Air Deccan or Air Dhakkan?

Shankar's post on his Air Deccan misery prompted me to blog about my own horrible experience with Air Deccan. So, here goes...

My fateful flight, DN-603, from Delhi to Mumbai was scheduled to depart at 3:00 in the afternoon. At around 11:00 AM I get an SMS from Air Deccan that the flight was delayed and would now take off at 5:30 PM. At 4:00 PM, I get another SMS, flight late, departing at 7:30 now. At 6:30 PM we reached the airport and from the Air Deccan counter came to know that the flight was further delayed and would now depart at 8:00 PM. After some time another SMS, flight late (again?!), departure at 8:30!

One interesting thing that I noted at the airport was, that even though so many flights were getting delayed and/or cancelled, it was only Air Deccan check-in counters that had long winding queues, commotion, and total chaos. Just a sample of the cluelessness of tha Air Deccan officials:

Random DN-603 Passenger: Madam, yeh flight kitne baje take-off karegi?
Check-in counter lady: Aath baje. (8 O' Clock)
Me: Par mere ko toh SMS aaya hai ki sadhe-aath baje (8:30 PM) hai departure?!
Check-in counter lady: Hain?! Ek min zara SMS dikhaiye...
(I handed over my phone with the SMS on the screen, she scrolls through it).

Check-in counter lady: Haan 8:30 par depart karegi. SMS aaya hoga na aapko bhi?
(Random DN-603 passenger leaves with a confused, amused, bewildered, hairaan, pareshaan, look!)

After the check-in and security check was over, we were subject to an endless wait. 8:30 PM swooshed by. No announcement. No SMS. No information whatsoever.

And then, with a stupid magazine in hand (Men's Health! What the hell was I thinking?!) I slowly dozed off on the swanky new Delhi Airport chairs.

I was awoken suddenly to a lot of noise. In the few seconds between breaking out from my dream world and snapping back to reality, I realized that the noise actually was chants of "Air Deccan hai hai!" The entire airport lounge was taking out a morcha against the airlines! I was zapped! I mean, WTF?!

And today I realized that this kind of shit has happened before with Air Deccan!

Anyways, the flight finally took off at 10:30 PM amidst a lot of (sarcastic) applause from the passengeres and embarrased smiles from the air hostesses.

Primary moral of the story is, if the price difference is very little, dump Air Deccan. Secondary moral of the story is that at least these buggers SMS you well in time, that the flight is going to be late.

Mumbai food sucks!

This side of the country has the suckiest food... ever. Period. No debate about that. It's not quite south, it's not quite north, it's some random "mash-up" gone horribly wrong!

My pet peeve is that Mumbaikars don't know what a sookha bhaaji means. Go to any wayside restaurant, order a plate of mix veg and you'll get potatoes, peas, and carrots floating around in a red coloured slurry. Order chana masaala, and you get boiled chhole (white coloured chickpea) in the same red coloured gravy. Paneer tikka masaala -- same gravy. Paneer handi -- same. Kadhai paneer -- ditto. Veg Kolhapuri, sounds like an authentic Maharathi dish, but no! Same goddam red curry! And it tastes awful. Yechh!

They make a mess out of North Indian food. Which is sort of understandable. But order any South Indian dish and the accompanying sambhar (which is the thing you need to get right) is a semi sweet, semi solid piece of mess.

Don't even bother trying out the paani-puri at chowpati -- sucks! I've had much better and much cheaper paani-puri in Kanpur. They're called gol-gappas up in the north and they can give the Mumbai paani-puri a run for its money. Fifteen (or twenty) bucks to six pieces seems to be the norm here in Mumbai. Back at IIT Kanpur (in front of Hall 3) we used to have five of them for Rs 2.50! Seriously. And after two years when inflation caugh up, the fellows increased their prices.... to Rs 3.00!

So you're only left with Marathi cuisine. Which, IMHO, is virtually non-existent. The only Marathi thing I've eater here is Missal/Ussal Paav which is not that bad. But, heck, how long can you keep eating dried peas and daal-moth in spicy curry?

The only saving grace in Mumbai is the rasta sandwiches and the rasta bhel. The sandwiches at that price simply ROCK! I'm especially fond of the ones I used to have right ouside Star TV's Mahalaxmi office.

And please don't tell me that I'm eating at the wrong restaurants. Sure, if I go to a swanky restaurant every time I need to eat my lunch, I'll probably get a better deal with the food. But swanky restaurant make not the local cuisine. ITC hotels all around the world are going to serve the same Dal Bhukhari. It's the wayside restaurants, the dhabas, the samosa-cutting corners which make the difference...

Rainbow FM: Rocks!

FM Radio -- the only saving grace of Mumbai. Minus that, the 30 min commute in the crawling traffic, amidst the early morning smog, would be a major pain in the ass!

And the crown jewel, of the eight or so channels my borrowed T.Sonic 610 receieves, is the unheard of government operated channel called Rainbow FM. Seriously! The best collection of music (the early morning english show, late afternoon ghazals, evening english show, etc.); the hourly news round ups in Hindi, which remind you of medium wave radio; sensible RJs; and lack of advertisements.

While Rainbow FM is busy concentrating on music, other channels are busy putting up posters in the Mumbai local trains, coming up with funky radio ads, and playing "Crazy Kiya Re" for the three-millionth-twenty-two-thousandth-three hunderedth-seventy-second time!

The only thing that I'm afraid of is Rainbow FM "going the Go FM way." I hope not! But the lack of advertisements means that it's inevitable. Unless the government keeps subsidising the channel to preserve the "culture of good music." Seriously, if the government can dole out subsidies for Haj pilgrims, this is a much better thing to subsidise IMHO!

