At times, I take things too seriously – as happened recently when I tried to sell my laptop. Within hours of my putting it for sale on ebay, somebody by the name Niraj Jain had purchased it, and I was thrilled. So far so good. What you wouldn’t have expected me to do, however, is the little bit of sleuthing that I did last night, stretching into the wee hours of the morning.

I unearthed what would have been a perfect crime but for a tad bit of oversight – the e-mail ID from Western Union was not quite from Western Union (www.westernunion.com), but from Westernunion-paymentonlines.com. But for the disturbing nugget of doubt about this e-mail ID, I’d have taken their bait hook, line and sinker. On hindsight, it turned out to be a good thing that I had purchased some talk time on Skype – it helped me call up Western Union’s customer care, and when I asked them to run this e-mail ID through their systems, they came up with zilch.

Yet another dead give-away was the telephone numbers. The buyer had given me a telephone number for contact, and so had “Western Union” in their e-mail, along with the name of a person in their “customer service department” – Russel Simmons. The remarkable thing was these numbers were more or less identical except for one or two digits. When I tried dialling the buyer’s number through Skype, sure enough, the call couldn’t go through. One of my UK friends was on-line, and I sought his help. He tried and reported that it was a private line – that is, the line itself was owned by the called party or something like that – and that it would cost a great deal of money to simply make a call to it.

There’s more. Another e-mail, this one purporting to be from Swift Courier International, which informed me that though they have a demand draft for Rs.52,000 in place, it would be on hold until I gave them the airway bill number for the shipment of the laptop. “This would ensure that while your money is on its way, the buyer’s laptop is on its way too, thus preventing any fraud”. How ingenious, and totally credible! That part of the fraud came unravelled too when I called up the customer care department of the *original* Swift Courier International (yes, it does exist and is head-quartered in the UK – the same country where the buyer claimed he was currently staying), and they couldn’t recognize the “reference number” that was given in the e-mail.

The icing on the cake (or the final nail in the coffin, whichever way you choose to look at it) was the domain name (westernunion-paymentonlines.com) itself – it was a “personal address” on MSN, whatever that means (see attached screenshot). The domain name for the Swift Courier’s e-mail was msn.com too, and when I checked the headers of both e-mails, sure enough, Hotmail servers were involved!!

I shudder to think of the loss I’d have had to suffer had I not seen through things when I did. The whole scheme was incredibly well-organised and I doubt if someone less alert (and less knowledgeable about domain names, etc.) would have even seen doubted this till it was too late.

Just to make things clear, eBay is a wonderful place to buy and sell items, especially when you can’t afford advertisements in your local newspaper. Unfortunately for us, the Niraj Jains of this world are far too cunning and prepared, and unless you stumble on to something like I did, the chances are you’re likely to get swindled big time.

Moral of the story: eBay advises buyers and sellers to avoid on-line payment systems like Western Union, and I am beginning to see why. When scam artists (yes, they have made it a fine art) go to such great lengths to make the whole thing look so credible – even including a shipping address in Nigeria – it does make sense to use eBay’s own payment mechanism, and / or on-line bank transfers.

And never, *ever*, ship out anything unless you’ve got the money safely in your hands. Unless, of course, you have so much of the stuff that you don’t mind losing some. In that case, my phone number is …. and you can call me any time of the day or night to relieve your monetary burden

P.S. Yet another moral of the story: If you’re in India, want to talk often to your friends who are staying abroad, and don’t want to go out of your home looking for a VoIP phone booth – and you wouldn’t want to, I guarantee you, at 1:30 a.m. – get yourself some talk time on Skype. Take my word for it, it comes in handy.

I was reading this article recently and was going through the reactions of the readers. I didn’t exactly do a count, but it did strike me that people are about evenly divided between condemning the fine and accepting it.

The real question, it seems to me, is not whether kissing in public is to be allowed or not; the more pertinent question is, who decides what’s decent in a public place? I would think that the decision about decency would be made by individuals, and not anyone claiming to be enforcers of the law. If you’re in a public place with your partner, and there are no “impressionable” (in your judgment) young ones (or old ones, for that matter) around, then go right ahead and do your thing, as long as it is love that drives you to do so. Don’t do it out of a feeling of defiance, to prove that you don’t care what others think; to show your parents and others who controls your life.

The reason I even have to add the clause about impressionable young (or old) people around is that in India, kissing, holding hands, etc. are simply not acceptable to many people. I suppose there was a time when the same situation existed many decades ago in England and other countries in Europe. And I’m equally sure that the first couple to have kissed in public would have raised a lot of eyebrows. But now, the people over there have gotten to a point where such things are common, and may cause embarrassment only if there is an old person around. Especially one who is staring!

We’re still a young country in the post-British era, and we’re experimenting with societal changes now. Yes, it’s going to be painful for some of us to accept certain things, and everyone is welcome to express his / her opinion for and against the topic, but in the absence of a consensus, penalising such public displays of affection seems not only crude and totalitarian, but also irrational.

Note: I have since learned that the riots following Dr. Rajkumar’s death were incited by politicians with the help of their cronies, and the actor’s fans didn’t, in reality, have anything to do with it. I apologise for the allegation.

