Pradeep Goorha

Powerful semantics and widely dispersed optics evoke a sense of suspicion in me. Folks, It isn’t because of current Covid19 gloom and doom. It probably is my going through the School of Hard Knocks after I finished all schooling that stopped at handing me degrees and things. As a consequence, with me alarm bells ring when somebody’s hype after numerous other hypes keeps hitting me with sickening regularity. China’s political system is one such entity. It has fooled the world into abject surrender through its low-cost manufacturing might, based on prison labour and below-sustenance level wages to its people. West didn’t care as long as it was getting stuff 20 to 50 percent cheaper than what they could have produced. Immediate gains, folks, immediate gains has been the mantra. China is flouting proprietary right by blatantly copying their designs. Well, let’s ignore it. They help me make much greater profit margin by making my smartphone cheap; I will live with their chicanery. China is ...

I wonder what this for-and-against ballyhoo is on privatisation of PSUs in India. It is simple; Government has no business running businesses. Other than the inevitable reduction in unnecessary manpower and therefrom creating some unemployment, there is generally no downside to privatisation. Is it then a debate on efficiency versus spurious employment? Tanzania — much smaller economy – privatised over 400 public companies within 10 years. They knew the manpower complements were 3 to 10 times bigger than what the work called for.  The country chose to bite the bullet and directed their attention to finding gainful employment opportunities thus making a positive contribution to the economy.    In India, PSUs showing reasonable gross profit are only in the oil and gas space, and in power and its distribution. These are areas the government is in a comfort zone because they fix the product prices. Coal India—not in the two above mentioned business areas—is perhaps the only n...

Back in mid-1960s, I loved everything American. This mindset developed after reading whatever American material I could lay my hands on—that included ‘Old Man and the Sea’ on one end and dozens of Earl Stanley Gardner mysteries on the other. Sunday morning shows of Hollywood movies of all genre couldn’t be missed. The menagerie included Ben Hur, Roman Holiday, Who is afraid of Virginia Wolf, Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, and a lot many other classics.    To me, America was synonymous with modernity, spirit of inquiry, technological development and the ultimate destination for those who had a reasonable chance to get there. After my engineering degree, getting into a US Graduate School was the extent to which I allowed myself to look into future. Nothing else mattered. It happened. I was accepted at a great college in America’s southeast—cloud nine and all that. After a month of orientation with the new environs, I ventured out a bit. On a blind date, sought by me, I drew...

Sinking GDP and negative growth rates are spooking all of us. The fact that we were expecting the nosedive has not diminished the impact when it has hit us. The problem needs to be addressed with uncommon commitment and a sense of urgency. The crisis is primarily a lagging indicator of two decades of mismanaged economy. Couple that with the Covid19 pandemic and the expensive cross-border tensions with China; and we have a daunting challenge on our hands. GDP is the aggregated value of goods and services produced within a year in the country. That apparently impossible to calculate figure can be arrived by totaling consumption, investment, exports and government expenditure. Government has understandably found their own expenditure a lot easier to handle. It is the domestic products in the other three areas that have shrunk. Drilling down into consumption, investments and exports reveals the underlying causes. It is going to be a hard grind, but we need to focus on agricultural reforms ...

The Integrated Command and Control Centre under the aegis of Smart City Bhopal is decidedly a great initiative. Its range of services is impressive and will no doubt help in several momentous ways. On traffic management part of the range of services, it is music to our ears that it aims at improving traffic flow using intelligent signals and keeping commuters informed on the status of public transport in near-real time. Yet, it seems like touching a motley of transgressions, e.g. running the red lights, disregarding zebra crossings, and some more. That is rather a small part of the enforcement domain, which, in itself, is only one of the three interacting disciplines. All three, i.e. education, engineering and enforcement have to go hand-in-hand to see some sanity on the roads. The most intractable of these three is education, because it involves lakhs of drivers and would-be drivers. Not only that, it involves educating the traffic policemen who, beyond the simplistic ones, know preci...

