I have been travelling by train a lot lately and as most people will agree that railways have improved quite a lot in the past few days. The cleanliness has improved, and trains run more timely than earlier. Railway stations are also improving - better facilities are in place (Kiosks, Cyber Cafes, vending machines etc.) and the staff is more 'friendly'. At the same time, the price of railway travel has gone up - even though nominally. In addition to increase in fares, new overheads are been added. For example, now if you book a ticket for a different destination than the location from where you are booking your ticket - you have to pay a surcharge. (Internet booking always had a surcharge). The question is - is the price rise justified in wake of the fact that Railways are the primary mode of transport for the weaker economic sections of the society as well? I think yes. Take the case of railways introducing better toilets - each toilet will cost Rs 60K ($1500) - this appo...

I got a nice forward today from Sabya ... the essence is something like this Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. When someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. You just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. You’ll be happy you did. I guarantee it. If you want to read it in full, you can read it here.

Arbit Choudhury – First B School Comic Character of the world, created by the duo of Shubham Choudhury & Hemant Kumar Jain has bagged this year’s Manthan Award for India’s successful e-Content for Development 2007 on. [To know more on how I am related to Arbit read this ] Sabyasachi Ghosh a friend of ours accepted the award on our behalf ... The award was given in the e-Entertainment category giving a major boost towards the need to develop a comical sense even when engrossed in our beloved work related pursuits. The award giving ceremony was held on September 22, 2007 at IICC, New Delhi and is given annually to promote usage of ICT at the grassroots level for innovation and ultimately e-Content development in the country. “Arbit Choudhury” is a comic character which came into minds of two people while studying in a B-School. Fed up with the same routine for two long years, they saw the funny side of it and created a comic character on their lives at campus itself. With the corpor...

Angry boss: तुमने कभी उल्लू देखा है? Executive (सर झुकाते हुए): नहीं sir. Boss: नीचे क्या देख रहे हो ? मेरी तरफ देखो !!

My GMail Inbox suddenly seems to have received a lottery in storage space - my Inbox size has suddenly jumped to 3681 MB which till yesterday was hovering around 2900 MB. I tried to figure out as to what happened but all I could Google was a blog post written way back in March which predicted that it would take 5 years for Gmail to reach 3.5 GB ... Anyway, so like a kid who gets a 100 bucks ' bakshish ' from his grandpa - I should start planning as to how I am going to spend the 1/2 GB extra space that I now have (not that I have exhausted my current space, but still). For starters, I will no more bother to delete 'heavy forwards'; then I could restart receiving a lot of email from mailing list where I have set up 'no email' option. To avoid email overload because of this, I will simply filter these emails, make them skip the inbox and have them marked as read. I know what you are asking me now - why the hell receive those emails if you aren't going to read...

We will surely miss the stink in the railways :-) With the successful completion of a pilot project on a "green toilet" and its certification and endorsement by railway minister Lalu Prasad a few days back, the railways have decided to replace all old toilets with "green toilets in all trains, an official in Rail Bhavan said on Wednesday. Read the original story for more.

I am going to speak on the topic of Blogging 2.0 at barCampMumbai2 today ... With this we also will open the registration for the beta of our web Application bloozler .... you too can check it out here . I have been working on this concept since more than 1.5 year now, since I made this blog post. Hope you all find it an interesting and useful webApp .... Here is the presentation I will make.

न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचिन नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोsयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे “What dies is the body, the soul is neither born nor dead” - The Bhagwat Gita This line from the Gita provides succour to many of those who loose their loved ones. One likes to believe the theory – more so because it is from the Gita – the epitome of human experience from over the centuries. But there are times when one wonders about its authenticity – if the soul is indeed all powerful, why does it succumb to the illness of the body? So many physically challenged people find their self-confidence diminished throughout their lives. There are some who are mentally strong - but (1) they are more exceptions than a rule (2) most of them have had to go through rough times before they (re)gain their confidence. One feels even more compelled to question this belief when death comes by. Death – a biological phenomenon; manifestation of the simple fact that just like any other machine, org...

When Manmohan Singh took over from Atalji as the Prime Minister of the country, there was widespread euphoria of speedier economic reforms and speedy economic growth. After all Singh was the very pioneer of the liberalization. However, the political naiveté and rubber stamp status of the PM has only been re-confirmed in the past few months. While the nuclear deal and the Left holding the Govt. ransom is the recent most manifestation of the PM’s weakness, this government has been an underperformer from the beginning of its tenure. Arjun Singh pursuing his own casteist agenda through reservations, the repeat of Mandal days at AIIMS (where the meritorious students had to face water cannons), the back track on privatisation of Navratna PSU’s, the slowing down of Golden Quadrangle Project, and inaction towards the teething lack of infrastructure – the UPA’s track record is filled with inaction and ineptitude. There are a few streaks of positive one of them being year's budget which laid...

We started the next day by visiting the St. Francis Church and Basilica – both facing each other. It was interesting to know that Velha Goa (means Old Goa) – an abandoned town today was a popular commercial hub in the medieval times with a population of 200,000. At St Francis Church Sabya and Shubham at the Basilica Church One thing that irked me about my visits to the church was that none of the artefacts were accompanied by plaques or notices detailing their significance. Let’s accept that none in the world today understands Latin (except historians and linguists) and if you want tourists to know more about historical places, you need to put descriptions around. I think this is something that the clergy need to be more concerned about rather than protesting against movies. Puratatva Vibhaag ke pathhar We moved to Palolem beach from Velha Goa – the breathtaking journey through the Ghats of Goa. And Paloelem is heavenly!! I think we would have planned spending more time there had we kn...