I have read recent reports (accompanied by scores of photographs) in the media about the recent Arun Nayar-Liz Hurley wedding. I was pleasantly surprised to read that Mr. Nayar heads up an IT firm!
Can’t remember the last time when an IT executive came together with a movie star. Is this a new trend? Revenge of the nerds 2.0, perhaps? 🙂
Online booking of airline tickets in India have started to take off. Arzoo, Makemytrip, Travelguru, Air Deccan being a few of the competitors. Not to mention, Yahoo’s farechase is also in the game. The start-ups companies in this space have raised boatloads of Venture Capital. (wonder why, for a technology that is so common place in the US). These sites are very much in a state of infancy and there is plenty of scope for improvement.
Here are a few observations/tips in case you plan to use these services.
1. These sites are very much in a state of infancy. All the sites uniformly have very poorly designed interfaces. Combined with the slow connectivity (which is common place in India) the user experience is outrageously frustrating to say the least.
2. All the sites are equally buggy. One of the sites gave me an error when I tried to confirm my registration! Another gave me a blank screen after I submitted the registration form. Then, I tried to register again and I was told that that login was taken. Thinking that this was a sign that my registration actually went through I tried logging in. The login/passwd combination did not match. I tried to reset password but was unsuccessful. Argghhh!!!
2. Prices are similar, though I found Arzoo providing lower fare results on quite a few occasions. Farechase rates are in $ and completely out of whack. In other words, Farechase is not worth using for flight deals within India.
3. Performing a credit card transaction online is scary. Thankfully, most of the India based sites provide toll free support numbers. These work well. You are best off exploring the various options online, narrowing down on your choice, and then calling the support line to purchase your ticket. The e-ticket gets emailed out to you after the transaction has been processed.
4. Only Arzoo appears to be Firefox ready. All the other sites went crazy at some point with content on the screen shifting around in bizarre fashion.
5. The good news is that all these sites returned better rates than the travel agents.
The Indian Consulate in SF landed itself in a needless controversy which could have been avoided with the purchase and use of a paper shredder! (A friend of mine who happens to be an obsessive advocate of privacy sent this to me. So I won’t reveal his name here 🙂
The Consul General does have a point when he says that this is a “cultural” issue but this is no excuse for not using a paper shredder!
Do you feel you are growing old and losing your creative instincts? Not to worry.
“….We often presume creativity is the domain of youth, that great artists are young geniuses, brash and brilliant iconoclasts. Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jasper Johns all revolutionized their artistic disciplines in their teens or 20s. Picasso created the first cubist paintings at 25, and Welles made “Citizen Kane” at 25. These artists made dramatic, inspired discoveries based on important new ideas, which they often encapsulated in individual masterpieces.
But there’s another path to artistic success, one that doesn’t rely on sudden flashes of insight but on the trial-and-error accumulation of knowledge that ultimately leads to novel manifestations of wisdom and judgment…”
This is an excerpt from an interesting article from the Mercury News. It makes the case with scores of examples of those who have produced their best work in their later years.
There is a nice article in today’s SJ Mercury News highlighting the benefits of feminism (author: Neil Chethik) to both men and women. Its an interesting perspective (based on personal life experience) on an otherwise hot button issue.
If you ever drop your cell phone in water here are some useful tips.
NY City Cab drivers are often the butt of jokes especially on late night television. I was pleasantly surprised to find on several cab rides in NY city that these folks are actually just fine. There is no question they are all very aggressive drivers. But I consistently noticed that they never made any demands of rates, they always used the best available routes to get you to the destination the fastest, they went out of the way to take you very close to your desired stop, never asked for tips etc. I fact one one occassiona cab driver actually took less money than the metered amount because he didn’t have the change! Many of them were Asians or from the Carribean.
Wish you (anyone who visits my blog:-) a Happy and Prosperous 2006!
Pakora Korner 