Stranded by the road-side

A few days back, when I was getting back home from work, my car suffered a break down. Though I had taken an offbeat road that day, the traffic was nevertheless very high, considering it was the peak hour. With very little knowledge on automobile service/recovery, no proper documentation of road-side assistance/service numbers and when Google searches failed to deliver, I resorted to phone-a-friend as the last option.

Fortunately, this option did work and I got numbers of few vehicle-towing service providers. From the numbers, I ended up calling Allianz roadside assistance, which offered very prompt services. They assured of a pickup in 60 minutes, however they had a strange pre-condition of online payment by the customer before initiating processing. Though demanding an upfront online-only payment from a customer stranded by the roadside didn't sound like a great model, I did manage to make a payment, inspite of running low on mobile battery.

The towing vehicle getting into position, while traffic flows by

Though it appeared by then that I had to just wait it out until the tow truck arrived, things didn't pan out that easily. Having gotten stranded on an off-road, in a drizzling weather and running low on mobile battery, I had to kill time by sitting in the vehicle. Thats when I had to put up with stares from every vehicle or passerby crossing me. And, they were of all kinds - the angry look from people who thought someone had pulled over, blocking traffic on a busy road to just while away time; the occasional sneers from few vehicles; and the genuinely puzzled, curious look from a lot of passengers, who at times paused in their tracks, some even re-traced steps back to my vehicle to give a proper, top-down stare before moving on!

Tried of this routine & unsure on how to respond to the stares, I finally pulled out my laptop and watched a movie. I'm sure this would have doubled the curiosity and furiousness of fellow passengers, but atleast that kept me glued to the screen. And, Backcountry was a movie that matched the mood :) 

The learnings for me from this episode were:

• Spend time learning basics of car issues & recovery, like a first-aid. Perhaps, keep a small printed cheat-sheet handy, to try out basic options before escalating for expert-help
• Keep the numbers of multiple service centres in the locality (I had just the one where I usually get service done, and that had closed for the day), apart from the numbers of towing services

...and perhaps, keep some movies handy to keep yourself engaged!

Celebrating Independence day

Its true that you don't need a ceremonial day to think about your country, rather this should be in your thoughts and actions round the year. Nevertheless, August 15th - the Independence day, such an occasion, however ceremonial it may appear, reinvigorates the patriotism in all of us. 

The fervour with which it is celebrated in various circles of our life adds some new meaning every year - amongst colleagues at work, with neighbours in the residential community, with children at school and at home with family. These celebrations and thoughts, particularly amongst groups of people makes it all the more meaningful and elevates the idea of a nation.

This year, there was an added dimension to this day, since our son who is in the PP-I class had to recite a patriotic song/verse in school. With a lot of googling and behind the scenes coaching, largely by my wife for this Kindergarten performance, we did learn something new! There was also help from a neighbour, Shalini Philip who came up with an original verse as a post-script to the song.

Here is a repeat of Krish's performance, from earlier today, for which, incidentally he had won the first place as well, at school!

When I searched for songs on the net, I couldn't find the lyrics for this song 'Oh my India', though there were couple of amateur videos of renditions by kids. I'm adding it here for completeness:

Oh India, Oh my India

I Love you, Oh my India!

            (Oh India..)

Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean

Arabian Sea, is near my nation

            (Oh India..)

Great Himalayan Ghats of India

Ganga, Yamuna waters of India

            (Oh India..)

Gandhiji, Nehruji, Swami Vivekananda

Everybody knows them as great Indians

            (Oh India..)

Flight ratings - whats the big deal?

Booking an early morning flight, for business, is always a tricky thing. Depending on your meeting start time (say 10 AM), you'd have to allow room for some buffer beyond the budgeted time, for landing at the airport and taking a taxi to the meeting location. You'd definitely need to allow atleast 45 to 60 minutes buffer time for any delays. 

But what if your flight gets delayed by upto an hour? All your pre-planning and scheduling goes right out of the window. So, thats some more slack time needed. However, the frustrating thing for me is that all this buffer cuts down on 'precious' early morning sleep time. Proper sleep on the day of travel is anyway a rare commodity, since I've found that you need to be up by 4 AM for a 7 AM flight. 

Same is the case with the night return flights. You budget time to get back home at an 'earthly' hour, say by 11 PM. Flight schedule changes and airport traffic congestion easily add up another 60 to 90 minutes.

This brings me to the question. Why don't travel sites show ratings of a flight's past performance? Is it usually on time? How is the service? How is the food quality? This can easily be aggregated from customers, post the travel. Since delays could also be due to airport traffic congestion or other reasons beyond a carrier's control, the feedback on timeliness could be on whether the boarding happened on time.

I'm surprised that none of the airline travel webistes do this today. This is a tried and tested feedback loop in other industries - think cab aggregators like Uber/Ola, hotel booking aggregators like Tripadvisor. In the travel segment, by aggregators like redbus (sample given here). The closest site I could find was flightstats, which is a dedicated website on past flight statistics and has other means of data collection since it doesn't have a customer feedback loop to leverage (see image below).