  How do we know that the liberals in India have not gone too far left, or the conservatives too far right? But before that, what does terms liberal and conservative stand for in India? And what do right and left mean? Are liberal and left two names of the same fare? And are conservatives and right near-synonyms. This inquiry isn’t going to yield clear answers, though. The reason is that these tags become titular labels of political parties. Their positions change from country to country; often so much so that labels confuse more than explain. A Back to Basics Tour is called for here; something like the American singer Christina Aguilera’ s eponymous fourth concert tour. Back in 2006, she put it all together including elements of 1920s-1940s jazz, soul, and blues with a modern twist. Let us see if we succeed in getting somewhere like she did. Theoretically, what liberalism stands for is all good and incontestable. Protecting and fighting for the rights and freedoms of individuals a...

Someone pays for my bread and butter, and I am asked to find faults in his work, and sometimes uncover his sleights of hand. In this scenario, why would I bite the hand that feeds me? Well I must do that, a certain certification authority says for reason that I am sworn to do so. Under this dispensation, I would be pretty much between a rock and a hard place. Rather an onerous existence it would be for me, if I rigorously go on nit-picking and unearthing the muck. Auditing is one of some such professions. The auditors’ work has this inherent precept that doesn’t seem much like at arm’s length with the company’s management. This arrangement has lasted since organised entrepreneurship began. For lack of information dissemination devices, no earthshaking misdeeds came to fore. This is not to say that banks and investors were not being systematically mislead since decades. They were, and they accepted it as more or less axiomatic. As for protection against recoveries turning sour, bankers ...

  If two things are not similar, they cannot be equal. This is true in mathematics, and mathematics doesn’t lie. No two men are similar, and no two women are similar either. It is plain to see that if they are not even similar, they cannot be equal. Given the large number of people (all different from each other), the governors in the system are faced with a tangled ball of wool that refuses to show its loose end from where they can begin. Understandably, for purposes of governance, administrations categorize a large number of unequal individuals into sets that can then be addressed to en masse.   Most real-world situations have hundreds and thousands of variables and intangibles. Models are constructed so that complex situations can be given a shape and form that is amenable to analysis and policy formulation. The challenge in constructing a model is that on one hand the model has to be a simplified version of the complex reality, and on the other its oversimplification ...

Those who love the sport of cricket, love it with uncommon passion. They love everything about cricket: the nuances, the idiosyncrasies, the enigma called the pitch, the works. Until recently, the sport was played only in England and its erstwhile colonies; there wasn’t any exposure to the sport many countries around the world. The trouble with cricket has been its five-day duration with breaks for lunch, tea, and drinks. For most people, no matter what the sport, a game should reasonably end in an hour or two. This 5-day long rigmarole was plainly too arduous to hold much appeal. Still worse was the possibility that the game could very well end undecided—no winner, no loser, that is. Cricket was a hard sell to countries that did not have the sport in the DNA sequences of its people. It was a lot easier for old loyal within the British Commonwealth countries to get their younger lot excited about it, its dispersion beyond the countries’ boundaries was far more challenging. The spectato...

 Kohli is all brio prior to steadying himself to face the ball. Thereafter, an uncanny blend of organization and destruction, fricassees a delectable stew. Smith appears antsier with his outre and wacky routine at the crease. You agonize whether that is an idiosyncratic boondoggle or an act of some substance. For some recondite reason though that prefatory drouks quietude in him, and readies him to lacerate the bowler: the final product a non sequitur to what was transpiring when the bowler was readying himself for the run up to the crease. Or, is it a carefully woven phantasmagoria? Quite a study of contrasts. Kohli, more symphoric than Smith. Smith less aesthetic than Kohli. Kohli, all style and will carve out a shot that calls for picking up your jaw from umbilicus level and thereabouts. Don’t get me wrong though; he can at times commit inexplicable lapsus calamis in that last fraction of a second. Smith, all fidgety for some agonizing seconds but transforming into a grace all h...

I am pretty certain, you have been to a restaurant with uppity ambience accompanied with some others you care a lot about. On some of those occasions you were no doubt seated next to a family with a kid keen on shrieking and howling for some reason better known to him. Probably the reason was well known to his mother too, but knowing her child rather well ignored it all as business as usual. She and her partner continued enjoying the meal blissfully oblivious to the horrific sounds the young one was emitting. It posed embarrassing problems for the restaurant staff who were torn between the Shakespearian dilemma — to interfere or not to interfere, that being the question. On one such occasion, the scene was a restaurant of some renown along with a fair bit of romantic aura. A set of two couples sat on a six-seater set with two little boys next to the table where my wife and I were trying to celebrate our wedding anniversary with lit candles, flowers, balloons. The works. Pretty early in...