Ravi’s Gadgets

I have been in Pondicherry for quite some time now, and I have missed all the oppertunities that have come my way to learn French. But I already speak 4 languages and I am not very keen on knowing another one. So I am pretty sure that I will be letting go any other oppertunity that I might get as well.

Yesterday when I was watching TV, I was shocked to learn that Chandrika Kumaratunga took her universiry course in Paris and speaks french fluently, and she speaks English quite well too.

Would that make me learn French? Well, the French President is a bigger guy, and he too speaks French, so why should I care of Chandrika Kumaratunga speaks French or not?

As long as I have google translator and have a computer on my desk with enough computer memory, I wouldn’t want to bug up my brain in learning a new language.

A motorcycle that was designed over a hundred years ago, has served for the British Army, has served the Indian Army, comes with 350 CC of raw power, and the basic design hasn’t changed one bit in all these years. Thats the Bullet, and I am buying one of those. It is in production in India, and most of the vehicles that are manufactured are exported, and only a very few is bding sold in India, and there is absolutely no advertisments.

I am interested in the model called the Thunderbird, and I would be going for it some time next month. It is a 500 CC motor cycle and has got a top speed of 180 Km per hour, that means you could reach Chennai from Pondicherry is a little over an hour, provided you have a good eyesight and a bit of luck that you dont hit any of the bulls or stray dogs that cross the ECR.

Unfortunately enough for me, I have never been able to connect to a better broadband from my home in Pondicherry than a BSNL connection. The operators who are available in my area are SIFY, Tata Indicom and BSNL, out of which BSNL is the best. The other two are even worse.

Sify goes down very often, and when you call their helpline, they just tell you that the problem will be fixed in 24 to 48 hours, and when your line goes down for 15 times a month, you will be left for a month without internet. TATA is horrible. I have written a lot about my experiences with them at the office and at home. So all that I am left with is BSNL.

The only good ISP in Pondihcerry is Airtel, and out of sheer bad luck, they dont operate in my area of residence, and at the office. The first office that I had taken in Pondicherry was in an area where Airtel served, and I was quite happy wiht the service, but now, I am stuck to BSNL.

What is so bad about bsnl? Well, there is absolutely no customer service to start with, though the lines do not go down for more than a few hours together at a streatch. I am supposed to have a 2 Mbps connection, but the speed never crosses that of a 256 kbps connection, and I dont understand why I have to pay for the limited line if I dont get the promised 2 Mbps, and why not go for an unlimited 256 Kbps. Well, thats the plan that I had in the beginning, and in that connection, no data is ever transfered, and if you download a torrent file or something with quite a number of data connections, meaning if your computer connects with more than say about 50 ips at a time, and still download data at around 8 kbps or something, you will never be able to access any other website though there will be a good amount of bandwidth that is open for your use.

Airtel was really good, and I miss the service, and for this if you ask me to relocate my home for the sake of gothic art, it would be quite difficult. Why dont Airtel expand here?

A so called freedom fighter got beaten up by the British terribly, and then he quit freedom fighting and started preaching the Gita and wrote a few books himself for a living. The man was Aurobindo Ghosh. A bengali, didn’t know what to do for a living, so went into freedom fighting, but ultimately managed to setup a huge establishment at Pondicherry, that is the Aurobindo Ashram and the nearby village called Auroville.

People always say that there is more money in there than anywhere else in the world, and that there is more drugs, sex and even child sex abuse in Auroville. Even BBC has made a documentary on it recently.

People do a lot of things in the name of faith. Faith doesnt come commercially. People shouldn’t have to buy books printed by these establishments, or buy other merchandize when they walk out of these places. People who do business with the organization shouldn’t have to pay an extra price just because there is a brand name called Auroville. It is not holy, but is just another business empire, where loads of illegal activities too take place under the cover of Faith.