Married But Available in Best Seller Lists

Rashmi Bansal was the first one to write about my first novel Mediocre But Arrogant. The article called A Novel Pastime appeared in the June 2005 issue of BusinessWorld magazine (read the article here) and of course it appeared on Rashmi’s blog at the same time. She had profiled this new author called Chetan Bhagat who had stirred up major interest with his first novel called Five Point Someone. Read more

If You Were A Brand

I was recently invited by PepsiCo to join a dinner being hosted in view of the charismatic CEO Indra Nooyi’s visit to India. She was voted the most powerful woman in business in US for the third year in a row by Fortune Magazine. Irene Rosenfeld who heads Kraft was the second most powerful. Irene is a PepsiCo alumni as well. Moral of the story: Food and beverages make people powerful. So eat well, I told myself. Read more

Dasvidaniya

Do you make lists? A daily To-Do list? Maybe even an hourly list of things to be accomplished? Do you find these lists helpful or do you find them tyrannical? Lists bind me down. Worse still, I make lists and then forget where I have kept them. So making those lists doesn’t work for me. Yet there are scores of people who find lists a great help. They find it a source of joy when they keep ticking off the items one by one on that list. For someone like Amar Kaul (played by Vinay Pathak) in the film Dasvidaniya, (means goodbye in Russian) he lives for the to-do lists. That gives him a meaning in his life. He looks forward to the next to-do so that he can complete all those things marked in his list. For all his obsession with accomplishing tasks on his To-Do list, Amar Kaul is not successful in any sense of the term unlike his friend Rajiv Julka played by Rajat Kapoor.  Read more