meek-investor

"To recall , or not to recall; that is the question". With due apologies to Shakespeare, this could very well be the modern day conundrum for businesses. The travails of Toyota , with its recalls, are very well known. What prompted this post is the news of recall of 1.2 million high chairs (the sort you strap your child to), because they could pose a fall hazard to children. Readers of this blog know well that this writer is an opinionated individual, prone to verbal excesses and assumes a god given right to hold a point of view on any subject under the sun. The less he knows about a topic, the more strident is his opinion ! For a change, here is a topic on which he confesses to not being sure about; hence both sides of the coin in this post. The case in question is about high chairs produced by a certain manufacturer in the US. Apparently the risk is that "screws holding the front legs of the high chair can loosen and fall out" and cracking plastic brackets can cau

This week marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the worst industrial disaster in history – the leak of the deadly methyl isocyanate from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Thousands of people died and the horrors have been well documented. This post focuses on one notable aspect of what happened after the disaster. Or rather what didn’t happen. Nobody has yet been prosecuted in a court of law for the accident. That’s right. After 25 years, there has not been a single criminal prosecution. There is little doubt that safety systems in the plant were poorly designed, bypassed in actual operation and there was criminal negligence on safety. Those of us who have worked in factories know how elaborate safety systems are when handling extremely dangerous chemicals like methyl isocyanate. And yet multiple safety systems seem to have been routinely bypassed. Just glance at the Wikipedia article on the accident that details the number of safety systems that were reported to have been non operat

There’s an interesting story doing the rounds in China. A 74 year old man got so frustrated with drivers violating traffic rules that he stationed himself at a junction and started throwing bricks at cars that jumped the red lights. This story has led to an outpouring of support on the Internet – huge numbers of Chinese have supported what the man did. I had posted before on road safety here . On this Saturday morning, when Typhoon Molave is raging outside and the wind is howling and rattling windows, the mood is one of how vulnerable man is. Hence this post again on taking road safety seriously. India and China, lead the world on road deaths. The second most dangerous place in the world is the Indian road. The third most dangerous place in the world is the Chinese road. There are more deaths on the road than in the Iraq war. Than in Afghanistan. Than in Darfur. Than because of swine flu. Why is it that perfectly reasonable people become monsters when they hit the road ? Refuse to we