A Konspiracy

I suddenly noticed that on the Statcounter, this blog got over 100 hits today. Yeah, increasing numbers are a ego boost, I'm puzzled what hordes of people see in this blog. Its quite a boring blog, other than the occasional times Snake Man goes batty. Anyway, I'm still in Delhi and have rebooked for Sunday evening now. Both single and double daddy are back, but both had to pull rank to get a seat (single daddy pulled MP having to get back to parliament gag and double daddy pulled Jain and Jain company gag). But Bombay is a resilient city, the Sensex (despite ONGC - which has a 18 per cent weightage on the index) is shooting up. While the energy major is down three and a half percent the Sensex is flirting with 7700. All this while TV18's scrip collapses for no apparent reason.
Talking about Bombay, tomorrow is the big day - DNA after months of tittle and tattle and non-existent planning and hiring is finally hitting stands. Jain and Jain editors and management have had crisis meetings over the past few days, yet there is a belief now that DNA is hitting Bombay at a very bad time. Because I doubt the city wants to know of another scoop while it limps back to a sense of normality. Talking of Bombay's pain, it was surprising how the Delhi papers covered the news. While it was all over TV, and again I think NDTV did a great job, especially with the helicopter ride "with the flambouyant CEO of Raymond, Gautam Singhania" - as according to Sreenivasan Jain, the Delhi papers other than maybe ToI and the Hindu ignored the incident. The day the rains hit, HT carried the rains as a short twenty word brief, focussing instead on the non-existent tragedy created by evil communist leaders such as Gurudas Dasgupta and Brinda Karat. Express carried some pictures, but on the second day, HT decided to go ballistic on the ONGC story. I still think Mumbai's shutdown is a bigger story than ONGC because it directly impacts more people. Of course, ToI is a Bombay paper (and if the proprietor's wife and daughter are forced to spend a night at the airport, it will make P1 for sure).
Coming back to the HMSI case, I'm surprised that a old India hand like Yokihiro Aoshima, the boss of HMSI and thus the seniormost Honda exec in India could screw up like this. I knew there were warning signs of labour unrest when I met him three months ago, but he didn't get into that topic. Everything inside teh plant seemed hunky-dory. Yet, when a labour problem does explode, there is a proportion of blame that goes to the management. Of course, if evil communists desperate to lay waste to Indian industry (like they have successfully done in Kerela and West Bengal) get into the picture, it becomes worse. This problem was exasapated by the fact that Honda Motors hire idiotic Indians in management, because the Japs are control freaks and having dimwits around helps them exercise control.
Anyway, I have one request to people who hit this blog a lot, leave some comments once in a while.
EDIT : Bonatellis has written a very interesting post about his experiences of the Mumbai Floods.