Mumbai stint: In retrospect

Exactly two years back, on November 12, 2007 I moved to Mumbai (from Noida) and joined Kotak Life Insurance. This transition from software developer to Business Analyst ( and from Delhiite..OKAY Noidaite to Mumbaikar ) was facilitated by my school-time friend, Amogh Dikshit, who did “this” to me for 12,000 INR (referral bonus) . On the other hand, I chose to do it because I had a dream ( no I didn’t want to sing a song dammit ) , a dream to become an Actuary, which unfortunately is still far from reality .

For no reasons, I thought to “document” few experiences, key learnings, some memorable events and my current financial position, which by no means makes me feel proud

Let me start with what is of primal importance to most mortals (including me ). No prizes for guessing, it’s about money, honey!

Current Assets: 8,732.68 INR (not to forget we are in second week of month)
Current Liabilities: 47,990.32 INR (thanks to my brand new Sony Vaio + phone bills + parties etc)

Investments: Were made with an intention to save tax but played a pivotal role in discounting my net worth
Long term liabilities: Remaining 12 papers of Actuarial

Yeah I know, this would scare away every gal around me but as they say, it was important for the sake of completeness

Professionally,clichéd it may sound, it was a great learning experience. The transition from Business Analyst to Project Manager was painful initially but one got used to it later on . The credit to this, undoubtedly goes to Rohit Acharya who believed in me or pretended so . Setting expectations, identifying/mitigating risks, think/thought through using it to your advantage and building relationships are now most frequently used phrases in my verbal/written communications. In case you thought I am adulating my reporting manager for promotion/hike let me tell you that you are partly right

Personal life went through a rollercoaster ride and I loved it!! Ventured into a start-up (read mDakia.com) ,which sadly is not in good shape and would be closed down anytime . Nevertheless, I am proud of the fact that I made an attempt. Lost few good and some “special” friends and gained many more . Added few extra pounds and got attracted to hookah.

Memorable events? Very few! First one was when I passed CT1 and CT3 sometime in January 2009. The feeling was great especially after having met disaster in May 2008 exams. This was immediately followed by maiden trip to Goa. Not that I did anything great there but thoroughly enjoyed the “freedom” in atmosphere. The second historic event was the most difficult trek of my life, which coincidentally is also the first trek since I came into this world . Conquering Ahupe Ghats was indeed an out of the world experience. Watching Saas Bahu Aur Sensex alone at Fame was yet another golden moment of life

Going with the trend (read Bollywood trend), I plan to come back with sequel of this post next year, more so because I don’t see myself moving out of Mumbai (not sure of KLI ) in near future.

To be continued…

Tum bechne main interested nahin lagte ho …

Not surprisingly this sounds very similar to arguably the most famous dialogue from movie Haasil

“Tum Election jeetne main interested nai lagte ho. Sirf issi ladki ka vote mil jaaye yahi kaafi hai tumhare liye”.

Last week I visited all famous and not-so-famous electronics showrooms (in vicinity of course ) in a quest to buy a laptop at cheapest price and with most freebies (can’t help it, it’s in blood ).The output of this excercise was a BIG hole in my pockets and a bizarre finding. This blog talks about the not-so-obvious part of it.

The sales guys, to say the least, were not really interested in selling. In one of the stores people were busy playing games (read Croma) and in other (Jumbo electronics to be precise) finding ladki in chatrooms. We were yet to recover from the shock when we encountered a sales representative watching porn (ALL THE BEST Staples)!! This obviously overshadows those (popularly known as Vijay Sales ) who didn’t bother to convince us when we walked out unsatisfied.

When mulled over one could think of “lack of sales incentives” as one of the possible reasons. But this,in my opinion, is not good enough to justify the act. I was wondering if anyone can help me with this?

HSBC Credit Card Sucks!

Few reasons why HSBC Credit cards sucks..

They never send statement with transaction details.All it contains is numbers Guess all their software can do is addition and fails to recognize words . Boss you could have requested me, i would have written a small “C” program for you

They have stupidest customer care department who refuses to update address if pin code is not provided.Or the address gets updated after 3 months in absence of pin code (read below)

Three months later they sent statement (with only numbers ) at the aforementioned address, with “pin code”. Believe, it took three months for them to figure it out .

One fine day someone called up saying that they finally managed to trace me. I don’t know which route they followed. According to me a quick search in their database would have done the job.

Few days later one finds a LEGAL NOTICE from Jus Juris (legal advisor to HSBC). A copy of same was marked to my permanent address (with PIN code missing). I presume it took 1 long year for their search engine to find that out.

When I replied to the aforementioned mail with concerns and proofs, no body dared to reply back. Dude, get your facts right before sending “Legal Notice”

After few more months someone called up saying that they want settlement, to which one said YES and the D-Day was decided. But no body turned up on the day. One more reason why they suck.

On a later day someone turned from HSBC to collect the cheque and in return handed over settlement letter. Not to my surprise, the guy misplaced the cheque, bloody suckers

Few weeks passed, they called me to beg for cheque and I obviously obliged.

