The Indicast Show

Indicast celebrates one year!!! Indicast style salaam to all our listeners who have stayed with us throughout! Keep those comments coming in. We love em all. Also, we have created a record of sorts in this podcast. It is one of those pacy episodes with a file size that wont annoy you! It is that time of the year when India gets a face lift literally. The festival of lights and fire crackers lighte...

Our first podcast with both of us sitting face to face...so it definitely was weird to begin with but we eased up as time passed . We start with a few HR issues that start ups like ours face. Belated Gandhijayanti and a very Happy Dry Day!! Whats up with national holiday's being Dry Days? We consistently digress from one topic to the next and have maintained the tradition in this podcast as well.....

Gandhi. Poora naam, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Munnabhai, the cult Indian movie has injected a dose of Gandhigiri in India. A nation of billion people is bombarded with news from all media vehicles on how Gandhigiri rocks in todays world of deception. Gandhi had moved a nation to action through his out of the box style of protests against the British non-violence and integrity being his weapons o...

Ganapati Bappa Moriya! Thats the mantra in India for the week. There is no festival which is celebrated with more pomp and vigour than the Ganesh Chaturti. People from all age groups participate in programmes to exhibit their talent on millions of different stages across the country. India is immune to blaring loudspeakers at 12:30 in the night during these 10 days! Bal Thakrey is in the news agai...

The Gods must be crazy! Well, that's what a rational man in his right minds would say to his god fearing friend if the latter were to believe in the "Mahim Sweet-Water Miracle"! We, at Indicast are God fearing men as well, but, we fear science as much as we do God! There is a thin line between science and supernatural and we are careful not to disappoint God by believing in his "miracles" blindly!...

Damn! They spend millions in advertising and nobody seems to care. And, now, suddenly they breed a few bacteria in their products and the country sits up to take notice! Well, I don't know whether advertising helps increase sales, but, negative publicity can sure hinder sales! Pepsi and Coke, the notorious giants are in the News again. In this episode we have mentioned a few statistics from the CS...

An MBA is the "in thing" in India among the "eager minds of tomorrow". We are not complaining. We hold that degree too. What we are against is the unprofessional methods of conditioning these eager minds to pick one B School from the other by publishing half baked survey reports based on perceptions and sheer lack of homework.

Hope. It's a funny word, isn't it? it's valium for some and marinjuna for others. It's dope. It's contagious. It spreads. It's an inspiration. Mumbai is on it... because it doesn't have a choice... because it can't afford a nervous breakdown. Mumbai is hurt. It is seething. We hope it is not immune. We hope some day we all will start asking questions. We hope that we, mumbaikars stop taking oursel...

When it comes to supply chain, only God can beat em. But, we couldnt interview God. So, we spoke to the second in command, Mr. Raghunath Medghe, the President of the Dabbawala Association, Mumbai. Following is an excerpt from an article from the Forbes Magazine: Mumbai's "tiffinwallahs" have achieved a level of service to which Western businesses can only aspire. "Efficient organization" is not th...

We are back after a long time. Blame it on my laptop which completed its 5th Anniversary and I had to gift it with a new Hard Disk and adorn it with a few accessories. Yeah, it was a costly affair, but, what the heck? We are back! Thank you for all the comments and the patience! "I am a cheerleader, I am a promoter, I am a salesman, I am a debt collector, I am a father confessor and there are othe...

Today, I walked past waiting patients to the quadrangle at the heart of AIIMS, where striking doctors prepare to go hungry for another night. There were candles all around, remnants of a quiet vigil from an hour ago. Little groups of students huddled everywhere, some on benches, others stretched out on red carpets in the centre of the ground. Around them, strung up everywhere, are banners. There's...

One fine morning, the 19 year old Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Vishwanathan wrote a book, got rich, got famous, and then, got caught. While she seems to have been only "inspired" by one of her favourite authors and that the similarities between her book, 'How Opal Mehta Got kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life' and Sophie Kinsella's 'Can You Keep a Secret' were only coincidental, we at indicast discuss th...

