Routines

Sometimes having a routine is really important & helpful. I have always found routines really boring and so didn't ever try to follow one. But I realize that subconsciously I have been following many routines nevertheless.

Like in avoiding to have a routine of waking up early & reaching office by a particular hour. I have made a routine of waking up late and anyway I reach office at a particular hour (late). No matter what, I tend to wake up between 8:30 & 9:00 and reach office by 11 - 11:30. I will wake up and look for my newspaper and spend half an hour with it, which has to be accompanied/followed by a cup of tea. Office is also kind of routine - reach office, check mails, check blog updates, start work, have lunch, work again (lazily), have tea, work again, have some snacks, work again, leave office. This hardly ever changes. Reach home, have dinner, watch TV/Movie, go to sleep. Even in a longer time frame, Whenever I get a long holiday or take a long leave, I go to my home town. Whenever I get bored at home I call up my friends & family and talk to them.

So, no matter How bad I think about the routines.. I keep following them all the time. Then I realize it's not all that bad. Because It kind of avoids the question "What to do next??" and saves a lot of time by that because that question is really difficult to answer at times.

But then I find that a scary thought as well. What if I never think of that question again & keep doing the same things forever? That is the kind of life I get nightmares about. As, I am a die hard believer of the motto "Change is Good".

So, I plan to strike a balance by consciously following healthy routines & then consciously breaking them on routine intervals ;) Well that sounded funny, didn't it. It's actually kind of tricky, as in I wish to use a routine to break out of routines. But then that could really work out. For example, I am going to set a daily routine, which includes time to wake up, daily office hours & few hours of sports. Then as another routine I plan to try out new things, like changing the sports/physical activity after some time. Obviously it will also give me the time to ask myself the question "What to do next?".

Now let's see how it turns out.. How well I could carry this will only become clear in a couple of months from now, but at least I feel good to follow a routine for a change ;)

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Moved to Airtel

I have been using Airtel mobile for last 4 years & have been more or less satisfied with their service. They have been a bit of pain in the butt at times but, If I look back, I have got a good service and more important good value for money all the time.

But this post is not about Airtel mobile service, it's about my painful adventures with Tata Indicom Broadband. I first got a Tata Indicom Broadband connection about 3 years ago. Then they had just started the service & Tata's brand name attracted me to them. I used their service for about 6 months (really??) and for most of this I was troubled with service disconnection, down servers, faulty recharge & worst of all extremely poor customer service. To get hold of one of their CC executive, I had to wait at least 10 mins & the issues got resolved when they really felt like doing it. So, naturally I got sick of their service and discontinued my alliance with them. Unfortunately at the point, not many service providers were there to avail the service so that might be one of the reasons for their poor show.

But that was past and they were new... so 2 years later I decided to give Tata's another chance. I took a new broadband connection from them and it got connected without much hassle in 4 days (not bad). This time I used the service for 9 months (not bad at all). During this time I faced disconnections/server down but less frequently, as in say twice a month or so. Speed was good but weird thing was, if I am doing a download using a download manager, my browsing speed virtually went to nil and it took a couple of minutes to open a gmail page. Another strange problem, when my account expired, I couldn't log into their online portal to recharge my account from any other Internet connected PC as well. So, it was time for customer service again. I filed a complaint for both and placed order for a recharge voucher. For the browsing speed issue they said they were clueless & will look into it.. Nothing happened. For the recharge issue, it has been about a month and I still can't recharge my account from any other PC. I was sent the recharge voucher, after repeated calls to them for 6 days, about 15 days after placing the order. Thankfully I was out of station at that time and I politely asked them to send the voucher back and not to bother me again, as I was again sick of their services again. I would like to add that there were the two major setbacks.. their service, customer service & technical assistance has been poor through out. I had to make at least one call to them every month. More than two years in service, have they learnt anything yet?

After I came back last Sunday, I heard that Airtel has started offering broadband connections in my area and that their customer service is pretty good along with many plans combined with their Land line connection absolutely free that also with zero monthly rental. Well tired of customer service that I was, this sounded really tempting and yesterday I signed up for Airtel Broadband service. To my utmost surprise they completed the cabling work yesterday itself and I was really impressed with the speed & the way it was done. I didn't have to see another dangling wire out of my window or a new hole in the window frame. It was done really smoothly & professionally. I hardly noticed the new wire-case used to cover the running cable. By today afternoon my broadband connection was functional & my land line connection was active. To top it all I am getting better download speed (old avg speed + 6kbps) as well. My browsing doesn't die when I am downloading in parallel. So, by far I am very impressed, but now the real show will begin.

Going by the start I expect a smooth ride with Airtel and will surely recommend it to anyone. But it may be too early do so. Let's see how it turns out :)

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Bangalore se aaya mera dost

This weekend I had no agenda as such. I had to go home this week so I was planning to do some shopping and that's it. Suddenly one of my very few school friends, Rajnish, called up & reminded me that he was visiting me this weekend. Initially I was embarrassed, as I couldn't remember it, but that was instantly replaced with cheer & excitement. After I hung up & was wondering how much fun it would be to do all the masti here.. I got another call and found out that the same day was the anniversary of two of my very good friends and that their relatives are throwing them a surprise party and wanted me & their other friends to come. All of a sudden I was really busy over the weekend, which was of course a good thing.

