Well, same was the case with me. If you are planning to use your out of state vehicle for more than a month in AP, then its necessary to pay road tax. The procedure to pay road tax is pretty simple, don’t be put off by horror stories.

I stay in the Gachibowli-hitech city area. Now I have been to three RTA offices, RTA Attapur, RTA, Kondapur and RTA, Khairatabad also. I found the Khairatabad office to be the most hopeless and useless. There is such a huge crowd there and the officials were very busy that they barely have time to answer any questions/queries.

So here is what I did step by step, if you have a NoC and need to get your number transferred then there would be an extra step after paying Road Tax. Before getting the NoC, do find out the RTA name. A NoC in Hyderabad RTA name doesn’t work in Rangareddy District except by going to Khairatabd RTA , a step which you don’t want to take.

1. Head over to Kondapur RTO in your vehicle, as soon as you enter, look around for someone in khaki uniform and tell him you need to pay road tax.

2. He will take you to a room which has space for 2 officers, the officers in my case were very polite. They created a check report for my vehicle and impounded my DL.

3. This check report is what you need alongwith your vehicle RC copy and invoice, head on over to the Attapur RTO

4. Ask the relevant form for road tax payment from one of the shops below, the RTA does not have any form in stock (maybe it’s a way to scam).

5. Fill up most details in the form, rest details would be filled in my the clerk who would calculate the tax needed to be paid. Ensure the vehicle value he takes is correct and does not include road tax already paid in home state.

6. Get the road tax value cross verified from the administrative officers who will double check using the original invoice.

7. Once 7 is done, you would need to get a draft made for the road tax amount and there is another small fee (230 I think) which you can also pay by cash.

8. Once you get your draft goto the same counter, the person there would issue you the coveted green receipt, take a few copies ,keep the original safe and drive around with a copy for the RTA folks on the road.

Since I paid the road tax, I have been stopped twice , the penalty is much more if you bring your car in and pay road tax much later.

I was dining out with a friend when I commented to him that the waiter seemed to be over-doing the whole ‘I am your server, tell me how is your food act’. It was getting annoying to me and I commented to my friend that he doesn’t need to do it. He reminded me of an incident which would make me skip a particular Subway India restaurant and I understood why some places always make it a point that you feel pleasant after going there.

It was new-year’s eve, we were planning on cooking a good dinner for the night and hang out with friends to ring in the new year. So I had skipped breakfast and hoped to catch a quick bite at the Subway in Jayabheri (Near Kothaguda Area). As usual, I got the robotic greeting from the person there. Waited a few mins for my turn, since it was a Saturday morning they were probably short of staff.

I ordered my favourite breakfast sub (which is bread + meat + eggs) and asked the guy there to add veggies (which are an extra 30 bucks or so, INR). anyway so this guy agrees but later on he says his cashier tells him not to allow it and he flatly refuses to add the veggies or for that matter anything to my sub. Now take notices of the fact that this is my favourite sub and I eat it all the time from this outlet as well as from other outlets. I ask for the manager, he points me to the shabby looking cashier , I say manager or owner, he gives me a number which is always switched off. I give up and ask him to finish whatever he had started making.

Now while all this is happening, I casually tell my friend that I will never visit this outlet again. It happens just like that, 1 bad experience ticks off something in your head and you involuntarily decide never to visit a place again. I decided to rely on the other subway outlet near my home that has no problems accepting my requests and whose workers actually listen to me. The owner of that store also responded well to me when I had complained about a certain issue.

That’s the different that good customer service can make to your business, just keep it in mind and instruct your employees to do the needful

I am going to send across this link to the Subway India folks and see if they can take a hint.

So I recently got a car, and like the deal hunting monster I am I started to look at the best credit card for saving money spent on Petrol, The Standard Chartered Super Value Titanium seemed like an awesome card, but alas they didn’t issue me the card, since I also own the Manhattan credit card from them. That’s another story, Standard Chartered bank has awesome product offerings but a pathetic customer care and customer relations team. Will post on that later. My credit limit is around 1/4 of my take home salary and they refuse to increase it.

