WiFi was installed in the whole area. Waiters were carrying iPhones instead of the regular pen and paper to take the orders. They have built in an customize application to run on them to take the orders as well as print them to a network printer near the counter.

Electronic gadgets being part of the common man shows the progress that India has made and about the economic reforms that it have undergone.

Technology for the masses …

One of the counter guys restarted the system, and viola what I see, I can’t believe. It was giving an error and waiting for the root password to be typed in. “Press Ctrl D for maintenance”. I was very much astonished to see the retail shop shifting towards open source.

I did a bit of a search after coming back home, and I found out that it uses TPLinux on it’s POS and the solution has been brought from Wincor Nixdorf, a German based company. Future Group has claimed to have implemented around 6000 such units across its shops.

http://www.wincor-nixdorf.com/internet/site_ASP/ASP/WincorNixdorf/Press_ASP

I had some bitter experiences at least 3 times (not sure how many times before) in the last couple of months when I felt the attender has cheated me. And it became very true when I noticed the same when done to another person filling up.

As an example, when you say you could fill up X amount, they press 0 and after a few seconds the another attender will come and distract you with cash or all sort of questions. While you are answering those questions the former will press a key wherein you meter reading will say that you have filled up X amount.

The best way to save yourself is to avoid re-filling in this stations.

I am mentioning the petrol bunks wherein I was cheated and I request readers to keep your eyes glued to the meter while filling petrol in this stations.

1. Bharat Petrolum – Sanjaynagar Main Road
2. HP Petrolum – Munireddy Paliya (Towards Bangalore Cannt from Mekri Circle)
3. Indian Oil – Dasarahalli Main Road

Next time I will make sure I have the video footage of the whole act.

But the question is, whom to blame. Government or the people? Let us put the words in a different way, from a third person’s perspective.

When one walk along the streets of Guwahati, what one notice more, footpaths or potholes or the ever going construction/renovation of the footpaths? Where will the common people walk?

Drivers have forgotten the very basics of driving. I think they should be sent to the driving school to do the basics right which includes lane driving and the reading signal boards. The very good example is that when one sees people parking their vehicles just besides the “No Parking Zone”, honk where is “No Horn” sign board and zoom pass when there are speed restrictions. That’s where basics comes into. Overtaking from the left side, driving in a zig zag manner can all be witness in the streets. Pillion riders are seldom seen wearing helmets, though there are lots of hoardings stating it’s necessity. There is always the urgency to reach the destination, not sure why that is true for everyone.

And the best what I witness, was city buses stopping in the middle of traffic signal and picking up travelers. The driver would not move until the bus is full. Sometimes it seemed that they would call people from the houses to board in. Common-on give a break, have some common sense.

One sees all sorts of vehicles in the road, ir-respective of whether that is main road or a connecting one. It does not matter. It just adds to the over whelming chaos.

Government also has some short comings. It’s projection towards the future is some what very less, almost negligible. Government should plan its project’s accordingly so that it could at lease sustain a minimum of 25-20 yrs. Projects are being carried out and by the tine it comes into reality, problems seemed to have multiplied in folds. Alternatives should be thought of before any implementation so to minimize the inconvenience caused to the public. One more factor to add is the bribe factor. Traffic rules are being violated left and right, but how many have of them has being imposed a fine. How much money has gone to the exchequer? Hardly any. Government Officers as well as the common user ar every happy to by-pass this and pay a small sum to the official, keeping both of them happy. Is this the way?

Rules are rules and they are made for the interest of the common public and it should not be implemented differently to a special class of people and differently to the other class. Government should be strong and potent enough in implementing the rules.

I don’t have any offense with any one of them, but it just projects a bad picture to the outside world and being an `Axomiya`, I too feel the pinch.

Participants: 2 wheelers, 3 wheelers, 4 wheelers, 6 wheelers, Trailers …
Contestants: Any user ir-respective of age
Vehicle: Any make, Local/Foreign
License: Not mandatory
Driving Skills: Not essential
Circuit: Bangalore – Mysore State Highway
Race Type: Death race
Timings: Open 24 hrs

The very good about this race track is that it is open to unrestricted public viewing and any one can participate from anywhere on that circuit and tend to increase on weekends. The track makes it’s way through small villages as well as some major cities, making it easily accessible to all the contestants.

Since I planned to push on updates on the track and the race status, I hoped into a Tata Indica and joined the already moving race group. I met the group at the Mysore intersection, one way coming from the city while the other being from the by-pass. Our driver was driving at 100 kmph, when I am being zoomed passed by 5 cars and when queried about the speed to him, he promptly said around 120-140 kmph. Our driver put his foot on the gas, and woh, we were also on par with them at 110 kmph. One Mercedes Benz and a Skoda Laura have just zoomed pass me at around 150 kmph leaving all of us behind trying to be the first. There is hardly and space between the two of the cars. If one puts on the brakes, I am sure the other would just ramp on the other. With both flashing indicators, they were just passing each one of us in the race track.

