Abandoned

This blog is not being used anymore. I started posting here due to the ease but have gone back to my original blog.
Mental Floss lives here
Picturejockey lives here

Justice league

I've written earlier about how the news channels are in it only for their TRPs. It's true that their prime interest is to maintain the popularity of their channel but in process they do come up with something good as well.

A good example of this is “poll khol” a program hosted by Shekhar Suman. It has been showing what the cops are doing. Previously they showed them sleeping and now they are showing them in taking bribe.

They showed the videos to the police commissioner who promised to take the action against the guilty cops. This showed another thing. Mumbai cops are the most shameless cops in the country. Some cops apologized, some acknowledged taking bribe but the Mumbai cops denied completely about it. All of them refused taking money while they were shown taking money from motorists.

This gave me the idea that may be more TV reporters can be doing this. If the government is serious about removing corruption they can tie up with TV channels to do more on this. Apart from this, CCTV cameras can be set up in the government offices of public dealing. Not only at the seats but also throughout the compound. I'm not sure if it will completely remove bribery but it sure as hell would make it quite difficult to take money.

If we remove the possibilities of taking money in the office, the people will fins other ways like the touts going and getting the money outside the compound but if they are aware that there can be some one watching them there as well they may not indulge in it.

Incremental Delay

While coming back from Allahabad after my SSB, I had to wait at the railway station for almost 10 hours. It takes about 10 hours to reach Delhi but on that day it took me more than twice that time. It was uncomfortable and inconvenient to wait for that train but what made it almost unbearable was the strategy of the Railways.

Instead of telling the passengers by how much time the train is delayed. They kept announcing that the train is delayed by half an hour, an hour, 45 minutes and so. If you know that the train is going to be 10 hours late, you can go check in a hotel and sleep, you can go and roam around in the city or you may do whatever you please but if you are told that the train is coming in 1 hour, you better be at the platform or you are going to miss it.
You still have to wait as long but this wait makes you very restless, tired and cranky.

I have seen a similar trend in the interactive industry. The company, for whatever reasons, will accept crazy deadlines and everyone will work like a cracked squirrels on it till they realize that the delivery is in 4 hours but what they have is not presentable. At this time the client is contacted for an extension in the deadline and in most cases client agrees to it.

Now you have more time so you can do better work. Not really. You have one more tight deadline and to keep it, you are retrofitting new ideas in what you have done earlier. You are working in increments and planning in increments and that is not the most effective way of ding something.

For example you are supposed to finish something in 4 days, you work hard but come up with something not good enough and then you get two more days. In those two mare days, all you can do is do cosmetic changes to what you have done earlier and that will have a limited effect. What you can do in 6 days is always going to better than what you can do in 4+2 days.

The question is why do we agree to do something in less time than what would be required and then deliver substandard work.
If you could read the minds of people during the presentation of such work, this is what you could hear:

“I gave these people 6 days to do something but what they have done is not up to the mark”

“You gave us only 4 days to do something and then 2 more days to revamp it, what more can you expect. You should have given us more time.”

If you see it from the perspective of the client, you had six days and not the 4+2 days as you think to do something but the results doesn't reflect that.

Passport, Income Tax and a red Signal

One of the things I am scared of is going to the government offices. The way people in government offices make you run around is not funny. During this visit of Delhi, I had to interact with the government officials for more reason that one.

Passport

Mira's passport has been delayed by the passport official for one reason or the other for the past ten months or so. This time they had asked us to submit an affidavit of our marriage and an ad in two national newspapers saying that Sunita's name is Sunita. (Mira has always been Sunita officially and the name on his driver's license and voters card is Sunita)

To get all this done, we first had to go to the Janak Puri's transport authority to get hold of a Notary Public who would give us two affidavits, one for the passport office and one for the newspaper. In one place is the passport office that is asking me for countless proofs of name and on the other hand is the notary public that is not the least bothered about any proof while making the affidavits for us and why should he be bothered about anything when the “Price is right”. I could have taken a guy along with me dressed in a burka instead of Mira and he'd have given me the affidavit for all he cared.

Any way armed with the proofs we landed up at the passport office. People here are quite enterprising. Once something is set up, a lot of other businesses supporting it spawn like mushrooms around it. “Sahib, anything you want to get done in the passport office?” asked a tout as I got out of my car and another one said “New passport, passport renewal, ECNR” like a guy selling movie tickets in black outside a cinema hall. The touts are not the only people surviving like plankton sticking on the ship of passport office. There are people selling food and drinks (mostly illegal hawkers) and the parking attendants parking cars in no parking area for those extra 10 bucks a part of which is definitely going to the cops who turn a blind eye to the cars parked in the no parking area and people driving in the no entry zone.

