The not-so-secret diary

News on 17th December 2009, UK: Cheques to be phased out by 2018. Personal experience on 8th November 2009, India: Cheques from cheque book of well known private sector bank  ‘payable at par’ only in the city where cheque book was issued. In the UK, use of cheques is declining by 10% every year. In Sweden and the Netherlands, cheques are now virtually extinct. In India, we have a long way to go before we can seriously consider being in the league of paper-less transaction countries. Although giving us company are the US and France where  successive administrators have seriously resisted the phasing-out of cheques even as cheque usage continues to decline. Coming back to India and the plethora of cash transactions that occur every day my first reaction was to sigh again. Then I decided to give it deeper thought. Even 5 years ago no one would have thought that a country with worrying UN and World Bank-type ‘Basic Facilities Depravation Statistics’ wo...

Have you ever seen a young child at a hairdresser's? You know when they are just about 1 or 2 years old. They still can't understand why they are being forced into a scary looking chair and why their parents or grandparents are holding their head tight as the evil man with the scissors descends upon them. That’s the point when they start wailing non-stop...... Now I don't remember my toddler-trips to a hairdresser or a beauty salon. I suspect that my mother, a natural at dress-designing and other arty things, probably snipped off my locks at home for a while! When I was slightly older I distinctly remember going to the little Ladies Beauty Parlour , a cubby-hole of a place in the Neelkanth shopping centre near my house. It was a mini-adventure. First you would have to sit in that grown-up chair, then have the white cloak wrapped around you, then the lady would spray water from a little white plastic bottle and finally with the click click click of the small scissors yo...