Pocket-sized dynamos

V. Pattabhi Ram

Wafers was short-listed by her office for her first overseas trip. It was part of a rewards package for stellar performance during the last year and would include a week-long paid holiday to Dubai and Singapore. A year ago, when she had joined the KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) firm fresh after qualifying as a CA, Wafers hadn’t thought that life would be so great for her. Even the encyclopaedic China had grudgingly admitted that the pony-tailed lass had come a l ong way during the last 12 months.

Dubai airport

As she stepped out of the aircraft at the Dubai International Airport, she was completely taken by surprise at what she saw. Nothing, yes nothing, had really prepared her for the sight. Wow. It was a massive airport, spic and span and with walkathons for the lazy, golf-carts for those who couldn’t walk the distance, huge duty-free shops where you could gaze and gaze with little thought, and a sea of humanity.

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A primer on sub-prime crisis

Srinath Sridhar

Rama Sridhar gave a groan as the announcement came over the airport loudspeaker. The flight to Hyderabad was delayed by another two hours. It was scheduled to take off at 11 pm now. Her son Ajay — a chartered accountant, working in Hyderabad — was nonchalantly flipping through the pages of a financial magazine.

Pleasantries exchanged.

Suddenly Ajay saw somebody calling out his mom’s name loudly across the airport waiting room. The middle-aged lady came running over and hugged his mom. Ajay now recognised the lady as Shalini, who was his mother’s old schoolmate. A middle-aged man standing behind her was her husband Vinod, who was working as a manager in a bank. As they all sat down, few moments were spent in pleasantries, even as Ajay got bored and got back to his book.

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Mobile number portability

Srinath Sridhar

Scene: A train

Characters: Avinash — businessman, age 34; Vinod — an employee in an established GSM company, age 50; Anu — B-school student, age 22; Susheela — customer, age 40.

Avinash sat down with a grunt and deposited his heavy suitcase below his seat. He gave a perfunctory smile to the three other occupants in his cubicle before whipping out his mobile. He remarked grumpily: “No signal again. I am getting fed up with my operator. Now that the Government is planning to introduce mobile number portability, these GSM service providers such as Secure Telecom have nowhere to hide. It’s shape up or ship out for them.”
Vinod coughed gently. “Err. I am Vinod. I work as Manager, Operations, in Secure, the service provider you were talking about just now.” Avinash was shocked. Anu grinned: “Hey all, I’m Anu, doing my MBA.. I see that this journey is not going to be as boring as I imagined.” Everyone laughed. There were introductions all round. The train merrily chugged along.

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‘Mechanism design’ in this year’s Nobel

Indra Nath

Irritated about the Rs 75,000 that he had lost in the stock market, Krishnan sat in a corner. “I am never…I mean NEVER going to that wretched place again…I have had enough of it,” he said to his wife Savithri who looked worried.
Both sighed as Krishnan slowly folded his socks into the shoes, anguish written all over his wrinkled face. As their daughter Priya came back after economics tuition, the couple quickly changed their mood and began humming a new Hindi song.
“Dad have you been trading again?” Priya asked.
“Yes”, he admitted for a change and confessed that he had just lost the money earned as performance bonus last year.
“Papa why do you trade…it isn’t an efficient system. Yet, even the Nobel committee seems to honour the idea,” Priya wondered.

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