Not so 'Good Times'

Bump has come-out with a new app called the bump pay for person-to-person mobile payments. So now if you want to split the restaurant bill with your friend or pay him some money that you owe & vice-versa you don’t have to write a cheque or withdraw cash from ATM. All you have to do is to type the amount you want to send, bump your phones together (physical contact of phones) and do the PayPal confirmation. And voila! the money is transferred. That easy!


Wish it was that easy for Kingfisher employees to get their salaries. The airline hit by turbulence and in the midst of a financial crisis had not paid their employee salaries for the last four months. The employees had threatened to shut down work if not paid immediately. After marathon parleys between the employees and the management, the company agreed that the salaries were ‘seriously overdue’ and the Chairman of the crisis-hit airline Vijay Mallya had last Tuesday assured his employees that their salaries would be disbursed in a staggered manner from April 4 to 10. The payment comes as a relief to the employees and their families.

One can never fail to empathize with a company and its chairman that is in the midst of a crisis, much of which it has to do with the way the airline industry is structured in India. However one can never justify non-payment of salaries to employees, because it directly affects not only them but also their families. The monthly expenses, groceries, school fees of kids, rent charges, EMIs for loans taken by employees, and much of such critical expenditure does not stop because a company is not doing well.

In Kingfisher case what looked even odder was that it continues to own an IPL team, pay through their noses to the players, own a formula one team but delays employee salaries by four months, all in the same period.