Vidhya Balan you have an immediate competition. You just can get dirtier than Congress. We know that state polls are on. Swept by trust deficit, the ruling Govt  stands slimmest chance in any of the states. The  demographic surveys conclusively indicate that results will be decided by OBC/ MBC voters. This class just has narrow personal interest of reservations to decide where to vote. If you have to win them, you need to dole out reservations in lucrative education, jobs, promotions or low risk high profit businesses etc. Now with model conduct in force , the ruling govt cant announce any new schemes, so out comes a possibly planted news on the cover of Economic times on 20th January ( Link given at the end of this post. It tells, keeping everything unconfirmed and every minister and offcial anonymous that Congress wil give 27% reservations to OBCs in petrol pumps, the biggest cash minting business. This it says is for benefit in the next election. Its made to appear like a brilliant investigative journalism by Rajeev Jaysawal at this opportune time in pure journalistic interests.If you are a general voter, it tells you,Congis wont reduce your quota. If you are OBC living in Bundelkhand, UP, punjab you will believe that Congress is your biggest well wisher. The content of this article is so setup to serve the interest of Rahul Khan ( Yes , his Gandhi surame is big fraud read about it in this blog : http://arunpurohit.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/the-brand-gandhi-and-how-congress-illusions-and-cheats-us-with-4-myths/) that it stinks of his desperation to establish himself. Mr Jaysawal ate a supari or bit the Congess bait is difficult to surmise. The dirty tricks by poll managers of Congress, to get  a moll, duress on   the editor, or an oversight ( innocent or vested ) we may never know. This front page story on ET, however must be taken note of by Election observers and opposition sympathisers, nation lovers, bloggers, and literates.  We can only hope that someone out there, uncovers the truth.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/governments-quota-card-27-petrol-pumps-for-obcs/articleshow/11560504.cms

PS: If you want to see pretty picture , you may like to visit www.wic.co.in  //

I have no disrespect for Mr Motilal who was a barrister but #WTF he is got to do with an NIT in Allahabad ?  Mr Malaviya must have been a great whatever he was but #WTF he has got to do with an NIT in Jaipur and same for the freedom fighter Mr Maulana whose name precedes the NIT in Bhopal. Essentially this naming business is one of the biggest evils of Indian society. The dying communists in the last days of their government named the most prestigious township after the person who sucked down the state from being the Industrial leader to the worst state in country.  The state of Maharashtra, I  heard from somebody has a law that no public road bridge etc can be named after a person. This law came into effect after it was discovered that some politicians paid money to get a road name after them. This law was amended some time ago to shamelessly name Pune Bombay expressway as Yashwant Rao Chavan Marg. In that behti Ganga, Congressis washed more hand to name Bandra Worli sea link after Rajiv Gandhi. If you wish to read more about #WTF Rajiv Gandhi has to do with BWSL bridge , you may like to read this http://arunpurohit.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/hello-rajiv-gandhi-whats-you-got-to-do-with-it/ . When I go from my home to railway station in Pune, I find that a small bridge is named after Rajiv Gandhi and also a chest hospital. On a recent visit to Bangalore, I found that somebloody politician to encash the popularity and achievement of Anil Kumble made a circle near MG road , Anil Kumble circle!!! He is a great cricketer but #WTF a road circle after him ?

Recently election commission touring the state of UP has passed a diktat that all statues of Mayawati and statues of elephants be covered. Some people are feeling good about it . I say DAMN who is gonna put cover on stupid 20,000 institutions and lakhs of roads named after Gandhi and family which they paint on their posters. Bloody every city worth its name has a #WTF MG Road. We have Universities, airports, stadia, schools, rural employment guarantee schemes, Nahar pariyojana after Gandhis and city renewal buses named after Nehru. Who the F is going to cover them? Mayawati has done less crime her crime and cancer can be covered. Who will eradicate the cancer of Congress and lakhs of stupid names they have given to our institutions.  Is the election commissioner even preventing Congress from putting their pictures on their electoral posters?   This primarily is the reason all the stupid arguments of giving Lokpal a constitutional status like Election commissioner do not make sense.  The CECs are nothing but impotent stooges of govt.

