Don - The Remake

If you happen to be headed out to watch Don or planning on doing so, please don't! However if you happen to be headed out to meet Sharukh Khan please tell him that he is old now and his attempt to be different is as nauseating as his original acting style.

Cleartrip.com sucks impresses

Original post below**

First check out the comments section of this post. It seems that Hrush Bhatt has been enjoying his weekend by surfing the internet and checking what people think about his company cleartrip.com. Luckily for me he ran into my crib-post and well he says he has got my refund credited back to my account. Now I haven't checked all that yet but hell I am impressed... very impressed. Regardless of whether the refund is processed in a day or a week, I hope it is done in a day though:), impressive is the fact that someone actually wants to see what people think about their work. I am really impressed by the fact that some entrepreneurs out there actually care about their customer's and want to cash in on repeat business by providing decent levels of customer service.

We Indians are accustomed to an apathetic attitude from dealers/resellers.. heck anyone who sells us anything is sweet and polite and flashes the "customer is king" placard on their walls, but once the sale is done they don't even bother checking up on their customers. No one seems to bother and see how many repeat footfalls they manage, because hell as we have it there are around 1-billion of us and if a customer doesn't return someone else definitely will. Someone else who will probably keep his/her mouth shut and accept a shoddy meal (Tamarind @ Koramangala, Bangalore, Something Fishy @ Langford Road, Bangalore) or someone who won't care that they don't provide a customer care number at all (indiatimes.com, though they have added toll free numbers recently) or someone who quietly pays up for services that are not being rendered (Cable Operators).

Ideally the goal of businesses should be to respect their customers and provide high enough quality of service, high enough to turn their "customer service" centers into "customer care" centers, only to check up on their customers and wish them well.

So much needs to change and there is so little time. So here's wishing the new breed of Indian entrepreneurs the very best and hoping they have read some of the books Hrush Bhatt and his colleagues have. Now only if the Jet Airways staff were reading my blog! Right Hrush?


ps.
Since I have listed part of my black list, here are some on my favored list
1. Kingfisher Airlines
2. Legends of Rock @ Koramanagala, Bangalore
3. Bejing Bites @ Richmond Road, Bangalore
4. Citibank
4. ICICI Bank
5. Syndicate Bank
and some more....


** Original Post
Booking a ticket online... stay away from cleartrip.com. I mistakenly booked a ticket via their portal last month (just when it was launched) and had to cancel the ticket and then the mess began and hasn't ended yet.

After I hit the cancel button I get an email that states that I need to take the paper ticket to the particular airline counter (in this case Jet Airways) and get it cancelled myself and then submit the canceled stub back to cleartrip via and email. What a ludicrous thing to do or even propose, and worse still this was an e-ticket, there NO paper ticket issued here. After howling at them a bit I manage to get their attention and they say that the refund will be duly credited back to my credit card within 15 days. Today its over 30 days and I still haven't received the refund so I call customer care (what an antithesis) to be told by a kid named Renuka that Jet Airways hasn't processed my refund yet and hence the delay. What the heck! I made a payment to cleartrip.com and I should receive a refund by them itself what do I care about what they need to do behind the scenes. Shoddy site, shoddy service.

So if you are booking your tickets online stay away from the cleartrip.com website, without hesitation.

Technorati Tags:cleartrip airlinebooking India

So where was I?

I just read that Vidya Balan supposedly studied at St.Xavier's College, the very same place that I graduated from. So how come I didn't bump into Miss Vidya Balan anytime. Damn god sure knows how to keep the beauties away from the beasts:)

And yeah as things may have it Vidya Balan turns out to be yet another mallu chick. Damn! Treasure chest down in southwest India. Unfortunately as an ex-colleague just pointed out all the good looking mallu girls are out of mallu-land.



Technorati Tags: vidyabalan kerala stxaviers

Diwali

Well this year's Diwali was spent out in Gurgaon. Though everything is alright the irony of this diwali struck me when I read the awesome deals being thrown at Indian consumers this festival season, courtesy TOI India's largest selling sleaze and advertisement daily. Seems like we have had diwali celebration with Indian tradition, Chinese firecrackers, Japanese cars, Asian gizmos, America and the Europe's outsourced jobs, Pakistani terrorism and finally our very own authentic dengue fever:)

Globalisation watch out, here we come!

Google's monopolising my online time

I just noticed that slowly I have moved most of my online resources over onto Google services. Here is the list

Google Reader [RSS Aggregator]
Google Docs and Spreadsheets [Basic MSOffice Needs]
Blogger [Blogging]
Google Analytics [Monitoring My Sites]
Orkut [Keeping in Touch with Pals]
Google Calendar [Organising myself]
GooglePages [My Website]
GMail [Email Services]
Picasa [Online Photo Organiser]
Google Talk [Chat]
Google News [News]
Google Desktop [integrated search, rss, cal, etc...widgets]

So is this going to be the Google Decade or something ? My laptop is dominated by the light blue and white colors of the silent giant.

