For you, a thousand times over

"Kite Runner" - I simply loved this book. Just brought back emotions from the tough times I face when I feel helpless, the feelings not very much different from what Amir agha faced. I still find it hard to believe that I took so long to find this book. A page turner, and one that was really great. Proof of it, is the time right now - 04:50 am, and i need to get up for classes in the morning.

Vodafone all over the MRTS

During my recent visit to Chennai, there were two changes that I noticed in the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS).

One, they have increased the frequency of services after extending it till Velachery. Being a stone's throw away from the Greenways Road station made this especially useful because now I had a service in any direction at least once in 15 minutes. Now, I don't have to worry even if I miss the train. Compare this to the time when if I miss the train, I either had to wait for 50 minutes to catch the next train or scurry along the Greenways Road looking for an exorbitantly priced auto rickshaw service.

Besides, the Railways has also installed a display saying when the next train is due for arrival. Though this wasn't working in most of the stations when I visited Chennai, the station authorities promised that they will be up and running very soon.

The other thing was the advertisements on the trains. While I am used to seeing companies advertising on the top strip of the outside of the train (local company ads like Ramraj, Dixcy etc used to come there), this time I saw an entire train painted in bright red with Vodafone ads all along. It's better to see the pictures than explain it in words.

This just tells me that the Railways are improving in getting revenues and Vodafone is creative enough to find new and better ways of advertising and reaching out to people.

eRail.in - A cute way of Searching for Trains in India

I had been wanting to post on this site for quite some time, but some sort of inertia had crept into me that I stopped blogging altogether in the past few days. But now that I've broken this inertia by posting one article, I feel like posting more! :)

This post is for all those people who are exasperated with the way we have to search for trains in India. The Indian Railways run website, is not the great way to search for trains. The site design is absolutely bad, and it takes one quite a lot of navigation to search for a train and it's availability. This is where eRail comes - a simple and very nicely designed site. The entire process of searching for trains, checking availability, getting the fares and looking at the train journey route are all packaged in a single page without any need to even scroll the page. The site also includes a map showing the route from the source to the destination station, courtesy Google Maps. The only functionality waiting to be integrated is e-booking.

Some screenshots from the site:

A Car for the Masses

The launch of Tata's 1 lakh car (Tata Nano) was something that I couldn't wait to see happening. After the scores of rumours over the past couple of years on how the car would be looking like and what strategiesTata Motors would be following to cut costs, the end product seemed pretty good. My opinion about having such a low-priced car was pretty much in the middle. On the one hand there is the pollution concerns and the infrastructure getting clogged due to hundreds of thousands of cars getting added, while on the other hand is the fact that this increases the reach of cars.

A couple of days back, I happened to overhear this conversation while travelling by the local train from Rau to Indore (now, this itself needs a separate post).

Person X: Did you happen to see the 1-lakh car?
Person Y: Yeah, Tata's car.
X: Seems like a good option to go for it.
Y: Oh why so, it's only as big as an auto.
X: But, it's a car. Small, but looks very comfortable. We just need to pay some money upfront and the balance can be paid in instalments of Rs.2300-2500 over 4 years. And already there seems to be a lot of queue for booking. It's very useful for a family.
Y: The engine is in the back.
X: Yeah, and the bonnet is in the front. So your items will be under your eyes only...

This conversation happened in a train which is used mostly by the people from lower middle class and local farmers. It opened my eyes to the fact that here was a product which is enabling a whole new set of people to converse on a topic which they wouldn't have even cared to talk about a few months ago.

The competition from the likes of Bajaj, Ford and others will add fuel to the competitive fire and help improve the reach of cars to the general Indian public. I only hope that theTatas cash in on their first-mover advantage in a big way before others come in.

Read this article by Robin expressing his views against the environmentalists' opposing of Tata Nano.