I had heard of IRCTC offering users the facility of booking long distance train tickets on SMS, but dismissed it as a fancy concept because one of the more involved activities in buying a long distance train ticket in India is to figure out availability of seats on the trains on the specific dates required, which would at best be a usability nightmare on a mobile phone
But this is something amazing, heard about it briefly on FM radio on the way to work this morning and later at work, a colleague pointed me to the news article. The concept involves enabling commuters to book local train tickets in Mumbai using a mobile phone through SMS. As against a cumbersome process of standing in long queues to book tickets, you just have to SMS your origin & destination stations to a number (along with something called a customer id) and bham! a return SMS will give you a confirmed ticket (with a time stamp and unique transaction reference code) and the amount will be debited from a pre-paid account (which I assume is being viewed as a proxy for the ticket coupons which commuter currently buy in advance and validate before every journey)
It would be much better if the amount is charged directly to user’s mobile bill (or pre-paid balance), which would ensure greater acceptability
The thing I like about this is that, here is a potential application that offers a fantastic direct benefit to the users, saves time and is easy too use. Nations such as Japan might think of fancy chips and smart card embedded in mobiles for such transactions (Felica), but in India, a vast majority of users (of various literacy level) have figured SMS out and any potential mobile application needs to be SMS enabled to succeed (India still has a long way to go in terms of GPRS/3G penetration in networks and also handsets)
From Mid-Day.com
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Can someone tell me what Suresh Raina is doing in the team ?
Ganguly kept out of Pak ODIs
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It has been the week from hell for Google. Once the much-loved and unblemished hero of the web, the giant internet group has suffered a series of blows that have exposed for the first time its feet of clay. The company that stood for “freedom of the net” is accused of humiliatingly submitting to Chinese censorship, conniving at the suppression of freedom in Tibet, exploiting the work of American writers and of running what is arguably the biggest porn and violence website in the business
An extremely well written piece bu Ivan Fallon on how Google is now the big enemy for corporations across the world and how Google seems to be getting into a mode wherein it is making the transition from the most loved enterprise in the world to to being amongst the most hated. Move aside Microsoft, Google’s gonna take your place in the hate stakes
Via Independent Online Edition – Science & Technology
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Have got to get back to work from Tommorow … That’s really kinda of sad, but like all good things, including this 10 day vacation of mine has finally come to an end 
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I guess I was rather fortunate to have watched the match this morning and witness Irfan Pathan’s magical hat trick in the Ist over. zero for 3 is such an amazing score 
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The Karting team (from left to right : Murali, Nandhu, Kamini & Deepak)
Shot at Kart Attack, ECR, Chennai
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After a very hectic but at the same time very exciting 10 odd day trip to Chennai and Hyderabad we are finally back home in Mumbai
It was great to meet up with family and all the kids at home. Sometime one wonders how times are indeed changing
Further to my previous post on Chennai, to add my thoughts on Hyderabad, I must say it was a dissapointment of sorts. The hype over the changes that Chandrababu Naidu has bought about in Cyberabad seem to be restricted to the specific parts of the city (Ameerpet, Jubille / Banjara Hills, Mahdapur, Hi-Tec city etc). The Hussain Sagar lake area has certainly got a make over with the Necklace road (and thus another place for people to hang / chill out other than Tank Bund) but the rest of the city, despite developments in the Real estate dont seem to have changed much from a quality of life perspective. Traffic continues to be very chaotic with little or no sense of driving etiquette, roads are very dusty and in general the place doesnt seem to ooze out the sense of excitement that I had expected to see. While I may be sounding overly critical of Hyderabad, I must confess that I do like this city and have spent 21 years there. The point I am trying to make is that the hype is a bit too much & people need to recaliberate their sense of reality when it comes to Hyderabad
I am saying this because in comparison Chennai (a place that I had spent 4 years and also a place for which I have never made an attempt to hide my displeasure with) seems to be making all the right moves. The roads are pretty good, there are traffic signals all round, the streets neat & clean. Chennai does have its share of hype with the IT Corridor and the attendant Real estate boom that it is in the midst of, the problems with Auto drivers etc but then again, in comparison, Chennai comes out trumps for me
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Normally, when you get back to a city that you have spent some time in, after a few years, the most common reaction is as to how the roads and infrastructure has gone worse, on how the traffic sucks etc etc …
Now that I am in Chennai after a good 18 months, I find myseld being surprised that these are not my reactions. I am indeed pleasantly surprised at the state of traffic very importantly being managed by many traffic lights with timers at all critical junctions where there is a potential of a jam. This certainly was not the case 2 years ago and is not the case in many cities in India
While traffic woes aided by 2 wheelers & buses continue, the streamlining that the signals being does mitigate the pain to some extent
To add to this is the fact that Chennai is a far far clearner city than Mumbai and it is indeed quite a pleasure to see the difference between Mumbai & Chennai on this front
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