That’s my IRC nick. I generally consider myself pretty non photogenic. However this is one exception. I somehow like this photo a lot.
This was taken by my friend Wahjava AKA Ashish SHUKLA with SHUKLA being in ALL caps.
I think even after the weekend shoot at Jama Masjid he is going to disagree about being bit by the shutterbug. 
I have very few friends with whom I can share anything and everything. And this guy is one of them.
Recently he had bought an SLR camera. Although he had never accepted or indicated that he was motivated by my “affair” with my camera, but I think that’s the reason.
This one was shot by his mum and I hope to see many such photos in future.
Mother nature never fails to amaze us. I have heard and also seen quite a few white peacocks both in captivity and in wild.
However this is a first time I am seeing a mixed White and Blue one. I was discussing about White peacocks with my sister when Google showed me this photo.
Awesome!!
I had always been fascinated by Old Delhi. This was the view from one of the tallest buildings in Old Delhi just behind Fatehpuri Masjid.
The day started off with an extremely positive note.
Yesterday evening I went down to Galleria market to have some snacks and found a pigeon lying on the ground unable to fly and a lot of people and kids gathering around it enjoying the fun. I did not even think twice before going, grabbing the bird and moving out of the place.
Coming back to my office, I started looking for a nearby veterinary doctor. Justdial was of immense help. They put me in touch with someone not so nearby, but dealing with birds. The next obvious problem was how to take the bird to the doctor. The bird was being very restless. It was impossible to hold the bird as well as ride my bike. My colleague Parveen came to the rescue. He offered to drive me to the vet.
Thankfully there was nothing wrong with the bird and essentially it was suffering from fatigue. The vet gave me a bottle of Vitamin drops which he showed me how to administer.
The next problem was of course finding the bird a home for the night. The obvious place I would have taken it would have been to my residence. But that was another problem. I stay alone here in Gurgaon and it would be very difficult for me to administer the medicine should the bird have to stay for more than a night. Thankfully Parveen came up with the brilliant idea of putting it in the office itself under a perforated carton with food and water.
The first thing I did today morning was to come to office and check on my new guest the pigeon. It seemed to be in pretty good shape and I could make out that it had eaten a bit. One more dose of medicine and I took it to the balcony to set it free. Once I opened my clasps, it was dazzled for a few moments till it finally flew to freedom.
I wish I was carrying my camera today….
It has always been my dream to get a DSLR for myself. I had been saving money since a long time but somehow things were not falling in place.
Finally got this camera for myself. I was not looking for a full frame camera initially. But after doing a lot of research decided to bite the bullet and get a full frame cam. Also, got a L glass since I intend to keep this body and lens for a long long time.
Time for weekend shoots? Only time will say….. But finally I got a friend in Gurgaon.
My experiences with the malices of multinational companies continues. After moving to Gurgaon and getting absolutely tired of the services and tantrums of Tata Photon+, I decided to try out my luck at wireline internet. The most prominent provider for ADSL in India is Bharti Televentures under the brand name of AirTel, so I put in an application for signing up with their ADSL2 services.
The first shock came when I had a look at the Tariff Plans. Being someone who lives in the World Wide Web, going for a Data Limited plan was simply out of question. While I was in Bangalore, there was a plan with AirTel that offered 1Mbps connection with no data limits for Rs. 1699 + taxes. Since this ISP has a presence throughout India, I expected them to offer me something similar in Gurgaon as well. There was a surprise for me in store that they have stopped giving out that Tariff Plan. Instead the plans they were offering was the product of a bunch of Marketing Jokers sitting together and assuming that the subscribers of their connection has no idea of what they are talking about.
AirTel has started offering 4Mbps connections in my area with a Fair Usage policy of 25GB. After the 25GB data limit, the speed will be reduced to 256Kbps. A simple math says that, this means that if I download at the maximum possible speed, I would exhaust my limit in less than 14.5 hrs. This seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Why on earth will someone like to take a 4Mbps connection for a whole mont if he is just allowed to use it for 14 hrs at its maximum potential?
This was not the end, the executive who came to ‘install’ the connection at my place said that I would have to buy a modem from them. Not only that, I would also have to buy a telephone set from AirTel if I intend to use the free calls that AirTel is bundling with my connection.