And today, I got the the same bill with some numbers and no details.Guess they are still stuck to the age old software which cannot recognize English alphabets.

One quick suggestion, stop bugging me!

Rupees 25 only

Yes, I am back!! Ahhh not with a bang but with an intention to share one of my NOT so good experiences.

Its been almost 2.5 years since I got my first salary. During this period, I stayed in three different apartments (rented of course ) spanning over two different cities and one country . The only common thing, that I can recall is we managed to figure in the defaulter-list of electricity bill payment. This obviously implied NO ELECTRICITY for couple of days followed by bill repayment along with late fine. This post focuses on late fine.

CITY 1: DELHI !! well actually NOIDA

When it happened for the first time, it meant shelling out few thousand bucks. I believe 95%  of it was used to grease palms of the line man. Surprised? don’t be. OK.. NOIDA is in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) , does that fact help?

CITY 2: MUMBAI !! well actually Navi Mumbai :-)

The second time it was entirely taken care by roommates (kudos to them!!), so don’t remember much about it but the last one raised many questions. It was Saturday morning and some one knocked the door at 9 AM and said Boss!! tumhaara connection ka connection kat ne ko mangta hai, tumne 4 mahine se bill nahin pataya. Well this time it made me poorer by 150 rupees and 5/6 of it was burnt on auto rikshawa or “rik” and this naturally baffled me

I still don’t understand how can Rs 25 is good enough to cover following expenses

• Tracking required to zero in defaulters
• Compound interest on unpaid amount
• Time of line man who had to visit my apartment twice i.e. more than hour
• Time of executive who spent close to 20 minutes on me

Note that I have not considered other expenses like rent of office and related expenditures leave apart value of my time

Can anyone help me out with this ?

Co$tly Re$ource ?

Statutory Warning: Please quit reading the post if you are from IT background and heart-patient too.

Most of us especially those who earn their bread and butter from an IT firm (including me) consider ourselves as well-paid, elite, crème de la crème blah blah…. I dare to differ in fact I can prove that maid-servants are “costlier resource” than most of us!!

Yes, its hard to believe and even harder to make you believe. But you see few simple calculations are enough to rip apart one’s belief.

Salary of Maid :Rs 500/month

Time spent: 10-15 mins per day. For calculation lets assume 12 mins.

Billing rate/hour: Rs 100 ( No maid works for more than 25 days )

Now you can do similar calculations for yourself and find out your worth. Well, I empathize with you

Round 1: Maid wins hands down.

Agreed, but I earn more than her as far as gross salary is concerned and lets not talk about lifestyle please. If thats your take I would suggest to hang on for few minutes .

Believe it or not, this is a real incident. Few days back maid of one of my acquittance Parag (name changed ) requested (read threatened) for a hike. They tried to convince her by putting forth several arguments and finally disclosed their salary. What followed next was an eye-opener for most of us, she was making more money than our bright “software engineers.”

Albeit, I would like to delve more into it but I am afraid of its impact on IT companies which in turn might lead to economic crisis. This obviously will have severe impact on my salary and further reduce my billing rate

If you haven’t lost your mental balance yet and this makes sense please do commnet. On the other hand if you think this is crap do not hesitate to blast Alok , mastermind behind the concept.

Free home delivery…

Perverts may kindly quit reading the post, its not for them . I am here to talk about the businesses that revolve around these three magic words. It might be pretty obvious to most of us as to why this concept has become the talk about the town but the question that cuts like a knife is that why someone will deliver stuffs to you for free ? Lets make an attempt to find out plausible reasons.

Feasibility of a business depends largely on answer to the question : Will it sell ? In this case the answer is a big YES. The reason could be anything, time crunch, lethargy or simply because it has word FREE attached to it . As the saying goes there is no free lunch on earth, the Pizza which “Pizza Hut” delivered might not be smoking!!! The other flip side could be that one will have to serve for oneself, I simply hate that.

OK, I have strong reasons to avail the service but what makes McDonald’s and likes to offer it. The obvious reason could be reaching out to those 3 times in a month who would have dropped in probably once in a blue moon. This certainly increases the revenue but what about profit margin, has it gone done down substantially ? I seriously doubt!! In fact I think its the other way round. Albeit it sounds counter-intuitive but it makes sense once you start calculating the rent of the space that you use, air-conditioned environment, salary of waiter, cost of maintenance blah blah.. Mind you the service provider simply kills aforementioned costs when he delivers it to your home.

The bottom line is that with same infrastructure (or with little extra) one serves more number of customers and hence generates more revenue.

VAS : GPRS Vs SMS

VAS, when we talk about it in Indian context the first thing that comes to our mind is SMS. I always wonder why one cannot associate it with GPRS ?

Supporters of SMS might argue by saying that its easy to use but my point is that the premium one is paying for making our life easier is not worth it!! Downloading a ringtone of size 50kb would have costed me 50 paisa and I actually paid 30 times more!! The painful part is that a substantial part of it goes to service providers which, I think can be easily avoided if one takes GPRS route.