So yeah, I came across the Citibank Indian Oil Titanium credit card which promises around 2.5% additional cash back apart from fuel surcharge waiver. I investigated into the card a little bit, my city  (Hyderabad) has a number of Indian Oil petrol pumps. So one lazy Sunday morning I went across from 1 petrol pump to another, all in the hopes of finding an Indian Oil petrol pump that has a Citibank Machine. Alas, checking at 4-5 different petrol pumps in a 6km radius, I could find none ?

So I went to the company Indian Oil petrol pump at Madhapur, surely they must have Citibank machine for swiping the card. But even they didn’t have a Citibank machine, they had 3-4 machines on the table, just no Citibank. Why would a company owned and company operated petrol pump not keep a Citibank machine when they are such big partners ? All seems a bit fishy to me. Is it that its just a trick, get people to take the cards but then limit the places where it can be used for maximum benefit ?

My conclusion is that the Indian Oil Citibank co-branded card is kind of a marketing gimmick unless you live near the minority of petrol pumps that are owned by Indian Oil and use a Citibank machine. Unless that is the case, you are better off dumping this overhyped marketing mumbo jumbo driven credit card.

I discovered a list on their website and as expected, only a few pumps seem to carry the Citibank machine and going that far(for me) would use more petrol than the cash back Citibank would give.

1. We departed 15 minutes before scheduled departure time.

2. We landed about 25 minutes before scheduled arrival time.

Check-in : Smooth, barely took 5 minutes, staff was courteous and offered me good seats when I indicated that I was a frequent flier. There was also another person with a portable checking machine, but he skipped me for some reason

Onboard Service :  Very professional, a little too professional ? A little more warmth will go a long way in making passengers feel more comfortable. Also onboard food is too expensive and not really worth the money.

Fares : Somehow Spicejet always manages to get a 1 to 10 rupee upper hand on Indigo prices. Otherwise Indigo is the most economical option on most sectors

So how does it compare to other low cost airlines, in a nutshell :

Indigo vs Kingfisher Airlines : Kingfisher is overhyped, expensive with a very bad CRM, you can see my previous post for more. Their customer care doesn’t even reply to complaints. On the other hand, when I had complained about Indigo’s seating policy last time I flew with them, I got multiple replies. This time the problem seems to have been rectified. I will confirm after my return flight only though

Indigo vs Spicejet : Not much to separate here except the exceptional on time performance of Indigo Airlines vs Spicejet. Last time I took a Spicejet flight at around the same time as this one, it was delayed by over 2 hours.

A rare honour, for this particular experience, I was so delighted to spend more time with my family, I give Indigo a Rating: 5 out of 5 stars , however I will reserve more comments for my return flight.

It can happen only in India and that too in this state. Readers from Andhra Pradesh have been reporting that bookmyshow and other cinema websites have stopped booking online tickets for movie shows. Bookmyshow has this banner up on their website all week :

Due to statutory reasons (Govt. of AP) all online ticketing in Andhra Pradesh is taken off the web till further notice.

There are reports on the blogosphere that all this is a part of Andhra Pradesh government’s monopolizing the online ticketing plans wherein they want to force cinemas to sell only through 1 online ticketing partner. The move at face value only seems grossly unfair and illegal.

This is ofcourse a huge inconvenience to the large IT and ex-pat crowd that is present in Hyderabad. The matter seems to be sub-judice in the high court with a stay granted in Bookmyshow’s favour , however reports suggest that the Andhra Govt. officials are still harassing Bookmyshow and its management team and that’s what prompted them to take the online ticket booking offline.

There doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel with the Govt. seeming obstinate to ensure that only their choice of ticket operator is able to sell online tickets in Andhra Pradesh.

I have grown up using the Nokia E63 and E71 so when dad lost his E71 (got stolen, no FIR from Delhi Police, deja-vu ? ) , E72 was the natural upgrade for his needs. So he backed off to the Nokia N72 while we searched for a good deal on the Nokia E72. Finally we got the E72 for around $220 from the United States, the phone came with the car navigation attachments which consists of a stand.

Anyway, the background ends here. Moving onto the phone itself. As soon as you hold the phone in your hand, you see it’s a sleeker version of the Nokia E63 and possibly even of the Nokia E71, although it’s a gram heavier than the E71 with the new features built in , it would be injustice to call it a bulkier version of E71.

