My mistake: I bought a HP laptop

Yup, my mistake I bought a HP Pavilion Dv6 2020AX laptop. The specs were very tempting and hence opened my purse strings. But that was the beginning of all my agony.

Guess what after showing off the laptop to my kids and telling them how magnanimously I would give them my old one, I sat down to work on it and obviously wanted to check my mails. While replying to a mail,I realised that the SPACE BAR just wouldnt work! Small problem I thought, and was sure that it was soemthing to do with the MS Windows 7 OS problem. My trust in HP was strong and was sure that it was some s/w glitch and started contacting the HP online support.

One Mr. Debayan came up on HP chat and as I was chatting my laptop's spacebar started working. Mr. Debayan was very happy (he did nothing). However I was unsure and asked him what I should do to ensure that it continues to work. And he started sending all the sugary sweet "thank yous" and links on how I should improve the system performance of a 4day old laptop. To my query that I should probably pray to God that it should work, he replied that it might be a good idea. But obviously the next morning it wouldnt work again. Mr. Debayan can you pray for me!

Yet I was sure that it was a s/w issue and got back to HP online chat hoping that Mr. Debayan wouldnt show up again. Thankfully Solomon Yvette came to help me and thankfully again this person understood my problem. He helped me with a couple of patches and told me that incase this didnt work I should take it to the service center. Alas, the patches didnt work.

So found out about the HP service center at Jaya Nagar and after a long wait of an hour cried on the service engineers shoulder. He assured me that they would get back in 2 days. So afterall it was not Microsoft's mistake but HPs!

Its been 15days since I bought my laptop and guess what donno when I will ever get to work on it. My day goes in calling all these people, chasing HP customer service at times and at other chasing Maha Electronics, HP authorized service center. Guess what they want to replace the keyboard (did you know that keyboard is called an accesssory in a laptop!) and the part is not available in all of India but they found it in Chennai after my pestering. I better brush my Geography now!

Anyways I shall continue blogging from my old laptop and updating...40k anyways gone down the drain :(

BOTTOM LINE: Never Ever buy HP laptops...Yuck!

I dont want mobile internet to invade my life!

These days have you noticed people are more interested and keen on maintaining relationships far and distant than the ones near by? Have you noticed how people who once used to converse with you over the restaurant table are now happily keying into their mobile phones and smiling at their mobiles and pleasantly taking the physical person in front for granted?

Yes, I am bugged with the Blackberrys and E71s & 72s of the world. Office mails get replied instantaneously 24x7. Friends in California, London and Australia are aware where you went for vacation and what you did there and how you celebrated your kids birthday but the next door neighbor has no clue of the same. They realise that their neighbour must probably be out as the newspaper isnt being picked!

Hello! get back to the physical world....virtual world in truth is "virtual"!

To cut the long story short, yes FB, Twitter, blogging, rapid reply emails are great ways of communicating and doing wonders to the world but nothing is more real and important that the people around you. Do not get addicted to these modern gadgets, they are for a purpose and dont get carried away by them.

You and I can INNOVATE for big corporates!

As parents or students, the label of “Scientist” has always been appealing. Every single student as he/she steps into an engineering college or design school or medical college or biotechnology institute, aspires that someday he/she would hold a product or process patent. All these aspirations come crashing as there is never ever a company recruiting for their R&D division.

Competition has been the answer to many a question. Organizations are having to continuously innovate to stay above the rest. The life of car which used to be a good 10-15 years in the good old days is now less than 5years. That being the case, where do the R&D houses run for ideas all the time? Corporates have woken up to the “Wisdom of Crowds”. They have realized that they need to strengthen their R&D houses with the wisdom of the entire community (end users, retailers, distributors, suppliers etc.etc.). You and me included.

But that’s much easier said than done. How does a corporate reach out to the entire community? A physical outreach program to that magnitude would burn a huge hole in their pockets and make the entire exercise non-profitable. The internet has come handy in this scenario. Did you know that organizations like NASA, P&G, Pepsi, Unilever and many more are using this technology to reach out to you and me. This is where Open Innovation comes in. Open Innovation is a process by which organizations reach out to the vast public for their needs. A lot of Open Innovation platforms (Ideaken, YourEncore, Innocentive) are successfully up and running and reaching out to you and me for their various clients. They ask for nothing more than the urge to INNOVATE and INVENT from us. The organizations also provide REWARDs for the most suitable solution.

So don’t let those aspirations wander away, internet has been a boon to many such aspirations and here is yet another vent.

Have you ever seen a Sardar beggar?

Read this in one of those forwarded mail trails and couldnt help sharing and noting the same in my blogs:

We all love Sardar jokes. But do you know that Sikhs are one of the hardest working prosperous and diversified communities in the world. My friend told me about the following incident which I wish to share with you. It has had a deep impact on my vacation, his few friends came to Delhi . They rented a taxi for local sight-seeing. The driver was an old Sardar and boys being boys, these pals began cracking Sardarji jokes, just to tease the old man. But to their surprise, the fellow remained unperturbed. At the end of the sight-seeing, they paid the cab hire-charges. The Sardar returned the change, but he gave each one of them one rupee extra and said, ''Son, since morning you have been telling Sardarji jokes.. I listened to them all and let me tell you, some of them were in bad taste. Still, I don't mind coz I know that you are young blood and are yet to see the world.. But I have one request. I am giving you one rupee each. Give it to the first Sardar beggar that you come across in this or any other city.' My friend continued,* ' That one rupee coin is still with me. I couldn't find a single Sardar begging anywhere.' MORAL: The secret behind their universal success, is their willingness to do any job with utmost dedication and pride. A Sardar will drive a truck or set up a roadside garage or a dhaba, put a fruit juice stall, take up small time carpentry, ... but he will never beg on the streets.

