Reliance and Merawala gana

I had taken two Reliance connections in 2006. The service was good, network was robust as compared to BSNL’s laughable alternative and the customer service was quite capable of dealing with anything thrown at them. Recently, I ported one of the accounts, which was CDMA to Reliance’s own GSM. I was quite happy with them.

Last week, the goodwill was suddenly broken. I got an SMS congratulating me that I had been successfully subscribed to ‘Mera wala gana’ service and Rs. 30 had been deducted from my balance. I had no idea what this goddamn service had to do with me nor how this crap came down on me. Luckily, there was an escape route – if I wanted to unsubscribe, I need to send an SMS to another number. I did this, with some heat, that I was compelled to do this ridiculous thing which I hadn’t asked for in the first place. Another SMS came that I have been unsubscribed from the service. On checking the balance, however, it dawned painfully clear on me that the money lost was indeed lost forever. They simply deducted the amount and won’t give my money back, even if I unsubscribed from their silly service. At about the same time, my second number got a message that it was successfully subscribed to ‘mantra’ service, with Rs. 30 going into thin air! If this was not cheating, what is?

I immediately contacted the customer care (*333), but mysteriously, all options to talk to a customer service executive has been blacked out. I tried the complaint service (198), but got the stock reply that all their customer service executives are attending calls and would I be kind enough to wait? I was definitely not kind, but waiting was the only real option. I waited and waited, minutes slipped past and got a full spectrum of advertisement from Reliance in the mean time. After 10 minutes, I disconnected since it seemed that they have deliberately tried to avoid any verbal communication with their service team.

I was determined to find a resolution to this issue or if it failed, to seek another service provider. I really wanted to have a chat with Anil Ambani and advice him on some other unethical measures he can personally undertake, if his company’s financial position is very bad, rather than stealing money from common people who earns money by hard work all day long. The TRAI web site was helpful in the extreme, as it gave the addresses of appellate authority of RCOM, whom I need to contact. It is called Online Telecom Consumer Complaints Monitoring System. I dispatched an email to the address, which was promptly replied to, the next day. An executive called me and said that my complaint will be resolved in two days and gave the phone number of another guy whose job was to see that every complaint is amicably resolved.

Two days passed, my money was not returned. Then the second executive called me and said that my balance has been restored and whether I was happy with the grievance redressal mechanism. I replied that I would be happy only after my money has been returned. At this point, he really became very gracious and announced that Rs. 100 will be credited to both of my phones as a goodwill gesture and hereafter, these two numbers will be removed from the purview of all such fake, cheating services. So, I’m happy now since I’m richer by about Rs. 140.

I thought this narrative would be helpful to others too. We are the customers and these bigwigs earn their livelihood from the money we pay them. We would give them money for efficient service and not for such gimmicks designed soley with the aim of cheating people. Let me be very clear, I have no complaints about RCOM’s quality of service and still think them one of the best. But, such unethical practices must be exposed in public and erring executives chastised a bit.

New Tourist Destination in Agra

Here's another reason to make Agra proud of! It is the home of the famous Agra Petha whose recipe slipped out of royal Mughal kitchens of Shah Jahan into the streets around 350 years before. There are thousands of shops selling this sweet delicacy made from ash gourd, but the original taste is said to be obtainable only from one vendor, Panchhi Petha Shop in Sadar Bazar. Besides the plain old petha, they now come in many varieties, with Angoori Petha and Kesar Petha claimed to be the best. There's even a sugar-free variant for diabetics!

Those who plan to visit Agra would do better to include Sadar Bazar to their list of destinations.

Source: The Hindu Magazine dt. June 10, 2012, Sunday

Shyamamadhavam - Readers' Loss

How can an educated, informed society allow itself to be cajoled into a blind alley, by wilful politicians? This is precisely what is happening in Kerala for the last one month and will continue to unfold for a few more days till the votes in Neyyattinkara byelection to the state assembly are polled. It was all let loose by the gruesome political murder of T P Chandrasekharan, a rebel-Marxist leader in Kozhikode district. The killers were by no means economical with their weapons. Cuts and slashes, numbering several dozen were found on the body. Though the Marxists blame it on hired goons, why should they waste enormous energy on unnecessary mutilation which was sure to arise public ire? The leader who was fearless (reckless, rather!) in the face of threats was claimed to be ideologically motivated and corruption-free.

When the din subsides, we must review the situation further. What was it that differentiate a Chandrasekharan from a Jayakrishnan Master, who was brutally hacked down in front of his students whom he were teaching while the blade slashed through his body? Or for that matter the countless cases of political murders for which Northern Kerala is so notorious? Clearly, something was different this time, otherwise the media and Congress-backed politicians wouldn’t have aroused such hue and cry for a martyred leader who was not even a Congressman.

