After much waiting, the day of departure was finally here. We were all booked on a late night flight to Delhi from Mumbai. Soumen decided to head to the airport directly from his office at Powai. Since my home was pretty much on the way to the airport, I hitched a ride with him. We left fairly early considering that we might run into traffic. However, the traffic was light and we were the first to arrive at the airport. Ajay arrived shortly after us. We were then waiting for Hansel and Gargi, when I unexpectedly ran into Avinash, an batchmate of mine from NMIMS.
Gargi and Hansel soon reached the airport. Gargi turned up with this huge rucksack in which I’m pretty sure she could have fitted herself into. After checking in that “heavy” luggage, we moved to the departure lounge where we grabbed a quick dinner of sorts at the airport.
Our flight to Delhi was on time, and about two odd hours later we were at Delhi Airport. We grabbed some more grub at the Delhi Airport, before moving to the departure terminal to catch our flight to Leh.

This post begins a series of posts that will appear over the next one week chronicling my Ladakh Journey. Each post will relate to one day of the trip.
But like all good things, this story would not be complete without first giving a little peek at the origins of this trip.
Well, my flirtation with the idea of going to Ladakh began about 3 years ago. At that time, Soumen and Jeevandeep, my colleagues at JP Morgan were toying with the idea of going to Ladakh. For some reason, their plans didnt work out. However, I was intrigued with the idea. Shortly after I got into one of the premier business schools in Mumbai and I had to shelve all plans till I finished my course. But I had planned on heading to either Sikkim or Ladakh when I finished the course, ideally in the time between the end of the course and the start of a new job. Continue reading ‘The Ladakh Journey: The Story behind the trip’ »

Some time back I had posted about this new Android App that I was working on which calculated Rickshaw Fares. Well the good news is that the App is live !!! The App is called “Cheater Meter” and you can download the app for Android 1.6 and upwards from the website. If you don’t have an Android phone (or even a “smart” phone for that matter), don’t fret – we have a web enabled version as well. Just point your phone’s browser to cheatermeter.in and use the web-based mobile application.

So far we have added features that let you calculate the correct fare for both Taxi’s as well as Autorickshaw’s in Mumbai. In addition to this, you can also calculate the correct midnight fare for journeys after 12:00 midnight. In case you have a problem with the autorickshaw, you can call the toll free helpline started by the RTO, right from the application itself.

I am pretty excited about this application, and we do have a lot of more nifty features that we will roll out soon (including our entry into the Android Marketplace). Please do use the application and let me know how you liked it or why you didn’t like it and what features/improvements we can add in future versions.

PS: We are also on Twitter, so please follow for updates.

I’m headed to Ladakh at long last. This trip is finally happening after along wait of more than 3 years and many cancelled plans. Will blog all about this trip when I’m back. Ciao!!

Cheater Meter

I have been a bit busy of late, so its been a while since my last post. What have I been up to of late ? Well not much other than “work” and a few pet side projects.

One of them materialized very recently as a result of a hike in the autorickshaw fares in the city. Earlier, one could calculate the fare payable by the simple formula of (10*meter-reading)-1. Life was good, but noooo… the autorickshaw unions had to go on strike to demand a raise. Following a very successful flash strike, the government relented and hiked the administered price to Rs.11 as the base fare for the first 1.6km and Rs.6.5 for every km thereafter. The result? Well other than the increased cost of an auto ride, the painful mental math needed to calculate the correct fare. In this case (13*meter-reading)-2.

This got me thinking – Could I somehow make it easier for me to calculate this on my phone? So I got round to creating a simple android application for the phone (tentatively called cheater meter).

The result is a fairly nifty app that lets you calculate the fare payable for both autorickshaws and taxi’s, created in record time over two evenings (pats self on back). I’m still working out a few kinks in it and it should be coming to an app store near you soon. There will also be a web app for all the non android phones out there (in collaboration with my good pal Aditya). Watch this space for more.

Tedx Mumbai was an independently organized TED event that was held in at BlueFrog, Mumbai on 3rd April 2010. Unfortunately for me, the event was held on the day before Easter, and so even applying to attend was out. Around the same time I was dabbling with a Ruby Script to automatically collate tweets matching a few keywords and tags. So I thought, let’s collate all the tweets from the event and then see the event from the eyes of twitter.
Some frantic coding later, my script was live on my server and I was set. Or so I thought.
The very next day, halfway on the way to work I realized that I had forgotten to setup a script to monitor the hashtag for the event. Out came my new Android phone to the rescue!! I managed to access my server, through Net2FTP and then copied the existing script and modified it using a web based editor and set up the script using my control panel, all from the phone. Whew!!
Net result was that I was setup, but about an hour late, so I missed out on a few tweets. I let my scripts run for the entire day as well as the next. What follows is an attempt to make some sense of the many voices out there. I do hope this bit of random craziness, gives you something interesting to read. Continue reading ‘Tedx Mumbai – A Twitter Analysis’ »

