How airtel does business: Telephone bills

I have a post paid connection which has the monthly payment due on 25th of every month. For some reason, they start sending reminders right from the the first week of every month. The underlying assumption.....the customers need to be reminded a hundred times about those bills. Now receiving a reminder everyday with a deadline nowhere around renders those reminders kind of useless. As a matter of fact, I don't want to make a payment when the due date is still week's away.

That said, when I do attempt to make the payment, there website doesn't work most of the time. Now, there is a limit to the time I can spend trying to make my telephone bill payment. I have a job to do and a life to live without having to spend days trying to make phone bill payments. Then, they have this twisted system of assigning the job of bill collection to some local parties who send some shady characters for the bill collection.

For god's sake airtel.....fix the goddamned website and send the reminders AROUND the deadline.

What the movies tell us- Trying to find out the meaning of life is a male conquest

Think about those movies like Matrix, Limitless- in which the protagonist gets up and feels lost or is being followed or is in some state of confusion but later on goes and finds the real awakening, some super power or the red pill. Now try to think of one similar movie which has a female as the lead. Nada....right??

It's true. Subconsciously, we accept that redemption, awakening, nirvana...(or whatever you call it) is meant for the male, only the male yearns for it while the females are busy drooling over shoes (remember Sex and the City) and dresses, trying to get married, nagging their boyfriends/husbands to death or just being cute and dumb.

Why should you stay away from your office

Recently, I was struck by the realization that I don't remember the stuff I read the way I used to, which launched me into a retrospection spiral. I think I have come up with some explanations.

On a side note, this is essentially how causality works. Things happen and then we dwell upon them and do the "platonizing" (this is the latest addition to my "fake smart talk" library which I have picked from a book written by an ex-Wharton student...go figure), i.e. calling something the cause, labeling the remaining as the effect and then slapping on some random statements as the explanations. Let's just not get into the list of professions where people make their living from this intellectual fraud.

Now, back to the square one, why did I stop retaining the stuff that I read as opposed to my verbatim recollections from books that I had read which had often bored my friends to death. The thing is, that earlier I used to travel a lot while not driving myself. When you are travelling for more than three hours through the same route everyday, you will get tired of site seeing sooner or later and will resort to something more engaging. I remember that most of my fellow travelers took refuge in broadly two activities-talking and laughing a lot on the cellphone and staring and gawking at the opposite sex. There was a minority which was a little more considerate and these people restricted themselves to texting, playing games on cellphones (it was not the internet on every cellphone era) or reading.

Now when you read with a fierce underlying need of ignoring your noisy and tiring surroundings, you learn to...well.....read and ignore them all....and that's why you remember it all.

So, if you really think that you are missing out some quality reading time, it's time to think about relocation.

Worst pick up lines

"Though this looks like a date but we won't call it a date."

And this one was recited to me by a good friend (he is the he in the conversation below)-

He enters the bus and goes to a seat on which she is siting.

He: Can I sit here?

She: Sure.

He: Thanks. Btw, I am He. What's your good name?

She: She

He: And what's your bad one???

Me and my cell

I do way more things for my cellphone than it does for me. I use it to receive the daily call from home (a purpose that can be very well served by the landline phone as well)....otherwise I look for it after having forgotten it at someplace, I move to go somewhere and then come back to pick it, put it in silent mode prior to every meeting and charge it before the battery gets drained.

I wonder whether it serves me or .......

You name it and it has been captured in a book

There was a quote in the end of Fight Club (the book) saying, "There is nothing a blue collared nobody in Oregon with a public school education imagine that a million people haven't already done". And I find it to be extremely true.....name anything however crazy, however perfect, however whatever that you have done, experienced or whatevered.....there is someone who has written a book about it.

PS- I am just done reading a book called "Keep the Change".

Begin 2010

It's really cold and foggy these days. I actually witnessed a less than 1 m visibility yesterday. I really love it when it gets cold like this. My life as ever is uneventful and today was another of the days when I tried to shut it off by refusing to wake up to the reality of it. My refuges are the sitcoms, movies, some books with a philosophical bent, some pulp fiction and a lot of sleep. I am really amazed at my ability to sleep and dream. I dream almost like some TV series...come sleep and they start...pause if the phone rings and start again as I doze off again. All the time I fantasy about some alternate form of living (like raking leaves in the backyard of a monastery).