India’s first passenger train journey

India's first passenger train journey
On 16th April 1853, India’s first passenger train journey began. It started from Bori Bunder in Mumbai, all the way up to Thane. This was a distance of 32 km, wherein 3 coaches were hauled by the engine. Thus started rail transport in India. This piece of history came to my notice not because of the ...

Indian politics: A conundrum of choice

This can also be titled, why I do not bother to vote any more. But lets keep that aside for the moment. Here’s the thing, there are basically only two major national parties (yes there are others who claim to be national parties, but who are we kidding). The Congress and the NDA. There are ...

Car Customization

In India, the moment you say the words car customization, the name Deepak Chhabria automatically crops up. DC used to be the pioneer of car tuning and modding in India. Back then, changing the looks of your car was not considered as the “in thing”, and people almost always made do with the factory settings. ...

Co-operation in Capitalism

If I have ever met you in person (or if you have frequented this blog for some time now) then you would know that I often extoll the virtues of the selfishness citing Ms. Rand and her essays on Capitalism. In fact I at one time have had a heart to heart conversation with the ...

Nothing special

I wanted to make this a special post. It’s my 400th one on the blog. However, 2 busy weeks and a sad case of writer’s block later, I decided to let myself go … where I get the inspiration, but cannot put pen to paper. Nothing is special. It’s a post, there. On the other ...

Best gift you can give your children: Education 11

We had a function at our place yesterday (it’s an annual thing). To say that the place was thronged would be an understatement. During this time, I get to meet folks whom I haven’t met in ages, from various echelons of the society. All there to serve God. More on that later. I met two ...

Batch of 2005

Batch of 2005
The world of business talks fondly of the batch of 1989 from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. This is due to the fact that a lot of participants in this class turned towards entrepreneurship and launched successful ventures of their own. The likes of Sanjeev Bhikchandani of Naukri.com, Rashesh Shah of Edelweiss Capital and ...

Concrete Ant-hills 3

Concrete Ant-hills
Yes, you read that correctly. Today when I was coming to office, this thought struck me. Aren’t we all nowadays working in some commercial complex or the other? Huge concrete towers where multiple corporates have their offices, and people moving in small “colleague huddles” from one place to the other? This is especially true in ...

Social Entrepreneurship – How is it any different? 5

I really do not see how is it any different from any other enterprise? I looked up the wiki page for Social Entrepreneurship, here’s what it says - Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and ...

Technology as a catalyst

This on the New York Times, an article about how a librarian had to change her practice skill-sets from being an archive keeper of knowledge to someone who teaches the right way to access the right data. How many of us still read books? Flip through their pages? Very few of the new generation do ...