Hope this always remains true...crossed fingers!

“3 IDIOTS” – Parents, Teachers and Society, certainly not the children!

Wouldn’t one and all agree with me if I say that “3 Idiots” was a colossal hit because it pulled a string somewhere in our minds? Controversies apart, Chetan Bhagat’s, “5 point someone” does form the basis for the story and it is sculpted well thereafter for better audience acceptance. The movie did get a lot of us thinking.

All through our childhood we hear that it’s a big bad world out there and that one needs to be prepared for the rat race, it’s an extremely competitive world!! But tell me have you ever heard of a person committing suicide because he didn’t get promoted or because of a bad appraisal or because his/her pay package is not as good as that of a colleague? Obviously NOT! Sounds ridiculous to end life for such things, right? Then why is childhood so burdened?

But on the other hand, how many kids hang themselves or consume poison post their X or XII board exams? Or like that bright kid in “3 Idiots” who hangs himself after soulfully singing “Gimme one more chance!” just because he was more creative and had an idea. Are marks and competition more important than the learning itself? In “India Unbound” Gurucharan Das says how America created a nation of fiddlers and hence is ahead in product innovation. Out there schools have a separate class called “workshop” where they fiddle around with different things. Bala Chakravarthy of IMD, Lausanne through his article in TOI wished India, “Happy new product innovations!” on the occasion of her 60th Republic Day.

Isn’t new product innovation the next right step for the knowledge economy? This in turn means that children, instead of writing verbatim answers of various questions in their tests, need to be quizzed about the application of such information. How many of you think that the right procedure for admitting kids into IIT should be through their projects and viva and not a written test?

FOG AND FLIGHTS: A case in crisis management

Year on year, come January and this news definitely appears in newspapers and news channels about how various flights and trains got cancelled due to bad weather/fog. Usually, I am one those newspaper readers who read this news with delight as me and my family would have just made it back from Delhi post the Christmas vacations, just in time, before the fog set in. However this January wasn’t to be the same and after ducking the fog for a good 5 years we were one among the many passengers who were stuck in the chaos post cancellation of flights.

Our flight was the 8pm one and by 10pm they told us that they had had to cancel the flight due to bad weather/fog. So as the men went about getting our flight rescheduled, me and the kids sat down in the lounge (squatting in the newly built Delhi airport lounge) playing word building. What ensued was the worst case of disaster management and more gripping than a Hollywood thriller.

It was saddening to see the way passengers were behaving and the plight of the flight officials. It was absolutely unruly. Infact some passengers started shouting “Kingsher Hai! Hai! Murdabad, murdabad” in true Delhi style!!! And some wanted to make sure that the next day’s flight would ferry them and not the passengers booked on those flights ! brilliant!! What is the point in taking those poor souls to task when its weather that’s playing foul. Would they dare do this in a foreign airport? The Mumbai passengers got around to bullying the Kingfisher officials as another flight had announced the departure of its Mumbai bound flight. The officials (illogically) relented and boarding was announced. We learnt later that the other flight kept taxiing on the runway only to de-board their passengers later in the night. So much for mob wisdom!

Isn’t there a lesson that we need to learn from this? Cannot the airline carrier issue a warning/ guideline (in Bold) in the tickets, that during this month there is a possibility of flights getting cancelled due to bad weather and that the airline will respond by rescheduling the tickets in the next available flight or refund the amount. They can possibly guide passengers by giving them numbers of nearby hotels. And airline folks, kindly learn to communicate clearly and have personnel to back your own men/women.

Medical insurance, Simplify please!!!!

We all understand the importance, the need and the benefits of medical insurance. There is absolutely no doubt in any citizen's mind about this facility called medical insurance. With the rising costs of medical care it makes utmost sense to insure ourselves and our families against any medical emergencies. So when the public is so clear about it why does the insurance industry make it sound like rocket science?

Just imagine how wonderful it would be if servicing a medical claim was as easy and "happy" as buying a pair of shoes at Zappos. Zappos is a breathtakingly beautiful piece of marketing where the focus point is customer experience more than the product itself. The company sees its core area to be "customer service" and to ensure this they bring in "happy employees". How ironical is that? Shouldn't a shoe company be focusing on style, size and fashion? You know the answer if you have spoken to their sales assistant on the phone.

Insurance is usually invoked when the family is already going through a difficult time coping with a sick member of the family. At that moment it becomes intolerable when one has to go through the clauses and sub clauses of an insurance policy. Instead of ordering for a CBI enquiry into the eligibility of the claim, would it harm the insurance company to come out with a more humane face and talk to the customer about the problems they are facing and use their vast knowledge base to suggest ways to cure the medical condition and extend a benevolent ear? We are certainly not paying thousands in premiums so that one fine day a customer service agent at the insurance claims department talks to us like we are lesser mortals in need of his/her magic wand! A patient hearing and a sweet good wish will go a longer way than actually picking the claim, or refusing it.

Also the language, when I hold my insurance policy in my hands it possibly sounds like the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between two nuclear countries. All that the insurance policy is to communicate is, "we are with you in sickness and health".