Met up with Clayton, my good old friend from my days of choir singing. He decided to take me to Chennai Dosa, which is a popular Indian cuisine restaurant in Wembley and other places in London.

Travelling to Wembley on a weekend from Canary Wharf is always a pain because the Jubilee line has “planned engineering works”. So, instead of taking the Jubilee straight to Wembley, I took the Jubilee to Stratford (opposite direction), which will soon be the place of the London Olympics.

From Stratford, I took the Overground to Gospel Oak where Clayton came with his car. Going by road today turned out to be rather painful since we came across three accidents yesterday. The first one made us take an alternate route which was several kilometres all over the area. The second one didn’t restrict our travel.

Chennai Dosa turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The rates are much lower by London standards, but I couldn’t help running a quick 70x conversion to INR! The place was filled with Indians and is apparently run by Indians.

The mutton biryani wasn’t too good, but the other prawns and chicken lollipop was yummy

Clayton decided to drop me back to Canary Wharf, but for the third accident near London Bridge and I chose to get off at Waterloo and take the Jubilee back home.

Tomorrow is a new day and we’re still debating if we should go watch a movie or not.

When I wrote Light weeks, these past two weeks has been, I was well aware that this was a temporary situation. And I wasn’t “disappointed”. I’ve been slogging it out for the past three weeks with life peaking last week.

While I worked from home two weekends back, I spent almost whole of last weekend in office. Thankfully, I enjoy my job, otherwise, I would have gone crazy.

I did manage to find some time to release a few updates to my plugins.

And, then I woke up last week to find out that PayPal has stopped personal payments to India.

And, the worst part is that all this is without warning. Now, I’m not really sure as to why this has been implemented. But, according to PayPal, they are waiting for some of their “business partners” to approve.

While we can still receive and send payments as “goods”, I find this entire workaround really stupid. And, once again we see PayPal’s lack of professionalism.

As for me, now I have to patiently wait it out and see what happens with PayPal. Unfortunately for them, I see a major move away from all parties, since we Indians form a really big part of the internet!

Here’s wishing all Indians, a very very happy Independence Day!

My Dad sent me an email today of an online system to address grievances in India. The mail goes like this:

Can you imagine this happening in INDIA ?

Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://darpg-grievance.nic.in/

The government wants people to use this tool to highlight the problems they faced while dealing with Government officials or departments like Passport Office, Electricity board, BSNL/MTNL, Railways etc.

I know many people will say that these things don’t work in India , but this actually works as one of the person working in CSC found. The guy I’m talking about lives in Faridabad . Couple of months back, the Faridabad Municipal Corporation laid new roads in his area and the residents were very happy about it. But 2 weeks later, BSNL dug up the newly laid roads to install new cables which annoyed all the residents including this guy. But it was only this guy! Who used the above listed grievance forum to highlight his concern. And to his surprise, BSNL and Municipal Corporation of Faridabad was served a show cause notice and the guy received a copy of the notice in one week. Government has asked the MC and BSNL about the goof up as it’s clear that both the government departments were not in sync at all.

So use this grievance forum and educate others who don’t know about this facility.
This way we can at least raise our concerns instead of just talking about the ‘ System’ in India

Scenario 1
Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along, then a fourth and. They start arguing about who’s right.
You are in KOLKATA

Scenario 2
Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along, sees them and walks on. That’s MUMBAI

Scenario 3
Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes along & tries to make peace. The first two get together & beat him up.
That’s DELHI

Scenario 4
Two guys are fighting. Both of them take time out and call their Friends on mobile. Now 50 guys are fighting.
You are in AMRITSAR

Scenario 5
Two guys are fighting and a third guy comes he writes a software Program to stop the fight. But the fight doesn’t stop b’cos of a bug in the program.
That’s BANGALORE

Scenario 6
Two guys are fighting. A crowd gathers to watch. A guy comes along and quietly says that “AMMA” doesn’t like all this nonsense. Peace comes in.
That’s CHENNAI

Scenario 7
Two guys are fighting. Third guy comes along with a carton of beer. All sit together drinking beer and abusing each other and all go home being friends.
You are in GOA

Scenario 8
Two guys are fighting. A crowd gathers to watch. A guy comes along and quietly opens a tea-stall & a thattukada (dhaba)…
U R NOW IN KERALA

I’ve been silent over the reservation row that has (en)raged this country for nearly a year now, until today…

Today the Lok Sabha passed the OBC Quota Bill. The Bill proposes 27 percent reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in Central Government-aided higher educational institutions, including premier institutions like the IIMs and the IITs. What is even worse is that this will include the Creamy Layer which in simple terms means the well-to-do OBCs.

The reservation row started when one old man Mr. Arjun Singh decided to create controversy. And what better method that to divide our already fragile country. He picked Rervations!

I am totally against reservations, but understand at times that this can help. However, what is beyond me is why do reservations have to be caste based. Why can’t they be economic based?

For those who haven’t read my blog earlier, I am a Catholic from a middle class family. I have always fallen in the Open Category. This has meant that throughout my life I have had to struggle to achieve even the bare minimum.

I remember very distinctly in SSC (Tenth) when filling up the forms how out of the blue several off my classmates turned out to be from reserved categories. It was strange because when they took admission they were in the general category.

These same persons today passed out from premier institutions because of or relaxed rules for reserved category students. It was (and still is) really frustrating because I always performed better them.

Our country received its freedom in 1947, i.e. nearly 60 years ago. Reservations were started some time later and were to be held for a period of 10 years. When will those 10 years finish?
If the persons in the reserved category still haven’t progressed, do you think that they will progress today?

With the passing of the Bill today what I expected indeed came through. Afterall who cares about the millions of students slogging it out everyday? Who cares about the General Category anymore?

I would really like to see reservations for us Open Category students. Atleast that way I will be assured of a seat.

And if you think that things won’t get worse, the same old man now intends to introduce a bill that will enforce quotas in unaided institutions as well as Private Sector companies.

There goes our Country down the drain. Or should I say watch it continue going down? X(

And they wonder why everyone is leaving the country and running away!

Gautam pointed out this article in the Economic Times today about Google’s Social Networking Site, a.k.a. Orkut

In a nutshell, this is because of the “We Hate India” community which has been present on Orkut for a long time now. I’m stunned that Orkut has not done anything about it in so many months of hundreds, maybe thousands of users reporting it.

AURANGABAD: The Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service `Orkut’.

The order was issued by Justice A P Deshpande and Justice R M Borde Monday in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by local Advocate Yugant R Marlapalle.

Read the rest of the article…

I’m a little charged up by my Manholes post.

Born, brought up and having lived in Mumbai all my life, I’ve found a lot of things to complain about in this city, be it the roads, the traffic, the corporation or the people at times. And then again there are a lot of things that make me really proud to live in this city.

I always look at both sides of the coin. At times it gets just too frustrating to do anything about it. At other times things are so amusing or downright stupid that all I can do is talk about it.

So, why not talk about this online?
My Nokia 6681, my computer and a good internet connection is all that I need and have

I have now created a new category labelled Yeh Des Hai Mera.
This category will be dedicated for such posts, pictures, events, current affairs and other topics of interest in Mumbai in particular and India in general.

Do you have any topics you would like to share with me? Do you know of any incidents worth talking about? Would you like to contribute to this section? Do you have any blog posts / articles that I can link to?