Even when the Ganga is a continent away, Indians who have immigrated to the US have managed to find an alternative – Jamaica Bay in Queens. Proving that while you can take an Indian out of India, the rituals and customs will emigrate as well. The park rangers in the US were mystified to find coconuts, bits …
Condoms sell very well during a recession, apparently. And so do guns and burglar alarms. When ruled by fear, our buying habits go back to our primal instincts – food, sex and shelter. But the same doesn’t hold true for the housing market, battered by 3 years of a dismal performance. In India, the rise …
It’s easy to notch up 10,000 hours of watching TV – which is why the whole world is very good at doing it. In his book,’The Outliers‘ Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for experience over talent. The premise is simple. Spend 10,000 hours of your life doing something worthwhile and you will get pretty good …
It’s the category with the highest number of awarded patent applications – mousetraps. From the time the US Patent Office opened it’s doors in 1838 upto 1996, over 4400 patents have been granted for new and innovative ways to capture the rat. It does not indicate the number of patents that have been rejected or …
I’ve always looked at voting in the elections with disdain. Who’s going to take the trouble of standing in a long slow-moving queue just to press a button at the end of it? But there has been enough noise created in the last couple of years to make me feel guilty about this standoffish stance. …
In India, no one bats an eyelid at forking up money to get a job done. Need a license? Pay the tout and escape the line. Need your passport fast tracked? There are rates and systems in place. It works far more efficiently than the official one. One of the reasons that corruption has taken …
A whole village can starve without water and nothing will be done for decades. In Peepli Live, a politician gifts a family a worthless water pump, that occupies pride of place in the house and is merely a way to deflect attention. But when a business needs it to survive, you can be a hundred …
On 25th March, I lost the one person in the world who thought I was perfect. She belonged to a generation that lived for their children, seeing no faults, prepared to sacrifice everything so that their progeny could have everything that they denied themselves. My mother did not have a refrigerator, ever. Her proudest possessions …
How do you get people to eat more carrots? Keep telling them they are healthy or sell them like junk food? A company in the US is doing just that. Packaging, promoting and selling carrots as the next thing to crunch instead of burgers or chips. And people just seem to be lapping it up. What does …
When personal space is encroached upon, we get acutely sensitive. Sitting on a train, a bus or an airplane, we devise our own ways to keep the crowds out. We bury our heads in the newspaper or a book. Plug our ears into music and tune the world out. Elbow digs into ribs are ignored, …