If you're in Mumbai give Rainbow FM (107.1 MHz) a shot -- you'll love it!

Fixing the Air Deccan website on Firefox

The wacky geek in me got the better of me this morning. Instead of spending the customary 30 mins reading up news on Google Reader, I spent my time fixing up the b0rked up Air Deccan website.

The Air Deccan website is broken due to poorly written Javascript and HTML which works only in IE. This was not the case some time back when the website used to work in Firefox uptil the payment step. Some recent "upgrades" broke the basic flight search in Firefox as well.

Thanks to the cool Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey you can fire up custom javascript after a website has been loaded. I quickly hacked up a greasemonkey script to fix the air deccan website on Firefox. Simply click on the previous link to install the userscript after you have installed Greasmonkey.

Steps to make the Air Deccan website work in Firefox:

1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Install the userscript to fix the Air Deccan website
3. In case the script doesn't work for you delete all cookies from airdeccan.net and try reloading the page. (Edit > Preferences > Privacy > Cookies > View Cookies. Search for airdeccan.net; select all the cookies and click on the "Remove Cookies" button)

Let me know in case you end up doing Step 3 given above. I'll try to modify the userscript to fix that case as well.

How to know the Greasemonkey script worked?

Before the script


After the script

Now I'll go back to reading the news :)

Your spouse may be a click away!

I know, I know. Everything is fair in love and war, and everything HAS to be fair in the Indian marriage market -- which btw, is getting high tech and riding the DotCom Bubble ver 2.0 -- but this, simply takes the cake, the pandal, the jaimaal, and all the brouhaha along with it!

Even though it comes from the house of our resident tabloid (some like to call it The Slimes of India), it's surprising! First of all, how can you ever... possibly... even remotely... think of a URL called SimplyMarry.com! I mean, what the hell is it supposed to be? Buying pet food online?

And for all those losers who're simply dying for something to "click" in their lives, the marketing department has come up with the perfect line, "Simple Search - Your spouse may be a mouse click away." As Amit Varma would say -- "Happiness Explodes!"


And to prove that they're not just another run-of-the-mill matrimony site who woke up too late for the DotCom marriage party (or reception!), they actually have a section called "Success Stories!" Will I get a refund if I have a divorce within three months? What about a replacement guarantee?

Oh, and just cuz I want to nitpick, their site SUCKS! I mean, apart from the fact that I hate this online marriage shit, it technically sucks. It got caught into an infinite javascript popup loop while I was registering. Check out the screenshot for a proof -- the goddamn error just didn't go away!


And to nitpick even further, why does the profile creation form force me to enter my body type and complexion!


Anyways, I sincerely want to thank the folks there at Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. for coming up with stuff like this. It made my day. Seriously.

Of (un)clothing and weird orgies!

From our resident tabloid:

Vatican defrocks priests for sex abuse

Am I the only one who sees humour in this, or what?!

Blah blah!

At least that's what Yatra seems to think of it's partners!



Just hover your mouse over the scrolling Flash unit at the bottom of their webpage -- my mouse pointer seems to have been left out by the screen capturing tool :|

I hope they don't think the same about their customers too :P

Note: This seems to work only with Firefox -- probably that's why they put that "Best viewed in IE 5.5 or higher" disclaimer down there :)

Bad zoke :)

Q: What is an Australian called in Bangalore?
A: Kangaluroo

HAR! HAR HAR!

WTF?

The screenshot says it all! And they actually have a Top-10 for this topic! Though I wonder who "Khala " is?!

My Dream Phone!

I've never cared much about phones -- I always picked the one which had the least number of buttons, was the sturdiest, and was from Nokia (that's because of the guaranteed amazing battery backup and omnipresence of Nokia chargers)!

For a long time I had the Nokia 1100 -- the "Made In India" phone! And I absolutely loved its usability.

One button to access them all,
One button to find them,
One button to do all the stuff,
And in usability bind them :)

But then I had to shift over to Reliance to get a RIM-to-RIM free pack, and it went downhill from there. Not even a single phone was good enough. I picked the least of all evils -- the Nokia 2112. But I still wonder why would Nokia, the only company that had got its phone UI right, go back and screw it all up! Who the fuck needs the "receive call" and "disconnect call" buttons -- you know the stupid red and green buttons on all phones. From 3 clicks to send an SMS in the 1100, I now need 7 clicks through a cluttered and complicated menu to be able to send a single message!

So, I've never cared much about phones, until today -- the FIC Neo1973 has me all worked up! No MotoRazrs, MotoPEBL, Nokia SOME_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE, Sony Ericsson's, and what have you have ever excited me as much as this phone does! An open Linux phone with GPRS. Apt-get style software updates. Open SDK. The power to tinker and write your own apps. The power to install hundreds of existing Linux apps. The power to change the UI if it sucks! Wow -- the possibilites are endless!

Can't wait to get my hands on one! Though I wonder how it would feel to dial a number using a touchscreen and not a keypad -- receiving/making calls while having food, washing hands, etc. is out of the window, I guess!

And I love the presentation that Sean Moss-Pultz (the creator of the phone) gave at the "Open Souce in Mobile" conference in Amsterdam. The power of simplicity!

That's what the phone looks like. A little on the unusal side, I must say -- but for all the phone narcissists out there -- it will make everyone take a second look at your latest "tool"!


The phone is called FIC Neo1973 but the software platform is called OpenMoko. The OpenMoko dialer.


The OpenMoko menu.