With all the dailies & business newspapers/magazines carrying tales of Pink Slips; economy; recession etc… a friend shared a retrenchment letter in a lighter vein….that pushed the blues away for a while:

Dear staff,

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown of economy in US since last Christmas, Management has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 40 years of age on early retirement. This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early). Persons selected to be RAPEd can apply to management to be eligible for the SHAFT scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination). Persons who have been RAPEd and SHAFTed will be reviewed under the SCREW scheme (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers). A person may be RAPEd once, SHAFTed twice and SCREWed as many times as Management deems appropriate. Read the rest of this entry »

I was amongst the early users to pick up an iPhone duly & start using it.

Having given up E90 due to it’s dud speakerphone…. I was convinced by Anjan Ghosh of TV18 whom I refer to as Tech Guru(for the study he manages to do on any thing electronic) that “iPhone is all about style and not about ease of use. Typing text is easy once you get habitual, but since this is a touch panel handset and we use our fingers instead of stylus, typing long test messages or mails is not that fancy. And when you compare ease of typing on iPhone with Blackberry, black berry is better. iPhone is all about style, sleek looks of the handset, the flipping of pictures using your fingers, the zooming in and out function while viewing pictures or websites and not to forget that the front panel or display is scratch resistant And don’t forget the audio quality “ apple’s iPod always had an upper hand over any other music player and iPhone anyways has all the functionality of an iPod too !! though it has a 2megapixel camera, the quality of pictures shot are amazing. One can easily get deceived by thinking it has been shot using a 3.2 or 5 megapixel cam !! He also warned me : The worst thing with iPhone are : you cannot forward SMS, or send SMS to multiple recipients. You cannot send or receive MMS. The Blue tooth feature of this handset supports only hands-free devices and nothing else. Which means you cannot pair your phone with any Bluetooth enabled handset or laptop to send or receive songs, pictures, vide os, etc.” Read the rest of this entry »

Indian Retail that had been rocking a year back is facing rocks today; some of it due to circumstances beyond control, but some definitely within control. Based on experience, discussions, talks over the past year……thought that some of these can be listed down…. Read the rest of this entry »

Some months ago, BMC & other allied agencies in their enthusiasm completed the work of road, drainage, foothpaths, bus shelters etc. where I stay.

The next day morning & continuously I saw number of taxi’s; rickshaw’s being parked there from 7 am in the morning but post 1pm suddenly disappear. Being the inquisitive kind, after a couple of days, started asking questions - Why the rush? What is happening etc. etc. to the watchman of the building, my driver etc. Read the rest of this entry »