Holy water

Ramesh Chauhan’s Parle Bisleri dominates the lucrative and fast-growing packaged water business in India and has expanded its presence overseas to Europe. But it appears that the company doesn’t rely only on the sharp business sense of its promoter. On Thursday, a businessman’s efforts to get in touch with a senior executive at the company’s Delhi headquarters proved signally unsuccessful. At first, no calls were answered; a check with another office revealed that a puja was in progress so there was no one available to man the switchboard. An operator finally did answer some hours later, only to say that the executive concerned had left for the day on account of the puja and could only be contacted the next day.