Blogs

For two years in a row, the month of September has turned out to be a black month for me. In a span of last two years, I lost two good friends. In September 2023, I lost Deepangshu Dev Sarmah. He was the Founding Ed...

When I realised that the Indian government was planning to make the recently concluded Bharat Mobility Global Expo an annual event, I was aghast.

In the ever-evolving landscape of automotive manufacturing, one cannot overlook the environmental challenges that persist. Mumbai's recent decision to retire its iconic red diesel-run double-decker buses, in service...

In the vast and diverse tapestry of India's sporting landscape, a captivating transformation is unfolding, akin to a resounding revolution that has set the nation agog. At the centre stage of this sporting metamorph...

Innovation has always been a critical driving force behind the evolution of the automotive industry from time immemorial. From the inception of the first automobiles to the development of electric and self-driving v...

What’s with journalists these days? Has journalism changed from being a noble profession to one that is ignoble? It seems that it has become a profession of jokers, extortionists, political stooges and spineless boy...

To say that an Electric Vehicle (EV) revolution is sweeping India may be a bit of an overstatement, but it is true that EV sales are in the fast lane and the country will see an EV revolution in the not-so-distant f...

Electric passenger vehicles (PV) today form a miniscule share of total passenger vehicles sales in the country today. Internal combustion (IC) engine cars and utility vehicles constitute the major share of PV sales ...

If you may have noticed, small electric cars are becoming a vogue in several developed countries. These are typically two-door cars that can seat four people comfortably. Take the example of Wuling Air mini electric...

Author Elisabeth Foley has rightly said, “The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” And that is precisely what Vikram Kirloskar and Toyota have demonstra...

The U.S. and India have different driving rules. India is a right-driving country (vehicles with the steering wheel on the right side of the car), but don’t let that fool you into believing you won’t run into plenty...

Many decades back, much before I joined the newspapers as a journalist, I remember reading the book titled ‘Iacocca: An Autobiography’. The bestselling book was co-authored by William Novak and was originally publis...

I love it when a random auto journalist in India writes in his column that a high speed car needs to be driven on a race track. Auto journalists are typically that breed of professionals who “run with the hares and ...

What began as a personal interaction platform of sorts has taken on an extremely complex form, more elaborate then Chinese whispers. I call it a ‘FILTY’ world. So what exactly is this world? It’s just a word I coi...

Today, the concern over climate change has pushed global business operations towards being greener and more sustainable. More and more businesses are incorporating sustainability goals in order to cut down on energy...

Cheer girls have an entertaining task before them. In fact, cheerleading is defined as an activity that involves participants (usually girls in skirts, waving colourful and glittering pom poms) swaying their hips an...

Just the other day a leading English newspaper came out with a report quoting a data released by the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB). It said that road crashes in India claimed 426 lives per day or 18 every hour...

“Gurinder is no more you know? He died of gunshot injuries a couple of years back. I was informed about this a few days back when I met a journalist from Punjab,” Shafiq told me. I was aghast. How is it that I misse...

Capt Jayant Joshi along with Lt Col AS Batth was doing a routine practice exercise in their Army Aviation Rudra Advanced Light Helicopter at the Ranjit Sagar Dam near Pathankot when it crashed into the deep waters o...

The last several months have been tough for the EV industry, specifically the 2-wheeler segment with multiple instances of fire and even a case of explosion in 2 wheelers using Lithium ion (Li-ion) based battery pac...

one needs to wisely choose the right vehicle to avoid any trouble during the trip. Mountains roads can be tricky, which in turn requires that the vehicle is very capable and sturdy.

Circa 1988: Remember the slow old days when things happened at the speed of an Ambassador car? For today’s generation it may actually sound as though we lived in a “slow motion” age! Among the several valuable posse...

It’s been several months since I accepted a car or bike “review” invitation. Yes, I miss reviewing new cars and bikes. There is no denying that fact. OEMs continue to shower journalists with free air travel, free 5-...

But strangely, I realised there were humans who loved us. But I wondered whether it was superficial. If they loved us so much, why did they not take us to their homes and adopt us? All I got was a pat on my head so...

I was born in a gutter. Soon I realised I had eight siblings. Four of them died a few days after I was born. I could barely open my eyes for the first few days after I was born. But I could feel my mother pick me up...

In the good old days, some of us used to pick up the morning #newspaper to read the latest news, whether it was on #politics, #sports, local development or #business. The more voracious readers amongst us spent thei...

As I was growing up I loved watching Hindi movies. During the 1980s and 1990s, and perhaps before that too, there was a “Bahadur” character in every other movie who always responded to his master by saying, “Jee Sha...

But all the talk of “Atmanirbhar Bharat” makes no sense if it does not bring in the moolah for the investor. In the early days of post Independence making moolah was very difficult because of the “red-tapism” and co...