The phone unlike its earlier version E71 has 2 cameras (one of them 5 MP)  and a much larger internal memory at 250 MB. The dual cameras promise good video calling capabilities and the much needed internal memory upgrade means more good things inside the phone for you. The phone came with a 2GB microSD card.

Physical Upgrades :

Compared to the Nokia E71, the Nokia E72 while having the same shape does have an individual character about it. The keys are changed, the camera is changed and even the unlock key combination is changed. All these changes add to a non-seamless transition from the Nokia E71. My first impression of the E72 was that it unlocks differently than the E71. That itself takes some getting used to. The email key is also precariously placed underneath the right soft-key. I accidentally keep pressing the email key every now and then. On usability these things push the E72 a notch lower than the E71.

But there is a silver lining. Nokia has addressed a long standing demand from the E71 which even the E63 had. The E63 had a flashlight button, the E71 lacked it but with the E72 Nokia has addressed the particular point.

The Nokia E72 has a trackpad instead of a 5 way navigational key. The trackpad is so small that its actually very annoying and prone to mis-clicks and mis-navigation.  The older nav key was definitely better than the new track pad which just gives the phone some novelty but nothing on the usability. Even browsing photos using the trackpad key is difficult as multiple images get swiped many times.

The Nokia E72 also has a standard micro USB port, to tell you the truth I don’t remember what was on the Nokia E71 as I always used it with bluetooth. 

The E72 also has a 3.5mm audio jack as compared to a non standard 2.5mm jack on the Nokia E71. What it essentially means is that you can use your normal headphones with the Nokia E72. The built in earphones aren’t really that great with respect to quality but do the job.

The E72 also has volume keys which allow you to zoom into and out of images. It took me a bing/google search to figure out on how to zoom in and out of images on the Nokia E72.

Apart from this the E72 comes with an accelerometer (I didn’t see where they use it till now). The phone interface doesn’t seem to have been customized for the accelerometer which is a dampener.

The E72 also has GPS which I am surprised to say is extremely accurate and beats the GPS on my windows phone in terms of accuracy (atleast here in Delhi).

The E72 is also supposed to have a proximity sensor and a magnetometer. Will update as soon as I see how to use those. Overall from a physical perspective, the device is a definite upgrade from its poorer cousin but there are still chinks which Nokia need to address.

Stay tuned for the second part of this review, internals.

I am dividing this post into 2 parts :

1. Advertisements via phone calls – Airtel has this number 9849805941 which was calling (is still calling) me once a day and plays ads. Since I had registered for DND I contacted Airtel to stop spamming me with ads. Soon Airtel came up with an explanation that this was not a telemarketer number and hence I should complain to the Police if I want these ads to stop, can you imagine that ? They had the audacity to say they want to protect the privacy of this number who makes 1 call to me (and other numbers ? ) every day with ads.

I have also escalated this matter to the nodal officer who is also yet to get back to me, even more suspicious is the fact that I cannot call this number and the line says the number doesn’t exist but still I get one ad from this number everyday.

2. Service messages and Automatic Service subscription – TRAI says that all VAS services need an explicit customer approval to get activated, of course the agents sitting there who want to make Airtel some fast and unethical buck don’t seem to think so. This had happened to me twice in Delhi and twice now in Hyderabad and the modus operandi is even more brazen. After my complaint I got a call from a call center agent who said “these services are activated from back end” , wow, ofcourse he didn’t give that in writing but call record will show he said that. He also claimed his supervisor was not there when I asked to speak to him. When I asked him to tell his supervisor to call me back the supervisor magically re-appeared. Wonder if these call center people are Airtel employees or vendors.

The customer care responses to my mails on the matter are below  (extraneous stuff removed) :

Mail No. 1

With reference to your E-mail dated 08/10/2010, you have expressed concern regarding balance deduction for your Airtel mobile number <snip>.

We realize that this situation must have inconvenienced you.
We would like to inform you that Cricket Alert Service is active and there is a charge of Rs.5/-. Hence, the balance was deducted.
Deactivation of Cricket Alert Service service: 
The Cricket Alert Service has been deactivated with effect from 08/10/2010, as per your request. Confirmation message will be sent on successful deactivation.
Adjustment:
We would like to inform you that the amount of Rs. 5/- has been processed and will be credited on your account within 24 hours.

