Airtelcallhome, where r ya ?

Two giants - Reliance and Airtel come up with prepaid phone cards to India to milk the NRI market and follow two different approaches to make money.

Reliance :-
Workable website with very little jazz.
Good customer service.
Good communication.
A tad bit expensive after offering cheaper fares earlier.
Call quality awesome.

Result :- 3.5 stars. I would have given it more if it was priced better.

Bharti Airtel :-
Jazzy website with almost nothing working.
Customer service number provided wrong.
No communication from the team. No e-mails.
Cheap, but they are crooks.
Cannot make a call inspite of them taking money from my credit card. I lost around 20 bucks, but my SIL lost 150!

Result :- Can't give it a star. I want to shove a rocket up their ass and send them into orbit, never again letting them to interfere in my life!

Tell me...have you seen any website taking money from your credit card (very promptly) without even creating an account for you! To make it worse, they leave no doors for you to knock. All this coming from a giant in Indian telecom, Bharti Telecom is just unbelievable. If you want to remotely feel my pain, try accessing airtelcallhome.com. It will take you an hour to load it!!

BEWARE EVERYBODY! AVOID THEM ! 7.9c is a deal very difficult to resist (initially 4 c !!), but some companies just don't deserve even a cent from you!

Kabul Express

We were on a mission to see Dhoom-2, D-2, DI-2, whatever they call it these days, probably to tout it as manna MI. We left our offices in time, checked with each other constantly, picked a restaurant close to it for dinner, finished our food at the right time and finally reached the theater 2 minutes before the movie started to realise that Dhoom2 was NOT PLAYING that day! So much for our planning :P. They were not running it that day to give room to a new movie Kabul Express that released this weekend.

With so much planning and almost no choice, we picked our tickets for Kabul Express and our journey from then on was eye-opening. We came out of the movie with a spinning mind and some of us came back with a different perspective on the happenings in Afghanistan, actually elsewhere too..

Kabul Express is about the journey 4 strangers(actually 5, but I feel the American had no part to play!) embark on, the poignant part being their composition. One of them was an Afghan, another a Taliban (a Pakistani settler) and the other two reporters from India and is a tale that talks about the current scenario of Afghanistan post-9/11, post Pakistan abandoning them. What makes the tale interesting is the different perspectives brought into the tale from it's protagonists. Here are a few things illustrated..

1) Not everybody from Talibans buys into it's ideals. They just consider themselves as a part of the army and follow what is told. Their aim is to have an intruder-free country.
2) There are a lot of Pakistani fighters in the Taliban.
3) Pakistan is caught in a weird web where it has to kill it's own citizens for its survival.
4) America sucking out oil from the territories it occupies replacing it with Coke and Pepsi :)
5) Mutual hatred between Taliban and the rest of Afghanistan and how ruthless and unforgiving they are towards each other.
6) How a town in Afghanistan lets of donkeys on the road with the hope that somebody will run them down after which they can stake a claim over the "precious" donkey and squeeze money from the offenders :D..Don't know if this is true, but I found it profoundly funny!!!

The ending was striking where a Pakistani soldier had to kill his own (a Pakistani in the Taliban army) under American pressure inspite of totally being against it clearly showing the pressure under which Pakistanis are in and the fact that American friendships last as long as they are in "their" favor. Kabul Express is really thought provoking. Go and watch it!

Btw, just saw Big Fish for the second time..While Kabul Express is a 'real-life' movie, Big Fish is really full of life. A movie about adding color to mundane life making it colorful and exciting for self and for everybody else :)

"Common" cold

"Atchoo..AAattchhooo!!" sneezed my manager. Me was passing by and after the customary "Bless you's", I asked her if she had a cold. She denied and said she had allergies. Frankly, the way I was brought up, anytime I sneezed, it was always a cold, atleast that is what I thought it was. Allergies were only for the skin or maybe the stomach. So, when I heard my manager say allergies, I was amused and thought .. "Ok, this is one more American thing maybe out of their paranoia, out of their indulgence with health". But, I was proved wrong eventually..

A couple of days back, I was trying to get rid of a few mildew spots in our bathroom here and out of brash ignorance/arrogance did all that with bare hands, sometimes going to the extreme of rubbing/scrapping some of it myself..I am the healthy one right...What would happen to me? After all, we had rolled in dirt as kids. We can almost take anything...But so wrong was I..A couple of hours after the 'clean', I had allergies, YES allergies. My nose was dripping like a stream, eyes had spokes in them and I was a little dizzy. I thought I was sick, the fever kinds and popped in a paracetemol in the night. Woke up the next morning with the same symptoms becoming worse, had tea and just for the heck of it started reading about "allergies". It was interesting to see how our human body generates histamines to battle against harmful intruders like mold, viruses and that allergies were sometimes due to their continual generation by our body under the assumption that the intruder was still active.

Now that I realized what it was, I went to Walgreens and bought some non-drowsy anti-histamine tablets and took one..Lo and Behold! my cold was gone..I mean my allergies vanished. It was really interesting to see how programmatic/mechanical our human body behaved. Just because the "intruder" flag was not set to false, histamines wouldn't stop. Set the intruder flag to false with a anti-histamine tablet and you are all set. Thank God, I know atleast now. I have been popping in Paracetomol for just about everything :D..

India's pathetic display

India has really entered the digital age now. Gizmos, gadgets, new-age technologies have become an accepted part of life. Cell phones have become necessities..companies are building business models around them. SMS, VOIP, Skype are mentioned in the same breath as cable TV. Our digital revolution has become so ubiquitous that our sportsmen have embraced it with open hands. I know sports and technology had a few associations but I never knew their relationship was so deep. Our cricketers are so enamored by this digital revolution that they have taken to it literally!!


Our performance in the current South Africa series has been pathetic, sub-par, dismal for lack of worser words...Batsmen mainly to blame for the shame what with the competition going on to score the lowest score possible...unfortunately they cannot score less than 0 which kind of is the reason why we haven't seen anybody emerge victorious...0's, 1's all around. Score of 20 looks awesome and personifies an Indian player with great determination, courage and mastery! Such is the plight!! Pitches and unfamiliar conditions were blamed for our misery, but for how long? We are going to play our world cup in similar conditions. Are we accepting defeat there already just because conditions might not be conducive? International standard players sieved from a population that is almost touching 2 billion which reminds me of one thing...Quantity never matters, it is quality that counts and we don't really come anywhere close...Our players are great on the books and better for excuses. Our current woes are attributed to our wretched coach (I don't like him a lot personally but blame him for this). We need a scapegoat, a reason to justify everything..in life and so in cricket.

What irked me the most was that even though we made rough weather of winning a 4-day match against a second rung team in South Africa, we were really celebrating it! I would actually curse our performance..In 2 innings we had around 400 runs and Pathan and Ganguly accounted for more than half of that!! Can it get worse? It sure can, but not a lot...Wonder who is going to talk some sense into our players and get them out of this rough patch, most of which I feel is self-inflicted...Indians (including me) have a confidence problem in general, we are self-conscious, evaluative and maybe a little submissive. Inspite of all this, the best part about us is that we have the power to shake all this off with our endless determination as is evident from our long freedom struggle. No other country could pull that off. In the same vein, I think our cricketers have the power to break their shackles, to play their natural game forgetting how pathetic they are and just start on a fresh slate. Give merit to every match and play it to the best of your potential.

All the best TEAM INDIA. Show us what we can do. Some of us draw encouragement, courage from your performance. Don't disappoint us. Show us you can fight like a tiger and WIN one for all your fans!