Rewind to the sensational swearing-in of Manjalamkuzhi Ali, the fifth minister of Muslim League in the ruling UDF. Congress ate dust in front of the powerful Muslim lobby and surrendered meekly before the diktats of communal leaders who saw secularism as another tool for clinging on to power. Voting enmasse, for their own candidates, this lobby is bent on hacking democratic process to insignificance. Uncomfortably for UDF, the byelection to Neyyattinkara came close on the heels and some ruse was desperately needed to divert public attention from the fiasco. The LDF promptly obliged by killing of an opponent, which is one of their areas of specialisation as boastfully owned up by its Idukki district secretary. Chandrasekharan murder case will first be neatly tucked away into the inner pages and then put out altogether from newspapers, once the byelection got underway on June 2.

An unfortunate sideshow of the issue was stoppage of a poem by Prabha Varma, a Marxist fellow-traveller and the resident editor of the party’s organ, titled ‘Shyamamadhavam’ by the periodical Samakalika Malayalam. Its editor, S Jayachandran Nair, took strong exception to the poet’s alleged justification of the murder in some other publications. With a pompous editor’s note, he stopped the publication of the poem after just three instalments which startied from the issue dated May 18, 2012. Perhaps Jayachandran Nair would do more justice to the readers for the trash regularly being published in his journal. Most of the articles can be stereotyped into anti-liberalistic, anti-industry, anti-American, pro-Palestinian to the verge of Al Qaeda-like propaganda and pro-Maoist, who wreak havoc in India’s eastern forests. The editor must understand that readers willingly suffer all this junk, only because the magazine is liberally endowed with literary gems once in a while. With the stoppage of Shyamamadhavam, which is a soliloquial treatise on Lord Krishna who is introspecting on the unjustified ways he used to win the Kurukshetra War. This is a good literary work unseen for a long time in Malayalam (at least, among those I have read!). Of course, the party’s organ has decided to continue the publication, but who would read that magazine, which questions the judgment and intelligence of a reader?

The readers obviously lost this time too.

Where are the Watchdogs?

Today is Vishu in Kerala, the festival commemorating vishuvam (summer equinox). Traditionally it is an occasion of light and joy being bang in the middle of summer. Questions like what’s the business of celebrating equinox is mid-April is not relevant in Kerala. We’re like that from the very beginning. We cling on to some beliefs and ideologies which are proven outdated and corrosive elsewhere in the world. Likewise, complacent time keeping pushed Vishu to mid-April, if the slipping goes unchecked, the month of Medam may fall drenched in monsoon rains in a future era (at a rate of 1 day in 72 years). When will a person of the calibre of Gregory XIII appear in Kerala?

 

However this post is not on the astronomical relevance of the local calendar. It served only to show the I-am-different attitude shown by its people. From March 20 onwards, newspaper agents are on strike demanding higher rates of commission and incentives and other facilities and what not! After passing time lethargically for a few days, the newspapers kicked in to provide alternate channels of distribution, which is the most meagre. You can’t expect people to go out early morning each day to buy a newspaper from a nearby store. Even the people who do it now would later postpone it to a more convenient time, which would turn out to be very late in the end. Popular habit of having the newspaper before breakfast has long gone astray, but surprisingly, people are taking it in their strides. Should such a situation is allowed to continue for long, we would lose the custom and end up depending on visual media to step into the shoes of the print media.

Frankly, newspaper agents’ demands are outrageous and should not be yielded to. Most of them covertly ask the newspaper establishments to increase prices and pay them higher rate of commission. It was only a year or so they began fleecing the subscribers to pay service charge – a practice unheard of anywhere in the world in newspaper delivery! The paper companies need to look for alternative delivery mechanisms to provide the daily paper at the door steps of the customer. You’ve to push the paper to the readers, since you can’t expect them to pull it for long. Or otherwise, if you plan to buckle under the agents’ pressure, do it fast and keep the papers flowing once more.

Newspapers and journalists are the watchdogs in a democracy, to keep it from the greedy machinations of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. Where are the watchdogs in Kerala now?

Prediction of rank in LDC (Ernakulam) exam

Ever since my wife wrote the LDC (Lower Division Clerk) – Ernakulam district exam and was on tenterhooks regarding the rank, she was always scouring the net for possible position in the rank list. She got 64 marks and the probable list contained 2202 persons. So, I offered her a prediction, based on statistics. It was a very very long time that I’d got anything to do with statistics, so a thorough search on the Net had to be made. The calculation proceeded along the following lines.

Representative sample for proportions n₀ = Z².pq / e²  (Eqn 1)

Where 
n₀ = sample size, Z² = abscissae of normal curve that cuts off an area at the tails (1 – desired confidence level, taken as 95%), 
e = desired level of precision (taken as +/-5%), 
p = estimated proportion of an attribute that is present in the population (taken as 0.5 for maximum variability), 
q = 1-p.