I do not have much a do with politics but lets keep the institutes of learning free from this dirty politics.  Lets  give better names, let make a clean corruption free India. There are thousands of ways to creatively name. . Mamata has revoked the name of Newtown from Jyoti Basu nagar . He hasa scrapped naming of another insittute after Indira Gandhi but a lot of muck needs to be cleaned still. If you believe that NITs should be kept free of this naming politics , please pass it on . Let a common consensus emerge in the country that no road, monument, educational institutes will be named after a person and least of all a politician

Bombay probably is a city of hip shakers. No just hip shakers but gaudy hip shakers. If you call a skimpy bimbette with a pout to gyrate, the sissies are out on the roads in huge number. The limp wristed ones raise their hands and scream.. WOOOOOOOOOO… Booooogie.. Yeow.. (WBY crowd, please see the image below ).   They have no reason to come out and help Ronan and his friend dying while saving their girl friends from molesters or Anna fasting to root out corruption.

The city shakes on stupid remixes, remakes and yucky trash oops flash mobs. A call for a sensible cause will always evoke Y-U-C-K. The folks lock themselves in their pigeon hole 2BHKs on 2x floors if you call them to vote ( the city almost always has least voting turn out ). The people love playing under arm cricket premier leagues in 20 X20 refuse builders leave for them on ground zero. They can come and shake their hips on ‘Rang De Basanti’ after the terrorists are killed. They have candles and they look kewl shaking left and right with some music yknow

Having a hope of  Bombay wallas coming forward to a national cause is a huge miscalculation. Its just not in their DNA. its said ,when you are fighting a battle you cant seek comforts. Anna fought a long battle in Delhi, that awakened the nation. That bought govt on its knee and the Bill in the parliament. The WBY crowd cant care much for it. Now here is where Team Anna erred. They sought the warm weather comfort of hedonist Bombay for protesting far away from the chilling winds of  New Delhi. Imagine, the impact of Anna fasting on a chilling stage, shaking and overcoming intense pain to fight the Corrupt Congressis. The vignettes would have galvanized the nation more. But here he went seeking the comfort and pleasure of Bombay and support of people dead with their conscience. The people with sensitivity already find  the city dehumanizing.( Read this : http://skeptic.skepticgeek.com/2011/09/11/why-i-left-mumbai/ ) I must not say that i knew that Anna’s Bombay pitch will flop but by their behavior, the Bombay wallas validated my faith. They are good for pelvic gyrations not national emancipation.

Its only human to err and make tactical mistakes. This Bombay battle is lost, not the war against corruption. Anna and company should have selected Chennai ( Rajnikant’s support,climate and awakened people are a better choice ) or may be Calcutta, the city with high political activism or Pune’s Kesari wada where Tilak started his Swaraj movement. Hope better sense will prevail

Its been 2 years of setting a farm, ploughing it hard, sowing seeds, adding manure and then irrigate it with sweat with a hope that it will rain. The saplings will blossom , they will grow into beautiful crop. For us at Simplibuy , the crop is still far off but the plant has come out of ground. It will get irrigated when you bless it with you love. Check out the baby plant http://www.wic.co.in/  It transforms your experience of asking of friends where to buy a product from, at what price etc easier. Here you  can discover interesting prices on high quality. You gain a lot from reusing your friends’ decision to buy. When you share your own buying experiences the entire community benefits and thanks you for this. In the long run it can ensure that no body is fooled about the price she should pay for her purchases.

Where is cheapest seller for product X in my city Y ?

http://www.wic.co.in/ Feedback suggestions welcome

Please see the image below :

Now see the Ux design of the same urinal pot.

If you noticed there is a fly in the pot.  Well thats not a real fly. Its been etched on the porcelain by the Ux designer of the pot. It was found that,  men when they see such fly in the pot, try to aim at it.  When they do so, it reduces the spillage by over 80%.   This is Ux design at its best

PS: Pictures and text courtesy :Xianhang Zhang on Quora http://www.quora.com/Product-Design/Whats-the-difference-between-UI-Design-and-UX-Design-1

• Complacence : Having got the Worli seabridge , he thought HCC has cracked the politco nexus code and they can get away with anything // Read permits, regulations, laws of land
• Ethic Deficit :  The township has been made cajoling the villagers and locals to sell of their land many times forcing them under the banner of big politicos
• Disregard for environment : Notwithstanding tall claims about it being a sustainable city, you can see the rampant violation almost everywhere. The basic tenet – ” No construction on hills and hill slopes” has been massacred
• Greed : The greed to extract more than lawful is what does most businessmen in. Speakasia, Anil Ambani, Radia are examples. Gulab babu wanted to take more juice out of  this project than actually coming and has got screwed.
• Immorality : This is the biggest one. He slept with Sharad Pawar, probably the Crookest of all crooks , gave him a good stake in the Lavasa corporation, faked records to show that he doesnt hold any equity in Lavasa later and allows him to hold stocks through proxy..

UFO WTF

When I try to find the cheapest price for some product today, I literally scream WTF.