Technorati Tags: Google

First North Trip

Well after being to Agra over a month ago I managed to make the best of a long weekend this time and went off to some places out in Himachal Pradesh. Started with Kasauli on Saturday, then out to Shimla on Sunday and Kufri on the final day ie Monday. You can check out my pics (beware they are mostly of the mountain slopes) at PicasaWeb

The places were not all that great, especially since they turned out to be really crowded. The only good thing about them was that they were in increasing order in terms of altitude. Kasauli at around 1900m, then Shimla at around 2200m and finally Kufri touching 2500m. Yeah managed to get in a go cart ride at the supposedly highest go cart circuit in the world!

Next time its off to some place more serene and away from the maddening crowds. If there exists one.

Technorati Tags: Travel India HimachalPradesh Kufri Kasauli Shimla

Milestones Remembered

When we were in Parkway Plaza at Penn we came up with a list of milestones that we could aspire to reach and measure our lives as successful or otherwise. We put this up on our refrigerator and well its probably out there still:)

next 6 months - find an assistantship (funding was everything then)
age 22 - finish off the master's
age 23 - get a job..one that pays
age 25 - yell at your boss, quit the job and start your own company
age 27 - loose all your money on your company
age 27.5 - put your tail between your legs and go back to your previous boss and beg for your old job back
age 28 - get married...preferably to a woman
age 30 - eurotrip
age 31 - get married to another woman in some other part of the world
age 32 - experience bankruptcy
age 35 - get a phd
age 40 - get divorced from both the wives and marry a chick half your age
age 45 - move to a country where you can be called a millionaire with the few bucks that you have left
age 50 - good luck staying alive

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Anyone willing to pay for Constructive Criticism?

All of us know the importance of good and constructive criticism in any aspect of our life, most importantly our work. Now we usually also know for a fact that criticism and the heated discussions that follow are probably the best moments of learning for most receptive individuals. However after all this it is really rare to find individuals who can digest criticism face on without pride getting in the way.

I have this uncanny and probably unwanted ability of speaking my mind out straight up without any hesitation. However on most occasions the receiving side usually doesnt want to hear anything that deviates from their current line of thought.

Come on the best way to learn, teach and improve on your ideas is by direct confrontation with people that oppose your idea. And if you can go ahead and manage to convince these same people that your ideas are much more better than theirs and these are the reasons why then you are bound to be more confident about your approach. And of course if you do not manage to convince these non believers then the fact is that either your idea is not based on a solid foundation or it is simply junk. Yes, you sometimes need to accept the fact that your idea may be not worth its weight at the scrapyard either.

Now while there are very few people who manage to accept criticisms there seem to be fewer who are willing to stick out their necks and blast out their criticisms to their peers and superiors with true confidence. Frankly I dont seem to have any trouble saying "Hey this sounds like crap!"

Corporates are willing to pay people to blog for them, to spy for them and/or do anything that would improve their organisation. What I am wondering is whether they are ready to pay individuals like myself to come out in their house and spell out exactly what I feel is crap in there and what are the things that bug me the most. Now remember this is what most of your employees think about them too but they are just too scared to say it out loud. Any takers? Though I haven't heard of any CEO's reading my blog just in case there are any interested in this prospect get in touch with me at allen.mathias@gmail.com

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Google is improving - proof

Theorem:
Google is constantly innovating on search and is actually innovating

Proof:
2 years ago my webpage at Penn featured as the "I'm feeling lucky match" for the search "allen mathias"
1 year ago Google featured something relevant to me as the 4th entry in its search results while MSN's beta search engine had me as the top search result.
1 minute ago Google features my blogger profile as the top search result for my name.

Therefore PROVED Google is innovating as we type:)

Hurray!

Technorati Tags: Google ImFeelingLucky Blogs

Manipulations of the Media

The recent uproar of Muslims throughout the world against Pope Benedict's remarks had me thinking that the new Pope is quite orthodox and even more confrontational than what I assumed him to be from previous literature. I, like many of the people around the world, fell in for what the media flashed out all over the place.

As it turns out the quotes of Pope Benedict though absolutely spoken by him were in fact within a context of reference to a passage from some medieval text. He simply quoted the text and was having a dialogue based on the same. There was no malice or ill intention from the Pope at all.

The media has been well known to "make news" out of basically anything, however demeaning and unprofessional it may be. Most of the headlines in the papers have similar sources. They simply take the few words from an entire article that would turn out to be eye-catching or a double meaning and print it out in bold as the topic of the article.

For decades now the church has been a non confrontational leader in the new world. At many a occasion the church has even apologised for mistakes of the past. There is no reason to believe that the church holds such views at all. Unfortunately the reaction to such concocted media statements from the Muslim community has been far from encouraging. If it were the reactions from a few uneducated people I would'nt have been surprised however we have national leaders who are reacting with such childlike tantrums that I fear that dialogue is not something in their minds at all. At least world leaders and the educated masses should have confirmed the sources of such an article and found out the entire text of the speech given by Pope Benedict before reacting in any way. Especially considering that other people of the community do not overreact.

It is truly shameful that Middle East leaders have not come out to calm the extremists. And ofcourse regardless of what their intentions are I am sure that Pope Benedict will come out with a an apology of any sort or form that the Muslim community demands so that the world is a more peaceful place for all of us.

