And also for K R Aadisthan, to test his potential Malluness.

Connect Veerappan and a Mallu author.
This is a Quizzing type “connect” question.

The connect also involves the noble sport of Nehru bashing.

419ers take Aussie financial advisor for AU$1m | The Register

A Melbourne financial manager faces a hefty prison sentence after stealing AU$1m from his clients and handing it over to Nigerian advance fee fraudsters.
Robert Andrew Street, 58, fell for a classic 419 scam after receiving an email from the Reverend Sam Kukah offering him a cool $65m in return for relocating cash held by Nigeria’s Presidential Payment Debt Reconciliation Committee. Naturally, Street quickly learned that there were certain expenses he had to meet to oil the wheels of the illicit transfer. Accordingly, he set about fleecing clients of his financial planning business – Making Dollars & Sense – by getting them to invest in fictitious get-rich-quick schemes.

Wow. A financial manager.

Shourie gives Rs 12 crore to IIT-Kanpur!

Admirable gesture, but didn’t his dad file a PIL against the very concept of the MP Local Area Development Scheme?

An interesting article in The Economist (Link will stay free for a week) arguing that the best way to ensure a smooth and successful succession in a company is to groom an insider through a formal selection process rather than recruiting someone from outside or holding a competition among insiders (as the BJP is doing now by default).

Somewhat related Question: What is the difference between Heir Apparent and Heir Presumptive? No searching or looking at dictionaries please.

Google Desktop has been launched. When will http://conscience.google.com come out?

Thanks to a commentor known only as Corrector of Maladies, I was able to skim through the original report by Goldman Sachs on which Rajeev Srinivasan based his article, and it turns out that I was thoroughly wrong, and unfair in my criticism of the author. The report does indeed do what Rajeev says it does, and I made a really bad mistake. The mistake I made was:
Continue reading →

(I am taking this back. See here)
I was browsing through the Blog Mela posts and one of the entries over there is by Shyam Nair who is trying to bash up Nehru.

Now that is an entirely commendable activity and I can only wish that more and more young men take up the hobby, but you should keep up some standards. For example, you should not approvingly link to Rajeev Srinivasan’s article on what he calls the “Nehurvian Penalty” that is, I am afraid, an embarrassment to anyone who understands numbers, as I have explained.

Gaurav has been rather unusually lucky in encountering stupidity. As for me, if ever I changed professions to become a serial killer, I’d specialise in killing ICICI Bank employees.

Here is a sample conversation I had some years back.

Me: I’d like a DD drawn on Lucknow please. [I was paying off my educational loan]
She: We don’t have a branch in Lucknow. Would Hyderabad do?
Me: How would that help?
She: You’d save on charges. If we don’t have a branch in a place, we’d have to use correspondent banks and the charges for that will be higher…
Me: But I want a DD on Lucknow. How would getting one drawn on Hyderabad help?
She: They are close by right?

She had a narrow escape that day.

Turns out that the indelible ink can in fact be rubbed off if you do it immediately after it has been applied. But it still takes time to do it, and that is the time when you are supposed to be voting, so if you go into the polling booth and spend all your time rubbing your fingers, I think people will notice..

Turns out that I am the blog of the day on Blogstreet India today. Don’t use this as an excuse not to read me tomorrow. Read me every day, whether or not I have written anything new.

Also link to me, so that my rankings in Blogstreet improve. It is a crying shame that I am ranked sixth and tied with Aunty. Help me pull ahead of her!

• It is obliged, not obligated
  
• It is uninterested and not disinterested, unless you mean disinterested, in which case it is disinterested and not uninterested. If you don’t know which is the right one, then use uninterested, because if you know what disinterested means, you will know the difference.
  
• It is almost always alternatively and not alternately.

Tomorrow will be the first time I will be voting using an EVM. One way or the other I’ve been missing out on voting, mostly because I was out of Bombay during the last election cycle and I couldn’t prove that I was staying where I was staying. During the Lok sabha elections it turned out that our name wasn’t on the list because we had shifted homes across constituencies and there was no one home when people came over to do the enumeration. Now, thanks to the efforts of my brother, we are finally registered voters in Thane.

The only problem is there is nothing at all to choose between the two morons.