On A Loose End

God, this world is getting more and more dangerous. If nature by itself was not difficult enough to live with, People around one make sure that one could never take his guard off. Now some genuine scamsters have taken the “people” danger to a new global level. Welcome to the Employment Scam I went through. It started with me putting up my resume on a couple of web sites, purely on an experimental basis, to see how good those were . The going was good and I generally did get relevant offers. Then one day I get a letter from another prospective employer apparently from Dragon Oil, UK, asking me to send in my detailed updated CV, which I dutifully did. A couple of days later I get a response from the same guy telling me that they have found my resume to be interesting and asked me to answer a questionnaire attached with the mail. The questionnaire was intelligent and looked like it was from a reputed firm. So I spent some time on it and forwarded the answers as requested in the mail. Fi...

A friend of mine once told me about the futility of Collective Bullshit. He was talking in terms of a boss bullshitting his subordinates collectively. He said, “It is simple, whenever the boss is bullshitting collectively, one needs to just look at some other person in the group and the entire bullshit gets deflected to that person.” In other words, everyone looks at some other person as if that person is the culprit and that way every one can keep his/her own conscience clean. The same holds true for collective responsibility also. Let’s take, for instance, the Mumbai terror attacks. When the question of responsibility came up everyone right from the Home minister of India, the chief minister of Maharashtra, the deputy Chief Minister and Director General of Police and the Mumbai Police commissioner refused to acknowledge their responsibility. The Home Minister of India had to be forced to resign by the congress part and did so very reluctantly, as did the Chief Minister and his deputy...

Circumstances – Massive dip in the oil prices world over. Good news - A few days back Air India announced a fare cut by 45 to 85 % in various sectors. Others are likely to follow suit. Bad news – The cut was limited to the basic fare charged and not on the fuel surcharge. What is happening, one might be tempted to ask. If the fuel prices have gone down, the fuel surcharge should go down, why the basic fare. There is a lot of economics at work here. This is an example of a Government aided scam. Let us try to understand it. The fuel surcharge here in India was introduced in Nov 2005 for the airlines business, primarily to offset the volatility in the prices of fuel and hence the Aviation Turbine Fuel or the ATF. No, it is not the brain of some over-intelligent Indian economist; it has existed in the west for a lot longer and has pervaded other sectors too, besides the aviation sector as it will, in our country too. How does the airlines company benefit? On the face of it, it might seem...