Handicapped and welcome!

At a time when IT companies are sacking people, Laser Soft Info Systems (LSIS), a leading banking and financial services IT company, employs one hundred disabled persons among its 500 strong workforce. Suresh Kamath, MD, started LSIS in 1986. Within 20 years, it has grown and is teaching other companies a lesson in corporate social responsibility through its employment policy. This policy ensures right to employment to disabled persons as much as it does to able-bodied candidates.

At Valasaravakkam, before entering the office, one cannot miss rows of wheelchairs at the parking lot. Once inside the office, one witnesses employees on wheelchairs moving from one computer to the next on the office’s ground level which is designated to the disabled employees. Prakash, an employee, cannot walk since birth. He is working on developing a hospital management software. “After my BSc in computer sciences, I joined this company. My initial salary was Rs 5,000. Today, after four years, my salary has increased to Rs 25,000 per month. I’ve also managed to help four other disabled people get employment here,” he says with evident pride. ....Continue

Simply Mayagardi in Uttar Pradesh

Auraiya is a nondescript town in the vast swathe of Gangetic plains in Uttar Pradesh. Four days before demitting the chief minister’s office in her second term in 1997, Mayawati had taken out two sub-divisions – Bidhuna and Auraiya – out of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s home district Etawah, to carve out a new district called Auraiya. Not only that, she also lured away a local leader Shekhar Tiwari from Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party. Little did Mayawati know that her own creation would become a thorn in her flesh 11 years later.

For the first time in over a decade, she was forced to cut down on the extravagance and grandiosity of her birthday celebrations which has been marked in party’s calendar as Fund Raising Day. Ten days before that, Tiwari tortured an executive engineer of state’s Public Works Department (PWD), Manoj Kumar Gupta, to his death because the latter was unable to fulfill the MLA’s demand for money to be ‘donated’ to the chief minister on her birthday.

The incident pushed Mayawati on the defensive, as the otherwise somnolent Congress and staid Bharatiya Janata Party took to the streets to condemn ‘killings to celebrate chief minister’s birthday’. The principal opposition formation, Samajwadi Party leaders too upped the ante demanding a CBI inquiry into this ‘fund raising’. Said former chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, “Mayawati has fixed a quota of Rs 10 lakh for each Member of Legislature and Rs 50 lakh for each MP, to be raised for her birthday. She has given her party workers a license to loot and extort.” The SP mocked Mayawati by sending party workers to ‘beg’ on the streets for a ‘fundraising’ drive for her birthday.....Continue

Kismat Konnection!?

One lad who is making the most of his singleton is Shahid Kapoor. After his breakup with Kareena, the JWM star was linked with all and sundry and lately, rumours of Shahid and Priyanka getting too intimate on the sets of "Kaminay" led to another controversy since even Priyanka had parted ways with Harman Baweja. But recently, Shahid was seen dining with ‘just good friend’ Vidya Balan alone. Although they had been spotted dining with common friends, earlier, but this time the two just couldn’t get their eyes off each other! Is there something brewing, Shahid?....Continue

Politico by default

Ravi Prakash Verma, SP MP, Uttar pradesh

While most MPs were roaring up and down the aisle of the Lok Sabha, hurling insults at each other debating the cash-for-vote scam, one man grimaced watching the tamasha sitting in his North Avenue flat. Says Ravi Prakash Verma, whose family has sent MPs for 10 out of all the 14 Lok Sabhas: “When Atal Behari Vajpayee’s NDA turned turtle, defeated by one vote, I had been offered Rs 10 crore for my vote. People do not know that I had rudely sent back the man who had come with the money.”

Becoming an MP has become a habit with the members of late Bal Govind Verma, Ravi’s father. He himself had been MP four times, his wife thrice and Ravi Prakash himself is in his third consecutive term. But though his father had been a minister, Ravi Prakash never went to school in a red beacon vehicle. He used to walk to and back from school. His school uniforms were never bought, rather, his once-MP mother used to stitch them for little Ravi. During his college days at Allahabad University, he like any other normal student stayed in a rented house, and cooked his own meals. And even now, there hasn’t been much change in his lifestyle. Unlike politicos who appoint PAs the second day after being sworn in as MPs, Ravi has none. It is possible that if you ring the bell at his door, his wife would open it, not some liveried servant. Most often he travels to the Parliament in the pool bus meant for members. He remains what his father was, a firm believer of socialist ideals of Acharya Narendra Dev. “I have bought no property during my tenure as MP,” he categorically told TSI. “Yes, I have property, but that is ancestral. For a living I farm my land. Indeed, he does not think of himself as a politician, but rather an intellectual. In fact, he came into politics to stop his mother from being duped by unscrupulous people. “After father’s demise, mother became an MP, but since she was not well-educated, people ripped her. So to help her with her paperwork, I returned home from Delhi, now here I am!” he smiles gently....Continue