I posted a letter

I clutched the envelope tight as I drove to office this morning. It must be posted today, I told myself. I couldn't help notice the contrast between the dingy basement room functioning as Kundalahalli Post Office and the steel and glass Cosmos Mall gleaming on the other side of the road. I queued up behind half a dozen people at the counter (wo)manned by a nervous looking fidgety lady alone. It was interesting to see what gets transacted there. A vermilioned lady was getting her Post Office savings bank passbook updated and asking questions nineteen to the dozen. The postmistress violently stamped the receipt and sent her packing. Next, an elderly gentleman wanted to know how much it would cost to send different denominations of money to Pune by Money Order (yes, people still do those, not everyone has access to NEFT). He was given a chit of paper with the different combinations possible and politely asked to rejoin the queue after deciding. A few money orders and speedposts later came my turn. I suddenly realized that I didn't even know what denomination of stamp I needed for my ordinary post letter. Turned out to be Rs 5. I bought four of these so that I don't have to queue up again this decade. Stuck one onto my envelope and sent it snailing towards the Income Tax office in Electronic City. Another study in contrast that. I had to come to a brick and mortar post office for the first time in a couple of years, because I needed to post a receipt generated from filing my Income Tax returns (brace for this) completely electronically over the internet this year!
As I walked back to the car, I wondered when I'd possibly have to visit a post office next. Probably not in a long time. And the reason for the reduced popularity of post offices (at least in urban India) is probably not mainly due to email. I'd guess the handwritten letter was dealt a death blow more by the ubiquitous cellphone. Very few would want to write a letter when they can talk directly. And then for the purposes of sending parcels, the zillions of private couriers probably do a lot better job than IndiaPost.
Ultimately it was enjoyable to actually transact communication the forgotten way. Hope the letter reaches though.

On Twitter

I've started to microblog on link:http://www.twitter.com/chandradip

Forum Value Mall Whitefield

So the mall opened on 18th June and we were thinking of having a look especially as it was so close by. So today we went in. Parked on the 3rd Floor (free multilevel parking, enjoy till it lasts!) and went in. The first thing we noticed was that it was pretty spacious. There was a children's dance competition on at the foyer. We went down to watch. There are 2 real coconut trees in the foyer! We also went into the MegaMart store, where this picture is from. Pretty decent place overall although a lot of outlets are yet to open. Right now we're investigating the intriguingly named "rattrap". Let's see :-)

McGraw-Hill: Jacked Up : Book

I finished up reading a book by Jack Welch's speechwriter. Turned out to be very very anecdotal. Essentially it had a single central message - don't bore your audience. Rest of the book was (using one of his terms) "hamburger helper". But unputdownable nonetheless thanks to the great narrative on life around Jack. McGraw-Hill: Jacked Up :

Sony Ericsson P800

I had a fairly short learning curve with cellphones. Pretty soon I'd figured which websites would review the hottest cellphones and reveal yet to be launched ones. In fact some of my friends used to ask me for these URLs. I think Google search hadn't matured as much at that time (all the others like Altavista, Hotbot, Dogpile were still smoldering as they died down). So, I came across this excitement about the launch of Sony Ericsson's first ever smartphone. The amazing P800. It had everything you could think of - and more. I was just wide eyed in wonder at all the stuff it could do.

One of the biggest attractions to most people was the fact that it had a digital camera built in. Actually that was probably it's weakest point because it did pretty poor grainy images. However, that's what people were interested in the most. So I spent a princely sum to make the P800 my own (around INR 30k, about 750$, IIRC). Sometime in 2003.

The P800 was the first Sony Ericsson-branded smartphone and was feature rich: built-in camera, a pen-operated touch-screen, media player, Web browser, organiser functions, PC synchronisation, GPRS, MMS, Bluetooth and Java. 3rd party apps had started appearing on handango. It had a great form factor as far as smartphones go. And it was curvy in a cute way. All subsequent models from Sony Ericsson went business like steel greyesque straightlined ones.

I used it for a lot of stuff. I got GPRS enabled and even used to surf the web. And Yahoo IM though Agile Messenger was a commonly used app. I heavily used this till mid 2005. In between at one time the screen broke (I'd dropped it) and I had to give it for an expensive repair (cost about 200$). I still have this phone as a back-up and I'd last used this in 2009!

Overall, I think this was a phone much ahead of it's time and I thoroughly enjoyed having it. Many phones I had since then were lot less impressive.

The thing I like the most? The rotating jog dial on the left of the phone. This made it possible to scroll and click on this phone even with one hand. I just love this feature. I guess it's a SONY proprietary design (the j70 had it too) and I miss this on most other cellphones.

Sony j70

Well, it was not just the battery problem with Siemens c35i alone. I confess that I wasn't immune to the social pressure of possessing a smart cellphone. I had also discovered the Burma Bazaar area while buying accessories for the c35i (besides the data cable, I'd also got car chargers, covers, cases, batteries, handsfree etc). On one of these trips I saw the pleasantly trilling metallic cellphone. On enquiry, I found this to be a SONY (which was unusual - there wasn't a SONY cellphone I'd seen before) and pretty well priced. I straightaway went in for that. It was sometime in 2002.




Subsequently some of my friends also bought this very same model. It was a very elegant design. And the polyphonic tones were very pleasing to the ear. Folks with the same model could exchange proprietary canned picture messages between themselves. It also had a speakerphone built in. Overall very nice and sturdy. Battery life was never a problem. I didn't have a handsfree cable and it wasn't available in the market. I remember pestering my roommate to get me one when he was on a trip to the US. I don't think I ever got one. Because by then I was already eyeing my next cellphone. And this was completely to meet a want, not a need...

Siemens c35i

It was not for long that I could resist the allure of a cellphone. I think I succumbed in the mid of February 2001. By then many more cellphone models had proliferated. And the rate plans had also become a bit easier on the wallet. After a decent amount of research (there wasn't really a whole lot of options still), I zeroed in on the c35i from Siemens.




For it's day it was probably a fairly advanced model. And it was in the top half of the models sold in Bangalore (at that time). The more attractive aspect was the very curvaceous design. The buttons had a bluish green backlight. And it had many features. Pretty soon I discovered that a data cable would open up newer frontiers. Based on some colleagues input, I hunted out the Burma Bazaar in Gandhibazar area (near Tribhuvan cinema). And got myself a data cable. It used to plug into the serial port of the laptop. With this I tried a lot of things. Most notably ringtones and screensavers. Even though this model was fairly popular, most people had stock ringtones. So I used to bask in the glow of ringtones based on my favorite songs and guitar riffs. Folks started coming to me to get ringtones and graphics updated on their screens.
The only trouble I had with this phone was bad battery life. Initially I had a very expensive rateplan and so it wasn't much of a bother as I wouldn't make\receive many calls. But soon after I received a connection from office which started seeing very heavy usage as tonnes of official calls were being made. In fact, at some times I used to rack up some of the highest phone bills my office had seen. That time, the poor battery life started being a big problem. And I started to look at an alternative...