Words like “Make in India”, “#AtmanirbharBharat” or self-reliant India have been doing the rounds much before we got our Independence in 1947. It was Mahatma Gandhi dressed in his simple cotton dhoti and shawl who...

Getting hooked on #narcotics substances can be very dangerous. They destroy lives, minds and souls. The sale and consumption of illegal narcotics are rampant across the globe. The first time I had a narcotic substan...

Yes, I know auto journalists and the organisations they work for are not rich in the real sense. Auto journalists cannot travel all over the world and drive fancy cars and bikes by spending their own money. No media...

As a B2C auto journalist, I was exposed to the world of glitz. Almost every car and bike launch, besides first drives and rides, meant free five star stays, free flights, free food and wine and at the end of the d...

OEMs are basically manufacturers of cars, two wheelers and other vehicles. I have often asked myself, are OEMs like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the poem written by Robert Browning. And are we journalists and influe...

I saw the #socialmedia tsunami coming but could never fathom its intensity. It was around 2004-2005 when platforms like #youtube , #twitter , #facebook , etc were born. Much later #instagram came into being. #tiktok...

Everybody in the auto journalism world had to adapt to new rules of social media, its charm, its pluses and minuses and its absolute ruthlessness amid the excitement and opportunities it offered.

A couple of decades back, #journalists were kind of independent when it came to reporting and they never had the management breathing down their necks to get moolah for their organisations. And even if they wanted...

In days of yore, #journalists were simple in their outlook, existed on meagre salaries and were there on a mission to bring out the truth. In the 1980s and early 1990s before the television boom, business journalism...

In Part 4, I explained what it means to deal with the “Paapi pet ka sawal hein…” issue. After all, journalists and PR pros are humans too. They have to survive.

Many of us would have heard of the Hindi phrase “Paapi pet ka sawal hein…” In essence it means, eventually it’s all about feeding ourselves, it’s about our stomach… Yes, we all work hard because we want to put food ...

Are #journalists different from #PRprofessionals? I really do not think so. Both jobs call for a lot of hard work, patience and self-respect. I have often referred to these professions as two sides of a coin. Throug...

In the past I have talked a bit about #journalists, but what about #PublicRelations boys and girls? Who are they? What is their mandate?

For more than a decade from the 1980s to 1990s, I was a business journalist working in different newspapers. #Journalists at that time were known for their ethics, self-respect, high moral standards and their vast k...

Every time the Auto Expo is held in India, the components players have an Asli Naqli pavilion which displays spurious components along with real ones. The purpose is to educate the consumers of the rampant availabil...

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has passed several orders in the recent past and each need to be criticised for its shortsightedness. It passed an order banning cutting of trees in Delhi. That was ludicrous to say...

They say IITians are smart and savvy and they are good at what they do. Look at what one IITian professor did to the Delhi traffic with his silly Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor plan. After spending hundreds of cro...

I needed a break and I decided to revisit the United States of America. The last time I spent in this fabulous country was 15 years back in the year 2000. Since then the country may have sold millions and trillions ...

Remember the line from the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare? “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. I can truly use that line for India now. There is something very rotten in the state of India. Forget ab...

Journalism is getting murkier by the day and so are some journalists...or should we call them journalists? People ask me as to why I do not want to attend press conferences (PCs) and I tell them it’s getting more an...

The Nurburgring was the Holy Grail for car manufacturers to prepare their cars for the worst lap of its life to break each other’s record. Some manufacturers would bring their cars to the track just to develop them,...

In our pursuit to find some of the most insane auto modifications in India we have come across things which will woo you, blow your mind away as well as make you hurl a rock at the atrocities some people can commit ...

Jeremy Clarkson. We all know that this man working for BBC and who hosts the show ‘Top Gear’ has a huge fan following. So does Sunny Leone and Pamella Anderson, at least when her silicon implants were in good order!...

With BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Audis getting popular, the need for speed on roads is understandable. These are fast cars and are safe and stable too. But no matter how broad a road you get to drive in India, you sti...

Indians at large possess some of the sharpest brains in the world. But when it comes to following traffic rules, they behave in some of the weirdest ways. India is a country where sex is literally taboo, yet prostit...

Every day we hear someone or the other, thinking of ways to replace the traditional human driver from the car, thus removing driver error from the equation all together which seems like a good idea…in theory. But...

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a clarion call to make India clean (Swatch Bharat), there has been a flurry of activities, both genuine and fraud, trying to heed to his call. Some have honestly taken up...

How was it before the internet became popular? Very simple, people read newspapers and magazines, watched the limited news on television and listened to radio. Then came the internet bomb. Why bomb? Because it almos...

A new trend going around these days in the auto industry is a feature that goes by the name of ‘driving mode’. This option of a driving mode started with the German luxury manufacturers and is now tricking down to t...