By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC It is exactly five months now. The time I have put pen on paper, literally. Tried it in the US where I had gone for a holiday but failed miserably. There is a folk story of Vikramaditya’s throne which reads like this: A simple and illiterate cowherd saw…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC To realise the value of ten years, Ask a newly-divorced couple. To realise the value of four years, Ask a graduate. To realise the value of one year, Ask a student who has failed the final exam. To realise the value of nine months, Ask a mother who…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC A 16-year-old youth gets up and starts perusing a newspaper. What does he read? Automation: Cognizant lays off 6,000 workers, Infosys to follow. Automation is a reality one has to face. In 1998, Kodak had 1,70,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo papers around the world. Now,…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC The recent stats released by the Ministry of Tourism has indicated that tourism is on the rise and this bodes well for this sun-rise industry which has both direct and indirect benefit for millions across the country. In the year 2000, the tourist arrivals were 2.65 million and…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC An interesting story: There was once a young lad who used to get angry at the touch of a button. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him to punch a nail to the fence every time he felt angry. The first day the lad…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC A recent government order asking doctors to prescribe medicines by their generic names and not by brands has sent the medical community into a tizzy. But a basic question comes first: Are our generic medicines manufactured for internal consumption safe? Ironically, India is the largest manufacturer of generic…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC Viktor Frankl, one of the great psychiatrists of the twentieth century, survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. His little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is one of those life-changing books that everyone should read. Frankl once told the story of a woman who called him in the…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC For at least a generation now — especially in urban India and educated middle-class families — we have raised our girls to be confident and fight for their rights. But we seem to have ignored an entire generation of boys who were not told anything about how their…
Very often people wonder why do we have children? Is it to carry on the family’s name or to raise children to take care of us in old age? The reason for having children is both to give and to appreciate. We should not ask for perfection in our children, neither should we expect them…
By N.K.A. Ballal, Retd. Sr. Vice-President, ITDC One walks into a dinner engagement. After the dinner is over, you notice a young man or a woman pick up their plates and politely ask their hostess if they can wash and keep back their dinner plates. How do you react? Wow, what an upbringing? Is this…
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