The towel on the chair: How it became India's ultimate status symbol

When the govt decided who could manufacture, import or expand a factory, permissions became valuable commoditiesLong ago, my father told me a story about a certain ‘Sunil ji. Nobody ever addressed him by his first name, it was always succeeded by a ‘ji’, because his office chair was covered with a towel. He would often wear a safari suit & a stiff-upper lip at family weddings. The guy with a govt job, an Afsar (officer), top billing in the arranged marriage market, despite having the lowest basic pay. At one such wedding, his wife blurted out an issue they were facing. Due to some clerical mistake, the details of their salary account was not updated, and Sunil ji wasn’t receiving his salary for over 2 years. They found this anomaly just last month. My family was grudgingly impressed, and h