Corruption seems to be the flavor of the season, so I'm dusting out an email from 2002 sent to close friends and publishing it. Again. This time with the traffic police. Now that it's over I don't know whether I should feel triumphant, righteous, sore or plain sad. I don't even know why I'm telling you all this. But here is what unfolded this afternoon: I had gone to meet a friend over coffee. Two hours later, I discover my bike missing. When I show my friend where I'd parked it, he points out that it's on the law-abiding side of the "No Parking" board, but outside the (barely visible) line drawn on the street. So off we go to the nearby police station, and sure enough, there's my bike in the parking lot. Traffic cop: "Show me your license and hand over 150 bucks, I'll give you a receipt that you can show to the parking lot attendant (PLA) and drive your vehicle out." Fair enough. But I had forgotten my wallet at home so ...

I don't remember what it was that made me volunteer to hold the key to Sushim's apartment. He had been living away from the city for a while and listed his old digs for sale, but was reluctant to hand over the key to a broker since he was in fear that the broker might start using the place himself. In a moment of weakness, I volunteered to be the Key Guy, to trundle out over weekends and show the apartment to the prospective buyers and brokers that Sushim coordinated over phone and the internet. It isn't all that taxing, really. I get to interact with some interesting people (and sometimes their brokers) and delve into their shelter-seeking psyches. Most ask me all kinds of personal questions that I find unrelated to their apartment-buying decision making process. Such as what I do, how I am related to Sushim (one broker asked me if I was his brother, and I confirmed) and where I live. Last evening was the first time I ventured out to the apartment on a weekday, and an ...

Every large company has a Purchase Department through which all orders it places must pass. If managed well, this is a good thing for the large company. It has a bunch of people who, in theory, are always on the lookout for efficiencies in purchases - leveraging purchases across departments, finding products or services of lower cost and ensuring that someone in the Materials Dept is not favoring his brother-in-law against a lower-cost supplier. For the vendor to the large company, this translates to the grim fact that the purchase guy exists for the sole purpose of driving your quote down. He will point out deficiencies in your offering. He will compare you against larger vendors who have efficiencies of scale. He will inform you of competing quotes that are much lower than yours. He will hint at a continuous stream of orders in the future if you manage to sell this one at a discount. And so on. I am not trying to say that the Purchase Guy is Evil. On the contrary, I know of instances...

Useful, no doubt, for sham weddings... Karve Road, Pune

I was a BIG environmentalist as a kid. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I decided that the society I was living in had too few trees and an open ground, and hence set about planting a few of the former on the latter. My parents gently reminded me that the ground was also used for other purposes, such as playing games and parking cars, and so my original grand plans of planting about twenty trees on the expanse got trimmed down to just two, on the boundary just inside the fence. Now with just two to plant, I could not afford to be indiscriminate in my choice of tree. After some searching in the library (the internet was non-existent in those days), I went to the local branch of the WWF , of which I was a member. There I asked Mr Samuel - a mustachioed gentle guy with a booming voice - which two trees I should plant, that would be the most beneficial to the birds, the environment and the world in general. Mr Samuel immediately brightened to the idea, and asked me to return in a c...

Outside ATM, Aundh