SquareShooter

I know this is not 1978 and we definitely are not going to travel back in time. But, it was impossible to skip the association of de-monetization of 2016 to what happened in 1978. Things were so poor then, as far as I could remember the talk in town was only about “aayiram rooba nottu sellaadhaame” (1000 rupee note is invalid), which meant people were not even bothered about higher denominations. None of the people we know had a thousand rupee note, and I guess not many of them had even seen one in their life. I do not know how the city life was then, but in a small town things were very depressing. We were fortunately an industrial town, so lot of trained and untrained labour jobs were there. Railway workshop also ensured inheritance jobs, and so most households had at least one wage earner. Unfortunately then most of those wage earners also had many children, dependents and so the wages were just not enough. Outside of the labour class, and among the SSLC, college educate...

Ratan Tata I am sure had no role to play in the scuffle that broke out between Bombay House security and media persons. But, I have had a long lasting crib about RT and his attitude towards media. I do not know him, nor can I claim to have interacted with him. In many years that I have been a business journalist, I have had opportunity to cover several of Tata firms’ Annual General Meetings RT chaired, industry events, though I can’t recollect many press conferences. There is however, one press conference of RT that I would never forget, though specifics of the event have faded from memory with years gone by …. That was a press conference, I think a Tata Tele press conference in 2001-02. What I distinctly remember though was the venue and the shocking way the media was handled – the Crystal rooms at the Taj Mahal, Mumbai. If my memory is right, it was a Tata – VSNL stake announcement with Pramod Mahajan participating in it as the then Telecom minister. There weren’t many tele...

We read every year of malnutrition related deaths in Maharashtra, children who are infected by out of date iron supplements at noon meal centres, poor pre-natal and post-natal health care for rural women. It is not that rich and famous in the cities don’t face this, but there are enough and more clinics and hundreds of crores worth of nutritional supplement that get sold to compensate for the carbs and white they will cut from their diets to stay slim and fit. I lived my early days, till I moved to Bombay with my first job in 1990 in a small town, with close connection to villages, though not much of nature. There have been certain cheap, but highly nutritional food that was available for the poor, without much fuss they consumed them. Source of iron, anti-oxidants and many medicinal value is the moringa or murungai tree, drumstick tree. The leaves are cooked with dal and eaten, the flowers may be some had recipes to cook them, and of course the staple veggie of the sa...

Essar Oil has sealed definitive agreements to sell its flagship asset, refinery business along with retail network and related infrastructure of Ports to Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, international trading firm Trafigura and Russian Investment fund UCP  for an enterprise value of approximately $13 billion. This is a landmark deal for India, which over the years tried to attract investments in the refining sector without much success. As long as the petrol and diesel prices were controlled, the market wasn’t lucrative for any foreign player. The Rosneft deal first came up when both petrol and diesel prices were deregulated giving a level playing field between the private and public sector refiners to market their products within the country. While Reliance, the only other private player in refining company built, expanded its refineries with export focus, Essar by far sold much of its refined petroleum products within the country through public sector refining and ...

A week ago, there was a news about connecting Borivili and Thane by a ropeway, and wait where would it rest on or go through? The hills of Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Sounds crazy and those of us who know what SGNP is have been left in a state of shock. First you have plans to cut through the “Park” for a high speed train service, next you want ropeways and what next? Open it up for “development”? Mumbai and its ecological hotspots are under threat, constant threat and in some ways the space crunch the city faces is also due to its geography. But, the greatness of this city is also about its geography, the sea one side, the forests and the hills on the other side, bringing abundant rains, feeding many small rivers and filling up many natural and man made lakes. There may be a million climate change naysayers, but for me having lived here for 25 years, the climate change is a reality. It doesn’t rain like that anymore …. not the predictable torrential monsoon showers an...

I am not an engineer, cannot assess value of construction, cost of projects etc., But this bit of news in the morning paper caught me by surprise. “The tender for hill cutting is worth around Rs 2,000 crore. The first two parts of the tender, said to be around Rs 550 crore, was repackaged owing to change in engineering works and design for combining the cutting and diversion of the Ulwe river. This part is currently under tendering process. The other two parts have been finalised.”  From TOI’s repot on ground work having started at the Navi Mumbai Airport site. Is it normal to include a whopping 2000 crore rupees to cut a hill to make way for the airpot? How much would that add to our “airport maintenance charges” or “user charges” per ticket? Does cutting the hill not yield any granite? Does 2000 crore include the value of granite to be mined? Or is it just the cost to cut and dispose the quarried stones? It is not unusual for big ticket projects in India being h...

Tyagaraja  “Naa jayammunu joochi nammare devuni” Last August, senior musician O.S.Thyagarajan was performing at Mumbai’s Shanmukhananda Sabha. One after other Tyagaraja kirtanas flowed. It was blissful, but was a surprise as well. It was not specifically a Tyagaraja festival, but one was delighted. Just a few days before that an article appeared that tried to portray a composer, revered as a Saint by singers of many generations now not in the right spirit. The writer had tried to show Carnatic Music is inherently casteist and how it is proved from what Tyagaraja himself had written in his famous Gowlai Pancaratna Kriti, ‘Dudugukala’ in one of the Caranams. Coming soon after the publication of that article, perhaps many in the audience would have been grateful to OST for making his whole concert a homage to Tyagaraja. OST brought out the greatness of Tyagaraja in all his true colours. When he sang ‘Sattaleni dinamulu vaccena’ in Naganandhini, Tyagarja’s lament on the nat...