Once inside the passport office, I was confronted with the semi-gods of bureaucracy running our country. He looked up the file on his computer and updated me on the status and I showed him the proofs and documents that I had gathered. He asked me if the proof was for change of name. I told him it could be called that “Yes, you can say it is for change of name, while in reality it is very natural thing for a girl to use the family name of her husband after getting married.” He looked at the documents and asked “What is Harish?” I told him that Harish is my surname and he got more curious “But usually Harish is the first name” He said it like it is an offence to have Harish as your surname and I would be punished for it by whipping my arse in the public. My patience that was already running thin finally gave in “Well it is my misfortune that Harish is my family name.” The guy turned a little sympathetic “Why call it a misfortune.” He sort of assured me that it is not really a crime. I told him my plight “If it is not my misfortune that you won't have made me run around like crazy for the past tem months.”

The man asked us to wait outside his office while he asked someone to get our file. I sat there cribbing about the whole thing for half an hour when he called us again “I still have not found your file, you can leave your documents with us and I will try to make sure that you don't have to come here again.”

A couple of days later we went to the passport office again, this time dad was also with us. This time Mira and I had decided to give a piece of our mind to the passport guy. We decide that if he still creates any more trouble for us, we are going to ask him to keep the file and that we don't need a passport anymore and we would prefer to get a forged passport and face the risks rather than take any more abuse form the passport office.

To our surprise, the guy looked up the file on his computer and gave us the news we have been waiting for too long “We have made this passport and you will be getting it sometime in the first month of September.”

Income Tax
I decided to file my income tax from Delhi instead of Bombay and went to the same guy who is filing my returns for the past two years. When I went to Delhi I knew that I would be required to pay some tax in addition to what has been deducted from my salary but little did I knew how much.

The accountant looked at the papers and told me what I had been expecting. I had changed the job in the last financial year and TIS did what a lot of other employers do while calculation the tax. In the column of any other income they wrote nil, instead of my salary that I was drawing from QAI. The ignored the salary I was getting at QAI and gave me the standard deduction twice and the slabs for income tax they used were also incorrect. I don't know how this happened but it is not a good idea on the part of Income tax department to just assume that I was not working anywhere before I joined the new company.

After some calculations he looked at me told me the bomb I owed the income tax department. I knew I would be paying something but the amount he told me was 5 times more than what I expected.

The next day I had to go to my bank to pay the tax that wiped off everything except one thousand bucks from my account. This makes my current trip to Delhi the most expensive one.

Red Signal
A day or two after reaching Delhi, some guy was standing outside my door with some papers in his hand. He asked me “Navin Harish?” I said yes and he handed me a paper and asked me to sign another one.

It was a fine for jumping a red signal in the month of February. My car jumped a red light on Baba Kharag Singh road. My brother may have been driving the car but 99% chances are that it is a mistake on the part of the cop while writing down the number because bhai is in Chandigarh, not Delhi. I treated as one of those random fines you get and you are better off paying them than arguing with them.

I was a little surprised that now they are delivering the fines by hand but that guy cleared my doubts “It is notice, the challan must have come by ordinary post.” Ordinary post that was so ordinary that the postman decided to throw it away rather than delivering it to me.

On the appointed day, I went to the Magistrate's office at Janpath with dad. As I reached there some guy came to me asking for the notice. Assuming that he was an employee of the court, I handed him the notice. He looked at it and said “Hundred bucks for this, hundred bucks for this and 165 bucks-a total of 365 bucks. I will get it done for 300 bucks.” Before I could figure out what was happening, dad snatched the paper from the tout and gave it at the window where it was supposed to be given.

First I was asked to sign a register that said that I plea guilty for the offence, then I was asked to pay a fine of 100 bucks and then I was asked to wait for the receipt. All this took about 3 hours and waiting in between these exercises, I was observing other people. There were lawyers-not the kind of lawyers you see in news making statements on behalf of their clients. The lawyers you see there are the ones I would like to say are -third rate. They come from the least preferred law schools where they got admission by bribing someone and passed the exams by copying the answers on their sleeves or better yet, sending someone else t appear in exam in their place. One of the lawyers was chewing pan; one was looking like a typical Bihari wearing cheep sport shoes with his court dress. All of them were trying to extract money from people who came there. A large percentage of those people were drivers who didn't know any better. The others decided to pay them to avoid the wait (but they did have to wait.)

All of this made me think about the opinion I had about the government offices. I used to think they are inefficient but I was completely wrong. They are not inefficient; they are more efficient and organised then the private sector. The work doesn't happen there because they don't want to do it. It takes ages to do anything but you must watch their speed after showing them the face of Gandhi ji. The same people who made you run around will start running around you after you offer them a little incentive for doing it.

The efficiently of those people is directly proportional to he money you offer. Gandhi, after all, is one man you can take for face value.

Opportunity lost is opportunity cost

I read this line while going through the economics book of my brother. It is a part of the process of calculating your profit. Among the costs, one is opportunity cost. If you were not doing your own business, you would be doing something else and for doing that you would be getting paid. In your own business, you are not getting that money so that is also a cost to you. I am thinking about this because of my recent trip to Delhi. I have taken a leave from my job and then I extended it. I extended it without prior approval so in some way, it is a risk I took. On its own, it is not so significant but an accumulation of such things may be damaging to my career. If I continue taking decisions like this that are not in the interest of my employer, I may suffer in long run. I may not get as much money as I could otherwise or I may not reach the level I could be making different decisions.

