Subject is not always essential

• The division of the sale price of a litre of petrol and diesel in Delhi, India. All prices in Indian Rupees

Petrol Diesel

Price/litre 47.50 32.46

Basic (Crude, refining 23.38 22.98

and custom duty)

Surcharge (State surcharge, 00.21 00.18

NRF, Shunting charges, RPO etc.)

Excise duty (Basic, cess and 15.17 05.20

Additional excise duty etc.)

Sales Tax (Cess, Additional tax, 07.74 03.54

Surcharge, state development tax)

Dealer commission + Sales turnover tax 01.00 00.56

The effect of taxes on the prices can be seen from above. The prices of petrol in Mumbai, India were increased by around Rs 4 some time back. After some protests again such a steep hike, the state government agreed to waive its part of the tax, but only on the one which I would have received due to the price hike. Even this caused the price to come by Rs 1.65.

• Telecom Italia, an Italian telecom company has started a call centre for itself in a rather unusual place. It has employed people accused of various crimes who are serving their terms in jail and has started a call centre in jail. Now, this is a model which can be replicated but with some caution. This is definitely good for the jail inmates who have some worthwhile job to be done. On the face of it, the advantages for the company outweigh the initial constraints and some disadvantages. However, it needs to be ensured that the system does not become a tool for the proliferation of crime in any way.

• As one moves higher in the hierarchy of a company, the work one does sometimes seems too simple for the kind of paychecks and perks it accompanies. I recently heard that the job of someone who has around 5 years experience in a FMCG company of India (and who has risen to a particular level) consists of things like: 1. When people of his company come to him with a new soap to be launched, he looks at the new product and uses his full intellectual capability to come to the conclusion that the colour of the soap should remain pink (as is now) but of a lighter shade. 2. When people of his company ask him how can the sales of their company’s toothpaste can be increased, his experience comes into play and he suggests them to increase the size of the mouth of the toothpaste tube. This would lead to greater consumption, as whenever their customer uses the tube, more of paste would be squeezed out.

• An insurance firm in India was offering education plans. As part of their ad campaign they came up with hoardings which enumerated the steps in education. There were various versions, each depicting different logical paths followed by students in their education. So, there was one which said: 10+2 --> MBBS --> MD, which seemed conventional. However, there was another which had: 10+2 --> IIT --> MBA. At first sight, I found it to rather faulty, the assumption is that after studying from IIT, students would not want to tread the path of management education and would go into something more research oriented like MS, PHD. However, the hoarding was quite contemporary and took into account the fact that the above presumption is no longer true. These days, more and more IITians want to do an MBA or get themselves jobs at consultancy firms or investment banks rather than get into research. Even the people getting into core technology jobs prefer these jobs to be in firms like investment banks so that they might get an opportunity to switch to a more of a finance job. The insurance firm also had a hoarding version which went: 10+2 --> Engineering --> M.Tech. This only meant that IITians are not considered engineers (greater or lesser?).

• I have written about how mobiles are proliferating in countries like India. However, can you find those people who started these all in your city. I am talking about those original users who took to the mobile even when the rates were as high as Rs 16/min (incoming and outgoing; rates now at max of Rs 1/min for outgoing, with free incoming). These are the people whose numbers go as 98100…, 98200…, since these number series were the ones introduced initially. However, if these people would be the ones having the highest amount of the mobile bills is debatable (and even verfiable).