© Santosh Subramanian – Some rights reserved - Under Creative Commons

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

To all drivers!

Anyone who had had a very close encounter in a road accident knows that all it takes is a few milliseconds to change your world, your family's world & even somebody else's world. I & SH had had a very close shave in Feb 2003 at Bangalore and the only reason we survived was helmets - The helmet almost broke into two and my head was intact... Apparently most of these awakenings/self-realization come only when one personally go through such a trauma because words, in any language, does not have the power to translate all that trauma into paper/web/media.

Drive Safely, Wear Seatbelts, Use Helmets if riding a bike! You are saving your life and may be a lot many others too. Nobody thinks high of you when you are speeding!

Watch this video & this is one of the closest that I have seen where the author/director has been successful in translating the trama - I dont know if it is just that I am able to correlate to it well..

Watch it here...


Friday, August 14, 2009

Rats - For a novel protest!

The pay-scale of top executives has recently invited a lot of debate and anger in the common public, especially after the US government had to bailed out a lot of companies, contrary to their general capitalistic stand on market and industry issues.

In February this year, The US President Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses as the economy was deteriorating and the government was spending billions to bail out some of the nation’s most prominent financial institutions. He had proposed a cap of $500,000 for the top executives whereas here is what some of the top-notch Banking guys pocketed in 2008.

Kenneth D Lewis of Bank of America - ~ $9M ($20M in 2007, down 58%)
John J Mack of Morgan Stanley - $1.2M ($41.4M in 2007, down 97%)
John G Stumpf of Wells Fargo - $9M
Vikram S Pandit of Citigroup - $38.2M

And
Rick Wagoner of General Motors - $14.4M in 2007 (I am wondering, for what!?)

I am no judge of executive salary & whatever reasons they have, I am not planning to break my head on that. There had been a lot of protests and debates around this topic here, especially since the public money is being used to salvage the drowning organizations.

But here is a very novel protest that appeared in Wall Street over the last week. This one moved location to the doors of company to company (most of them Banks - in the Financial District where Wall Street is) everyday!



Courtesy for the statistics: - A New York Times Project

Tuesday, August 04, 2009