Side Effects of Online Shopping

25th August 2008
So, I had ordered a gas stove from future bazaar and it was supposed to be delivered at home. I had also ordered some pots and pans and they were being shipped separately. For some background, my truly semi-furnished apartment had come with an empty cylinder, no valid gas connection and a gas stove without the burners. For the last one month I have been strugling to get the gas cylinder filled since I don't have a valid connection. I therefore need to get it in black, which would cost about Rs. 650... which I am willing to pay... still it's taking like for ever... apparently none of the 12 watchmen in my apartment complex seem to have a clue about where the residents get their cylinders from!

I got a call in my office yesterday afternoon from a courier guy saying that he is at my apartment with the delivery from futurebazaar so I asked him to leave it with the reception. I also told the security that I will collect it at night from whoever is at the desk at the moment. At night when I went back and walked to the reception, there was a gas stove waiting for me, so I took it, then the watchman also gave me a pipe and a regulator with it... I wasn't expecting that a stove would include it but I thought it's good... I needed it anyways... and then I saw a gas cylinder lying there... it reminded me and I reminded the watchman that I need a cylinder to be filled as well. This is where it gets interesting... the watchman said... this cyliner is yours as well... I obviously was surprised and told him that I ordered just a stove, nothing more and he goes... "it's some scheme from HP" I don't remember the last time I was so pleasantly surprised but somehow I controlled my emotions and said, "I need to get it filled anyways"... and he said... It's already filled! I was like... this is not true... I paid Rs. 700... I can't get a stove, a pipe, a regulator and a filled cylinder... all this for 700 when the gas refill itself was just 650. The security personnel seemed convinced that it's possible... Now, I remember the last time I was so pleasantly surprised... it was about one minute ago... I thought ok... Chamatkar... great... God Tussi Great Ho types. I anyways deserved some good treatment after the bad experience with Future Bazaar (They had messed up my order previously and I had to write to the customer service and spend a few days getting things sorted out). So I came to my room with all the stuff, unpacked everything, set it up and for a moment felt like... have you seen the movie Dark Knight? the joker at one point says "I am like this dog chasing a car but if I ever caught one I won't know what to do with it". That's how I felt like after setting everything up. I lit up the lighter and after making sure that the gas works... happily went to bed.

I got up in the morning, looked at my kitchen and thought... nothing comes this easy in life. I kept feeling that something was wrong... anyways, I was leaving the apartment for a while and I met the watchman on the way. I told him that I am expecting another package today (the pots n pans, remember?) and he took out a packet and handed over to me and said it came for you yesterday! That was the pots and pans... one might have thought that the call I got from the courier guy was for these pots and pans but being the eternal optimist that I am, I thought may be I received two couriers yesterday, the stove as well as the pans. Then I went back to my room and went online... futurebazaar site... and checked my order status... it said, pots n pans delivered... gas stove - ON THE WAY!

28th August 2008
I had a very difficult time convincing myself to do the right thing and go tell the watchmen to find the person to whom all that stuff belonged. It's been 3 days since and the stuff is still with me... no one has claimed it yet and it hurts to just let it sit in the kitchen and not use it... but it will hurt even more to let it go... :-(

I even called a friend on the night I received the stuff and both of us convinced each other that it's a good marketing ploy by HP to provide such schemes and how it will give them an edge over Bharat Petroleum and how the advent of pipelines might have triggered such a move... you can tell that both of us are fresh MBAs.

But seriously, mera to ab chamatkaron par se vishwaas hi uth gaya hai.

Ek Akela Is Shahar Mein

July 20th, 2008
Before I start, I am going to be very optimistic and assume that this blog will be read in the non-Hindi speaking part of the world as well and I will therefore translate the title into English as well. It reads,"A lone guy in this city", this city being Mumbai and the lone guy as one could easily guess is yours truly. It's been 3 weeks since I moved to Mumbai and I haven't been able to find my groove yet. Not to say that I don't like the city, I think I do, it's just that the time it takes to get used to the ways of this city is perhaps much more than any other. But then, no other city is quite like Mumbai either.

I took a train from Kanpur to Mumbai and was met at the Dadar station by a driver sent by my company to pick me up. I was also met at the station by Vishnu, my roommate from business school who now lives in Mumbai. The hotel was about 10 kms from the station and it took us about 2 hours to traverse the distance - fairly common going North from Dadar in the evenings. I won't say I was surprised but it did serve as a crude reminder of how much 'fun' traveling was going to be in Mumbai.

The next few days were great- meeting friends, family and co-workers and enjoying the change of environment after a long break since B-school got over. But soon I had to take the plunge into one of my most grueling experiences in recent times - APARTMENT HUNTING! The last time I looked for an apartment was in Washington DC and I spent a good two months doing so, but that was for other reasons (I was traveling to Cincinnati every week and only had weekends to look for a place). I had about 2 weeks in Mumbai to find a place else my company would kick me out of my hotel room... well, that's an exaggeration I would admit, they would have asked me very politely to bear my own expenses.

So, I started looking for a suitable apartment online on a number of websites and I was delighted to find hundreds of postings for 'my ideal place' to live. I noted down the details of many and called up the agent and booked an appointment to see the few places I really liked. I show up for the apartment viewing at the scheduled time and realize how much of a novice I was to think that those were my ideal places to live! Almost nothing was as advertised - as long as the place has enough space for 3 people to stand it counts as capacious, if you are seeing anything but your neighbour's window from your balcony then it's a great view, as long as you can reach the airport or train station within 1 hour from there it's called right next to it, anything less than 10 years old is new, put together a dining table, a bed and a refrigerator and you have got yourself a fully furnished apartment, not to forget if you can reach your house without falling into a man hole or being robbed on the way - even if you get drenched by rain water logging on the street till your knees and you are surrounded by slums on three sides of the complex - you are in a very posh location! And of course since you are getting such a wonderful place, you will have to pay a handsome amount for it - it's only fair and I am sure you would agree.

So I got the idea of an ideal place out of my system fairly quickly and started looking for the least compromised option. After seeing about 30 places over a period of two weeks (did I say that I just had two weeks to find a place?) I finally settled for a nice 1BHK in Powai that didn't cost me a leg and an arm and the owners seemed like reasonable people. It was a new apartment (new in the same meaning that I was aware of till now) and close to my office with the kind of amenities that I would like to have. It was categorized under "semi-furnished" which typically means you get furniture but not electronic items, which seemed to be the case here as well. Turns out that this place was literally semi-furnished. It had a dining table but no chairs, it had a sofa set with the rocking chair missing (I found it later on at the owner's residence when I went to sign the contract), there was a stove without the burners and there was a bed without a mattress. I am not even going to talk about no lights, no curtains and... you still reading?

August 18th, 2008
Oh well, all that's a matter of past now and I am almost settled in my place. I am still waiting to get a burner and a gas cylinder so that I can deliver on my promise to prepare a Thai meal for my bhaiya-bhabhi. I got a fancy microwave/grill/convection combo this morning only too realize that its plug is so huge that it doesn't fit into any of the sockets in the apartment. I am not even going to talk about what I had to go through to get my cable connection and internet (I even had to call TRAI at some point of time - but that's another blog altogether). I think I can safely say that in the last 6 weeks or so I have talked to more people (and machines) than I have done in my entire life. My Sony Ericsson phone has refused to store any more numbers and any time I make a new contact I have to find someone from my past life whom I don't need anymore and delete him (or her) from my life (I mean phonebook) and then add the new person in... has improved my prioritization skills tremendously.

If only I could tell you how much I love this city...