Infinite thoughts

Returning from a long hiatus... will that still be called a hiatus or was that a break or a sabbatical?.. Let's not worry about it. Happened to watch " Matka King " on Amazon Prime over the last few days. The story is based on a known-but-not-so-known person in 60's/70's Mumbai. I have no idea whether the story truly represents the original personality or not, and that is not the point of this blog. The series started with some catchy sequences and held the audience halfway through, about 4 to 5 episodes. Each one is almost an hour long, and it did hold a good story in those episodes. Brij Bhatti, the lead of the series, portrayed by Vijay Varma, working for Lalji Bhai (Gulshan Grover), decides to separate out and starts his own "honest" business of gambling via Matka. The USP was to be honest all the time. Open the cards in front of the people; in fact, have your players open the cards. This built the trust with the gamblers very quickly. The story goes...

Some recent experiences. Except for one, rest are pretty good. Domino's Pizza : Few days back, I came to know that Domino's has started with online ordering system. With my recent adventures of online shopping, there was nothing to stop me and I ended up in ordering online. The experience was pretty smooth and hassle free. Given that it was first time, Meghana confirmed the order by calling up the concerned outlet. Incidentally, we checked the watch exactly at 30th minute and realized that the pizza hadn't reached us yet. And then it was hard to stop Meghana to call up the outlet to check what's happening with our pizza. To our surprise, when she mentioned that it is already past 30 mins, the outlet manager was kind/professional enough to agree to keep the "Domino's promise" and promptly asked us to call him back when the delivery boy reaches. The Delivery boy also gracefully returned some 300 bucks, no questions asked. The wonderful thing happened af...

I happened to visit Big Bazaar today after a long time and was happily surprised not to have so much rush in the mall. I had always discouraged myself from visiting Big Bazaar for two reasons. One - the huge rush and second the congested arrangement inside the mall. I found More comparatively better than any other super market including Reliance Fresh and Spencer's . Last time when I visited Big Bazaar it had impressed me with the variety of grocery items available under one roof. This time I was amazed by the speed with which the billing was completed at the cash/credit counter. While the counters were still having a big queue and each customer having tens of items, I could not ignore that each item was getting correctly read by the bar code reader in the first attempt itself. It was a good to see this seamless operation as I have kind of got used to bad bar codes/readers in the More super market. It has been a constant observation that almost 15-20% items will be required to b...

It got me really excited when I came across the introductory video of the new application from Google - Wave . It seemed to be feature rich from a truly collaborative tool perspective. The video itself was very nicely done with proper examples and how to use this new wave. And then it was a long wait of few months before Google started distributing invites for private beta. I was eagerly waiting to get the invite as I had promptly registered and opted for beta invite when I had known about it. Finally I could manage to get an invite (although secondary) from one of my friends around 1.5 months back. As it happens with every new toy, there was a lot of enthusiasm to try out this new tool. Meghana could also manage to get one invite for herself. And then for few days we used this tool as a "chat" application. It was really cool to see what the other person is typing in real time - his/her edits/deletes etc. The interesting part was I could add comment to any of the earlier pos...

A story that many from young generation would connect to is the story of " 2 States ", a recent book from Chetan Bhagat . Krish, a Punjabi boy and Ms Ananya Swaminathan, Tamilian Brahman, get involved with each other during their stay at IIMA. Since both of them love their respective families, they wanted an approval from them for their marriage. After initial failure to get both the families know each other on the convocation day, both of them realize how bad and challenging it is going to be. Krish and Ananya decide to take up the challenge and then unfolds a hilarious but mostly true to life drama that happens in Chennai (Ananya's home town) then in Delhi (Krish's home town) and some trips between D and C. I was hooked to this book throughout and didn't want to keep it down until it was finished. The lead characters, Krish and Ananya have been portrayed very well and same is the case with supporting characters, Ananya's family and Krish's mother. The on...

It was time to use the gift voucher I had received sometime back. The voucher was issued by Popular Book House located on Deccan just next to Good Luck. I had never been to this book store and hence I was very enthusiastic to check out this shop. The shop is there for quite a few years, but I never had visited it. Being a regular visitor of Crossword and Odyssey, I am used to the kind of book arrangements, space etc. I had my expectations lowered, given that the shop was not a big one, but definitely was expecting some organized display. But to my disappointment, the shop turned out to be much more chaotic. The section names and the books in that section were not really matching. Cooking, Health and Yoga are stacked in rack. Management, Self Help books were scattered all over. It was very difficult to check if you were looking for a particular category. Meghana had a reference of one of the management books - name and the author. Thankfully the owner (or manager?) knew the book and wh...