There are thousands of articles on the world wide web talking about getting maximum mileage out of your car. Just like the millions of car owners that wanted to get the most mileage out of their cars, I was reading through dozens of ‘how to’ articles on ‘hypermiling’. Hypermiling is a term coined by Wayne Gerdes, and hypermilers are those drivers striving to exceed the EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) fuel economy rating of their vehicles.

I’m not going to talk about the cars and their mileage efficiencies in the US and Europe, but in a country like India where one cannot exceed 35-60 kmph inside congested city roads. Also, enormous traffic jams that happen due to the callous..

It is a universal truth that burning of coal is one of the major causes of global warming, acid rain and other toxins in the air. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, about 3,700,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) is released into the atmosphere - by a typical coal plant in an year. It may sound oxymoronic if one talks about using coal and going green. Well, why not? Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS in short, seems to be the technological answer to this oxymoron!? The US 2008 elections are red hot right now, and many who’ve voted for Obama or McCain are keeping their fingers crossed.

If there is one game that people all over the world knows that India plays, it should be ‘Cricket’. Though being a British game, circket and India are synonymous - many, over here, eat and sleep cricket. In my office, I can see most of my colleagues glued to their laptops and desktops, constantly refreshing (inspite of having ‘auto-refresh’ feature) the Rediff cricket live score page. You go to a tea shop, there you see an old FM radio connected to obscenely big speakers playing cricket commentary. Even if the tea shop owner doesn’t like cricket, he urged to tune into cricket news - customers’ popular demand. When I opened today’s newspaper, the headlines screamed “Anand is World Champion”..

As a mark of success on its maiden attempt in the exploration of the romantic and intriguing Moon globe, Indian scientists at ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) have placed the Moon spacecraft into the Transfer Orbit around the earth. Powered by the indigenously designed and built Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C11), the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft carried 11 payloads - three from the European Space Agency (ESA), one from Bulgaria, two from NASA, and five designed and built in India. So far, so good! Good job ISRO!! The scientists of ISRO have achieved something great, under challenging circumstances. How did you feel today when you opened the morning newspaper and saw..

Well, this can be considered more of a rant (or a rant-laundry-list) than a creative post..but I believe many fellowmen concerned about the future of this country would second my thoughts..

1. Government servants - Respect your office and portfolio, allow your subordinates to do their duty and keep a check on them. Money isn’t everything, think about your future generations.
2. Revise the pay package for the people in secret services and the police.
3. Stricter laws against corruption - corruption may not be eradicated, nevertheless, can be made to stay at the top-most levels. Corruption starting from the bottom-most levels up to the top is not a..

Well, after my (new) experiences with the corporate culture of our present day multi-national companies for a couple of years, I moved on looking for better opportunities. I must say, it was pretty much the same in the new company too, but I wasn’t affected much by those anomalies that I came across in my first couple of jobs - essentially, I was able to better manage the situation, practice some politics, and things like that. Considering the fact that I spent more than two years in Western Europe, I was not entirely comfortable with certain things the new age multi-national companies in India practice.

Well, what should I say? This topic was not even in the remotest corner of my brain when I logged on to the dashboard of http://www.ubiquitense.com. Usually, once I log on to my site, I’m confronted with various topics that I must write about, but end up choosing a topic that would be easier to finish before 11:30 PM (ahem! that’s when I go to bed). Sometimes, my brain is just too dry to think of a topic that I could write about. Today, I was caught in the middle of the aforementioned scenarios; and finally, I thought of writing about our corporate culture that is prevalent today. Some topics that are covered here:

Identifying yourself among others in the corporate jungle, Team chart: Who are you connected with?

There are quite a few in my office who own diesel-powered cars and the street price of these cars are close to nine lakh rupees! It’s sad to realize the fact that they will be paying lesser than most of those unfortunate middle-class people who yearned to own a car, putting a major portion of their savings on a good small petrol car. This is the kind of discrepancy that arises in a society that is neither entirely capitalist nor communist. The capitalist oil companies would want the government to…

From my vast experience of my encounters with dogs and traffic policemen, I never look at their eyes, and if I did, I’ve invited trouble already. One vague stare at a rabies stricken dog, it starts barking and comes running at you. It actually pains me to draw an analogy here, but…

Well, you might ‘ve guessed what this post is gonna be about. Yes, the recent noise created due to the cheerleaders’ dress code in IPL matches. I guess the cheerleaders have done a good job of not only turning the attention of the crowd watching the IPL games on them, but also that of the politicians and other sports people from across the country.

Is cheerleading vulgar? Let’s see the definition of ‘cheerleader’ from Wikipedia - “Cheerleading is a sport that uses organized routines made from elements of some tumbling, dance, …