This is something I think nobody considers. There are people who would get upset because I didn't visit them, but I am sure they themselves will not be too keen themselves to take a decision that may be damaging to their career, none of them would be willing to take a day off to see me. Leave that aside, none of those people would consider leaving the office a little early for me. At this point I would like to say that it is wrong to generalize people. Not everyone is like this there are people who would take time out to see me and as a matter of fact, those are the people who are NOT going to taunt me that I came to Delhi didn't went to see them. "You were here for a complete week but couldn't take out some time to visit me."
"I am sorry, I was really caught up, why didn't you come over?"
"Yeah right, I am so busy, marne tak ki fursat nahin hai, kahi aana jaane ki to baat hi choro."

This reminds me of another thing-the tendency of people to show that they are the busiest people in the world. Those people have no respect for time. They will invite you for a meeting and will be late, you invite them over for a dinner and they will make you wait till 11 in the night and worse is that they will invite you over their home and will not be present when you reach there. Someone invites you to their home, you land up there on time only to wait painfully long for them to come. When they do come, they will act as if what they have done is completely normal and they won't even apologize for wasting your time.

"I got stuck up, just as I was about to come, my boss called me for a meeting... it's all right yaar, I am only an hour late. Did you have tea?"

Un(usability)

As a designer in interactive medium, I have to make sure that things are usable while designing anything. I think about how user would interact with it and that sometimes requires a change in the original design. If I see that user is going to feel lost with the way things are currently designed, I do them again to make them more usable, and that sometimes means compromising on the aesthetics of the original design. The final design may not look as appealing as the original one but it is definitely more usable than the original one. An example of this is the navigation on two image galleries. The first one was "Textures of life". The navigation in that one showed six thumbnails at a time and to see the next or previous six images, one has to click on a "more" button. When I saw people not being able to see the next set of images by using the "more" link, I changed the navigation to what it is in "a look around" where all the thumbnails are shown upfront.



I feel that the same thought should be applied to every thing but sadly it is not. One good example of bad usability is the buildings I see around me. "RNA heights" is a building that was being made when I moved here. Now it's complete and a lot of houses have been occupied as well. You can spot which house is occupied by the grills outside the widows and a sunshade above it. After these modifications by the residents, the building does not look as good as it used to earlier.



Any builder who has built even a single building in Bombay knows that people do the two things mentioned above. So why don't they make some arrangements for it themselves while they are making the building ensuring uniform look. They can alter the design so that a rain/sun shads is not required. Even it is required, they can make it uniform and they can themselves install the grills.



Going one step further. I have seen that the buildings are made using the concrete pillars. The structure of the building is supported by a concrete structure and the brick walls will not add to the strength of the structure. In such a case, why don't these people give the buyers a choice to design their own house? As a buyer, I may choose the entire wall to be a big window and it is possible for the builder to do it for me because I bought the house long before it is completed. I'm paying Rs20 lacks for a house, I won't mind paying one lac extra for an option to design my house.

Shining my shoes

I didn't polish my shoes this morning because whenever I do it, it rains. I have seen that if I polish my shoes, wear clother that take long to dry, wash my car or generally anything that could be affected adversly by rain, it rains.

This made me thought about Indra-the god of rains. There are people who are worshipping him, trying to please him so that he will bless them in rains in draught affected areas. If only those people knew that Indra can be pleased just by polishing their shoes.

Working in Government/Private sector

Working for the government of your country is a nice thought. In an ideal situation, the government is working in the welfare of its citizens and directly helping the cause by working for the government is a very great and fulfilling experience. But things are not always so and the situations are not always ideal. I don't need to say what government and the people representing government offices do.

I am not interested in criticizing the government but talk about the option of working for government or working in private sector. Let's stick to that.

The opinion about working for the government is divided. They are some who think the only job worth doing is a government job and the other who don't like to work in the government sector.

There are a lot of reasons why people are not interested in working for the government. read the complete thing here

Image Gallery :: A look around

I guess I need a new subject. This is one more image gallery that I have created of things in or around the house. This gallery features the pictures taken around the house. Check it out. While you ae there. You might as well see the rest of the image galleries.

Veg AC

I didn't knew that the ACs are also veg or non veg. Check this out

Civic sense

We talk about our rich heritage and our culture as we are the only cultured nation in the entire world but when it comes to putting our speech in action or in other words, showing some civic sense, we are among the worst in the world.

We cut people off while driving. A few days ago I was in the office pantry with a friend of mine taking tea from the vending machine. I had two cups in my hand. I filled one and just as I took it, some other guy standing with me jammed his cup.

Today I went to the doctor. I took off my shoes, after a while it started raining and when I was coming back I realised that some nice woman had taken mine and Mira's shoes from where and put them in the rain so she could leave her shoes in the dry.