Random Rants/Adventures in Life

Pakistan - Should it be Balkanized ? While discussing my earlier post on 'A Weak India' with people, I realized that there was a total lack of awareness among the Indian Diaspora about what is going on back home and in general the subcontinent. I did get a few intelligent responses and one particularly interesting discussion was what is the rationale of having Pakistan as an independent country ? Life is the gift of nature, but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom", says a Greek adage. Maverick Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf needs to suck up this sage saying down to his glib throat; whether he and his predecessors have been helpful in providing a " beautiful living" to the people of Afghanistan, their own denizens who had clamoured for Pakistan, and to the hapless Moslems of Kashmir, on the eastern fringe of truncated Pakistan. The leadership in undivided Pakistan, by pursuing unsound policies, had on the contrary played fraud on its own people.

After spending so much time away and enclosed in my own world, it is really unfortunate that very few articles or happenings move me. However, while watching the new Bollywood movie, Tango Charlie, I started thinking about my home country and its general indifference towards anything and everything. Tango Charlie is about a BSF soldier who is rescued by two Air Force pilots from a remote Kashmir post. While ferrying him back, they start reading his journal which outlines his work from the forests of Mizoram battling Bodo militants to Naxalite extremism to riot control in Gujarat. The finale is in Kashmir while guarding a vital supply bridge.Tango Charlie brought home the very valuable lesson, "History forgets a country that forgets its soldiers". How easily we as an Indians forget the fact that it took the sacrifice of nearly 600 of our brave soldiers and a Kargil to awaken us from our slumber. And it is slumber again that we are in again. Every day, every hour, someone in In

Mumbai dabbawallahs Dabbawallahs: Mumbai's best managed business Source : Rediff news - http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/nov/04dabba.htm (Links open in the same window, right click and use 'Open Link in New Window' to stay on the blog) Prince Charles is not the first person to show an interest in the dabbawallahs of Mumbai. In fact, the first time they actually shot to international fame was when his compatriots at the BBC did a documentary on them way back in the late 70s. But it was in the 1990s, when management lexicon became a part of daily life, that the interest in Dabbawallahs, now synonymous with Mumbai's blurringly fast life, grew. Today, they are feted regularly and invited to lecture students of business management. Corporate chiefs applaud them, management gurus use them as a models. So what makes the dabbawallahs so unique? And how do they work? At the simplest, the dabbawallahs deliver home-cooked meals to individuals at their workplaces and return empty