With the summer season at its peak, this May, has been an eventful one for the shining brand called 'India'. In the past couple of years, India has appeared in more publications and magazines across the world than it has in the past 8-10 years put together! Was India built in a day? We discuss India and its tryst with fame in this episode.

The summer has always been hot but this time around adding fuel to the fire is the daily load shedding ritual for about 3 hours. I have heard stories where 8 hour load shedding has become a norm. So we decided to take that topic up and present our views on it. I tried hard but couldnt help giving out a few numbers. Abhishek has the honour of hosting the show this time. You will also hear dogs bark...

Has the Indian judicial system become like a cricket umpire where a few bad decision are part of the game? Killers are being let go and then rearrested, rape sentences are being handed out like the christmas cake. And to top it, the quota system is back. We are for merit based selection but at the same time the under previleged have to be helped out. Abhishek presents a solution. What do you say?

For this episode we have picked up two topics concerning women but one of them remains a big issue while the other one is a "fabricated" issue by the traditional media. The sentencing in the Marine drive rape case caught our eye and Abhishek went on a number hunt to get a few facts while I took a look into the Indian Penal Code and its definition of rape. The other topic we cover was about the goo...

We are (like any other Indian) passionate about cricket. So we had initially planned this episode to be about what we feel about the Young Team India. But as it happened, we recorded this episode the same day that Team India was embarrassed by a depleted England team so it ended up being a rant. Then the second topic that we squeezed in was the Miss India Contest.

This week we aren't late and had a guest with us for this show. A friend of ours, Shalin Mody, works at NASA and we had him over to chat about his experiences. We didn't go into details about ISRO and talked generally about space exploration. The topics covered are Asteroid mission being cancelled, zero gravity, space tourism, Vision for Space explroation.

Its becoming a habit for us to release episodes with a sorry for the delay but this is the last time. A lot of things happened but nothing that we could talk about for 15 mins entirely with boring you people so what we have done is spent time on several topic. So here is Indicasts episode #15 for you.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT ( don't ask me why they dont call it NNPT) is in the spotlight with Bush's upcoming visit to India. He's coming over to discuss some Indo-US nucleur deal for civilian use. So we just thought about giving you some gyan about what the hell NPT is about and why is this such a big deal.

we decided to talk about Rang De Basanti (needless to say that its a must watch) and discuss a few facts that were mentioned in the movie (dont worry we havent given out the plot) but just picked on a particular thing that a character says. The discussion lead us to talk about IAS and how to get into it and importantly discuss facts about it.

We are back after a 3 week hiatus and we apologise for that but the schedules kept clashing. Thats the trouble having a sales guy as a co-host ;-) . We used up this entire episode to talk about things that happened in 2005. Rediff had a special end of the year article about various things about 2005. So we picked the top ten things that made us (Indians) happy in 2005 and top ten trends that rocke...

The vocalist for fabulous Indus Creed and the awesome Alms for Shanti, Uday Benegal, makes an appearance on IndiCast. I had asked him to join us to talk about the past, present and future of his band and also about generral things happening around him. As usual, we had to battle a few technical problems and had to edit a few awesome moments out of our chat. This episode does contain a few fucks he...

We are huge Sachin fans so we decided to dedicate this episode to Sachin Tendulkar for reaching yet another milestone. The episode contains snippets of sachin's first mainstream interview with Tom Alter and also various incidences as experienced by many greats like Anil Kumble, Dravid, Richie Benaud.

After struggling to get good internet connection, we were able to find a stable connection and record this episode. I invited a college friend, Porus Satwe, to talk about talk NRI related finance stuff. This porbably might be the most informative IndiCast to date. Porus explains the difference between NRE,NRO and FCNR accounts as it relates to NRIs. We had decided to talk about investing options a...