So, I received Rajnish on Saturday morning.. we both were starving, so we had brunch and loads of starter chit-chat. Then, while he went on to relax after his tiring journey, I ganged up with another friend bought gifts for our friends and went to their surprise anniversary party, which thankfully was in Lunch time. Party turned out pretty well, they really were surprised to find us there :).. After that I called up Rajnish & took him to show around my under construction flat which I had bought last year. He seemed to like the flat [sample one of course ;-)].

Over coffee in Wakad CCd we were thinking what to do next and then I just asked him let's go to Tony da Dhaba (40 kms from that place) and have rabbit for dinner. First he was surprised then quickly agreed. We went back to my place, put some warm cloths on as it was getting dark & cold already, and left for Tony da dhaba. As it was not safe to drink & drive at night, specially with so much of police check posts everywhere, thanks to Republic day nearing, we decided to have booze after we get back. We drove to Tony da dhaba, enjoyed the ride... but were disappointed to find out they no longer served rabbit. Apparently they suddenly started loving the cute creature & so made them pets instead of serving them. How funny is that.. sudden realization of love for rabbits :P

Nevertheless we had Tandoori Bater, which was tender & good, but difficult to eat, as there were too many bones. Then we played safe and had Mutton Rara & Mutton Masala, both were cooked really nice & were pretty good. For dessert we had hot & crispy Jalebis. But fun for the evening was Double Apple Hukkah.. He was trying Hukkah for first time & really loved it. After dinner we headed back and were home by 1 am. Then it was time to relax, with soft music & rum, we talked about all sorts of things, our school days, friends, job, life & what not. Not sure when, but we went to bed quite late. Next day we spent shopping which was a need rather than fun :) We saw Shivaji Market (a huge meat market) and were startled to see so many Kites (bird) swooping across the street. They didn't seem to mind the ongoing traffic & swept very low, not sure why.. cause there weren't meat on the streets. But it was fun & scary.

After this we had lunch & then Rajnish left for Mumbai, his next stop. So, it was a really great weekend. I drove no less than 150 kms in 2 days, had a lot of booze, expletive count must have overflowed and fun factor was unlimited. After his visit I am determined to visit Delhi in coming days now. I am planning for a while to visit Delhi to see the city & visit some of my school friends there.

As of now, I am off to Muzaffarpur(Bihar), my home town for a week. Cheers!!

P.S: I recently started with Twitter & sure it's fun & addictive. Probably I will be able to post updates to Twitter so you can follow my twitter id "vikashskumar" for updates.

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Bloggers Anthem

Stumbled upon this video named fittingly the Bloggers Anthem and couldn't resist sharing it here :)



I Blog, Therefore I Am. I Am the Blog. - video powered by Metacafe

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WATBlog Wednesday in Pune

Though I and many other people were skeptical about the idea, I thought I will surely give it a try, and thankfully I wasn't disappointed at all. It was a great meet with so many people turning up that it looked like a new year bash. Everyone was enjoying conversing with mostly unknown set of people over beer & also really cool lounge music in the background. The open air garden setting was just perfect with ample space. I talked to so many people from all sorts of start ups (mostly) and realized that Pune is actually exploding with start ups & entrepreneurs. Host of the evening & founder of WATMedia Rajeev has written a blog on the event here & shared the party album on Facebook here.

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The Year I would like to forget but can't

31st December, Last day of 2008. It really had been a roller coaster ride for me. Taking a cue from Pratik's blog I thought I will also summarize the year gone by. For me this was a really bad year but let's see..

For the good It was ...
A year which started on an ecstatic note having just bought my own apartment.
A year when I found that I do have real friends who will stand by me no matter what.
A year I enjoyed my hobby of photography clicking memorable pictures filling up my HD with images.
A year I grew up a bit & saw my priorities in life changing drastically (for the good).
A year when I was named TAKI, BEWADA etc which I am proud to be :)
A year when I came closer to my Family.
A year when I could no longer miss any moment of being with my dear ones.
A year when the worst stock market crash didn't affect me at all.
A year when my cousin & many of my very good friends got married.
A year CFoV came to life.
A year when my nephew Aryan was born.
A year when my Manish Bhaiya settled here with family.
A year when many new fine dining restaurants opened in Pune & I tried most of them.
A year when I matured in blogging & got my own domain for it.

For the bad it was ...
A year which took away from me the person I loved the most. The only person whom I loved more than myself, my mother. With her my dreams, my purpose went away and went away some part of me which changed & transformed me & my life in countless ways.
A year when I cried the most.
A year which shattered my family.
A year when I lost my faith in God.
A year when I injured my wrist in an accident and suffered from back to back health problems for about two months.
A year when I lost my beloved camera.
A year, home loan interest rates ran northwards right after I took a huge home loan.
A year when I could no longer take things lightly or be a kid and had to start acting responsibly.
A year when my learning curve went to an all time low.
A year when I didn't travel/drive to any new place.
A year of shattered expectations from my nearest ones.
A year when my Father suffered from stress and faced new problems through out the year.
A year wasted for my brother.
A year of financial crisis at Global, National & personal level.

So, personally, a year I would like to forget but can't and I am glad this year ends today.

Hoping & wishing a better & happy new year for me, you and everyone :)
Cheers!!

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Strawberry Sundae!!!

Strawberry Sundae small (1 scoop of Strawberry & vanilla ice cream with
fresh Strawberries & whipped cream) we had @ newly opened
Amul Ice cream parlor in Lane no 7, Koregaon Park.

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