ganpa's rants

During the last two decades of the previous century and the first two of the current century, the world has witnessed, an amazing spectacle of unhindered trans-continental harmony in movement of goods, services, capital, ideas, technology and people from one end to the other.  It is irrefutable that the whole world has reaped a mountain of benefits from this era of globalization. Developed countries explored new areas to shift labour intensive manufacturing jobs, which resulted in enormous cost savings and consequently more healthier bottom lines.  Under developed and developing countries world over gained huge benefits of this surge in jobs and opportunities and managed to transform their countries to emerging economies. The new found middle class emerged in these beneficiaries and huge hitherto unheard-of numbers were hauled out of poverty. The undisputed champion to benefit from globalization has been China which has become the defacto manufacturing shop floor ...

Appa !!!! for God’s sake please don’t be soo stingy!! Just throw that cover off and get a new one on line. It hardly costs you 300 bucks. My daughter screamed across the room at me, as she saw me struggling to repair my smart phone’s flip cover. There was nothing too wrong with the cover of my smart phone. It was a flip cover and the flip cover had gotten unfastened from the silicon base partially. All that was needed was   Rs 5 worth of Fevikwik and some dexterity and Lo the flip cover was restored to its former glory. That, the former glory itself was a bit tattered is a different matter altogether. However, that’s a different story for another day. Similar scenes play out in my house almost every other day. The antagonist is always me while the person expressing deep anguish could be my daughter, or my wife or my mother, or could be any possible combination of the three afore mentioned characters. Mr Scrooge, Mr Miser, I have been frequently addressed as such and...

The world as we knew it has ceased to exist. Well it actually did in December of last year, when, in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province a   small cluster of about 40 odd patients were diagnosed with a mysterious pneumonia. This was subsequently connected to a Novel Corona virus and the Huanan wholesale seafood market. Lots of speculations about its origins, transition and eventual transmission to humans, its reproductive number R-nought, have been made, but none conclusive and with substantiated evidence. They are at best educated deductions made from extrapolating past similar data and at worst conspiracy theories of a Hollywood addict on a weed inspired high, Truth be told, we are now sailing in unchartered waters. The Wuhan virus has thrown the most meticulously planned strategies of nations, into the dustbin. Just the other day, we were debating about Countries with the largest GDP’s, trade wars, etc. The favoured topic of discussion from boardrooms t...

At a very early age I knew I was wired differently from most of my friends around me. Those days we did not have television. The radio itself was quite a novelty. The Indian print media did not boast of an auto-based magazine to the best of my knowledge and even if one did exist, I am sure it must have been way above my financial stratosphere. Our only access to “foreign magazines” which would host photographs of motorcycles and cars would be at British Council Library or some old magazine shops. Even then, when my friends would excitedly pore over glossy images of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, I would be frantically searching for images of brawny stripped-down Land Rovers, Pajero’s or Land Cruisers. This unique area of interest extended to naked bikes and cruisers as against classy fully faired sports bikes. This however is a story for another day.  The bare truth was that ever since I set my eyes on an automobile, I always favoured brawny Jeeps or SUV’s as they are more ...