjudication and enthronement of Indian (Andhra)-origin Nina Davuluri as Miss America 2013 is not only a triumph for this 23-year-old medical student, but also a well-deserved slap in the face of the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood and beauty pageant organisers, who seem to be innocent of all notions of ethnic good looks. Although multi-ethnic […]

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Classic fascism

The puppy-under-motor car analogy drawn by Gujarat chief minister and BJP’s national election committee chief Narendra Modi whose prospects of becoming prime minister following the 2014 General Election are improving by the day, reveals a dangerous mindset. Responding to a question by a Reuters correspondent on whether he experienced remorse over the massacre of 2,000 […]

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Faux Superman

With Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi emerging as the BJP/NDA front runner for prime minister in the General Election due next summer, the remarkably long run of the incumbent septuagenarian Dr. Manmohan Singh of the Congress-led UPA government is all but over. But Singh has little cause to complain considering that contrary to the Lincolnian assertion, […]

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Humbling experience

In your editor’s not unlimited experience of seminars and intellectual fests, the three-day Milken Institute Global Conference 2013 spread over April 29-May 1 in Los Angeles, was arguably the greatest accumulation of the choice and master spirits of our age. The more than 3,000 attendees (most of whom paid $7,500 (Rs.4.13 lakh) delegates’ fee for […]

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Base considerations

One of the peculiar anomalies of self-styled socialist India governed by a greedy establishment with superpower aspirations is that it is the largest importer of arms, ammunition and defence equipment worldwide. The fact that 46 percent of the country’s children suffer chronic malnutrition induced by poverty, mass illiteracy and unemployment for which the Central government’s […]

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Legally aided tycoon

Arguably no denouement in recent times has given as much satisfaction to the country’s smug and risk-averse Indian middle class as the comeuppance of Subrata Roy, the self-styled managing worker of the reportedly one-million strong Sahara Pariwar (family) which is actually a clutch of para banking companies, with claimed 30 million depositors spread across the […]

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Strange phenomenon

A curious paradox of the Indian establishment is that a growing number of its children are choosing to desert this democracy and live abroad, especially in the US. This strange phenomenon came into sharp focus on February 5 when the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative released an exhaustive 214-page report, exposing 54 countries that […]

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Bollywood hypocrisy

The reportedly rising number of readers of this page are surely well aware that your editor is no Bollywood buff, and certainly not a fan of its over-hyped ham actors, whose movies are an assault on the senses and an insult to people with even minimal intelligence and logic.

However a surprise endorsement of my sustained […]

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Straight-talking judge

In the tower of Babel which is the public discourse the world’s most populous democracy dominated by politicians whose prime motivation — it’s easy to discern — is not the public good but primitive capital accumulation, Justice (Retd) Markandey Katju, chairman of the influential but toothless Press Council of India (estb. 1966), stands out as a […]

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Thackeray’s legacy

The death due to natural causes in Mumbai of Shiv Sena founder-supremo Bal Thackeray (86) brings closure to an inglorious chapter in the political history of India and Bombay — India’s commercial capital — which he perhaps more than any other individual, transformed into Mumbai, the crime capital of India.

Despite all encomiums and veneration including […]

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Mean subsidised billionaires

According to the Delhi-based IT industry lobby Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the garbage (NB: that’s not a typographical error) city of Bangalore (pop. 8 million) aka the Silicon Valley of India hosts more than 170 IT and related companies with an estimated 500,000 employees on their muster rolls. Official encouragement given […]

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Failed vilification campaign

The flood of media eulogies for the late Dr. Verghese Kurien, former chairman of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF, owner of brand Amul) and architect of Operation Flood (which transformed milk-deficient India into the world’s largest producer of milk and dairy products), is in sharp contrast with […]

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Politicians’ president

Congress party veteran and former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s consummately plotted transition from North Block, New Delhi to the magnificent 340-roomed Rashtrapati Bhavan, marks the culmination of Mukherjee’s 40 years of survival and prosperity in the treacherous corridors of power in the national capital. On July 22, following his 69 percent vote of an electoral […]

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Deserved government

On several occasions, the frequent — once every nine days — peregrinations abroad at public expense of Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (exposed by India Today), have provoked trenchant comment on this page.

Now it transpires that the itch for free foreign travel is not peculiar to Ahluwalia. Information reluctantly provided under […]

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Excessive thrift lesson

The puritan ethic of thrift and saving is a virtue to be admired. But in business and industry, if the invisible line between thrift and plain old-fashioned stinginess is crossed and becomes a nostrum of corporate policy, the consequences can be grave. This is a hard reality which the Bangalore-based IT heavyweight Infosys Technologies Ltd […]

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Lachrymose bad end

At the fag end of an undistinguished career in Indian politics, Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh, aka the Raja of Reservations, didn’t get the reservations he wanted most — Congress party tickets for his son Ajeya and daughter Veena to contest from safe constituencies in his Madhya Pradesh bailiwick. This unfair denial of […]

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Naïve euphoria

Although the hit feature film Slumdog Millionaire, set in India’s commercial capital has swept Hollywood’s annual Oscar awards bagging prizes for best picture, musical score and sound recording, not a few within the intelligentsia — your editor included — have experienced a peculiar reluctance to view it. By all accounts Slumdog is a gut-wrenching depiction of life in […]

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Sucking up kicking down

The most important unwritten nostrum of the sycophancy culture of the Delhi durbar, especially of the Congress party, is to suck up and kick down. And that’s the practice followed by the controversial Union human resources development minister Arjun Singh with consummate ease. Recently following a storm after he was reported to have stated that […]

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Reel life NCW

On one issue the usually brain dead scriptwriters and directors of Bollywood and its regional avatars are bang on target: women are the worst enemies of women. In reel life, the greatest persecutors of heroines and indeed any woman endowed with half-good looks, are the scheming mother or sister in-law, and often the neighbourhood killjoy […]