Eco friendly India

Remember back in March of 2013 when the city of Austin banned the use of single use carry bags and one had to pay $1 or $2 to get the carry bags? I am seeing a similar initiative in Mysore, India. If you shop in the major stores like Sapna Book House, More and Shoppers Stop at the end of your shopping you will be asked the question “Do you need a carry bag?” if you say “yes” then be prepared to cough out any where between INR 1 to INR 5. Pretty cool and nice idea but not a major impact as this value is not shared by lot of the smaller stores which makes a lion share of the stores in India. Also, in my opinion INR 1 to INR 5 is not that big for the people who shop at these locations.

The kicker was when we went to Karanji Lake, a state owned lake and nature park. At the entrance they inspected our bags and took out our “one time use plastic carry bags” and replaced them with paper bags. More about the Lake nature park at some point in the future.

Universal Phone Charger

Found this in the taxi we had rented, pretty nice invention an all in one car phone charger.

Sad no Apple charger at all.

Cell phones and India

In US I have always lived with AT and T as my cell phone service provider, barring a few months of hiatus in which I switched between Verizon and T-Mobile and again came back to AT and T (or Cingular as it was called then). When my wife came along I switched from single plan to family plan and with the addition of smart phones I added data plan but remained with AT and T itself. Every time I had to get a new handset due to my umpteen reasons I have signed a new 2 year contract and gotten the handset at a discounted price. For my usage, there is no concept of prepaid plans or pay as you go but I pay a fixed monthly cost each month. Another point, I am stuck with a locked phone and there is probably no concept of a dual sim.

Now compare this to the cell phone market in India

• There is no contract as we went with a prepaid plan and each street in the city has plenty of places that offer mobile currency recharge. 
• The cost of the sim was INR 100 out of which 81 was reimbursed to our call plan
• The cost of the calls is INR 1 for 1 minute for outgoing and incoming is free and INR 1 per SMS for sent only and received is free, contrast this with 20 cents per SMS both incoming and outgoing in US
• The concept of dual sim is a pretty standard affair and I know a lot of people carry dual sim phones and some even use 2 SIMs one from BSNL and one from either Airtel or Vodafone or something similar. I may be wrong but in general BSNL is a fairly standard feature.
• The killer is the internet plan or mobile data plan as it is called here, for INR 300 one can get 1GB/month plan and for INR 100 one can get 300MB/month contrast this with US where I pay $15 for 200MB/month or $20 for 300MB/month
• Thanks to the Android OS and lack of discounted phones from providers, one can witness true innovation in terms of handset design and manufacturing. One can get an extremely decent handset (dual core processor, ~1GB RAM, 4-5MP rear camera, high resolution screen, dual sim capable) for INR 10,000 or less.
• The price range and feature range of smart phone handsets is also huge INR ~7,500 to INR ~70,000 (Galaxy S4’s and Iphone’s)       
• Another plus is that one can have their choice of manufacturers (SAMSUNG, LG, PANASONIC, SONY, LENOVO, MICROMAX, KARBON, HTC, INTEX, GINOEE, APPLE, NOKIA and so on) contrast this to US where we only see 2 main ones Samsung and Apple with Sony, HTC and LG being the distant 3rd.  
• As I said before the market is highly segmented and in my observation SAMSUNG is one of the few manufacturers who is playing the whole range and I now understand why the analysts were disappointed with Iphone 5c (not cheap enough)

Before you guys pounce on me, I do agree that my analysis/comparison is not apples to apples as in US we have lot more features in the plan plan like free nights and weekends, cell phone  to cell phone free, lots of wireless hotspots and so on. Also, I haven’t played around with budget carriers like Cricket or Virgin wireless in US. 

Men eat 33% more than women

Shocked by the title, its not my statement but a statement by a reputed restaurant called Rajdhani in Bangalore. Don’t believe me, I have the proof below.

During our recent Bangalore visit our good friend took us for a lunch at this Rajasthani restaurant called Rajdhani. The food was wonderful and the service was nice too. In our state of extreme contentment we didn’t look at the bill and paid it off. But my curiosity made me look at the bill once for sake of it and I must say I was slightly surprised to see that I have been charged 33% more than the other 3 persons having lunch with me.

The location of Rajdhani that we went to was UB city mall, the construction of the mall made me understand why kingfisher airlines has gone bankrupt.

Not fair, I fight for equality :).

Innocence of the child

After nearly 15 years and for the first time ever for my 3 year old daughter we are celebrating Diwali in India. Diwali means crackers and if you are familiar with India the moment you start crackers in front of your house you will have bunch of kids dressed in ragged clothes standing in front of your house begging you to share some crackers with them. If you are born and brought up in India you know to ignore these kids as yielding to one means  you are opening flood gates for the rest of the gang to appear.

But for my daughter it was the other way, she was enjoying the crackers with us and some other young kids from the neighborhood and the moment she saw these street kids she became very excited and said “hey look other kids, come join us”, “everybody say hi”. The funny part was we were forced to share some of\our crackers just to send them away.

Thanks to my daughter we managed to do some charitable act, though a small one. I don’t know how long will this innocence will last but is fun till it lasts.