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 ?
A mate at the office has a WiMax connection from Reliance Communications.
His connection has been “supposedly active” ie, the Reliance folks claim that it is, he cannot ping to any place on their network and surprise ! the bill shows zero on utilization of bandwidth (the bill does land up on time ).
So what does our intrepid hero do ? He raises a complaint / support ticket.
Actually, he raises many since each ticket is closed without any intimation. The series of tickets increase - 61992323, 61993181, 62105605, 62111172, 64334042, 64333585, 64476745, 64377287, 64828709.
And they also seem to have a support system with a funny sense of humor. The stock response ? “With reference to your complaint regarding internet not working (64333585), please note that as per our records your request is already provisioned from our end, the issue has been resolved and the same has been confirmed to you”
If anyone has has similar predicaments with these folks or, $DEITY bless you, have found a solution, can you please drop a line to sbathe at gmail dawt com ? I am sure he would be happy to get this annoyance resolved.
I confiscated a copy of The Raghu Dixit Project album from Shreyas and haven’t stopped listening to it. Guess it is time to take a picture Go ahead grab your copy before it all sells out - you will not stop listening to it either.The album launch happens on the 26th of February 2008 at Mumbai.
A cup of good coffee can make one relax and be eloquent. So today, it was proven that “a lot can happen over coffee” when a mate revealed that the last year an enlightened manager had noted in the annual appraisal that this person was “pragmatic and impractical“. Go figure !!
Thanks to Runa, who did this new look *gotchi 
and Kushal who took a nice picture
Someone I know had a very interesting thing to say. We sure do live in interesting times …
