Leaps in Finance

My first interaction with Vipul Vadhiya was when he was in his final year of engineering at VIT. He joined the Bulls Eye CAT program. I soon realised that our Gujarati friend was probably earning more than I was. After college got over, Vipul, and his friends, Amit and Shiv, would take Science classes in … Read more

The Aam Aadmi Surgeon

Neighbours are your real relatives. The flat opposite our’s has always been owned by the Pandits. But it was only when they decided to shut down their hospital in Devlali and shift to their Pune house that our relationship started. Dr Pandit’s dad had started the hospital in the 1960s – and though Subodh ji … Read more

Rolls Rocker

Sukhpreet Singh Sial is Chetan Pal’s friend. Both have their factories in the Ramtekdi area. Roll Mania has its office about 200 m from our home on SB road.  Prasanna and Yours Truly dropped in for a chat on Sat, 9-Nov-24. My first roll was consumed during my Calcutta days – I think my favourite … Read more

Ecology Expert

Arvind ji and yours truly attended the first VD Vartak Memorial lecture organised by the Botany department of Pune University on 25 Nov 2024. The speaker was Dr Madhav Gadgil. I have been a big fan of Gadgil ji – and the opportunity to hear him live was too good to pass. Madhav ji started … Read more

God like AI

Ramesh Raskar was born in Nashik, India and he finished his engineering education in Electronics and Telecommunication from College of Engineering, Pune in 1991. He was an avid photographer in his college days and this interest led him to do a PhD in projector based 3d graphics from UNC, Chapel Hill. Raskar then joined Mitsubishi … Read more

Parenting Orphans

We cycled to Talegaon to visit https://www.theajitfoundation.in – Through Abhay P, CEEPL has been supporting them for the last two years. Met with Vinaya Nimbalkar, who looks after the Pune center. She and Mahesh, her better half, started this foundation about 20 years ago. They have had more than 4,000 students who have benefitted from … Read more

Parks, not Parking

253 words Then there are the colossal tracts of sheer space, the oceans of real estate —a precious commodity in cities especially—that cars have taken from us. Most automobiles are parked 95 percent of the time, just sitting, immobile and unused, doing nothing except hogging up space. From an economic perspective, this is absurd. The … Read more

Embodied Energy

591 words Humanity’s insatiable appetite for energy created the climate-change crisis. The same appetite is now impelling us into an energy transition which carries its own tremendous costs. Switching from fossil fuels to renewables is an improvement, but it’s not nearly enough. It’s necessary, but not sufficient as a solution. To create a truly sustainable … Read more