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Punjabis are a very distinct community, wherever they may be settled, and Ahmedabad’s Punjabis are no exception. We asked a cross section of the city’s Punjabi population what they thought of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) winning a thumping majority in the Punjab elections today. They say they weren’t surprised by the results. Varun Maira settled in […]
On the occasion of Ahmedabad’s birthday on Saturday, VO! Interviewed the chiefs of three major companies to find out how they view the city’s prospects. All of them agree Ahmedabad is a great place to live, but they also say the city needs to become more “outsider friendly.” People from other places are not too […]
Samir and I met in June 1991, a year of heavy monsoon in Ahmedabad. He moved in with me within a month and we’ve been together ever since. The love has endured for over 30 years and if India recognised marriage between two gay men, we would have been legally married. Samir and I are […]
America’s NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has gone on record to say that a sense of humour is a must-have attribute for a good astronaut. Now more and more companies have come around to the view that it is a quality to be valued in managers as well. Some have gone so far as […]
A friend of mine has invented an air purifying machine that he believes can compete with any of the expensive brands available in the market. He is currently trying to persuade a leading manufacturer of air coolers in Ahmedabad to produce and market his invention. The interesting thing is that he is not an engineer, […]
At the age of 84, Hari Prasad Chaurasia appears unsteady and frail, but that impression quickly dissipates when he begins playing. The doyen of Indian classical music created magic on the fifth day on the Saptak Music Festival on Wednesday, with his hour-long performance of Rag Maru Bihag. For a while, it seemed the unseasonal […]
Recalling his enthusiasm and love for life, Shubha Mudgal dedicated her performance at the Saptak Music Festival on Sunday to the late Ashok Purohit, architect, bon vivant, music connoisseur and a pioneer of Gujarat’s multiplex industry. Ms Mudgal recalled the times she had stayed at Purohit’s house and performed at the City Pulse multiplex campus […]
Ahmedabad could have asked for no better New Year gift. Saptak, the city’s marquee classical music festival, is back in its live version after a year’s break. Launching the event at the LD Arts College campus on Saturday, Saptak secretary Sandeep Joshi, said that the audiences are ready to return to live concerts and artists […]
Nirmala Kurien, 63, is best known for being the daughter of Verghese Kurien, but she’s a remarkable personality in her own right. A divorcee and a single parent, Ms Kurien built an independent career in Chennai, to support herself and her son Siddharth. She is currently General Manager, Human Resources, at Sankara Nethralaya eye hospital. […]
Between the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit in early January and the State Assembly elections in late December, Gujarat has a lot to look forward to in 2022, Omicron notwithstanding. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was all over Uttar Pradesh ahead of the state’s impending assembly elections, celebrating successfully completed projects like the refurbished […]
Remember the friends you made in the early days of your career? You exchanged confidences, swapped gossip, has discussions involving this interesting new concept called “work” and at the end of the month, you went out and blew up your salaries together. Most of these friends may have been lost to time and performance appraisals, […]
Spiderman: No Way Home is one of the biggest box-office grossers of the year and it’s not hard to see why. At the old multiplex on SG Highway where I watched it, the audience consisted mostly of teenagers and 20-somethings and they all cheered and clapped at the most dramatic scenes, just like their counterparts […]
Even as new townships come up on the outskirts of the city, there are large areas within Ahmedabad that are ripe for redevelopment. What is stopping them? The workings of the real estate market are complicated and often opaque, but a glimpse is provided by an academic project at CEPT University, the findings of which […]
When it comes to promotions, logic might dictate you pick the best performing candidate. That iswhat large bureaucratic organisations usually do. Unfortunately, that often creates a piquantsituation in the long run. Laurence Peter spelt it out most convincingly in his classic book, ‘The PeterPrinciple: Why Things Go Wrong.’ If organisations keep promoting competent people until […]
Winter has arrived with a vengeance, heralding the culture season. Every art gallery in Ahmedabad has something on and the exhibits keep changing on a weekly basis. The Hutheesing Centre, for one, has been curating a series of group shows, the latest of which is Shaam-e-Art, featuring works by 25 artists from Ahmedabad, Vadodara and […]
As a cub reporter with Indian Express in Ahmedabad in 1991, my first national byline was courtesy an interview I did with Verghese Kurien. Before that, my only contact with the man was when he delivered the convocation address at the Indian Institute of Management, while I listened rapt in the audience. Kurien was not […]
The recently formed LGBTQIA+ Cell of the Indian National Congress celebrated Children’s Day in an unusual way in Mumbai this Sunday. It organized “Chacha Nehru Story Time,” a book reading session by transgender activist Nishtha Nishant in Café Arpan in Juhu. Ten children in the 6-12 age bracket attended the event, with their guardians in […]
When President Biden recently spoke of how pencils used by American kids are assembled from wood sourced from Brazil and graphite supplied by India, he probably meant to illustrate how complex global logistics are, for even the simplest of products. At a time when the global supply chain has run into big problems, with supplies […]
In 1999, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric (GE), ordered 500 top-level managers to reach out toyounger people in the company in order to learn how to use the internet. He himself roped in anemployee in her 20s to help him navigate the Web. Welch was a pioneer when it came tomanagement ideas and this […]
His third nomination proved the charm for South African author and playwright Damon Galgut, who was awarded the 2021 Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Promise. Galgut had made it to the Booker shortlist in 2003 for his novel The Good Doctor and in 2010 for his novel In A Strange Room. In […]
