Pertinent Observations

13 Apr

Sponsorship Cannibalism

Back in 2004 Shamanth, Bofi, Anshumani and I started the IIT Madras Open Quiz. In some ways it was a response to critics of IITM quizzing, who blamed our quizzes for being too long, too esoteric, too disorganized and the likes. It was also an effort to take IITM quizzing to a wider audience, for [...]

21 Oct

Metro Notes

One of the advantages of being jobless is that though you’re poor in terms of money, you’re rich in time. So you have all the time you want to do things that give you random kicks, such as riding the new Bangalore metro on the second day of operation. The reason I chose to go [...]

07 Oct

Agoda + TripAdvisor

Ok here’s a startup idea. Basically a combination of Agoda and Tripadvisor (basically a front-end combining those two backends). I’m looking to book a hotel for a forthcoming holiday. So what I’ve been doing is to search through agoda for hotels available for those days and within my price range, and one by one searching [...]

03 Sep

Going postal over verification

Sometime in the recent past, I had to go to the post office to claim some money (some deposit my late mother had made there). As in other government offices, they needed my “address proof and ID proof” before they gave me the money. While my driving license was enough proof of identity, they being [...]

27 Apr

Art as a celebration of life

On a long leisurely walk towards Gandhi Bazaar yesterday evening, we ventured into this pretty-looking ancient house which said “Bimba, the Art Ashram”. We turned out to be the only visitors in the place. There were some four “shopkeepers”, led by this guy with a funny beard called Deepak. Deepak was to lecture us for [...]

21 Apr

Cab guys’ tales

I travel to and from work in the company-provided cab. It’s a fairly convenient system, offering you flexible timings, and routings that aren’t too bad. The overhead in terms of time of traveling by cab is about 15-20 minutes for a 40-minute journey, so I take it on most days. Given a choice, I try [...]

18 Apr

On reliably asking for help

Last evening while I was trying to teach the wife to ride a geared motorcycle, a middle-aged woman accosted us. She told us that she was a teacher from Hiriyur (Chitradurga district) and had lost all her money and needed help for her bus charge to go back to town. This sounded suspiciously similar to [...]

20 Feb

ODI

As the World Cup starts I realize I’m liking ODI cricket more now than I used to in the last couple of years. The key thing for me, I think, is the second coming of classical batsmen to One Day Cricket. The problem with ODIs in the mid 2000s was that it had become a [...]

19 Jan

Reliance Retail?

So on Sunday morning when I went to Reliance Fresh down the road I saw this guy who runs a vegetable store nearby frantically running between shelves, stocking up huge quantities of fresh vegetables. If this were a government store, and if this were license-permit raj, we could have said that this guy was hoarding [...]

19 Aug

Successful IPOs

Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read the headline. Does this sound right to you? MakeMyTrip Opens Up 57% Post-IPO; May Be Year’s Best Deal It doesn’t, to me. How in the world is the IPO successful if it has opened 57% higher in the first hour (it ended the first day [...]

© 2012 Pertinent Observations | Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)

GPS Reviews and news from GPS Gazettewordpress logo

Bad Behavior has blocked 1001 access attempts in the last 7 days.