It is hard not to get energized by supercop, mother, social worker and TV anchor Kiran Bedi (born 9 June, 1949). She is a bundle of energy and is always in a hurry. Her diminutive frame is deceptive. She is a woman of conviction and resilience to do what she has set out to. She has always attracted admirers and critics in equal measure.

I suppose the pyschologists and pyschiatrists - called "shrinks" in popular parlance - have their own code of silence. Once they are certified to practice, they are not supposed to give away the secret tests and techniques about how they figure out of the person lying on the couch is normal or abnormal depending on the response to the tests. To the person being tested this can evoke different feelings eg Awe or Aw (short for awful) and everything in between. So naturally people are anxious - which by itself could tell the shrink stuff about you that you don't want them to know.

So the word of caution to employers and employees alike: Don't do anything that would make you squirm if it made the headlines of every newspaper and TV channel in the world and where the anchors or scribes are your sworn enemies. Till you know what is good for you stick to Tweet Nothings.

How many books does an author have to sell before it is classified as bestseller in India? Why are Indian authors suddenly in demand? Have readers started noticing them because there is a proliferation of these authors in the bookshops in India? I believe there are many factors that have tapped into the collective potential of Indian authors - especially those who write in English. The foremost is the willingness of international publishing houses to identify local talent. What has happened is that readers who snootily ignored books that were not literary have started reading what was labeled as "commercial fiction or masala fiction".As you read this article by Sandhya Iyer, notice the happy confluence of events that lead to Indian Writing In English (IWE) growing out of its elitist bearings in the last few years to appeal to a wider mass readership, offering a variety like never before, says Sandhya Iyer in this article.

Collective nouns are a fascinating quirk in the English language. As the Rinkworks site would put it in the ir fabulous collection of collective nouns, "One of the craziest oddities of the English language is that there are so many different collective nouns that all mean "group" but which are specific to what particular thing there is a group of: a herd of elephants, a crowd of people, a box of crayons, a pad of paper, etc. There is great diversity of collective nouns associated with animals, from a sleuth of bears to a murder of crows."

There is a quaint little bookstore in Gurgaon, India called Quills and Canvas run by Shobha Sengupta and her husband Vivek. It is what you would expect your own cosy attic to be. Cramped but cosy, full of books of all genres, paintings by contemporary artists all existing cheek by jowl. I remember going there for a panel discussion with Sankarshan Thakur of Tehelka (http://www.tehelka.com/) the magazine that is credited with some sensational exposes, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (media person and economist) and Amit Baruah is the Foreign Editor of Hindustan Times.

A Sachet (pronounced Sa-Shay) was a small packet of perfumed powder placed in drawers to make clothes smell nice. It also refers to "a small sealed usually plastic envelope containing a small portion of a substance such as shampoo" says the Collins dictionary. In India the term has become synonymous with shampoos. These sachets contain upto 10-20ml of shampoo that can be a convenient and affordable option for people even at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). The cola giants had Rs5 bottles of Coke and Pepsi primarily targeted at this range. Other consumer good companies - think FritoLay's packs of potato chips - have launched products in the magical five rupee zone. From shampoo to colas to cell phones, the sachet marketing option is attractive to an increasing number of consumers. The British Economist EF Schumacher blasted away at the traditional thinking of bigger is better in his work "Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered" as long back as 1973. His idea was that for developing economies mass production needs to be replaced with "production by the masses".CavinKare made its shampoo (brandname Chik) available in a one rupee sachet since 1989. Ten years later they tried to dig deeper into the rural market by introducing a 4ml shampoo sachet for half a rupee. On 14 Decmber 1983 when Maruti Suzuki invited the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to launch the first ten 800cc cars, the middle class of India soon made it their darling. It was small (as compared to the tank like Ambassador or the box like Fiat and perhaps a Standard Gazelle) and sleek. The sachet version of a car.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation says Gary Hamel - the management guru. Very clearly if you are one of those who believes that you are now with it because you now know how to use email, you do not belong to the Facebook Generation. Dear Gary, you will be happy to know that I am no stranger to Facebook. As someone recently mentioned that you have to be on Facebook (which I am even if it is really tough) to be considered cool. Many teenagers continue to express deep angst at the enhanced age generation who have now taken over as Facebook users. When a website has like two or even three generations using it simultaneously, it clearly is a message to the youngest of the family to move on and seek online shelter for the homeless someplace else. The young and the young at heart cannot necessarily share the same cool hangout spots.Despite all the developments on the net, none of the social networking sites have found an answer to the Three E-mail Challenge. Put simply it means, with friends it is tough to exchange more than three emails on a subject without running out of steam. Let me explain what this is all about. In the pre-email era, the probability of meeting someone from school or college was remote. You met a couple of them at the airport or maybe if you missed your flight, the way I met Pingy after years. A freak snow storm had left me stranded in a remote town and that's when I met Pingala Reddy, my class mate from school. While he wasn't my best friend then, I must confess I really enjoyed meeting him after so many years. Right after I got back I wrote him an email (email no 1) thanking him for his hospitality and how much I had enjoyed meeting Pingy and his family. That I would love to host him and his family when he would visit my part of the woods next. Pingy wrote back instantly (email no 2) saying he will take me up on my offer for sure. I wrote back (email no 3) that he was welcome to do so any time and that my family would love to meet the Reddy family. This email was followed by silence. The point being that with friends who you meet after years it is impossible to have an email exchange beyond the three. Facebook doesn't have a solution either. After many years Pingy wrote another mail (enclosing photo of family vacationing in Spain) and asked me if I was planning another trip to visit him? This was email no 1 of this exchange. In email 2, I responded that a family vacation in US would break the bank and hence not on the cards unless he offered to fund the trip. Pingy sent a cryptic smiley :) in email 3 as a response. We haven't corresponded since.I met Rascal Rusty at Dubai airport last December. He was running to catch a flight but managed to convince me to sign up on Facebook before he rushed off. All the blokes of our class were evidently getting buttonholed into joining this social networking site that all the college kids had discovered a while back. I signed up and promptly added Rusty to my list of friends. I trawled the site to look for more classmates. Slowly I found Joy and Gur there as well. I now had 3 friends on Facebook. The community was growing. The only thing was that I did not quite know what to do after that. One day I learnt how to write on the facebook wall. Spray can in hand I went and wrote a bold "What's up?" on all three walls. Joy ignored me. Gur replied "Nothing" and Rusty said that he was traveling for the next 2 weeks to Venezuela and will respond after he is back. The three email challenge has been replaced by the Facebook version of it.Meanwhile I got a friend request from a person who I could not remember ever having met in my life. I accepted it simply because of the compulsion to not be seen as a boor who would not say hi to a stranger. That's how Josh became my friend. He had 462 friends on facebook. He was clearly a popular beast. He could well be the next President with such a large number of friends to support him. By now I had discovered how to peek into his photo albums and heck, was I scandalized by some of them. Since he is a friend I will not share with you what I saw beyond gently hinting that Josh has the lifestyle of a rock star if the photos were anything to go by. The next morning I found that he had thrown a sheep at me. Thrown a sheep? Whoa !! What's that all about. What was I supposed to do at this act of unprovoked violence? Should I throw a knife back to show that I was not to be taken lightly. I thought of asking Rusty, Joy or Gur for advice. Then I remembered that in most murder mysteries lesson no 1 is if someone threatens you, do not broadcast it. So I decided to be discreet. The next morning I found Josh had sent me a patch of green earth. The fellow is finally coming to his senses I thought and wants to make peace. I have decided to keep quiet and see if this fellow is serious about gifting me real estate. With the falling prices of real estate this fellow probably thinks it a bargain to pacify me with a nice 4 acre plot. Hmmm... I wonder if I should forgive him by accepting the "patch" as he likes to call the plot. I changed my mind. I maintained a cool aloof silence which got Josh to send me a poke on Facebook. How does a poke get delivered? Maybe someone comes home, rings the bell and without exchanging even a hello, pokes you and goes off. I am really ticklish and hence I stayed home without answering the doorbell for a day. I was wildly successful in throwing the "poke delivery person" off track. They could not find me. I have since then been discovering one new surprise everyday. There is a quiz which lets you learn what you were in your previous life or scary ones that discover how low your IQ is. Today I checked my Facebook account. I think Josh is crazy. He sent me a party hat. He is mistaken if he thinks I will forgive him so easily for throwing a sheep at me and that too when I had done nothing to provoke him.