Yes SMS is omnipresent but these days number of GPRS compatible phones are not less. One can get it for 4K or even less. All we need to do is to spread awareness and thats what I did in this post.

One can talk about lack of killer applications but then who is supposed to develop one, someone from us of course.Lack of infrastructure can again be one of the reasons but thats because low GPRS traffic. Its pretty obvious that we are in a deadlock situation. The only way out is to start from any one point and others will connect automatically.

I have been part of GPRS Vs SMS quite a few times, unfortunately nothing concrete came out of it. The reason could have been absence of quantity/quality of people or lack of understanding. This time I intend to bring all those who have got to anything with VAS under one roof i.e. this blog .

I request all the readers to help me in serving the common cause and I of course take the responsibility of collating the entire information. I declare house open for the debate

P.S. FYI, VAS India 2007 is scheduled on 6th of this month.

The WALL

Rahul Dravid, of course not. I am not here to talk about him. Sorry to disappoint die hard fans of Pink Floyd, its not about the famous album and the WALL in front of you is of course not in question .

This has got something to do with Mobile Web, which is more exciting than cricket matches . Moreover, its can easily overpower Pink Floyd or for that matter Floyd-Beer combo in terms of intoxication. No wonder mobile web has managed to find place in my blogspot!!

Designing a wap site which can be rendered on majority of handsets is still a tricky problem. The reason behind this is very simple, several mobile devices hit market every week each having different screen sizes, browser, supported markup language etc… The problem gets further aggravated due to different implementation of markup languages. Not to forget each markup language comes in different versions!! This boils down to the fact that one cannot create wap site and hope to render it on different mobile device without any glitches.Developing wap pages for each device or each genre of device is of course foolish.

If you appreciate the problem I am sure you will certainly have high regards for WURFL and its founders. To those who are unaware of it, least I can say is, this is repository of more than 7000 devices and their capabilities.It can give you information about 400 capabilities of a device based on User Agent, which can be extracted from the http header.

WALL is another killer product from the group which based on user agent modifies a wap page so that it looks good. The process is very simple but by no means effort of Luca and Andrea can be undermined, in fact its the other way round its because of their toil, life has become simpler for developers like us. It extracts user agent and based on it finds device capabilities which results in transformation of wap page in appropriate markup language. The result is happy end user.

Hats off to WURFL!!!

P.S. The much awaited iPhone will be launched in USA few hours from now but we Indians will have to wait for one more year

Cash or Credit ?

A Rupee today is more than a Rupee tomorrow, I believe this since I was less than 10. How true it is, lets find out.

Picture this, you intend to buy a laptop for 50k. Since you had cash you thought its always better to pay in cash otherwise one has to pay interest which would be overhead. I must say its time to change this mindset because The Times They Are a-Changin’

Let numbers do all the talking. There are various financial institutions like Bajaj Finance and Citi Finance which are dying to give money on credit. Rate of interest they charge is 4.5 and 4.75 percent per annum and of course processing fees which lies between 2.5 to 3% ( one time).

Now, if you want it to get financed for 2 years (yeah that s possible, they do it for 3 years also) you effectively pay rate of interest between 6-7%. If you are still with me let me load you with one more information. These days fixed deposit in an bank for one year will fetch you close to 9.5% interest!! If you want to move a step ahead (15-20 %) mutual fund is obvious choice. Yeah, if you deal with stock market, you should not be reading this blog .

What this effectively means is that if you pay by cash you incur a loss of 3k to 15k for a stuff which is of order 50k in two years!!

Does this make sense?

P.S. I do not work with Bajaj Finance or Citi Finance

Did you mean: SUMMIT Ramani

One fine Saturday morning (actually afternoon ) when I woke up I thought of googling my name ( Sumit Ramani ) to know my popularity index. It took 0.15 seconds for google to aver:

Did you mean: SUMMIT Ramani , enough to spoil my weekend. As most of you might have guessed, I rattled off everything that came to my mind.,thank God nobody was around .

I thought to try to search for same on other search engines but could not muster up courage for almost three hours. After much deliberation, I typed my name on yahoo, with my eyes almost shut . Sumit Dhar’s Page (Hey, no offense indented ) was the first result . Obviously, Yahoo deserved severe punishment for the sin. But this time I decided to go Mahatma Gandhi way, non-violence. I took an oath, “I won’t you use Yahoo from now on”. Soon I realized, to imagine a life without yahoo messenger is difficult ,what followed next was obvious

Things didn’t end here, hesitantly I tried Live Search by msn. I scribbled my name in search bar and pat came the reply:
Were you looking for “Summit Ramon“ ? .Was wondering what restrained search engines from saying something like “Who the hell is Sumit Ramani ?” After all, there responses were equally brusque .

The big question is where exactly the problem lies, with search engines or with me?

My take: Search engines have long way to go!!

Dare to comment??