Infinite thoughts

Amongst many of the online shopping sites, Indiaplaza is becoming my favorite shopping site. User friendliness and multiple payment options being the two most important reasons. Some of the purchases include a personalized Parker Pen and quite a few books. The biggest shopping that I did was just two weeks back - Samsung Galaxy S2 - a gem!! Meghana was eying this piece since February this year. The mobile launched only recently, however, with a huge disappointment on the price front. Our expectation was somewhere around 24-25K given the feature set. The launch price was 33K!! Meghana had almost given up the hopes of owning it in near future and had started looking for other options. With none is site, I was seeing her desperation. And Indiaplaza came in to rescue :) It offered flat 3K discount on the listed price i.e. 30K, still a bit more than what we wanted it to be priced at. And one fine day, I received a discount coupon in my mail box, worth 1K. Net price - 29K. We tried the Sam...

Yipit is a daily deal aggregator which is providing value added service on top of the daily deals provided by various sites. As per this report on TechCrunch , the service currently caters to 335 deals in 32 cities and is having 250,000 subscriptions already. The value that Yipit adds is the interest based deals sent to you in an aggregated email. You can store your preferences (e.g. Restaurants and Yoga, but nothing on hair loss treatment) and based on that the deals will be sent to you. Of course, you would get the deals in your city or the city that you subscribe for. Another interesting value add is "deals near you". Apparently each deal is accompanied with location information, which is mapped with the address that you provide (optional) and then you can get the deals which are closer to your address. I feel this is a very cool aggregation and has very good potential, especially in the domain of location aware mobile app. I should be able to find ou...

While everyone is waiting for prices to come down in the real estate market, which won't happen anyways, even the virtual land is up for sell. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is all set to allow domain names including any suffixes. So far there was a standard list of domain suffixes available, but with this new scheme, anyone can claim domain name ending with any string. Read more at the times article or directly from ICANN website . Businesses would need to ensure they pick up right domain names, and now probably multiple such names to retain their internet identity and safeguard the customers. This could mean a lot of cash, which is really unnecessary, if all that I need to do is to redirect all such domains to my primary website. What it means for end users? Nothing much if you are a simple web surfer. You would still be able to reach the required website as you would usually rely on the search engine to give you the right URL. Ho...

While driving back home, I was planning for a lazy afternoon and was contemplating whether to rent a DVD or do something else. And suddenly my phone rang. It was a promotional call from BigFlix , a movie rental service, which I had used in the past . Not believing the coincidence, I immediately started wondering if I should re-subscribe to the service. The person on the other side of the call was really nice and was selling it very softly. Knowing that I was ex-subscriber, he was rightly selling me the renewal and wasn't touting the service benefits. Finally I agreed to listen to his promo offer. It was 50% off on the website listed price of Rs.1000 if the payment is made using some specific banks debit card. Suddenly I realized that there could be another problem - delivery. Since I have now moved to Hinjewadi office, delivery to the office would be a problem. When I told this to the sales person, he agreed that there wouldn't be delivery possible at my office addr...

If you are really worried about the effect of Baba Ramdev's fast unto death fiasco on The Yoga , remember following points: Baba Ramdev's Fast Unto Death has nothing to do with The Yoga or his Yoga capabilities. The Fast Unto Death that Baba started is purely political and there's nothing "Yogic" about it. This world is divided into two kinds of people - Who practice Yoga and who want to practice Yoga - some day. None of them would be shaken because of Baba Ramdev or any other Baba doing political stunt. People have heard enough examples of Sadhus going on fast days together and still surviving. Swami Nigamanand is a live example (My bad... He is no more. Govt was too busy fighting the fight against corruption and didn't get time to pay attention to this Swami, instead chose to focus on Baba Ramdev). There were cases in the past and there would be cases in the future too. Yoga is too powerful to fall just because one person preaching Yoga has not demonstrated...

Absolutely thought provoking blog post by Seth Godin   http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/the-taskmaster-premium.html   "Work for a coal mine and make minimum wage. Discover a coal mine and never need to work again."

Why Am I Happy to have my FD doubled every 7 years but absolutely hate if the petrol price follows the same path? Remember there was a time when the compounded pre-tax yield on the fixed deposit was 100% every five year. Now it is has increased to somewhere 7 and 8 years. It feels good to see that your money is doubled in 7 years or so. Last 13 years, I have been part of the working class, I have observed the salaries shooting skywards to the tune of 8-10 times. This is restricted probably to IT industry, however, even other sectors have seen growth to the tune of 10% y-o-y which is beating the FD interest rate. Even the salaries of household help have been increasing in the same ratio, slightly higher at times. But when it comes to petrol prices, which is following the same trend (o n an average price being doubled in 7 odd years ), everyone is furious. Interesting, isn't it? :)

Belief? Passion? What is it that drive me? Is there anything that I have done something unusual to live upto that belief? Hard questions .. and I really don't have answers to it. Am I leading an ordinary life? May be.. but I think the beliefs and passions have no co-relation with whether I am sub-ordinary, ordinary or extra-ordinary. Beliefs and passions are expected to set a goal for yourself in terms of achievements - monitory, prestige, self-satisfaction etc. I am in search of such things about myself -what drives me? What keeps me going everyday? Is there something I look forward to outside my day-job? Do I take out time to do something everyday no matter what? Do I readjust my priorities to give preference to some task/activity/hobby? Answers are coming negative.. all negative... Seems like a need for deep soul searching.. what is that one thing I'd do everything? And if it is not there, what will that one thing, I'd be most happy to take up? I hope to find answer soon...

The busy schedule keeps me so much busy that I don't even get time to ponder over what would I do if I get some time free :) So far, my default answer was - reading, and I used to claim that I can read anything that is in front of me, may it be a magazine or may it be a news daily or may it be novel. However, my recent observation is that this is not entirely true. The newspaper, I hardly get to read it and whenever I get it I just skim through it instead of reading. There is a huge stack of novels (thanks to Meghana) but I hardly read any of them. And magazines, it has been a long while I have bought any magazine. I think I like the inspirational or thought provoking or educational (really?) books rather than novels (Case in point - some of my recent read books - The Greatness Guide , The Case of a Bonsai Manager , Romancing the Balance sheet , 7 Habits of highly effective people (current read)). I really don't remember the last novel that I read, probably it was " The L...