When is the new year celebrated in India? Tough question to answer my friend. The answer is really "that depends". There is a spate of new year celebrations happening in different parts of India of late. The Sikhs celebrated the new year on 14 March to mark the first day of Chet - the first month of the year. The Parsis celebrated Jamshedi Navroz on 21st March 09. The Kashmiri new year Navreh was celebrated on 25 March '09. Two days later the the people from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka celebrated Ugadi to ring in the new year.

The "Mistry" in question is Pranav Mistry, Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. What do you get when you combine a Web cam, a projector and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a Bluetooth smartphone. You get Sixth Sense. Access to information that exists somewhere can give you an advantage. Hey look what having a search engine can do to the way you retrieve information. The constraint is that you pretty much need to have a cell phone or a portable computer which will give you access to the database. The When connected to the internet, the huge database of real time data can create a game changing device like sixth sense. You can watch the demo at Ted.com TED is short for Technology Entertainment and Design. That is one of the places you go to find out what is cool. And if that peer group gives you a standing ovation, you know that you are on to something big.

Fresh out of Business School, MBA in hand, the taste of toast and mixed fruit jam still fresh in the mouth, when we joined the work place, life was very simple. You came in to work and bust your guts trying to work. We all hoped that the big boss would get impressed with our dedication.

We all know that politicians need to be accountable. The Intellingence units need to be able to gather the early warning signals and coordinate with the police or Anti Terror Squads to take preventive measures. The media too needs to avoid the temptation to sensationalize news and put innocent lives in danger. We have on many occasions watched the television channels trying to outdo each other in being insensitive. They televised live the rescue operations by the police, the NSG commandos trying to enter the Taj Mahal Hotel. Just by switching on the television the terrorists would have advance warning of what the commandos were desperately trying to do stealthily. The lack of accountability showed up big time during the terror attacks in Mumbai on the night of 26th November 2008 when terrorists held the country hostage.

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.

Kolkata in the Eastern part of India is home to Tagore, Amartya Sen, Mother Teresa, Satyajit Ray and old school romance. Nostalgia is the best sauce to feed your imagination. Ask anyone who has seen Park Street in its heydays in the late '60s and '70s. Christmas and New Years eve meant dancing on Park Street, I am told. The greats of Rock, Jazz and Blues all performed live in the various restaurants and nightclubs of Park Street during those golden years. The Victoria Memorial, Soccer fever and Utpal Dutt's theatre all happened here. The long adda sessions at Coffee House is a thing of the past.

A Blog is like a baby - very easy to conceive but very hard to manage. And yet - people have them ( I mean blogs, not babies). Everytime someone is swelling up with the deep desire to educate or entertain the world, a blog is a great place to start. A blog is not just about self expression, but it is also about throwing your ideas up for scrutiny. You will get appreciative responses and they are easy to deal with. Blush and be coy. But are you also prepared to deal with a swift hurt on the anatomy (figuratively speaking) and ego (literally, not figuratively)?