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Showing posts from July, 2014

Building a State and its Capital – The curious case of AP

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Can AP emerge as another Singapore as was promised? Ever since the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh happened and Telangana was formed, there is suspense on where and how the capital of the residual AP or Seemandhra as it came to be popularly known, would be built. A lot of speculation is in the air that the capital is most likely to come up somewhere in between Guntur and Vijayawada. The land rates which were already high at these places including those in towns like Ongole, Rajahmundry, Kakinada and Visakhapatnam seem to have touched the skies with no one knowing the upper limits. While only the powers that be may know where exactly the capital of AP would be formed, it is clear that none of the cities mentioned above, except to some extent Visakhapatnam, have the look, feel, infrastructure and attitude that a capital is supposed to have. A preliminary visit to any existing state capitals will make one realize that building a state capital is no child’s play and takes enormous am

Who Is Your Customer? Whose Customer Are You?

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For most people and especially for a sales and marketing professional, the word that stays at the top of one’s mind is the word CUSTOMER, for there is no organization without customers. A customer is not necessarily someone that buys goods and services as the dictionaries say. Organizations spend a huge amount of human and financial resources in addition to time to understand the psyche and satisfy their customers’ wants and needs at every step of the sales process right from the point of designing a product to its after-sales service. But if they stop at the point where one thinks that a customer is only outside the organization, it would do no good in the progress of that company. For an organization or an individual to be highly successful what is required is to understand the word customer in its informal sense and that is “an individual with whom one has dealings”. If we literally look into this meaning, it translates into positive results for the individual as an isolate

The ‘Colonization’ of English Language

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A slate is where we started our learning The British have colonized most parts of the land and spread their English language to many parts of the world. They made it appear to everyone that it is great to speak English and live like the British did, which fortunately or unfortunately most colonized countries believed and followed. That learning English helped many people immensely (including this author) is not contestable at this point in time because even if some country wants to do without English or learning the same, it is just impossible now. The Portuguese and Chinese have been able to save their languages from the onslaught of English. It is said that Chinese are proud of their language that seems to have survived more than 5,000 years.  Indians for sure have embraced English language so well that some people feel it an offence to speak in their own native language. If two people from the same state met, even though they can speak in their mother tongue, they still pr

Statues Everywhere But Spirit Nowhere

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi aka Mahatma Gandhi is known as the Father of the Nation.  His birthday falling on 2 nd October is celebrated as a national holiday and also as an International Day of non-violence. Go to any village, town or city, there will not be one which does not have his statue or a road named after him. Likewise we come across small streets, big roads, public gardens, libraries, function halls, etc., named after one ‘great’ leader or the other whether it is the Nehru or Gandhi or several other regional leaders of each state. The latest issue rocking the country is the ambitious plan of NDA government to erect a 182 metre high Statue of Unity to be built in honour of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat’s Narmada district. As per the reports, this statue is likely to be the tallest statue in the world beating the current record of 128 metre high Spring Temple Buddha statue in Henan, China. It is also supposed to be twice the height of Statue of Liberty in New York.

Facebook Friends Classified

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Friendship beyond boundaries Friendship and friends are so important in one’s life that they come next to family and in some cases they are ranked even before one’s own family . If we closely look around, there would not be a single person who doesn't claim to have either a friend or a family. A friend need not necessarily be another human, but could be an object or bird or an animal depending on one’s circumstances. Whatever it is, a friend is a friend. Remember the movie Cast Away in which the hero Tom Hanks lands on an uninhabited island and out of sheer desperation draws the face of a man on volleyball . He calls it Wilson and spends the entire time on the island by talking to it. He in fact has several arguments while conversing with his FRIEND Wilson which never spoke back to him. With great difficulty he builds a raft and tries to set ‘sail’ on it during which ‘Wilson’, his only ‘friend’ falls from the raft making him feel lonely again. This is a film I liked the