Z = 1.96 for 95% confidence level (from normal curve)

Substituting the values in Eqn 1, n₀ = 385

Applying finite population correction, n = n₀ / (1 + (n₀ – 1)/N) (Eqn 2)

Where n = required sample size, n₀ = obtained in previous step and N = population (2202, for this case)

Substituting in Eqn 2, n = 327

The roll numbers of shortlisted candidates were exported to Excel and a macro was run to identify 327 random numbers from the list. Marks obtained by these numbers were collected from Kerala PSC’s website, tabulated in Excel and sorted. My wife’s marks were introduced in the middle of people who obtained exactly 64 marks each. She came at 41^st place.

This was for a sample size for 327, extrapolating to the total, 41 x 2202 / 327 = 276.

Applying precision of +/-5%, her rank can be anywhere between 165 to 385. This I say with 95% confidence, though I have a hunch that it will be between 250-300.

I’m writing this on Mar 15, 2012, the results are expected by this month-end. We’ll see then!

31.3.2012

The results have been published. Her rank came out to be 254.
Prediction is 100% successful. Statistics is great!

Seven Categories of Religious People

Richard Dawkins categorises people into seven categories, based on their religious beliefs and the probability which they assign to divine existence. This makes for curious reading and helps people understand what is meant by agnosticism.

1. Strong theist: 100% probability of God. In the words of C G Jung, 'I do not believe, I know'.

2. Very high probability but short of 100%. De facto theist. 'I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there'.

3. Higher than 50% but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. 'I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God'

4. Exactly 50%. Completely impartial agnostic. 'God's existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable'.

5. Lower than 50% but not very low. Technically agnostic, but leaning towards atheism. 'I don't know whether God exists, but I'm inclined to be sceptical'.

6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain, but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there'.

7. Strong atheist. 'I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung "knows" there is one'.

Source: The God Delusion by R. Dawkins

Book-banning Indian Democracy

Freedom of expression is an inalienable right of a citizen living in a democracy. India eminently guarantees this freedom to its citizens in its constitution under article 19(1)(a) which reads "All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression". Before the ink drying on these letters, there comes a proviso in article 19(2), stating "Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence". No one objects to preventing such expressions which threatens the soverignty, security, foreign relations and integrity of the country, contempt of court, incitement to violence and offending decency or morality. But public order? That is a sweeping generalization which in effect nullifies the spirit of the freedom granted. This is a loophole any government can adopt to stifle dissent. In a country which is swamped with fanatics and religious minorities whose passions are offended by even innocuous cartoons, no wonder the ruling faction chose this subclause to summarily ban books which they don't approve of. Below is a list of books banned in India at present. (Source: The Hindu, dt. Mar 4, 2012).


1. Hindu Heaven - Max Wylie (1934)
2. The Face of Mother India - Katherine Mayo (1936)
3. Old Soldier Sahib - Frank Richards (1936)
4. The Land of the Lingam - Arthur Miles (1937)
5. Mysterious India - Moki Singh (1940)
6. The Scented Garden (Anthropology of the sex life in the Levant) - Bernhard Stern (1945)
7. What has Religion done for Mankind - Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (1955)
8. Rama Retold - Aubrey Menen (1955)
9. Dark Urge - Robert W Taylor (1955)
10. The Ramayana - Aubrey Menen (1956)
11. Captive Kashmir - Aziz Beg (1958)
12. The Heart of India - Alexander Campbell (1959)
13. The Lotus and the Robot - Arthur Koestler (1960)
14. Nine Hours to Rama - Stanley Wolpert (1962)
15. Unarmed Victory - Bertrand Russell (1963)
16. Nepal - Tony Hagen (1963)
17. Ayesha - Kurt Frishchler (1963)
18. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D H Lawrence (1964)
19. The Jewel in the Lotus (A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East) - Allen Edwards (1968)
20. The Evolution of the British Empire and Commonwealth from the American Revolution - Alfred Le Ray Burt (1969)
21. A Struggle between Two Lines over the Question of How to Deal with U.S. Imperialism - Fan Asid-Chu (1969)
22. Man from Moscow - Greville Wynne (1970)
23. Early Islam - Desmond Steward (1975)
24. Nehru: A Political Biography - Michael Edwards (1975)
25. India Independent - Charles Bettelheim (1976)
26. China's Foreign Relations since 1949 - Alan Lawrence (1978)
27. Who Killed Gandhi - Lourenco de Sadvandor (1979)
28. Understanding Islam through Hadis - Ram Swarup (1982)
29. Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim - Sunanda Datta-Ray (1984)
30. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie (1988)
31. Soft Target: How the Indian Intelligence Service Penetrated Canada - Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew (1989)
32. The Polyester Prince - Hamish McDonald (1998)
33. The True Furqan - Al Saffee and Al Mahdee (1999)
34. Islam: A Concept of Political World Invasion - R V Bhasin (2007 - Maharashtra)
35. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India - Joseph Lelyveld (2011 - Gujarat)


Even Bertrand Russell couldn't escape the censoring of some obscure chicken-headed bureaucrats!