Mail No. 2 (the same service had again been activated by another agent) – During this period I was on vacation and my phone was switched off so I didn’t realize the balance deduction till I wrote them a mail :

> Thank you for writing to Airtel.
>
> With reference to your e-mail dated 17/11/2010, you have expressed concern
> regarding promotional call and message , deactivate the Value Added service
> for your Airtel mobile number <snip>.
>
> We realize that this situation must have inconvenienced you. However, we
> assure you a prompt action to solve the concern.
>
> We would like to inform you that as per our records there is a charge of Rs.
> 1.50/- deducted for the activation of Cricket Service.
>  
> We would like to inform you that the Cricket Service  has  already been
> deactivated on 03/11/2010.

I am still waiting for my Rs.1.50 refund and stoppage of these advertising calls. I am sick and tired of Airtel’s brazenness now and seriously want to switch over all my connections as soon as number portability comes over. This is also the most serious I have ever been about consumer court, totally aghast at the service dished out by Airtel to me (4-5 year old customer)

However a lot is left to be desired in terms of store experience and feedback handling by the store. I have felt disappointed with the services rendered in the stores multiple times, each time taking the pain to contact Shopper’s Stop via their online portal but never even in my life did I receive a response from their first level customer service. I will explain why I think the shopping experience there needs to improve.

1. Arrogant sales staff – This happened to me last week, me and dad were shopping at one of the Shopper’s Stop in the NCR area and this guy just kept on hovering over us like a bee over a flower, my dad asked him to excuse him but he was relentless staying there with a sheepish grin on his face, it was only after I sternly told him that I will call him if I need him did he move away.

But this is nothing, recap 3 months in the past, same store. I had recently got a new job (well paying ), so I was looking around in the store for a gift for my parents and the perfume counter caught my eye, I starting checking out the testers for my dad and voila out comes another sales associate with an aim to disturb us. “What can I help you with ?” he quipped with a malicious looking grin on his face. As if I am so dumb that I cant use a perfume bottle.

I felt like Irfan Khan from Mumbai Meri Jaan, like this guy was just there to ensure that I didn’t use the testers of the perfumes. I promptly excused myself and went away from there. I can imagine the associate feeling proud he saved 2 sprays of the tester without realizing his encroachment cost him a sale. In contrast the folks at Pantaloons don’t bother you while you check out the testers. Maybe the staff here is trained like this.

I wrote to shopper’s stop about this incident via their online portal, till date no one has reverted back to me.

Recap a few months before this also, I needed to get my jeans altered, since it was getting late I requested them to send the altered jeans to my home (offered as part of Gold membership to First Citizen). Guess what, “Sir, I will have to talk to my senior about that,” some fake conversations later: “Please collect it after 1 hour from here only.”

2. System not working, salesman disappears with card – I am in another city and mom and dad are out shopping at Shopper’s Stop and they pick out some stuff to purchase. At the billing counter they are told that the first citizen system is not working and neither is their credit card machine. In an instant the sales person disappears with my parents’ credit card to try on another machine. My parents frantically try to locate him, for all we know he could be skimming our card. He reappears five minutes later with the card saying its still not working. My parents dump their purchase there and walk out. I had asked my parents for the executive’s name, and I complained via their online portal. You guessed it right, no response !

3. Customer Care needed, but no response – This one is about when I needed customer care with one of the items I had purchased from their store. I wished to know the procedure for repair etc. Again I wrote via their website and email addresses and got no response. It was only when I got in touch with a senior employee personally that I got a response. It was smoother sailing after that though.

So what is the purpose of this post ?

Its not to defame this store (I infact still visit it once a month), but to bring to the attention of some of the senior folks on what they are doing wrong. Theirs is a publicly listed company and if they don’t even read/respond to customer care emails, it’s a worrying factor. Lets hope we see some change after someone from Shopper’s Stop reads this post.

