Driving and teaching on a virtual holiday

Diwali is an important festival and the day after it, people must be relaxing. It was  a pleasure driving to Ropar today morning. I could drive comfortably and safely as there was very little traffic on the road.

I had decided not to cancel the class but discuss a topic outside the course content. The number of students who had not gone home was only 6. I had expected more but it did not matter.

It was an opportunity to sit around in a circle and explore a topic even if I did most of the talking. I wish I could experiment with sitting with a group of 10 students once a week instead of teaching 40 students for 3 hours.

I am convinced that meeting the students even once a week for 1 hour will be more effective as long as we do not have all the sessions on the same day. That is because I as an instructor would get thoroughly bored.

I suspect that this is not something I will ever get a chance to try :(

Be Somewhat Safer, Break the Law

 The following extract from "Be Safe, Break the Law" definitely resonates with my experience of driving in India:

Higher speed limits are often safer because what is worse than speed is variable speed, some people driving fast and some driving slow. When the speed limit is set too low you get lots of people who safely break the law and a few law-abiders who make the roads more dangerous.

I find myself driving faster in order to be consistent with what others are doing. The tendency of impatient drivers to overtake dangerously increases sharply the slower one is driving.

The difference for India though is that our traffic is inherently variable. A slow truck or a tractor is tolerated, though with minimal patience, as the slow speed is expected from them and they are too big to squeeze through on a two lane highway with oncoming traffic.

However, a modern car going too slow - Nah!

Thanks to the irritation with the commercial channels, I have found that there are very interesting conversations on Lok Sabha television. Today, I was listening, unfortunately, to the tail end of a conversation with an MP talking about how important the question hour used to be and these days, it is the one which is routinely disrupted. I recall in my younger days going through the column on questions in the parliament.

By  a coincidence, I saw a TED talk on media should pay attention to non-violent movements in Palestine. It struck me that may be the loss of question hour is related to the same reason. Disruption of the house is exciting news. The commercial channels cover it in great depth. However, questions and answers are not exciting television - unless it is in Kaun Banega Crorepati format.

So, I now have one more grouse against our commercial media. A very unfortunate side effect of commercialisation - the loss of serious discussion in the parliaments.

"According to the service rules, it is necessary to work with the organisation for at least 3 years after coming back from such leave."

To claim that the condition has been met as the resignation was more than 3 years after the study leave was over in spite of being on un-paid leave (absconding?) for two of those years seems like a very convenient logic. And if the government does not agree with this interpretation, it is hounding the person - an even more bizarre deduction.

The loud support by some of the media is downright insulting to intelligence of the viewers and readers.

Incredibly Stupid Parents

It was bad enough that the car was driving in two lanes. Usually, half in each lane but sometimes in the fast lane.

When I came closer, I noticed that someone in the car would hold a baby outside the car window.  The baby must have been enjoying the breeze at 70 Km/hr. The baby was held outside the car several times before I managed to overtake them.

I was horrified at the possibilities which could ruin the family's fun.

Keeping Road Rage Under Control

I try not to forget this story and keep calm.

Yesterday, I saw a policeman try to stop a vehicle ignoring a signal. The driver just sped away. The policeman walked away helplessly.

This morning, an idiot parked his two wheeler in such a strange way in the middle of the road that I had a hard time taking out my car and not hitting the motorcycle. The parking lot was virtually empty. If someone had parked next to me, I would have had to honk and get one of the two to come make space for me. Absurd.

Why did that idiot park in this manner? It is beyond me.

State of IT Usage in India?

Mutual funds in the old days would give paper certificates. As computerisation increased, these paper certificates disappeared and were replaced by an account statement. Over the years, each purchase became a different account. Some consolidation of the accounts into folios was done but even then I had a lot of folios.

Online handling of the accounts meant that I had to manage multiple folios with multiple passwords. It seemed simpler to try to consolidate them.

The rules were not too complex, though some seemed a bit silly. But without silly rules, bureaucracy would not be able to survive.

Since online purchase required that a registered bank account be used to prevent money laundering, I filled a form to add a second bank account to each of my holdings. That would also ensure that the bank accounts would be the same for each folio that I wanted to consolidate.

Request was rejected because it was treated as a request for CHANGE of bank account though the form was for ADDITION of bank accounts. The change of bank account required some more papers. I suspect that the chances are their IT system could not handle the additional requirement introduced by the regulator.

There was some impact of my request, which I cannot really comprehend. One of my holdings now had the account number of one bank but the name of the other bank! The dividend could not be credited. I had to provide proof of the account which was already there in their computer records! The service centre printed a copy from their system, which I signed and submitted.

I decided to make one more attempt as ensuring that the registrar did not goof up with my bank records was a scary proposition.

This time I carefully consolidated only those folios which had the same bank account. Folios of one bank were consolidated but not for the other.

Reason - the bank details did not tally. That was strange. However, it appears that in their system, the bank details associated with each account are separately stored. For some reason, in some folios, in some of the holdings the other bank's details were present. This is a logical fallacy as per their rules. But their computer system is more flexible!

Since that flexibility is not be used, it clearly implies an erroneous data model of their system.

The process has left me bewildered and worried. As the computer systems keep getting more complex, I will need to monitor my accounts to ensure that no mess has been created.

I have also decided not to consolidate my folios because I wonder what new errors will be introduced.

Or may be they moved their processes to the cloud as they  were too complex - as in tech-comics- let cloud computing make your life-easier.