1.      Google always returns millions of results none of which helps me buy something locally or electronically.  WTF?

2.      The e commerce stores like ebay or India plaza show only the prices listed by their screwed up affiliates. WTF?

3.      I do not know how to find the champion seller in my city who is selling at the cheapest price. WTF?

4.      I do not know how much to bargain and sellers always seem to start from Mt Everest. WTF?

5.      There are some smart guys who buy products at prices less than me . I feel like an ass WTF

6.      The deal sites do not show the products I actually want. They are selling SPA, massage, adventure fish pedicure and WTF!

7.      I do not get to know if the product is selling at lower price in a big city (Bombay) near me WTF!!!!

8.      Do I have to ask all the people in my network and beyond just to find the lowest price of a product WTF

9.      I am dead shy of asking my neighbor where she bought her latest gadget from .I know she is a very smart shopper and if I cant be smart enough WTF

10.  Do I have to search 20 sites on web to find the cheapest price of any thing ? WTF

11.  Do I have to leg crawl multiple stores, haggle and conclude who is selling it at cheapest price. WTF ?

12. The online seller, shipped the product different from what I ordered. He pissed me off by changing the picture on site later; took 2 months and 10 calls to give my money back. WTF!!!

13. The consumer protection laws in India SUCK ….. WTF

14. I want to gift the product to my beloved  today, I want it now. If I have to pay through my nose or wait for 5 day to get delivery.. WTF!!!!

PS: This post is inspired by the striking and hilarious  WTF images you can see on http://www.behance.net/gallery/WTF/599855

Most of us have been witness to removal of Mr Thomas as the Chief Vigilance Commissioner only after Supreme Court intervened and forced the Govt to act. It has come in common public knowledge that there were 3 people taking decision to appoint him.

1.  Lungi Master P Chidambaram
2.  Manmohan Singh (  I believe we should use Dr for people who actually deserve,) and
3. Sushma Swaraj

Sushma knew that Thomas was corrupt and opposed the appointment.   Lungi master knew that Thomas was corrupt and his appointment was tenable  Singh knew about the impropriety of  appointment of a person having alleged corrupt conduct.  Both Chidu and Mannu tried to pressurize Sushma into agreeing into Thomas’s appointment. Good sense and conscience prevailed over Sushma’s judgment of situation. She said , that if they were going ahead with appointment, her dissent against the appointment be formally noted.  Chidu and  Singh inspite of formal dissent went ahead with the appointment.  The untenable appointment was quashed by the Supreme court . Embarrassed by the reprimand both Chidu and Mannu feigned ignorance of criminal act by Thomas.  The question is : Were they having malafide intention or where they under some sort of duress where they had no option but to do an unethical conduct?

I had this question clouding my mind  and I was not able to see any reasonable answer for this. Today , I meet a former bureaucrat who apprised me about what had happened ( I have no resource to verify this anecdote and have very little to question his integrity ).  The story goes like this . Madam Sonia Gandhi had gone to a church . She made Mr Thomas there who did some expressions to please her. Thomas was on verge of retirement and wanted to cling on. Having won the lady’s affection he could get her to write a small note  which said – “ Please accommodate him “.  Its told that there was no other suitable vacancy available . Just like any Congress sycophant, Chidu and  Singh didn’t have gumption to even think of  questioning the note from Congress Chief . The fly of Thomas was swallowed by both of them.

Conclusion : While this may be an here say but it may also be true. While these disgraceful two some may never agree to this . They will continue to adorn two of the most important positions in the country. They are on verge of becoming co accused  in 2G scam and eventually landing up in special cells of Tihar. We are castrated for 5 yrs to curse ourselves of having a PM who has been literally abused by an American senator to have a shameful “ In attentive Management Style “ . I am peeved at the way Nation is being run

