Provoke some...

Has your flight every got cancelled? Yes, maybe and you felt really bad when that happened. When that happened the airlines booked you in another flight. Has it ever happened that the flight you were booked into ALSO got cancelled? Well, that happened to me yesterday on returning from SJR @Roorkee. I took 28 hours to reach Mumbai from Roorkee. I am sure some of the US/UK batchmates would have reached earlier. That should have really pissed me off. But you know what? It didn’t. The spirit (I like the Hindi word “Suroor”) of meeting all friends and visiting the campus was so high that nothing mattered. “Will I recognize anyone?" was the question that repeatedly did rounds in my head, "Has the University changed after so many years?" (I still don’t feel like calling it IIT), "Does the UOR spirit still lingers?" and many such thoughts were put to rest the moment I laid my eyes on the first set of classmates who had flown from around the world for t...

"It is shocking to see the government is classifying watching movies as luxury and subjecting us to the similar tax structure as of five-star hotels and casinos," said Nitin Sood, CFO of PVR yesterday when the government announced the GST rates on various products and services to be applicable from 1 st July this year. This made me wonder. My initial thought resonated that of Mr Sood as to how can anyone classify watching movies as a luxury? But then I took a step back and did a bit of number crunching. So, ladies and gentlemen, tighten your seat belts as what you are going to experience is shock albeit quite opposite to the shock experienced by Mr Sood. In India, any movie which grosses Rs 100 cr (USD 15 Mn) is considered a super hit. This makes sense considering the average revenue per film is an abysmal Rs 5-10 Cr (USD 1-1.5 Mn). Most of this is collected in the first week itself since unlike the days of yore when the success of the movies was defined by their ru...