The Leela Palace had an even more outrageous price: Rs 1,25,000. The 1999 Mouton on the Imperial list (the wine Aveek had sent me and which cost Rs 28,900 at the Taj Palace) was Rs 62,000 or more than double the Taj Palace price. So, I looked at the wine lists of other deluxe hotels. None of us will order the same wines as Aveek does, but the principle of variable pricing is a dangerous one. If there are such huge disparities in wine pricing, consumers needed to be made aware. (Rs 1 lakh versus Rs 28,900.)Īnd as the man had been my boss (Editor-in-Chief of all ABP publications) for over a dozen years, who was I to disagree?īesides, he was right. I mumbled something about how the Oberoi’s prices included tax while the Taj Palace’s prices do not but I knew that taxes, though high (around 29 per cent) could not account for the vast priceĭifference. That is how much the Oberoi charges for the 1999! And the Taj Palace only charges Rs 28,900! How can they justify it?” “Not the 1998, which is the more expensive one. “It is one hundred thousand rupees!” he expostulated. I indicated that these were not wines I ordered on a regular basis, the way he did, so could he please just tell me what the Oberoi price was? But do you know how much the Oberoi charges for exactly the same bottle?” “I am having dinner with a very high profile person today,” he continued (more high-profile than the claret-swilling Ninan and Nandan?), “and I thought I would order the same wine at the Oberoi. “Ah, yes,” I said, not sure where the conversation was heading. “Well, the 1998 we were drinking cost Rs 39,900,” he said (and there was a pause in the conversation owing to my sharp intake of breath), “but the 1999 I sent you was Rs 28,900.” I gulped and said nervously that I had no idea. “Do you know how much the Mouton cost?” he asked. I would never have been able to afford Mouton Rothschild at the Orient Express so we accepted the bottle gratefully as a gift from an ex-boss to an ex-employee and did not dare ask how much the wine cost.īut the next day Aveek called. It also turned out that they had drunk the hotel’s entire stock of Mouton 1998 (according to Aveek, “an exceptional year”) so Aveek asked the sommelier to send us a bottle of the 1999 vintage (“good but hardly in the same league,” he said, stroking his beard thoughtfully) and to put it on his bill. It turned out that Aveek, Ninan and gang were drinking one of the world’s most famous wines: Mouton Rothschild, a first growth from Bordeaux. He passed our table, took in the very nice, but hardly exceptional, wine that we were drinking and generously promised to send over a bottle of the stuff his table was quaffing. This star-studded gathering was interrupted when Aveek set off for the loo. It turned out to be Aveek Sarkar, who paid my salary till 1999 (when I left ABP and joined the HT), along with TN Ninan (another ex-employee of Aveek’s who now heads Business Standard), Chiki Sarkar (Aveek’s daughter who has just been appointed head of Penguin – on her own merits, though Penguin India is also part of Aveek’s empire) and Nandan Nilekani (who needs no introduction). I was sitting at the Orient Express having a quiet family dinner when I noticed that the restaurant’s staff was buzzing around a VIP I would absolutely love to be getting to use this tool more but the costs and time it takes for me to code as someone that's not trained in the field are costly.I have my ex-boss to thank for this piece. The price is so high that it's very hard for me as a junior academic to get someone to fund even the university edition and has always been an issue. They also could really work on the graphics or at least ability for users to connect to make their own graphics. Learning to code is very hard for it and they need better examples and more support. Most others only focus on one tool or maybe two (such as most system dynamics software). From the methods that can be implemented to the ability to connect or interface with other programs and tools, it is the complete package. It's the most versatile of the software packages for systems modeling by a landslide. It allows me to be creative and artistic in ways other packages don't, but it could use more ways for sure (such as in aligning text or objects more easily or better graphics). I was becoming jaded in academia until I was sent on a training to learn to use it and it's just so versatile that it makes me have faith in academia again because we don't all have to use one hammer and make everything a nail. Comments: I absolutely love this software.
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