Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

If you've been the long drawn fisticuff between the dollar and the rupee you know this already It is six pack season and the rupee is flexing its muscles like SRK in OSO. In the recently concluded Indian Economic Summit, Gerard Lyons, chief economist & group head (global research), Standard Chartered Bank said, "The rupee we maintain its unrelenting march and possibly climb to Rs 30 to a dollar in the next five years." But not everyone is swooning. And this bit of news has not come easy to the foreign tourists who prefer paying in dollars. A couple from Texas, Beth and Tim Warner went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and were surprised when they were asked to pay in rupees, as they knew they can pay in dollars. Until now, foreign tourists to sites like the Taj Mahal have had the option of paying in dollars or rupees. They had to pay Rs 250 per head to enter the mausoleum. "The ruling is aimed at safeguarding tourism revenues, following the recent fall in the dollar,&

I walked with a friend to the newsstand the other day The friend bought a paper and thanked the shopkeeper in refined words. The owner, however, did not even acknowledge it. "An unsociable person, isn't he?" I commented as we walked away. "Oh, he's that way every day," shrugged my friend. "Then why do you continue being so polite to him?" I asked. My friend replied, "Why should I let him determine how I'm going to act?" Politeness is generally not only accepted but also appreciated in all spheres of life. Living in society, we need to possess certain qualities, amongst them being politeness, that enables us to live among people and to interact with them successfully. We have to choose our words and thoughts carefully; no matter whether we are having a bad day or we are just tired of the way a person is behaving. It truly requires a lot of restraint and self control to avoid reacting to provocative behavior ; When a person behaves badl

One out of every ten people lives on an island. Of the six billion plus people that inhabit our world, 200 million live in Indonesia alone and some 60 million live in Britain. Indonesia consists of 13,667 islands of which only 6,000 are inhabited. Britain is the only island that is connected to a continent (Europe) via the Chunnel (the underground rail to France). Of all the islands in the world, the largest is Greenland. You could perhaps think of Australia as an island - it fits the description but it is considered a continent because of its unique plant and animal life. Antarctica is also a continent. But there are many islands you probably never heard of. The smallest island in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is Bishop Rock. Lying in the most south westerly part of the UK, it is one of the 1,040 islands around Britain and only has a lighthouse on it. The remotest uninhabited island is Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic and the remotest inhabited island i

Youngsters don't start smoking because they think it's cool. They take their first drag out of sheer curiosity, reveals a new study conducted by the Roy Castle Foundation. 82 per cent of smokers pick up the habit before the age of 18, according to the Liverpool Longitudinal Smoking Study. Some youngsters start puffing away as an act of rebellion; others take to it to attract friends and a few do it just to kill time. Young smokers in the city back up these findings. "I started smoking when I was 17," says Karen Thomas, a software professional at IBM. "There was no particular reason why I started. I was just curious. Then it became a habit to the extent that I was smoking 20 cigarettes a day," says Karen, who is now down to less than 10 a day. Kshitij Jain, a student at Wesley Degree College, stole his first fag from his dad, who is a smoker. "I tried it when I was 11, but it wasn't a regular occurrence until I turned 19," he says. "I

3 Dec'07: Sri lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan got the inevitable 709th wicket before his home crowd in Kandy, becoming the world's highest wicket taker in Tests surpassing Shane Warne's record. He finished the day with 6/55, his 61st five for.

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion equivalent to half the global population on Thursday, 26 years after the first cellular network was launched, research firm Informa said. Since the first Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) networks were switched on in 1981 in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway, mobile phones have become the consumer electronics sector with the largest volume of sales in the world. "The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement. "For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when," Newman said. In recent years the industry has seen surging growth in outskirts of China and India, helped by constantly falling phone and call prices, with cellphone vendors already eyeing inroads into Africa's countryside to keep up the growth. The

28 Nov'07: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has finally quit the Army after remaining Army Chief for nine years. But whether this means he will become a ceremonial head of state or continue to call the shots is a million dollar question. There is no denying the fact that Gen. Musharraf will lose considerable power because he has vacated the powerful military slot. Though Gen. Musharraf says the new chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani , is a trusted man and will back him as a powerful President, this appears to be only a hope. In 1998, Gen. Musharraf was chosen by then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as the most trusted man, but within a year Gen. Musharraf toppled him. This can still happen. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto thinks that with Gen. Kiyani and other similar-minded generals taking over the Army, an unpopular Musharraf as a civilian President would be of no benefit. Gen. Musharraf, however, insists he retains the Army's support and, to that end, the 55-yea