Intelligentle

India, behind its colorful veil of spirituality, scenic beauty and serene charm, has a darker shade of sadness. It pathetically fails to protect its future, the children. The data from National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) paints a rather disappointing picture with only a few states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and New Delhi showing a positive deviation from the national average. While the national average of Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) stands at 40 (per 1000 live births), Madhya Pradesh and Assam fails to save 54  lives as of 2013. Kerala with its renowned, now declining, Kerala model of health care has an infant mortality rate of 12. This aforementioned numbers proves that with political will power, governance and personal health awareness we surely can save more lives every year. Even though we cite Kerala as an exception in this scenario there are states such as Punjab making good progress in this regard. These are the...

"We are not giving you a new car, we are merely servicing it", was the response of one of those sincere service engineers when I pointed out the humongous service cost I had to incur after the last scheduled service. Besides questioning your intellect with such naive statements, they are also used to face the customer with any regret after doing a bad job. To put things in perspective, I shall provide a rough calculation of the maintenance cost incurred for my  Chevrolet Beat Diesel LS from the second year service: Year 2 service: 12000+ INR: T his includes a PCV valve replacement which was not included in the actual service manual. They told that they can alter the service manual without informing customers. Year 2.5 service: 6500 INR.  After one week of this service, a spring near/connected to the clutch was broken costing around 500 INR and I had to leave the vehicle for a day, causing me great inconvenience,  Both the front brakes jammed for no ap...

I live in a civilized society, or may be that is something just in my head. When we shifted to Bangalore some six months back, I knew it's not going to be a smooth ride. But the dog eat dog attitude which I'm witnessing in fast paced cities like Bangalore is beyond imagination. I am unsure if it can be completely attributed to the non-stop life, happening 24X7, but it sure contributes to it. For instance, when on the road, all they care is about their car, time and safety. The attitude has changed to 'Life is valuable, only if it is mine'. 'Mutual respect' is a term we conveniently forget and the problems rooting from this exponentially grows, day after day. The following series of events happened in the apartment I live in, where people belong to upper middle class occupy most of the houses. That day I parked my bike at the basement and was walking towards the lift when I heard a messy argument. One of the occupants, who works in a frontline IT company in I...