I don’t recall why I looked up Pankaj Mullick, but once I did, I recalled one of my favorite songs. Admittedly not one of his best renditions but there was something about the LP that made it special. Please excuse the formatting.
ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ বন্ধন সব মোচন কর’ হে ।।
প্রভু, মোচন কর’ ভয় ,
সব দৈন্য করহ লয় ,
নিত্য চকিত চঞ্চল চিত কর’ নিঃসংশয় ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।
ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ জড়বিষাদ মোচন কর’ হে ।
প্রভু, তব প্রসন্ন মুখ
সব দুঃখ করুক সুখ ,
ধূলিপতিত দুর্বল চিত করহ জাগরূক ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।
ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ স্বার্থপাশ মোচন কর’ হে ।
প্রভু, বিরস বিকল প্রাণ ,
কর’ প্রেমসলিল দান ,
ক্ষতিপীড়িত শঙ্কিত চিত কর’ সম্পদবান ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।
I noticed (as did others as well) that in recent times I have been doing a whole lot of purchases online. I generally buy books and a little bit of music so I thought I can share some experiences with online retailing and a few retailers in India. In no particular order, here goes:
Indiaplaza.in
- big online presence supplemented by being the back-end various *shopping portals
- landing page is much too cluttered
- good selection of books
- reasonably good selection of other items (haven’t bought any from there)
- search engine is unstable - throws up lots of irrelevant results
- an unexpectedly bad customer service that doesn’t have a RT (or like system)
- packaging quality of consignments are uneven and generally going down
- the inventory does not catch “Out of Stock” items quickly (one can actually still order them and wait for refund)
Flipkart.com
- a bare site design - functional and pretty fast
- good selection of books and details associated with each book is accurate
- good quality of packaging
- path to cart is short and easy
- search engine needs some love - throws up irrelevant results
- doesn’t have a recommendation thing (”those who bought F00 also bought Bar”) thing yet
- not many user reviews of books
- no tie in with Goodreads
- average customer service (nothing exceptional that is)
- not all payment gateways are functional at this point
MusicYogi.com
- landing page has too many moving images / bright colors
- path to cart is short and easy
- good selection of Indian Independent Music
- not so good selection of other kinds of music
- the emphasis on movie DVD is a bit odd
- awesomely good customer service
- search engine needs love - times out more often than not
- not too many reviews on the site - user feedback needs to be worked upon
Sagepub.in
- doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, worked with Konqueror but barely
- a range of selection of books and journals
- path to cart is complicated (asks for far too much detail than required to complete shopping)
- payment gateway is sluggish at best
- search functionality is better than other online book retailers but requires improvement
- currency details are overdone and that level of details is jarring
Most of the portals seem to suffer from not being designed with the “online” experience in mind. More like the traditional over-the-counter experience being somewhat morphed into the semblance of online. The other additional aspect is that none of them work on creating a social network around their portals which would lead to a community of loyal users. Which in a way is very strange given that it is a good thing to do.
And in a completely unrelated news, SCIM is up for translation.
Spent last evening chewing mails, reading up Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free and Open Source Software Projects [PDF link thanks to Kartik] and listening to music from Soulmate. Mail chewage is a necessary evil and one of these days I am going to write down how to “get it done”. Got “Shillong” off MusicYogi (that awesome site which is making me sing praises for them) and was surprised by the quality of their oeuvre. I quite like Blues … , St Valentine’s Day Blues, Shillong (Sier Lapalang) and My Baby. Having never heard them, I didn’t know what to expect and they are good, real good. Wouldn’t mind at all to watch them perform live.
Waiting for this book to land up. Meanwhile finished Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country - doesn’t say anything new other than arranging the old facts in proper relational sequence and tying them together in a journal like form. Too much actual dialogues being written down which comes in the way of a good read. Speaking of which, if someone uses Goodreads.com, I am “Sankarshan” there - perhaps you would like to connect.
Looks like Microsoft is doing an IndiBloggers meet at Pune tomorrow. Agenda being showing off the LiveWriter thing. Hmm… time for Kushal to work on his offline blogging application I think 
In the not-so-good-news department it turns out that the industrial growth has dipped to 5.3% as per news reports. That of course will set off the usual cascade of dips in various indices and pundits on television proclaiming about “the fundamentals being tested“. Which, by the way, is a phrase I can never make anything out of. Add to that the alarming news about global food stocks and things don’t look to be rosy at all.
ps: Haven’t seen potential SoC candidates from India for GNOME - wonder what’s wrong ?
Sometime back I was telling all those who cared to listen that the Calendar might be the single most elegant piece of UI improvement that Cleartrip has put in place. Sadly, I guess they are failing to get some other bits in place eg. the confusion between Madras and Chennai (the location selector has Madras whereas the results has Chennai) and the flights on the Calendar not getting reflected on the trip selection bits. The site has become noticeably slow in churning out the results (or is it due to the readability of the inserted advertisement while the results page loads ?). In short, I don’t think I am going to use the site even to check the options of which are the flights available till they get some improvements in place.