Simple bus ratings from redbus.in	FlightStats rating summary

Contemplating migration onto a new home

Early 2015 was when I resumed blogging after a long hiatus. A couple of months later, I was already contemplating migrating my blog out of Blogger, maybe onto a new, own site or some new-age platform. But having blogged just over 50 posts across 10 years, and with a largely erratic blogging pattern, I wasn't entirely convinced about the effort-outcome tradeoff.

So, I set myself a target of crossing 100 posts overall and maintaining an average of 4 posts a month (roughly a weekly rhythm), before moving the needle on this thought. Now about 1.5 years later, I have crossed 130 posts and also have hit the targeted monthly post average. And this is something that I'm immensely pleased about with myself! Perhaps, talking now about migration is justified.

Before getting onto options being evaluated, one thing I've been clear about is the migration out of Blogger. The Blogger ecosystem is metaphorically like a once-busy city, now in ruins, and not much left for the people who've chosen to stay back. There are newer avenues that have sprung up, each with its own theme, philosophy. And many of them are welcoming and thriving.

I was earlier more inclined towards a self-hosted site using Wordpress. Medium was a strong alternative as well. The more I read about pros and cons of Self Hosted vs Wordpress vs Medium, the more confusing it got. The cons aside, I've been quite excited about Medium and the way the site has been shaping up over the past 2 years. While it seemed to be a good platform for writing content without worrying about the technical aspects, Medium has gotten better at promoting stories, surfacing content and connecting people. The change is noticeable as I've been consuming several blogs off Medium, over the past months.

The option of using custom domains on Medium has recently been introduced and is seeing good adoption. This seems to offer the best of both worlds and suits most of my immediate needs. So, for now, I seem to be settling around a combination - Own domain name on Feedly. 

Staying relevant in the Radio cabs space - Is Meru holding up?

Nokia's CEO ended his speech while announcing their distress sale to Microsoft saying, “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Immediately, he and the entire management team publicly wept.

All case studies on Nokia dissecting the reasons for failure point to one thing in common - "inadequate pace of innovation & the seeming reluctance to change even as their world was turning upside down". Interestingly, all market leaders across industries who have been swept away with fundamental changes in their respective industries have this in common - Polaroid, Yahoo or Sun Microsystems.

When I need to book a cab, I usually check the 3 apps on my phone - Uber, Ola and Meru. The occasion decides the app that gets picked. If its an early-morning drop to the airport, the choice invariably is Meru (having burnt hands on a couple of occasions while trying to switch to other operators). For every other case its either Uber (on those rare occasions where surge pricing is not on!) or Ola.

Having used Meru for over 8 years, I'm amazed at their consistency - both, in their 'uber' punctuality with guaranteed before-time arrival AND in they being wedded to technology that is atleast few years behind the industry. 

Their Android app has few frustrating touchpoints. For instance, a basic thing such as the 'favorites' feature doesn't really store your home/office location. Meru, surprisingly doesn't yet have a navigation map for its drivers. The GPS seems to be used only for cab booking. So, the driver doesn't have the advantage of routing technology, and the customer's bill summary doesn't provide a route map, unlike Ola/Uber, which offer this check on whether the driver took an optimal route. Without GPS mapping & proper address storage, you end up explaining your home address & landmark to the drivers, every single time. 

While these contribute to a poor UX overall, their significantly higher fares put off users. Today, a bulk of their daily trips seem to come from airport drops and pick-ups, which is one location where you can still find a very high number of their cabs. Considering that the rival cab aggregators do a pretty good job in the above areas along with providing a seamless app user experience, it remains to be seen when Meru would catch up. However, I've noticed in the past that they took an inordinate amount of time to start offering online payment and wallet facilities, years after their peers, so this may take a good amount of time, as well.

As a side note, strangely I've noticed several of their drivers, across trips handing over their business card containing personal contact details, with Meru branding, possibly encouraged by the company. This is puzzling to say the least on why a cab aggregator would encourage their drivers to push for direct bookings with customers.

Pic Source: Forbes article

Thus, directionally the story of Meru cabs doesn't appear to be too different from the fall of some of these biggest names, in the anecdote at the starting of this post. Meru had a stellar rise to the top in the organised cab players market and at a point had a near monopoly in a couple of major Indian cities. The arrival of cab aggregators marked the reinvention & rejuvenation of this industry - players like Uber, Ola & the erstwhile Taxi4sure had innovated the radio cabs space, unseated Meru cabs from its leadership position and gave it serious competition. 

Thankfully, the story is not yet over for Meru. It continues to try and reverse the downward trend, raise funds and even put in place an expansion plan to fight back. However, the initiatives don't seem to be paying off at the pace that the competition is grabbing business from them. Atleast from a consumer's perspective, things don't seem to look good. 

Can a fitness tracker keep you in good shape?