After moving to Bluehost, I experienced downtime the very 2nd day, pretty significant, I got in touch with the Bluehost live chat support (pretty useless most times) who told me (in different words) , This is shared hosting, we cant do anything about downtimes or server issues, please take your issues elsewhere and switch to VPS. I very honestly asked the support person that I am bringing downtime to his notice and he is asking me to shift, suddenly he became soft and told me I had the choice to switch to another host but they wont take care of errant sites on server and neither will they assure me that downtimes would be reduced. It was like downtimes are Ok.

Anyway I kept on with Bluehost as it was overall reliable, then came the next blow : CPU throttling. Its every blog owners nightmare. PHP scripts would routinely be timed out and every time a wordpress page would load, my account would be throttled to ensure their grossly oversold servers are ok. I tried everything, using super cache, cleaning databases, removing overheads etc. But none of these helped. In an experiment, I myself would access a cached age of my account and still find that on each pageload my account is throttled. Page source would confirm a cached page was served. I own small sized blogs and such throttling out was giving me nightmares.

I don’t care what Bluehost tells you but CPU throttling is a deal breaker for me, the site would become excruciatingly slow during access.

Then began the search for the new Cpanel host. Stablehost was suggested by my brother as it had an offer offering 75% lifetime recurring discount. Interesting i said but warned him that if its too good to be true, it sometimes is. So I started to find bad reviews about Stablehost but surprisingly there was no bad review of Stablehost on the Internet, only people praising their personal customer support. I was impressed and those who know me know that customer service should be really good to impress me .

So I have signed up for Stablehost and its been more than a week and haven’t faced a single issue yet, all websites were transferred to the new account and things seem to be running smoothly. However I hope I don’t have to eat my own words. The reason I switched was that unlike other hosts, I can take a 6 month contract, yearly contract etc. for the same rate so switching is easy.

The customer care has been prompt and smooth, maximum time taken to respond was 12 hours for a domain transfer request to be initiated, otherwise I would get a reply within 10 minutes. Such a nice standard of personal customer service is a refreshing change from the robotic customer care of Bluehost who would routinely ask me to cancel my account in case of any downtime and never once reimbursed me for downtime.

Stablehost still has a 50% off coupon running on their website (use BDAY or TOS, both work) and if you are looking for a good, friendly host that offers realistic hosting, please have a look at Stablehost. The 5 GB space 100GB bandwidth plan would barely cost you $36 for the year after the discount. That’s much cheaper than bluehost and other hosts and they dont grossly oversell like Bluehost.

UPDATE: We have used StableHost for about 2 years now. Sadly, as the company has grown bigger, so has its indifference towards users and attitude towards its customers. The shortcoming of Stablehost is that they now recommend their shared hosting only if you have a low traffic site which would require at most 2-3 PHP scripts running a second. They recently implemented a policy (without notice to their existing customers) about restricting maximum (not average) running processes to 10 (down from 20). If your site is just serving static pages, they might be useful but for anything more complex than a low traffic WordPress blog, their admin advises you to look elsewhere.

P.S. : These are affiliate links, but the review is 100% original and not sponsored.

The second time they drove to that place to get the 1st voucher redeemed and unfortunately they were in a hurry and didn’t look at the bill receipt properly. So here was this item marked ‘buy 2 get 1 free’ everyone on the aisles and my parents didn’t get the offer. The funny bit is that its the same brand that they had been cheated on a fortnight ago in exactly the same fashion. The customer care had tried to fool them into accepting the flawed bill, but Mom and Dad have learnt from me on handling these shrewd business people and were able to get a refund in the form of a credit note. Impressive but if I were there I would have pushed for a cash refund.

Anyway, instead of driving to Big Bazaar again and going through the painstaking exercise of explaining to them again, I decided to write to them an email and asked for a refund for the extra money my parents spent. And here’s the shocker :

For the first time in my life, writing to the Future Group has failed to even evoke a response, I have used that email ID for complaining against everyone from Furniture Bazaar to Food Bazaar to Big Bazaar, but this is the absolute first time the Future Group has completely ignored my complaint. No follow-up, no apologies and no compensation. Seems like the customer complaints against them are turning out to be genuine. Hope they recover soon and go back to being the customer friendly organisation they are supposed to be. About me ? I am poorer by Rs.60, but all is well