For those who care to read the speech. This is the link here

Technorati Tags: Vatican Pope Benedict speech Muslims

Lagge Raho Vidyaji

I dunno what it is with me and smiles. But for me a beautiful smile is well worth making a fool of myself. And man does Vidya Balan take the cake for actresses with a genuinely breathtaking smile.. Well Sushmita Sen is also right up there with her but since I just saw the new flick Lage Raho Munnabhai, Vidya has the queen of all smiles.

Technorati Tags:VidyaBalan,smile,Lage Raho Munnabhai

TOI's only interesting piece

For me Times of India is probably the worst newspaper there every is. Not a shred of journalism in the tons of pages that it burdens itself with. Even the basic spell checker seems to be missing in the software used to write their columns. Most of the news is either stale or copied from the internet with little or no intention of giving credit where due nor is an attempt made to provide a different perspective. And yeah I buy it because of the adverts thats all. But the quote for the day this thursday was worth the paper and ink used to print it.

It irritates me to be told how things have always been done
... I defy the tryanny of precedent

- Clara Barton

Made my day especially with the BS that was being fired towards me for the most of the week. Cheers.

Emperor for a day

I am sure most of us have fantasised about various fairy tales. Surely wondered about the fairy who grants your 3 wishes and man do I have my 3 wishes all down and ready just in case she drops by. But recently the question arose about what would you do if you were given charge of the country for an indefinite amount of time. Now here is something that I can't let pass so easily. So lets get into the nitty-gritty...well atleast some details.

So here is what I would do if I was made supreme commander of India with absolute command and authority
1. Implementation of Uniform Civil Code after a timeframed dialogue process.
The worthiness of a Uniform Civil Code in as diverse a society as India is overwhelming. There is no reason why the various parties concerned have not been able to reach a consensus on this issue. Most importantly it has been the largest minority community who is not ready to get this issue in the forefront. Not even in Islamic states have they been given this much freedom. However it is time that they stood up for being true citizens of India and show that they are willing to let go of some haphazard ways for the betterment of their own and the country as a whole. Ofcourse dialog is important and a must. However there has to be a timeline set and this timeline should be set in stone so that we can move forward towards developing a strong and united nation.

2. National Language.
The issue regarding the National Language has been bought up on many occasions however nothing has been done about it. For the nation to be one nation we need to identify with each other and there is no better way than by having a common medium of communication. The national language Hindi should be compulsarily spoken everywhere and all sign boards throughout the nation should bear captions in Hindi, English and the local tongue. The debate could be continued for a limited period of time to decide if Hindi is not a suitable national language but it should occur within a very limited and short period.

3. Paid Mandatory Military Service
Military Service has been touted for many years but the problem there being the simple fact that India has the largest growing youth population in the world. This leads to a statistical nightmare in terms of carrying out a thing like mandatory Military Service. However if we go ahead and enforce the same for 2years by replacing the customary 11th and 12th grade with 2years of military service and making the youth pay for these 2years an equal amount they wouldve paid towards their education we can possibily have a way of lowering the cost burden on the economy. Moreover Military Service can also be replaced with things like community service, rural volunteers eg. teaching in a school for 2 years etc.

4. Cleaning the politicians
Having the same bloodline of politicians has lead to the mass rape of our constitution by these so called elected officials. There should be a limit on number of people who have served/leeched the country from a particular family, sons, daughters, nephews, neices etc all included. Moreover people who would stand for election need to have been in community service for atleast 5 years and should not have crimes that ellicit the death penalty registered against them. They should have atleast completed their graduation and know how to dress in a suit and tie if need be.

5. Timeframed Elimination of Reservation based on caste and a move towards providing opportunity to the economically backward sections.
The reservation system in the country has been misused from the get go. The people who should be getting the benefit of this system are nowhere in the picture while the scoundrels in parliament make fake certificates and place their signatures on the same for a paltry sum. The caste based reservation system is clearly a step in the wrong direction. There needs to be a system that provides economic support ie low interest or 0% interest loans to people from economically insufficient families.

6. Strengthening the Police Force.
Save Mumbai and Punjab the police force all over India is in shambles and definitely not worth mentioning. The level of corruption in this guardian of our society and the most visible form of governance in our daily lives is nauseatingly high. There needs to be an immediate increase the pay scales of these gentlemen while weeding out the rats and boot-polishers of the politicos within these ranks. Their morale should be boosted by providing regular interaction with the armed forces and making sure that this force is ready for frontline duties as a reserve force for the nation if and when need be.

7. Panchayat Raj and Central Control
The states would continue to have autonomy for various purposes, especially with daily governance and issues regarding the region. But any decisions that would lead to turmoil or cause other states to carry out nefarious actions should be dealt as a matter of the nation. The Centre would have total control towards taking decisions on these issues. Moreover the panchayat type governance model should be followed wherein localities govern themselves and are allowed to invest a portion of their taxes paid back into their own community.

I am sure I will remember many more once i leave this space but these are all for now. Cheers!