I remember some laptop companies being sued because they were not ready to provide OEM licenses for Operating Systems free with their products. The logic obviously makes a lot of sense. If I have bought a laptop for say word processing, it is impossible for me to use it without an Operating System. So technically, the product which is being sold to me can’t be tested or used in the way it is being sold. So as a customer, my rights are not being honoured. In the similar note, I have not bought a telephone cable from AirTel. I would not be able to use the connection without a working modem.
I think the reason why AirTel is able to do away with all these malpractice is because there is no other ISP in India who is worth their name or price. Also it seems either the Indian Government is incapable of understanding these malpractices or they are just interested in their share of taxes. But one thing is for sure, I will keep my eye open for any alternatives that I find and would dutifully try to spread the awareness of the largest ISP in India.
Shame on you AirTel.
Gone are the days when there used to be one or two mobile service providers and the customers are stuck with the woes of monopoly. We have lots of options these days from scores of providers providing kick ass bill plans in both Postpaid and Prepaid forms.
After moving to Gurgaon, I required a local number. Since I would be staying here for a while, I decided to take up a Postpaid local GSM SIM. It always starts with the market survey and the existing provider always gets the advantage. So I contacted AirTel, my existing service provider to move my relocate the connection to Gurgaon. I was pretty upset to find out they could not provide me a comparable plan. But I think thats the story for another day.
While AirTel was taking an excessive amount of time to relocate the connection, I decided to try out other options. I was strictly against Vodafone, Reliance and Tata Indicom. So the other options left were Aircel and IDEA. Filled up a form for a new connection on their website and got a call the very next day from one of the Agencies offering an IDEA connection. I was pretty impressed by the turn around time since the ‘IDEA guy’, Sachin Goel (Mobile Number: +919990925333), was in my office with his brilliant ideas that very morning within 2 hours of making the call. He committed to get the connection provisioned before evening and offered me a plethora of choices of numbers. He asked for Rs. 250 as security deposit to which I refused and asked him to charge me in the first bill.
Now the actual story starts. As per his commitment, the SIM was supposed to be provisioned before 2100 hrs. I was unable to understand how he could possibly get the connection activated without a verification done on the billing address. At 2130 hrs, I gave him a call asking about the status of the provisioning as on dialing the number offered to me, the response was ‘Invalid Number’. His response was, he was unable to deposit the form as it was raining. Nevertheless, he said he is going to get it done the next day, a Friday.
The next day his phone was unreachable the whole day. When I was finally able to call him at about 1930 hours, his response was he was unable to do it because he was too busy picking up other connections. When I told him that this was not as per his commitment, his response was “SIM tor ke phek dijiye” (Break the SIM and throw it away) and hung up on my face.
Now, generally the story ends here when the subscriber breaks the SIM and throws away promising himself he will never look IDEA’s way. However for me the worse was yet to come. The following day, Sachin called back and apologized for his behaviour yesterday as he was having some personal problems. I am generally pretty short on patience, but still I decided to give him a chance. He again promised to get the number provisioned by the end of the day, Saturday. While I didn’t expect anything to change drastically, the number given to me remained invalid.
The final blow happened today. In the morning I got a call from someone who claimed to be calling from IDEA. He was doing a verification call for my connection. I finally started believing that my number would finally be provisioned. However in the afternoon Sachin called me and said that he will not be able to give me the number which he initially committed because it has already been given to someone else. Strangely, the dialling the number still says that the number does not exist which clearly indicates that the number is still available. Now I finally broke the SIM and threw it away.
Lessons learnt:
What a third grade bogus IDEA SirJI
Update 1: I posted the link to this blog on the FaceBook page as well as Twitter page of IDEA Cellular. Neither they responded back, nor they bothered to delete the post. Looks like they just don’t bother about their image with the customers. I would definitely not like to subscribe with such a company.
Update 2: This one is just for fun. I even posted to the Twitter page of Abhishek Bachchan. Even he didn’t bother to respond. Not that I expected a response, but this definitely implies that he is only interested in the money he earns from being the brand ambassador for a company and least bothered about his own image.
