Moments so Far ...

I desired to go online to file returns. Its a very funny process. The government has already deducted the tax at source. Your employer has all your tax inputs. Still you would go through the process of collecting Form-16, file returns, print out form-V acknowledgement, send it back to Income tax. Every year, year on year. Is there a better way to optimize this mess and save some taxpayers money to reduce IT staff and this silly process? I put the request on Brigade Gardenia Yahoo Group and promptly neighbourhood responded and urged to go for taxsmile. I did. I tried to go through their demo, but even with BSNL broadband they were slow. Gave up. Registered and chose Gold. Realised that only additional benefit in GOLD plan would be they sending the ITR-V on your behalf instead of you sending it to IT department directly. In both cases you would need to courier either to Bombay taxsmile address or IT Bangalore address. I thought Bangalore would be a cheaper option. This was on saturday. T

It was 12:10 PM. It was a typical Sunday afternoon. Some habits die hard. Even though every day is Sunday, you still believe that Sunday is "good old times Sunday" which used to be a day on weekend. We have had a series of dal-chaval and roti sabzies for many days now. Dominoes sent SMS a few days back with a coupon code stating "Anniversary.Celebrate with us.Buy 1 get 1 free, Valid till 26th July". I generally don't deny participation in times of celebrations. The temptations ran high and for sometimes later went "dry". The urge to order a pizza sitting on a lazy bangalore afternoon on a "typical sunday" took over. I made the call to 08044448888. He thanked me calling and asked me the area of my residence. The call was redirected to another outlet in Bilekahalli. The lady could not hear my voice. Yes, my sweet humble sound of murmur. The first signs of frustration appeared and I thought of switching providers. Anyways, I called up again and

A neat way to pay property tax online if you have a property in bangalore. As launch offer BBMP is not charging extra on credit card payment. You can go to http://218.248.41.198/ and choose form IV or V depending on whether there has been any change in your property from last year. You will need Application number from assessment year 2008-09. The number on top right corner of pink form. If you are lucky to have saved it to your files. Not the white receipt. You will reach a pre-filled form which either you can print to pay in nearest BBMP center or if you have started to trust online gateways and carry a credit card then choose to pay online. Remember to note down the new application number NOW. You never know when you will need them. Online option will lead you to IDBI gateway and there you need to have your credit card handy, your tax details comes pre-filled. You are done with the payment in your cosy little bed. Time for the receipt. You have still not invested in printer. Okay,

Rajdhani express leaves Jhansi at 01:20 towards Bangalore. I saw my ticket a thousand times and wished that it was really 00:20 or 23:20 or 22:20. My uncle and their family was kind enough to entertain me till about 23:00. Then the power and mosquitoes took over the reins of mind and allowed it to lose patience. He asked me "Why are you so uneasy?". I gave a lame "I dont want your night to be wasted because of me." We went to Railway station and I found a cybercafe offering Rs 25 per hour. I said "I want for 10 mins, Will you reduce the price? There is noone inside, atleast it will give you some business." He was adament and said "It will not be compromised. You will have to pay in full, in advance" and he showed me the notice that said "Even if there is a link failure your money will not be refunded". I checked email and forwarded the BSNL bill copy to my brother so that he could go to BSNL office and show it to them as proof of me hav

Some people suffer all their life, either physical or mental problems. Everyone has blocks and they stumble upon them all the time. They hold on to them whereas all they want is release from them. Some people live life to brim, serving and losing themselves in the moment. Some people eat to live and depend on others to nurture and substantiate their livelihood. Some spouses are lucky to perish before their better half. Some simply drag till end of time. There are some who dont need any support until the end and then they simply pass away. There are some who prolong living by medications and survival toolkits. Suffering is pain to watch as well as to experience. But why do some people suffer more than others? Some people are lucky and dont get chance to suffer. Some start suffering the day they are born. Some grow and cultivate reasons for suffering. They carry the cause and hold on to it. Suffering burns life before death actually does the ritual. What kind of life do you want? Can you

Karnataka express leaves Bangalore at 19:20 hours. She gave two wait listed tickets to us in Tatkal. If the tickets dont get confirmed then you can get refund otherwise not. There was a bulky guy and an army man. There were others who were exchanging and adjusting for seats. I wanted to exchange my seat too but the person was not available until Sholapur so I had to be content with middle berth. The young lads were in engineering college in Bangalore. They had laptops and heavy duty mobile phones and the train had three way sockets to get the electronics going. Thankfully the same sockets would trip every few minutes to discourage the desperate and entertain the rest. We were having food and they would attempt to check the power point at our berth, the wire would hang lose and touch the food but they dont care. They put metallic and ear piercing music which could drive a normal ear crazy but they dont care. They would put ugly, disgusting, downtrodden and filthy horror movie and everyo

It was late in the evening when the news came. I could not do online booking because she did not have ID. I went out in my wobbly swift. She (now I am talking of swift, a car) has been indicating that her tyres could be punctured or wheels could be imbalance. My brother asked me "When did you last fill air in it?" I said "today I filled it twice and I have come to this place in auto fearing the tyre would lose tube. I enquired on the way for agents who give real train ticket without need for ID card and there was none to found. Everyone said, they could give the ticket but the risk of travel without ID would be on ticket holder. IRCTC online ticketing has disarmed the once powerful train ticket agents who would maintain stock of tickets for all ages and all days and all trains to all places. I got a call from my brother and then my father. "Why dont you go? She would be alone. She has never travelled alone." My mind also reminded me that I had not gone in marri

