Archives: Experiences

I was idling away a lazy winter afternoon at office, most probably nine years ago, when I got a frantic call from a friend. Her youngest sister’s husband had been diagnosed with dengue. There was reason to be worried. They needed blood, latest by nightfall. There was only this one sureshot place in Delhi where you could get the blood you wanted, even if it wasn’t available elsewhere in town. We had to act, fast. I rushed out of my Kasturba Gandhi Road office and picked up my friend. We made for this locality in North Delhi, a part of the city neither of us had any clue about....

I was a tad surprised when he told me that he wouldn’t be able to meet me late evening since it was late, and he would have to return home. You don’t always expect guys to rush homewards just because it is a trifle late. We had initially planned to meet early evening, but another appointment had held me up. So we caught up on phone, and fixed 8:30 the morrow morn for a tête-à-tête. Since you don’t expect things to move at the same pace in Kashmir as it does in Delhi, I took it easy. I was late from word go; he wasn’t. The young man was there in the hotel lobby on time....

Shortly after I landed in Agartala towards the end of 1988, some seemingly philosophical questions confronted me. All for the wrong reasons, you know. Not because I was a Bong who loved squandering time on theoretical balderdash. This was, after all, my first job and I intended to retain it. Come hell or high water. The issue of a philosophical dilemma was posed by this hell-water thingy. I was a simpleton, and hadn’t still lost my innocence. There was reason for me to be upset over the question of what was right, and what wasn’t. ...

In the last week of June, when a young Naga woman in New Delhi was denied entry into the pretentiously titled club called Urban Pind, the talk of the town became all about racial profiling. The issue was still raging fire when animal rights activist Ambika Shukla scribbled an obnoxious canine caper in some newspaper about what she derisively thought about Nagas and “other Northeasterners” relishing dog meat. And all this after the Times of India, in March, apologised for carrying a piece underlined by a reprehensibly racist remark about women from the Northeast in an article on...

I am a brand loyalist – I loathe changing brands. I smoked Gold Flake Kings for eight years till I switched over to India Kings because I discovered a discrepancy both in the tobacco quality and the filter itself between the packs of 10s and 20s. I have puffed on the India Kings brand for the last 10 years. I stick to Old Monk when drinking rum and Black Label when guzzling beer. Unless the bar offers no other choice. I have worn Lees and Levis since I-don’t-remember-when. Latter-day brands have not been able to wrap me over. Brand strategists could well look at me as an extreme...

My experiences with the grievance redressal mechanisms of various services and service providers over the years has quite often left me with a bad taste in the mouth. So when I was faced with the choice of a DTH service provider last year, I thought there is perhaps little to choose between Dish TV and Tata Sky. After a brief weighing of the scales, I saw my preference tilting more towards the latter, mainly because I thought their prefix curried more reliability and credibility than that of the Goyals, who didn’t come across as anything more than brazen moneymakers to me. The...

I had been restlessly waiting for my credit card to be delivered. I always become a bit uneasy when the expiry date of a card draws near and the new one is yet to find itself in my hands. So I was. I mean, my being uneasy. When the doorbell rang the other scorching afternoon and I peered over the parapet to see a man who could only be a courier deliveryman, I was more than relieved. Phew! There comes my Standard Chartered Bank card. But it didn’t. Not that noon at least. With an air of superciliousness, the smartly-dressed man from Blue Dart asked for an identification. That was...