I had written earlier about how online shopping does make my book purchases easy. Well, it was too good to be true anyway. I’d pre-ordered (like many others) last book in the Harry Potter series with the fond notion of getting it either on the 21st or on 22nd of July 2007. 22nd July was a Sunday when this year began, so I’d have guessed that the folks at the online bookstore factored that in when promising delivery. Today I get a mail saying “If you are not located in any of in any of the following cities : Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkatta, Ahmedabad ,Cochin, Hyderabad: your book will reach latest by 24 July 2007 . All books were shipped on 21 July , however there is transit time of 2-3 days (excluding Sunday)“. It does suck big time when you cannot watch television since some m0r0n news channels are actually divulging the bits of the story and you are breathlessly awaiting the arrival of a book which now seems to be delayed all the more.
UPDATE: They claim to have been overwhelmed by over 15000 pre-ordered books, but managed to deliver it albeit a day late.
Finished reading A Long Way Gone - normally I am a very fast reader, but this book just holds you on to each page and makes you think over what is written. Highly recommended. Currently on the second reading of Strange Pilgrims and All Quiet on the Western Front. This does mean that my “ToRead” book list has become very short with only 3 books read to be gone through. For a month’s worth of reading it has been a nice trot.
I have had it with buying books at a bookstore especially if that bookstore happens to be a Crossword - their in-store staff simply don’t make the cut. Having no idea about what books they have in stock they invent irrelevant stories to ward off possible purchases. In short I would not recommend buying books from them. The issue with Landmark on the other hand is the perennial hovering of their in-store staff which is annoying and reminds me of the bookstalls of some “large names” when they appear at the Kolkata Book Fair. Much as I like to buy books after I touch them and read the print size the callous approach taken by these two leave me with no other option but to move to online book purchases. On a side note, Landmark scores over Crossword in being prompt to reply to e-mail book requests and transaction related queries but is just about it.
Runa suggested trying out NDTV Shopping for books. I tried them out and they seem to have understood what good service is about. I ordered, purchased and packed a book to be delivered to my mother at Kolkata on Sunday. She’s received it in an excellent packaging on Tuesday (that’s yesterday) evening. I had purchased two books for myself too on Monday however a glitch with the payment gateway (the usual browser related stuff I assume) put the approval in a limbo. I exchanged a couple of mails with the mail address provided and lo behold !! - the order has been cancelled (which I had requested) and the transaction amount refunded. All this without a glitch. The only thing that could be better was the search engine. That is an important part of the shopping cart experience and the current search engine just does not allow too much modification allowing one to figure out the book of choice. Oh !! The prices are nicely below those offered by the brick-n-mortar bookstores.
Update: As someone who suggested so persuasively on IM, kudos to Indiaplaza (formerly Fabmall) for an excellent job.
Pankaj asks folks to figure out the English of a Faiz gem. Here’s what my trusty Faiz collection gave me:
May I be a sacrifice to your streets, oh fatherland, where
It has become custom that no-one shall go with head lifted
And that any lover who comes out on pilgrimage
Must go with furtive looks, go in fear of body and life;
Applied to the people of heart now there is method of administration
That stones and bricks are locked up, and dogs free
Strange since I was trying to recollect bits of these phrases some days back…
Found this nice book on O’Reilly pitched with just the right mix of content that makes a book good. It is not a great book. What it lacks in punch it makes up in the mix of topics and the ease with which they are writtent. While the initial parts might come out to be a rehash of old known facts for the old timers, the new readers would do well to go through them since they provide an understanding of the whole concept of the Mozilla Project and of course perhaps the two best products (barring Bugzilla) that have come out of that stable.
Very end user oriented - this is not a crash course in getting up and running with Firefox and Thunderbird. Rather, this is a nice stroll through end UseCases that any user of the two applications will have and sure enough there are screenshots a plenty to make them feel at home. The last part of the book deals with writing extensions for the applications. This is a section that really does not fit into the scheme of things. Writing extensions while fun could have been taken either as an online section or as separate book altogether. In short, this is a useful book to have while using the two applications.
Few battles in history have been waged with greater ferocity, desperation, bravery, and atrocity than the battle for Berlin at the end of the Second World War. No one can tell a story better than Ryan, and he is at his very best here. In this book Cornelius Ryan brings his masterful powers of description and discerning eye for extraordinary detail to bear with force and elegance. This is a wonderful book, immensely informative, densely packed with facts and figures, and told in a compelling way by a best-selling author who can vividly recount seemingly countless tales of the most ordinary of individuals caught in the unforgiving and often deadly embrace of total war.
I had a copy of Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle picked off a street side vendor. That copy was precious since the author had autographed it and presented it to some dear friend. A classmate of mine had nicked it from my shelf (and even went to the extent of keeping it hidden when I was in their house). I found a copy of the book (not my copy) at a bookshop again. Riveting read more from an understanding of the characters involved rather than the historical sweep of events.