Its not the place where you could spend 4 hours of your life. You can see the world. The world can see you. You are touched by the cool winds as much as anybody else would out there in the open. You can shout "Security" and keep doing until the poor fella has to wake up. He looks around for source of sound and it does not not seem to be coming from regular places. Atleast where he expects humans to be. But she was no ordinary human. She was old and bold, probably in her sixties and she was looking down at the world. In those days, only the Queens would peep out of their palatial windows from behind the thin veils. She had no choice but to be behind the grill. It was transparent. It was open. My child rushed to me and told me. I rushed out and had a glimpse. She was majestic in her disposition. She was royal. She was stuck in utility balcony of her apartment in Golden Magic, Brigade Gardenia in JP Nagar Bangalore. Probably on sixth floor. There was not much to be undone as the

Sales is a number. Especially so in seasonal markets like online entrance management test environment. Now that CAT has become online from this year, pioneers like testfunda are going to have a field day. To take advantage of this you can get in touch with Priyank . He is a passout from NITIE and thus knows the intricacies that go into belling the CAT. He can give you options on various strategies to manage CAT and other management test that go online from this year. His startup is focusing on similar business line. When would you recruit somebody for sales and what will keep them attracted to the seasonal game? Is it on low fixed monthly income and high on commissions? Or is it other way around.? I believe that selling is a number game and only numbers give business and only numbers come in return for your efforts that you put on the field. Thus the focus has to be on charging a bull towards greener pasteur. Its entirely upto him to ignore the grass. Be content with the dry grass in f

Now you can subscribe to your favourite website to which you regularly visit for routine stuff like diet, news, clothes, electronics accessories. Google recognised that fact and has brought site subscription into your organic search results. I guess they are still organic. Google may not be charging these websites to display smartly in your search result. They also get a smart colorful cube on the left and content specially designed for you. You like the website and now your search engine too knows that and thus the search output is on more familiar platform. And your relationship gets converted into a triangular affair. You, Your favourite web site presenting its content in, Your search engine output. Did you count three? Yes, so it makes a triangle. Check them out at http://www.google.com/coop/docs/subscribedlinks/faq.html . Is your feed reader becoming redundant now? Why would you want to go back to your reader and duplicate the erstwhile inbox like experience of email system? You

You will and should breakthrough only after five years. You will be making loss till three to five years. Your dreams will rub with market and market will polish them with reality check. Unless ofcourse you are lucky. Words of golden advice from Subodh and did you believe it that I was meeting him for the first time. Any venture needs time to mature. When you see the fields you dream of eucalyptus oil but the tree needs nourishment and support till atleast three years before it can even start smelling. You may wonder that its only a tree and all eucalyptus tree grow the same way and you will also zip through. Well it rarely happens that way. He gave example of Google taking seven years to turnaround even though it was world beating idea.Till that time all good ventures run in Stanford hostel. Some don’t even see the light of the day. It never sunshines. Some persist and make it work thorough "Com'on man, you are an intellectual and if you don’t make it work then who else can.

I enjoyed using twitterfeed for a while. I especially liked their dash board and was encouraged to visit it once in a while to check how many twitterites have actually clicked on the bit.lyies and feedburner links. The animation moves left and right making you presume for a while that atleast a million would have clicked it till it stabilizes and tells us its 2 or 50. But the thing which I did not like was you can only see the stats for the last two successfully posted feed and on clicking the feed itself you can see two more. I had posted query in getsatisfaction " Dashed by dashboard " and they said it will affect performance and so they are keeping it low. Their blog says that they have been recently funded by two nice groups and I am left to wonder where the money is going if it is not able to capture simple stats about my link. For I believe the only performance concern could be the listener waiting on people to click on my bit.ly in twitter. Beyond that I don’t think

Now I don’t have to retweet my blog post using meme. Twitterfeed does that for me. And not only for my blog but I can get tweets on other blogs whom I want to follow on twitter. Meme will still hang around for a while because I want my readers to be able to retweet the post from here to their respective blogs if they want. But if my readers will also feed my feed to twitterfeed then who will retweet. I have also put "add this" which has got tonnes of buttons to social bookmark. I don’t know how effective is the experience in which you open a series of button and then choose your favorite and then go ahead and socialmark it there. Instead do you think if I put a Digg here readers will more likely to push it. Digg the article as it’s a single push experience in which you know you are going to Digg and then you Digg. In AddThis you wonder what and where will I add and then choose from multitude of choices. I don’t know what works for you but for me twitter feed does. You simply

She was walking in front of mother-in-law. They went to buy vegetables in the basement of Magnifica, Brigade Gardenia. The vegetable vendor comes here on Wednesday and Saturdays. Most of the time people go there and come back disappointed. When you meet them they say "Vegetable vendor has not come in yet and if he does not come then we have to go to Fresh and Greens" or similar name. The place is less than a kilometer away. That is quite a distance compared to a walk to Magnifica basement. And these days the Big Bazaaar express has come in bang in front of RBI bus stop. It is less than a kilometer away. Hope people will not have complaints on that distance. So, a stalk of beans fell in front of her. It was only a single green thin bean stick lying in front of her. She pointed out the same to her, the lady who had just procured her vegetables and was dwindling home in her prime time. She turned back and noticed the bean stalk. It must have pinched her a lot. As she managed to

A good business mind knows that if he has to make money in toll then every instant a vehicle should whip past the toll gate. There should be no interference of whatsoever, neither at the start of toll nor at the end. A government and administrative mind will not care about the money that went into the pipeline to construct this huge infrastructure. Whether you recover the money or not is also beyond question. Also, thoughts should not be spared on little things like "Traffic pile up at start and end of junction". But instead let people wait and lose patience and then you announce a flyover construction to begin simultaneously near the start and end of new sea link highway. It will also go back to dear Mr. Oil , a highly price sensitive commodity to announce a raise just after they have won an election. Remember, before the election there was a drop of Rs. 5 and after election there is raise of Rs. 4. The common man gains Rs. 1 advantage. Along with that will come cess to incr