The current struggle has only one element of struggle, the Gandhi mimic ( Hazaare Saaheb ) and Nehru equivalent interlocutor of Prashant Bhushan. We have not had the armed forces revolting yet like 1857 ( The service chiefs should down, discuss and put their free thoughts down corruption ails them too ). The police still obeys the Govt( A  police man is paid a pittance and if corruption is stemmed he has a chance of getting better legal pay and higher self esteem).  The national wealth is still getting siphoned out( Now its not London but  the Swiss Banks ). We were obsessed with Gori Chamdi then( Gorey ne bolaa toh sahi hoga, Gorey ne banaaya toh badhiya hoga ) and used to rub our skin with soap three times a day. Now we have dumbwits who buy and apply Fair and Lovely/Handsome every now and then. The obsession with European gori skin ruined us in both cases ( We need to get over our fair skin obsession. Read servility to fair skinned Pseudo Gandhis).   The Britishers used to divide and rule, now we have traitors appearing in forms of , Aruna  and Arundhati Roys. There were irritant Rai Bahasdurs during those times and now we have Sibbal, Manish Tiwari and Pronob. Rai Bahadur Nandan Nilekani’s respect for politicains has gone up in last 2 years.We had pipe smoking, shake gyrating elites then, we  have english speaking twitter dirrhoec self proclaimed thinkers who feel it its a #Jokepal. There were chamachas, informers of British govt on the  pretext of ‘Angreji raaj sab sukh saaj’ and we have advocates of more and more mercy to politicians now on pretext of parliamentary procedures.  Can we make a museum where we can park these langoors.  The national mood is such that Forget bringing back black money, people will pay atleast Rs 50 each to just spit once on Manmohan Singh, Tiwari, Singhvi,Jayanti N, Janardan ,Raja, Kanimozhi , Sharad pawar and Pigvijay Singh. Humor apart, there are lot of similarities with our first freedom struggle ,what we did to attain it and what we should do now..

The difference now is : that time we had a big foreigners to contend and today we  need only 540 parliamentarians to be eliminated

Recently there was an article in Economic times about, “How you can save a lot of money by going online and using the sites like snapdeal, taggle, sosasta etc.  It makes its advertisements look like they are news items. Wikipedia on ethics in media campaign talks about making advertisement look distinct from news items. Often we have front page sold to marketers and news items which promote advertisers. On inside pages you find articles which run like news and you see ‘Advertorial’ written in nondescript font somewhere.  Considering this, should we expect popular media to give us any bit of information which is trustable?

Coming back to this article about how you can save money, we tried to check facts by visiting these sites. The basic requirement was : We wanted to buy ipad 2- 32GB for ourselves . This as claimed in the article is a gadget. Lets see how these helped.

1. Snap Deal : This was our first stop. We saw a lot of noise about dance classes, vacation and nothing about what we needed. They do not provide any deal on what we needed. They provide deals on what profits them. More like a seduction to spend on some thing we do not need. Will that save me money ?

2. Taggle.com : This was our second destination. “More for less “ screamed a clichéd statement. I remembered an elephantine COO of a company who himself was pathetic but used this to honk engineers with this stick. It used to mean take less pay and work more . We heard that Taggle has a great management team with very bright people. If this team of bright people had to copy Groupon they must have found something brilliant must have done something good for the users Poor Groupon still has not yet found a business model and learn from its imitators. I searched for ipad 2 and this is what we got now at 1711 hrs, August 21, 2011, Sorry, inspite of all the media noise this doesn’t help us in our simple need.

3. SoSasta.com : This site had made a lot of noise after acquisition by Groupon. Now if the Big daddy is dying in US of Yay!! ( It needs USD 750 Mn to stay afloat) we had little hope that it would be of any use. We gave it a good try. This again was selling something which I do not want. This time , a stainless bar set. See below: and then to my chagrin, we found that there was no way to search. We went to see all deals. We expected and saw the same stupid deals for Spa, tattoo and irritating Machhli pedicure. This too didn’t help . We didn’t have intention to carry on with the anymore deal sites but to complete to this post , we had to kiss the last post.

4. Mydala.com : It cleverly took me to its Pune page ( IP detection ) . It was selling an irritating local icecream for Rs 49 /= but to my relief , it had search. And we searched ipad 2 and this is what we got:

We realized that these imitators of Groupon do not help you with what you want.

Conclusion : These deal sites are flavor of the season with India’s investors and gullible customers. We know of people who bought coupons from such deal sites for Spa and realized that the coupon was applicable for such hours that they could not use it even after 3 months of wait.

The conclusions then can be :

•  The news articles need to be read with some scepticism though you may not like smelling the rotten fishes between the lines
•  The deal sites don’t save you money on what you want but on what they can profit from or have arrangements done.
•  The deals offered mostly are on things which don’t sell at particular time for example, a dinner for two at 1100hrs on Monday mornings.
• If investors have put in money on some site and its spending on advertisement of paid news article its not necessarily a good site
•  India is mammoth country with lots and lots of people with really bad taste and anything / everything is being sold with loud media campaigns

PS :  Like swines give birth to 20 piglets in every lanes there are dealsites  launched by everyone. In Singapore there is a dealsite for every lane. Imagine, India having that many and the stink in cyberspace will be suffocate us. Its not practical and feasible to discuss or tolerate every other dealsite erupting like sores.

A few months later : This blog starts sounding the deathknell for deal sites :http://www.indiadealsites.com/829/is-interest-in-snapdeal-waning.html