I had a great time at the inaugural edition of Ignite Mumbai which was held at Cafe Goa yesterday. For those who don’t know, Ignite is a stage where people wanting to get across their ideas have five minutes to do so. The kicker is the strict time limit and the automatic slide transitions. The talks could be on any topic under the sun and a fair amount of them end up being hilariously funny as well. All in all, it can be an intense short session where you can be exposed to as many ideas in a short while as possible. I kind of liked this format as it lets you soak in nuggets of information and ideas in a short focused time as opposed to the longer format of say a TED. Continue reading ‘Ignite Mumbai – The unvarnished truth’ »

IPL-Gate is all over the news, Mr.Tharoor, our debonair Minister of State (MoS) for the Ministry of External Affairs (MeA) is one of the first casualties. What I haven’t been able to fathom is the large scale support and dishing of the good minister in public forums like twitter. I haven’t really been able to get around the idea of him having done something drastically illegal that would merit the kind of polarization we are seeing. Let’s look at some of the allegations against the good minister.

• Allegation #1 – Mr. Tharoor used his position and influence to get the deal done in favor for the Kochi consortium
  Hmm…this is an interesting one, considering that there is a certain politician who is virtually the patron saint of Indian Cricket and who could have gotten the deal done with more certainty and less hoopla. Also the winning bid for Kochi stood at Rs.1,476 crores, while the losing bid was apparently way lower. For someone who is supposed to have helped “rig” the process, he certainly overbid and did a poor job at that. So what exactly is Mr.Tharoor supposed to have helped do ?
• Allegation #2 – Mr. Tharoor received Rs.70 crore as a fee for his role, that he sought to disguise as free “sweat” equity paid to one Ms. Sunanada Pushkar
  Again, for doing a poor job I don’t think you get a reward. Still lets see this too. Well, first of all it’s the Kochi Consortium’s money, they can very well give away all of it if they wish. I don’t think we should be bothered as long as its not public money that finds the way into that 70 crore amount. Also, remember that the IPL and BCCI are private trusts, and contrary to public belief not arms of the government. Secondly, on the issue of tax evasion, while I don’t really know what the IT rules are, I don’t think taxes really come into the picture on notional income which isn’t yet realized. It would be like paying taxes every time your bonus shares go up in price. However here I may be wrong.
• Allegation #3 – Mr. Tharoor’s antics in public did not befit a minister of his stature
  Guilty as charged. Mr. Tharoor what on earth were you thinking ?

To summarize, in my opinion, Mr. Tharoor may or may not be guilty of points one or two, but its certainly not right for us to crucify the man before all the facts tumble out (and boy are they tumbling out).

So far Mr. Tharoor only seems to be guilty of being in love with the limelight, and lets hope for his sake that it only seems to be that once all the dust has settled

I’ve been using a Nokia 6100 as my primary cell phone for pretty much the last six odd years and so I finally decided it was high time that I brought myself kicking and screaming into the smartphone era.

After much pondering I decided that what I was really looking for was a phone that featured a camera, could play music (with a radio), surf the internet, get me on twitter etc on the go, allow me to install apps, show my location using GPS + maps and maybe allow me edit documents.  The first phone that came to mind was the iPhone, but in my opinion it was way overpriced at about Rs.33, 000 (I could replace my desktop I think for that price, plus I’m no fan of Apple’s pricing and for how it treats its users). Initially I had narrowed down to either a Nokia 5800 or Nokia E72. Both phones had most of everything I wanted and were a lot cheaper than the iPhone. On a whim I decided to check out what android phones were available in the market, and after much thought I narrowed down on the Samsung Galaxy Spica. Continue reading ‘Samsung Galaxy Spica (i5700) Review’ »

Sometime last month, my good pal and former colleague from JP Morgan, Soumen asked me whether I wanted to accompany him and another pal of his on a trip to Dapoli. The description of the place seemed interesting and there were forts nearby (have a fascination for old forts), so I decided to tag along.

Dapoli, a small town in Ratnagiri, along the Konkan coastline is about a 5 hour drive from Mumbai. The place boasts of being a mini-hill station, as the elevation rises quickly to 800ft above sea level within just 7km from the sea shore. It has a number of beautiful beaches close by, some old forts, an excellent agricultural university, old temples, caves, hot water springs, parasailing, ATV rides on the beach, dolphin spotting, plenty of spots for birding and some fantastic local cuisine. In short, there is something for everyone at Dapoli. Continue reading ‘Dapoli – Serene heaven by the coast’ »