Economy
Logic of layoffs
IN THE US in last year alone, more than 600,000 persons have reportedly been laid off due to the shrinking earnings of most companies. The knee-jerk response is to cut costs either by hiving off units not connected with the main thrust of the enterprise,
selling off surplus movable and immovable assets, or closing overseas offices. Inevitably, all cost-cutting activities immediately and directly affect the job security of employees. One fine morning, the ill-fated receives a ``Dear John, Sorry about tha
t... Wish you the very best'' letter, and they are jobless, hapless and clueless as to what their next step should be.
Cleaning the Augean stables
IN THE days of my childhood it used to be a fairly frequent experience. I went to the residence of some classmate who lived in the old part of Poona, in an old sprawling ancestral house. I would be taken proudly around the whole precinct -- enormously th
ick walls, wood works, narrow windows, dark passages, somber corridors and narrow steep staircases.
Editorial
Kutch tokenism
EVEN AT THE risk of sounding churlish, it must be said that the excise holiday to manufacturing units in Kutch announced by the Prime Minister is misconceived and unwarranted as being against accepted principles of distribution of state largesse for thos
e in distress. It seeks to make a distinction between the people affected by the earthquake in terms of the intensity in the different regions.
Politics
Political quake in US Senate
ON June 5, the 100-member US Senate is all set to witness a shift of political gears, the like of which it had not witnessed in the last 50 years. No doubt, Dr Marshall Wittmann of the Hudson Institute allowed himself to be carried away by irrational exu
berance when he likened the ideological metamorphosis due to occur on that day in terms of the composition and complexion of the Senate Committees to ``the equivalent of the Bolsheviks taking over from the czar during the Russian Revolution'', but there
is certainly no doubt that from that day on, the US President, Mr George W. Bush, and his Republican Party would have had to surrender their initiative to the Democrats.
Uneasy lies the head...
KING Farouk I of Egypt made an intriguing statement soon after the Second World War ended. He said, ``In a few years, there will be only five kings in the world, the King of England and the four kings in a pack of cards.''
Himalayan challenge for India
WHILE NEPAL hugs its grief, and speculation about what really happened last Friday runs riot, the question for India is: How will the reign of Gyanendra, who is said to be more like their father, King Mahendra, than his dead brother was, affect New Delhi
?
Stocks
Learning from US stock market -- Selective adaptation is key
RECENTLY, one came across an interesting article on financial derivatives (Business Line, May 31). Unlike many commentators who criticise
Technology
Fuel cell bus in Berlin
BERLIN is likely to be one of the earliest cities to run a bus on fuel cell technology, if the project subsidised by the European Union materialises by the turn of the year.
What are fuel cells?
FUEL cells are devices that convert fuel into electricity where the fuel is not burned in a flame (as in conventional engines) but oxidised electrochemically, that is, fuel cells are not constrained by the fundamental law that governs h
eat engines, the Carnot limit, which specifies the maximum theoretical efficiency a heat engine can reach.
Bio-medical implants from Midhani
THE efforts of Indian Defence scientists are holding out promise on two fronts -- in producing products that help defend the country and in spin-offs that help the ordinary citizen.
