Mumbai Coffee House

ring ring Dead voice: we have a tie up with an insurance company so please waste your phone time and listen us while I drone on Sultry machine voice....welcome to Big International Bank, please enter your account number followed by hash brown potatoes me:done SMV Please enter your date of birth in .... format me: done SMV Sorryyyyy I can't recognise your date of birth, please enter your date of birth me: done SMV Sorryyyyyyy I can't recognise your DOB Confused Voice: Sir this is Jane Singh how can I help you Me: I want a change of address CV: Please verify your pin number on the phone. me: done CV: Oh sorry our system is not working today. Please answer the following questions. 1 what is the specific gravity of hydrogen 2 How was the thrid person to climb Mount Everest 3 What was your mother's vavourite maiden snack 4 What is your overdraft limit Me: what is an over draft limit? CV: sir, that's the wrong answer. Please call again Me: But I need to change my ad...

I caught snatches of the coverage of the cyclone Aila in Calcutta and Eastern India on Bengali news channels. On one side there is the terrible loss of life and property. On the other hand there are people who were out on work and stranded because there was no public transport. My mother and brother were two of those. Thank God for the metro. That at least helped people to some extent. But buses? No! Taxis? No! Autos? No! The frantic faces of people of TV were really sad to see. And from what i saw on TV today, it is the same in Punjab with many stranded thanks to the riots there. And this happens everywhere in India. Whether its in the commercial capital, Mumbai, the ruling party's current darling, West Bengal, the Prime Minister's state, Punjab... any place that you can think of. The calamity could be natural like a cyclone or floods or man made like terrorist attacks, bomb blasts, riots or the current violence in Punjab over the Gurudwara in Vienna. Innocent people get stuc...

Under your tough shell lies a frisky soul Snoozing in a corner when you are alone You somersault when we are around Thinking you are S piderman you try to cross the glass walls You don't speak a word as you stare into the world But when we are around, baby you do rock Your needs are little as are you Six fish sticks, twice at eight With your beady eyes you look into mine God only knows what goes around in your primitive mind Dunno if you know our days together are numbered But why think of that while we are together

There was a lot of enthusiasm amongst folks I know on the American elections. Barack Obama fans in India were all over Facebook , Blogspot , Twitter rooting for him. Recently I have come across some folks questioning the apparent apathy of such people when it came to the Indian elections. Questions raised were whether such people even voted here. Or on why there was hardly any chatter on social network sites on the Indian elections. Now let me lay my cards down in the beginning. I voted. It was not easy to get registered but Imanaged it over three years. I am sure many would have tried but couldn't. Secondly I too was cynical of the obsession over the American elections. Especially if one was not active in the Indian political scene. Having said that I must say that I can relate to those who were over the moon with Obama but inert on India. In the American elections you had a man who was inspiring. A man has appeal cut across economic and social classes. Who was fighting agai...

Well the election results are out. It seems that we will have a fairly dominant ruling party after ages. One might subscribe to part of their policies and not to the others, but overall this should be a good thing. Hopefully the markets and economy will respond well to this and hopefully some things will get done in India for a change. Democracy is fine to a point but one needs some autonomy while leading, in all walks of life. While both the Congress and the BJP have their specific stances, the fact is that practicality rules when it comes to governance so I don't think either would have been disastrous for India. Example of this would be the communist government in Bengal which woos industrialists or the BJP government which never pushed its Ram Mandir stuff when it was ruling the country two elections back. The other great surprise is the Left losing in West Bengal. I left Bengal a decade back so I don't know whether this would have been a surprise to those who live th...

you are probably here because you like surfing. You might even blog. At least the net means a lot to you. But what do you do if you cant access the comp. For eg i have a back pain today and should be in bed. Taking out the laptop and pounding away is not a good idea. At least the fancy e 71 which k gave me helps me stay connected. But nothing like tv or a good book if you are in bed i guess.. Unless the geeks come up with something where you have a comp in the form and size of a book. Is such a thing there?

i will write a more detailed post later as i am quite drained out tonight. This is for all of you who have been following our housing society woes and have been supporting us. The special general body meeting happened today. And, in short, we won! We swept the floor with the museum piece. And everyone supported us. Quite a fight, full drama. More later ...

I earlier wrote about the delusional secretary and his Mickey Mouse committee in our housing society who weren't allowing us to rent out our house. Since then my parents in law swooped in and got us a letter from the deputy registrar directing the society to let us rent our place. We found a tenant after losing four months of rent thank to the society goons. And suddenly the society, who had not replied to our application for four months, has called for a general body meeting to 'enforce' a ruling passed by them two months back not allowing people to rent out our house. That meeting's tomorrow. We have pumped ourselves up for the fight. We have figured out that we have a solid case: the society cannot stop a person from renting their house and passing any such law is illegal the Maharashtra Co-operation act, section 79, 2001 actually encourages people to rent out their vacant flats to help bring down property prices we have seen cases where court rulings have overruled...

I never thought I would cheer for Sachin and Jayasurya when they were bashing the Knightriders team at the IPL . Nor did I think I would clap for Yusuf Pathan when he helped the Rajasthan team with the Super Over against Knightriders team. But I must thank Badshah D@#$% for converting me to a Mumbai Indian fan. And for hating the Knightriders. First he drops Kolkata from Kolkata Knightriders . He probably thought that his own name was big enough to carry the team. He didn't need Kolkatans by his side. Well he is mistaken. It was the passionate Bengali which made KKR the most successful franchise last time. And dropping Kolkata has got the home city against KR. And my question is that who gave him the permission to drop ' Kolkata' from the name? Why is this the only IPL team without a regional identity? And secondly the way he has treated Saurav Ganguly was sickening. It's not that other captains have not been dropped. Dravis , Laxman were removed as...

I voted for the first time yesterday, since I moved into Mumbai ten years back. I had voted twice in Calcutta when I stayed there. It was fairly easy then as the political party cadres would ensure that your name was on the electoral list. Conscientious Bengali that I am, I tried to get my name on the voters list a few years back. This was before Jaago Re, Lead India, Rock The Vote tried to get people to vote. So I took Kainaz with me and went to a nearby school in 2006 to submit our voting forms. The place where they were taking the forms were chaotic. We found it tough to get through the officials as they were speaking in the local language of Marathi. We filled our forms and hoped for the best. We didn't hear anything after that till I once got a call from an official for verifying my antecedents. The problem was that I was out of the country. Kainaz went and apparently the gentleman told her that we would need to go to the office once again. Three years passed since then...