Recently I had changed jobs. My earlier employer had a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and my BlackBerry HandHeld was locked by the IT policy. Since I used to use my own SIM as well as Handset, the policy which was pushed to my phone was pretty permissive. However certain things like the “Firewall Policy” as we as the “Password Policy” was locked.
I had been lethargic for the first few days but finally decided to sit and clean up the policy. Unfortunately the BlackBerry Admin of my previous employer was too “lazy” to push a blank policy file to my device. So I had to manually remove the policy. A very good writeup on how to remove the IT policy can be found here.
However after completing the entire procedure I found that although the General Settings screen inside Security didn’t show any IT Policy present, I was unable to disable the Firewall. There was a small red lock icon displayed next to Enabled on the Firewall Options page. I could however disable the Password policy which further confused me. My first assumption was, the blank policy file which I downloaded and pushed must have been corrupted. However on further looking I found that its not the case. Poking around in a lot of BlackBerry related forum revealed that a second wipe should do the trick. The device is going to the second wipe now.
I however feel that is a functional flaw. Why would the device need 2 wipes in order to completely clean all IT policies?
Update 1: Wiping the BlackBerry didn’t help 
Need to look further.
Update 2: Found a much simpler way to solve the problem here. Turns out that RIM has been sensible enough and provided a mechanism to directly resetting devices to factory settings by using the standard loader.
The idea of mobility had always excited me. I really like to be able to access my work and other stuff while being on the move.
Wireless internet access has been around for quite some time in the form of GPRS and EDGE tethered through mobile phones. But the speed had always been so bad that one could not ever think about doing any “work” on such a connection.
I was very excited when HSIA became a reality in India. Many providers like Tata Teleservices, Virgin Mobile, Reliance Communications, etc started providing USB sticks which could be used for mobile internet access up to 3.1 Mbps. The USB sticks were however programmed devices which were locked to the provider. This very reason of putting money and getting stuck to a provider kept me from subscribing to such a service.
However this time when I was going to Calcutta for a surgery, I convinced myself for getting a USB modem which would allow me to have internet access while I was in the Hospital. I had cornered on two providers, Reliance NetConnect Broadband+ and Tata Photon+.
My first impression with Tata was terrible. I got in touch with a representative who visited my office with a demo device. The speed was pretty impressive. However it did not work with Snow Leopard due to some driver issues. I decided to go for the connection and submitted all the forms and documents to the executive. However he did not turn up for the next 2 days with the new device. I thanked my stars and decided to move on.
A couple of days later, I visited the Reliance Website and found an option to buy the USB device online. However I left the registration form incomplete on the online store and decided to research a bit more. Strangely I got a call from a Reliance Executive in Delhi who wanted to “assist” me in buying the device. I must say that he had excellent marketing skills and he “got” me. He promised to get the device delivered by the end of the day and he held up his end of the deal.
As per the conversation with the executive, the device was supposed to be activated the next day. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen the day after, either. I just got too busy with work to follow it up further.
3 days later, I got a call on my mobile phone inquiring whether I am using the Netconnect Device. On cross questioning, the executive confirmed that the device has already been activated.
Now comes the tricky part. Most of the users for these devices use Microsoft Windows. So when I asked about Snow Leopard to the customer care, they were completely clueless. However I did find an “installer” for MacOS on the Reliance Website. I am always skeptical about installing software just for the heck of it. I was trying to find out if I could get around without installing their “Advanced Dialler”. I was using a ZTE device and unfortunately I found out that it is not possible to not use the dialer. Apparently its not just the dialer, but it also includes a driver for the device.
Strangely, I found that my battery runtime drastically went down when I was using the Netconnect Device. I found it hard to believe that just a USB stick is pulling down my Battery life of 4+ hours to just 2.5 hours. Further poking around revealed that iostat was reporting back extremely high disk writes. Curious about what is going on, I checked with lsof which files are being used. To my horror, I found that the dialer is so advanced that it writes an extremely verbose debug log to /var/log/system.log. As a result of the continuous writes, the disk was active the whole time the system was on battery and hence the low battery time.
At this point, I had enough of mobility and finally sold the device on Ebay. I guess the eternal wait for the auction of 3G spectrum in India resumes.
Reliance Rest in Peace.
