India -- Full of Life

"India Rising, India Gaining, India Growing, India Blooming" shout the Indian media. For once, I agree whole-heartedly--in more ways than one. As the !ncredible India campaign would rightly have you believe, India is absolutely full of life : being here is a perpetual multi-sensory overload. However, today, my focus will be on a slightly different definition of "life" in India.

Tabling the discussion of pro-choice vs anti-choice, let's define life for now as a single functioning cell. The conditions generally required for cell growth are

1) Temperature around 35 degrees Celsius: check
2) Ample supply of water: check/double check during monsoons
3) Supply of nutrients (carbon/nitrogen): check (you don't want to know where these "nutrients" are coming from)
4) Lack of antiseptic toxins: check

Where am I going with this? Grab a fruit in Bombay, take a bite, and leave it out for 5 min. Even in your filtered-air, daily cleaned office, 10 fruit-flies will come to life. You can literally watch life happen.

Hence, in a country with such conditions, when people use handkerchiefs, re-usable diapers and cloth tablewipes/mops, no wonder people get sick so often!

While its may be environmentally friendly, India's luxury tax on paper towels, kleenex and toilet paper needs to end ASAP. Besides paper's compostable. Due the lack of a proper market, the situation has gotten so bad, I know people that import 'Bounty' from the US on a regular basis! Pretty please, Indian government?

India gets Finance's oldest yet hottest accessory

Every couple of months, I disappear from the blogosphere while I live in my office. It's that time of the year again, but I have been able to sneak a few minutes to share this earth-shattering news that is causing an uproar of self-congratulation amongst the Indian financial media: India finally has a single character currency symbol! See below:

The Rupee, long considered a 2nd-hand currency behind USD, EUR, GBP, YEN, and even CAD, AUD, CNY, and CHF is finally getting its own symbol in Unicode, joining the ranks of Dollar, Euro, Pound, and Yen. The symbol was designed by an IIT professor and is a blend of 'R' in roman script and 'Ra' in Devanagari script

While it is just a symbol, I have to agree, it's pretty cool we have one. I'm not just saying that b/c I've gotten tired of typing "Rs" or "INR" on every output table.