After over 2 months of using my Fitbit tracker, here is a review of the device:

I’ve been using Fitbit to primarily track the 'steps' and 'floors' metrics. These have been fairly accurate and quite useful. The other two metrics - 'calories' and 'distance' are derived from the above, and hence have a high correlation. However, they are useful additions to have. I’ve hardly used the Heart-rate meter. I did try sleeping with the device strapped on, for a couple of weeks, but the accuracy was low. It showed lesser hours slept, at times under-reporting by over 4 hours. Not finding too much utility for this metric, I stopped wearing it to bed.

I've found that walking for 45 to 60 minutes adds up to about 4000 steps on an average. This combined with general moving around at work and using opportunities to take calls mobile leaves you with an end-of-day count at around 7000 steps. These fitness trackers come with a preset target of 10,000 steps a day, however, somewhere in the range of 7500 would be a good enough target to achieve. I generally take the stairs at every given opportunity so the average floors climbed or 'steps' metric has been healthy at around 12 to 15 per day, while the pre-set target here is just 10.

The Good aspects: 

• Reasonably accurate tracking of steps/floors 
• Nice, sleek design with vibrant colours. Fairly sweat/water resistant - have put this through minor water splashes
• Instant vibrate-alerts indicating achievement of pre-set targets for the day
• Was pleasantly surprised to discover that the display was a touch-screen, something that I found out after 2 weeks of usage - only when my 1.5 year old daughter kept insistently tapping at it! 
• Gamification through achievement badges. However, you end up collecting most of the cumulative badges within the first month (50 km, 100 km, 500 floors etc). Would have been great to have some badges for consistency or month-on-month performance 
• Dashboard provides a good summary and reportedly the best amongst other fitness trackers. Gives a useful set of summary metrics, trending and breakup. 

The Not-so-good aspects:

• The data dump offered for csv download is disappointing. It just extracts the daily total, whereas an activity-wise summary (distance, speed, incline captured) or by-minute detailing would have been better. 
• The dashboard has scope for improvement. Long-term trending (over 30 days) would have been very useful. Further, the weekly summary doesn’t give you a week-over-previous-week summary, nor is a comparison provided against personal averages/best. I’ve now ended up creating my own summary view in excel, based on the csv data download available.

My Fitbit main Dashboard

Overall, Fitbit Charge HR is a good companion that does the job of making you stay active, by the very act of being visibly conscious and up-close through the day. Its almost like a trainer prodding you to move around. Gamification is a definitive motivator. There are days, I’ve felt bad that my steps count were a paltry sub-2000 and have ended up taking a long walk at night. 

Yes, the difference is partly psychological, but I would definitely recommend this for anyone conscious about their activity-level/weight or aspiring to get into this zone. 

Kabali da...!

Note: This post is not a review of the movie

Its been a week since Kabali fever gripped the country. Just as expectations soared right into the sky prior to the release, there have been mixed reviews the past 2 days, after it hit the theatres. There are people who've showered the movie with praises on the bold departure from the popular Rajni genre. While, there are others who've come out with punishing criticism and have even gone to the extent of talking about an impending end of the ageing actor's career. Yet again. 

For a couple of decades now, release of every Rajnikanth movie is marked with the frenzy and celebrations that merit a festival. There are fans who worship him, critics who write him off, people who are drawn-in with interest, while media keeps playing to the gallery. For every movie, as people outside Tamil Nadu struggle to fathom the build up with disbelief, the analysts yet again try to dissect what routinely sets off such a craze time and again: whether its his style on-screen, or his personality off-screen or whether all of this is some irrational, maniacal following that defies any sane logic. 

Love him or hate him, but you can never ignore Rajnikanth. 

Having blocked tickets for Kabali through several friends, I ended up booking 17 tickets - across 2 theatres and for 3 different timings! There were also colleagues planning to join in for the Tamil version of the movie, just to partake in the Rajni craze, though they didn't understand the language. Our preference was to watch the movie with the Hyderabad hackers, the good folks who had organized a special 'Kabali bus' from IIIT to watch the first-day-first-show of the movie at PVR. Having booked tickets for the event through them as well, I had given away all the other tickets for the FDFS show at Prasads. It didn't take too long to find takers for those tickets, and surprisingly long after the tickets were given away, I kept getting requests for tickets based on my facebook post. 

However, PVR made a last minute change in plan and decided to screen the movie in its Telugu version instead of the planned Tamil one, for an already booked show. With this, I was pushed into a last-minute, mad scramble to get back a few tickets on the night prior to the movie release. With some magnanimous friends agreeing to return a few tickets, we kept our date with the first-day-first-show. We had ample fan-crazy moments in the show and it was pure fun. 

With the Boss!	Pre-movie selfie in front of Prasads

At the end of it all, the story of watching the movie was perhaps, no lesser than a short-movie script! Finally, if you're looking for my take on the movie, I'd just say that I liked the movie and enjoyed its detour from a prescribed, formulaic script. But, I'd have to warn that this is a fan speaking! I'm sure, the debates in the media will continue for a while and more 'final verdicts' will be passed. All said and done, 'Rajnikanth - the phenomenon' will continue to both baffle and entertain people for some more time!