Light of the Lamp

Hi friends,                    Hope many of you have taken time off this last week of the year before logging on to year 20s. Yep, we entered the millennium with usual fears and hopes, crossed the 'teens' and now ready to get into the next decade with usual hopes and apprehensions. I thought I will continue writing about the remaining part of our Europe travels, but for now I am touching an unplanned topic.                                                      Recently, we attended a wedding in Bangalore where the wedding organizers were spreading awareness about 'zero-waste' wedding. We enjoyed the traditional, Tamil-Brahmin wedding feast and I did not waste anything what was served on the plantain leaf. My husband follows the principle that what is served on a plate or a plantain leaf should not b...

Hi pals,                        As promised I am back with more of our Europe travels. We  had to travel by bus from Amsterdam to Bad Bentheim and from there we traveled by connecting trains to reach Berlin Hauptbahnhof which means Berlin Central railway station. Traveling by train (not the tube or metro ones) in Europe was my dream, as the trains will be much cleaner  and less crowded. It is also a good opportunity to see the changing landscapes from one place to another. Though dozing off is common during these journeys, I tried to stay awake to my best to see and enjoy the landscape. There were acres of farms with no people, some places had trees with fall colours. We could see the typical Dutch homes at first, and then when the train set foot in Germany, the changes began to become visible. There were some car manufacturing factories like Volkswagen along the way. We reached Hannover and from there we had to cat...

Dear friends,                      It has been quite a long long time since my last post here. I logged in here and found that I posted the previous article more than 3 months back! That is a long gap! If a blog needs to be active and popular, one should constantly update it with any interesting topic. Since mine is not a blog which specializes on one subject, I am free and happy to write on any topic I feel passionate about.                                             As I would have mentioned in my previous articles, one of my passions is travelling to new places and observing the limitless possibilities a place offers us. Travel relaxes and rejuvenates our souls from our stressful routines, broadens the outlook of life. It is no wonder that a person like me looks forward to grab opportunities to explore places in and o...

Hi friends,                    V G Siddhartha-the name synonymous with Cafe Coffee Day, the chain of coffee outlets also known as Starbucks of India. Did you or me know him like that until yesterday? I can vouch that the general public including me was unaware of its founder compared to other business tycoons like Ambanis, Vijay Mallaya, Lalit Modi, Bajaj, the Rajus of Satyam Computers, the biocon founder lady Kiran Mazumdar etc. The man who redefined the way the Indians drank coffee in the early 1990s did not deserve to become an overnight household name in a tragic manner. Hailing from family who owned acres of coffee plantations in Chikmangaluru, Mr Siddhartha started a coffee trading company, ABC with Rs 60 million turnover. He improved an ailing coffee curing unit in Hassan and has curing capacity of 75,000 tonnes. He exported thousands of tonnes of coffee and sold 2,000 tonnes of coffee locally.         ...

Hi folks, I present you yet another article written by my Dad, Shri. S. Muthukrishna Iyer on the feasibility of changeover to Electric powered vehicles for which lot of proposals are put forward by our Government. This article got published in a local community magazine in Trivandrum. Please go through this and bring in your views. Thanks. Hurdles on the path of changeover to Electric Vehicles By S. Muthukrishna Iyer, Thiruvananthapuram (1) Preface Question: India government’s policy: ‘No sale of petrol/diesel fuelled 2/3 wheelers, cars, buses and trucks in our country after 2030’. Why so? Answer: During winter months, air pollution is beyond habitable level in metros, particularly in Delhi. Reasons are categorized under 3 heads, namely, stub burning after harvest, dust from construction related activities and vehicular pollution. For many years, CNG is used as fuel for some categories of vehicles in Delhi as per the directive of the Honorable Supreme Co...