As we were cruising along on that speed, oh, what do I see! I see a cyclist trying to make it’s way on the the circuit. As far as I can see, he is seated on his Hero cycle, with one hand holding on to the cycle while the other hand trying to adjust his `lungi`, which does not seem be holding on to his waist. God, please don’t take his `lungi` off, else their might be a sudden increase in the Testosterone level in some contestants.

My driver would just shift the gears in order to lessen the speed along with the breaks. Oh what an idea, though it leaves the engine burning. As we are competing with one another, I notice a a group of villagers walking just beside the circuit, one set trying to cross the circuit and the other happily sitting by the side of the circuit gossiping, while our contestants are zooming by. Oh no. God save them.

The space that is between the cars is hardly a meter and everyone takes it granted that the former would not stop. The best part is that all the big vehicles would be driving on the extreme right so that other’s would have overtake through the left, a new overtake rule. They are the Big B’s of the road and would not give any indication while changing lanes making it difficult for us to shift and overtake. One needs to squeeze past them as we and fellow racers did.

I reached Bangalore and was lucky enough to complete the race and come out unharmed. Will update once again when I would be a part of the race. With government easing on the speed breakers rules on the roads, hope to have some more excitement as days go by.

This is Ophiophagus signing off for the day.

I went to the cabin, where in Mrs. Purva Suryarao, was shifted. She was undergoing a lot of pain but the joy of being a mother, overwhelmed the pain. I felt like crying, after seeing the pain that she had to undergo for the birth. Giving birth is itself a rebirth to the mother due to the pain/trauma that she undergoes and in past there were incidents wherein only one of them used to live.

I quietly started comparing our complicated lives (which we have made complicated) with that of the life of a kid. A small thought which sprang up was that when we grow up, we don’t think of what trouble/pain our parents might have gone through in bringing us up. We just think of our own self and our worldly pleasures, and when questioned, we try to give ample reasons to justify ourself. Do any one of us try even to think of the mark would it leave on our parents. The fame, the respect that they have earned with all experience goes off by just one wrong deed of our and still we don’t care for that. Is this the way we should treat our parents? Or there are better ways of dealing with it.

A never ending list …

So, what/whom does it help? I am not sure whose whims it fulfills, but it leaves a huge impact on the state/centre revenues.

We humans have a good mentality of doing things and we Indian’s in particular, have one great quality. Up till our boundaries are safe, we don’t care for others. We have seen people breaking public property during the the time of bandh’s and riot’s but we don’t care. In the sense we don’t feel the pinch, since it does not go directly from our pocket. What we tend to forget is that the taxes that we pay to the government is being re-used for the public property. I have seen people being proud to say that they have destroyed public property. WT.? So, when some one breaks/destroys a public property, bottom line is that we pay for it in-directly. So who is to be blamed? The political babus who form of the government or the common people?

India, has been greatly driven by politics in the past as well as today. You can peep into and see the dirty politics/policies that goes into, for getting the throne. As a matter of fact, you can’t give a `clean chit` to most of the political leaders as of today. The very basic qualification is to have a `good criminal` background (except a few). And it is them who gives the verdicts of bandh’s and hartal’s just to get into limelight. The worst suffers are the common people, daily wagers and it cost an whopping amount of around 20,000 crore to the exchequer. Political parties don’t give a damm on that figure. And as common man, we sing the way to the parties. No one thinks about the money that is being lost since we don’t directly pay it.

Being a developing country we can not afford bandh’s and riot’s. It’s too expensive for the nation.

Moreover the same server had the slow mounting of NFS issue. Users would just wait for at least a minute after issuing the `ls` command and when login to GUI mode, it would just be in some state of hangover mode. I tried re-installing NFS kernel server along with updating the kernel, but still no help.

When doing a search somewhere it was mentioned that host needs to be identified. Since I was using IP’s, I thought it would not be a problem, but later on I found out that you need to make entries so that `idmapd` is able to locate it, some sort of a reverse DNS lookup. While restarting nfs-common you see two services being start, idmapd and statd. `idmapd` is the NFSv4 name mapping daemon. It provides functionality to the NFSv4 kernel client and server, to which it communicates via upcalls, by translating user and group IDs to names, and vice versa, while statd creates a file in /var/lib/nfs/statd/sm. When starting, it iterates through these files and notifies the peer rpc.statd on those machines. In case it does not find, it just takes it’s own time to mount it.

The same solved both the problems and user’s are also using it without any complaint.