Cabbage Pathrode

Savouring Cabbage Pathrode at Woody's. On the left is what remained of green chilli bajji.

Little Red Riding Hoodlum

So we bought junior his first bicycle today. Alongwith came a red helmet. All was well till we put the bicycle in the car's boot. Then we realized that junior and his headgear weren't to be parted. For the rest of the evening we're shopping with helmet in tow (and junior underneath it). Sure makes it easy to spot him in crowded shops though.

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.