I have regretted most of the time spent outside my office here in Bangalore. The roads are bad (this is worth repeating), the traffic is worse, and there is no public transportation system worth its name (the proposed Metro is going to be operational by 2008 at the earliest, though I feel that’s being overly optimistic), and the city goes to sleep at 9 p.m.!!

The day before yesterday, the popular Kannada actor, “Dr.” Rajkumar, passed away due to a cardiac failure that’s not uncommon for someone of his age. Going by the way the people of this city reacted to it, you’d think that the Chief Minister of the State or the Prime Minister of the country was assassinated. There was violence on the streets (several vehicles were burnt), shopowners all over the city drew their shutters down at 4:30 p.m. fearing the rampaging mob, and bus services within the city ground to a halt. Why, every mode of transport coming into and going out of Bangalore (except the airways) stopped functioning. It was not until this morning that normalcy of life resumed.

My friend, who kindly provided me shelter for that night (since there was no way I could have reached my hotel amidst the riots) knew enough about the people to realize that the bus ticket that he had purchased for travelling back to his hometown would not be worth the paper it was printed on, and took the earliest flight out of the city yesterday, paying such a huge sum that I felt aghast! All because the pusillanimous Chief Minister and the city’s finest couldn’t come down hard on the rioters and tell them that their favourite star may have died but that’s no reason for life in the city to come to a standstill!

IT capital of India? Puh-lease!

I have been in Bangalore for the last three weeks on an official visit, and I can’t help hoping this trip gets over quick! Not that Pune’s roads are a motorist’s dream – far from it. But the traffic jams in this city are much worse than Pune. I suspect, however, that it’d only be a matter of time before Pune catches up with this undesirable trend.

I had once been to Bangkok when my parents had been there and was told that sometimes, it took a couple of hours for the traffic snarls to clear up. Gosh! Thank God these cities are nowhere near that level, but it does get irritating to think that a two kilometre journey on an automobile from my place of stay to the office can take as much as fifteen minutes!

It’s all over – the fight for a principle has lost out against the need for peace of mind; I’ve sold out to the devil who must now be grinning happily.

The guys at Stan Chart started calling me again, and this time, due to other circumstances, I was in no state to fight back. And I gave in to the temptation to buy my peace, exorbitant though the price may be (39k, to be precise). I couldn’t, however, resist the temptation to make the collection agent feel guilty – I thanked him profusely, making sure that my dripping sarcasm wasn’t missed.

Heck, now that I’m writing about it, I still feel the pangs of losing so much money

After a long, long time, I spoke to a friend who has come down to India for a visit from the US. She’s lugging her little boy along with her too. The only sad part is we probably won’t be able to meet when she’s here. That’ll have to wait for a future date I guess…

Of late, I’ve been struggling to remember details of conversations that I’ve had
with friends – what they have been up to, names of some of their friends, what
new job have they moved into, and such. Seems pretty commonplace, until you
happen to know that I have been saying this for more than three summers now.

What’s wrong with the old bean, you start wondering, when things start getting
worse and friends accuse you of being careless and even casual about the
attention you pay to them.

If you do know, drop me a line

I had written a strong letter to Standard Chartered Bank expressing, in no uncertain terms, what I felt about the way I was treated. I ended the missive with the words, “Don’t expect a single paisa from me” or words to that effect. I am not privy to what effect those words had on whoever read that letter, but they seemed to have terminated all kinds of communication with me. Of course, the inevitable monthly statements informing me that my name has been added to the “industry-wide defaulters list” keeps coming to my mailbox. Should I say thanks or what?

I have no further reason to complain. Not yet, at any rate.

Rajan stood watching them play – he, the one who could not run about like them all. He, who didn’t have to pay attention to what his teacher has saying in class because he didn’t need to; he, who could have told you what the largest twin primes less than thousand were even when abruptly woken up. Such was his fate. He resigned himself to watching them. The unexpected happened.

One of the boys looked at Raman, and decided it would be to his own advantage if he were to persuade the others to let Raman join the game. He knew cricket was not a game that kids afflicted with polio could really play, but he thought he would try as well as not since he definitely needed Raman’s help in preparing for the rapidly-approaching exams. At any rate, he had nothing to lose.

He spoke to the captain of the other team. Since they were both good friends, they asked Raman if he was interested in joining them. His eyes lit up as he nodded. They told him he could only be the umpire. He agreed gleefully. After all, being part of their group, even as a non-player was much, much better than not being included at all.

Up at 9. Done with ablutions by 9:30. Clean up rooms, mop: 9:35. Start cooking post food-status-check in refrigerator – 9:45. Shower: 10. Muesli with milk for breakfast: 10.15. Done with boiling potatoes, now onto curry: 10.20. Done with curry, leave for office: 10.35. Work till 11.45. A light snack: 12. Lunch break: 1. Back at work: 2.

Okay, you guessed right – that is my routine. The exact minutes of the hour keep changing from day to day, but you get the general idea, don’t you?

Decided to post this if only to prove that I have this silly streak in me. Ditto for vanity. Not that either required any proof in the first place <g> Hmm, well, this is off the record: I’ve also got a lot of time to kill