This is the first Budget in my memory of Budgets over the last half a century which has embraced upfront, enthusiastically and emphatically, technology, modernity and fiscal sobriety, notes Shreekant Sambrani.
The ever-astute Ravi Matthai, Director of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1971, offered me a basic salary of Rs 1,000 per month on my return from the United States. I doubt if IIMA could hire a faculty member at Rs 55,000 per month today! points out Dr Shreekant Sambrani.
A democratic set-up is a necessary instrument to choose rulers, but it cannot always provide a roadmap to a good society. That needs a moral compass, which is prominent by its absence in the current campaign, says Dr Shreekant Sambrani.
Dr Shreekant Sambrani pays tribute to M S Swaminathan, renowned agricultural scientist and a lifelong crusader against hunger who passed away in Chennai recently.
'No one took umbrage, because they knew Laxman had no malice in him.'
Dr Mitra called the Pandara Road crowd a 'cheerful collective of young dreamers,' united in its 'love and pride for the newly Independent India,' despite 'sharp disparities in background, temperament and attitude.' Dr Shreekant Sambrani recalls his encounters with the legendary economist who passed into the ages.
India's freedom, its rambling but working Constitution, its parliamentary democracy, its lumbering administrative machinery all have many a father, but its greatest claim to fame, especially today, that of being a modern state, is due to but one person: Its first and longest-serving prime minister, Nehru, says Shreekant Sambrani.
'Competence, experience, matter, did you say?' 'No music was sweeter than the mash of xenophobia, jingoism, racism, misogyny.' 'And the master busker to play the tune was round the corner to capture an eager audience just in the nick of time.' Shreekant Sambrani on the Trump Triumph a week after his upset victory.
The work of Norman Borlaug, who helped save billions from starvation, is worth recalling, especially as opposition to gene-modified crops mount, says Shreekant Sambrani.
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