We have seen many banks since a decade. With the pioneer Citibank deciding to set shop in India, its been no looking back for many banks since then to start enticing their customers in many different ways to retain them. The public sector banks too realized this down the line and banks like Canara Bank, SBI and Bank of Baroda have now quickly upgraded their service level to be both personal and professional to the extent that it matters.

If you have seen the Samsung advertisements their caption reads “Next is what?” This is the caption they have set as a vision to themselves to continually innovate all the time. So then can there be a banking experience similar to this? Today I had the pleasant experience of opening a savings bank account at ING Vysya Bank which I wanted to share with you for those whom it would matter. Read on.

I was an existing customer of ING who recently happened to close my account. I went to SBI to open a savings account. But the kind of reception I received there, and the kind of forms I had to fill put me back a little. I decided to give ING a try again. One has to understand that you can currently use your ATM card in other bank ATM’s upto 6 times a month free. But with ING’s Orange Savings Account and a minimum balance of Rs.10000, you can use their card at will at all possible ATMs for free unlimited number of times. Reason enough to try out ING again.

Now here comes the surprise. I walk into the branch. I stand next to counter 1 where there was some customer being attended to. Within ten seconds, the official asks me what I need and when I said Savings account, in less than a minute I am offered a seat, and a form to fill up. And if you thought I had to fill up thousands of details, you are wrong. I signed at relevant locations, gave him one photo, put in my nominee’s name and my mother’s name and bingo – its done.

The next thing I know is I am seated with the manager Ms.Shweta, who introduced herself and after some talk, I am given a welcome kit – yes then and there all in a total of less than five minutes. Can you believe what all the kit had? You won’t if I tell you – it had the debit card, the cheque book, the ATM Pin, the internet username and Pin, instructions on all types of account charges, mobile banking Pin, customer ID and account number details, and a visiting card of the manager for further queries! 🙂 I was just DUMBSTRUCK at a loss for words. I could not believe that in ten minutes, I am walking out of the bank as an account holder with nothing more required than the details already provided.

One word – “Awesome!”. In the past ten years, never did I receive this kind of service from Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, SBI, Bank of Baroda, ICICI, Canara Bank – none. Well done ING. Your customer service requires a blog post. I am more than pleased to invite others to meet you.

And as we all know managers make employees, not the other way. Ms.Shweta is proactive, informal, and inculcates a sense of belonging into all the bank employees, who do things in a right way in a very involved fashion. This is what is called zero-effort marketing. ING Vysya Bank, Koramangala is definitely an example of a well managed bank branch.

I will stick with ING as long as I can, just due to this one experience with many more to come. If you want me to describe ING Koramangala in one word – PROFESSIONALISM. Check it out yourself. And with the experience I have had at ING, there is no doubt that they will not realize their mission statement specified at the top of this post! 🙂

You can contact Shweta here:

Today morning, it was a shock to understand that our very own Kannada Superstar Vishnuvardhan was no more. He had died of a cardiac arrest in Mysore at an early age of 59 years. His movies are still etched in my memory right from my childhood and has brought cheer to many a fan in the state. No wonder then that his demise has brought about sudden shock to the state. With him, two superstars including Rajkumar are no more. Hopefully we will be able to educate our children about our great heroes of yesteryears!

You can read all about Vishnu here. Do listen to the song above, I really liked it as its not only great sounding, but also shows Vishnu in traditionality of Coorg in terms of dressing and choreography.

May his soul rest in peace.

Bengaluru has not been called cosmopolitan for no silly reasons. Moreso, the cosmopolitization has further gnawed into Bengaluru’s very own IT locality – Koramangala. The locality is already known for some 300 odd good restaurants to eat in, and just when you thought it may not grow further, the Punjabi’s decided otherwise!

Enter “OYE Amritsar”. The very own Punjabi joint to tickle your palates one step further. We decided to check out on this restaurant for lunch a couple of days ago. It was an office team lunch and time to dig into what OYE had to offer us. After a good long walk, we reached the place. Thinking it would be like any other restaurant, I walked in. And the first thing I notice – is the language. Punjabis are known to misspell English and as far as they put forth the point, they don’t really care how the language is used. My apologies to the grammatically correct Punjabi friends, but this misspellings are the things that make OYE an interesting place to eat in.

The food is only half the story. The shiny old Lambretta scooter at the front, the BarBar shop shutters depicting the types of hair cuts offered, the references to bollywood, London, and finally the big bold Sardar with his Kudi depicted on the walls – everything is part of the dining experience. One word – this place is a must go, since its mood changing. It has the potential to uplift even people with the worst of moods to uncover the grin on their faces.

Coming to the food, the customary drink was I think Jaljeera, but it was so intriguingly tangy with twists in every sip. Now a drink must leave you wondering, and thats what it was at OYE. The usual salads later, came the rotis and rajma dal, with butter panneer masala without which its nothing is a complete Punjabi restaurant. Some sweets and ice creams, and after a heavy dose of meals, came the knockout punch for those who dared it – sweet lassi. I would say this lassi alone is enough for lunch. Drinking it along with the buffet means you are either a hardcore punjabi, or you’re sure to swoon into a heavenly nap after the lunch.

And for those whose stomachs cant hold more, there is always the TOLET, oops – I mean the toilet for the JENTS and LADISS.

If you guys and gals want something seriously different for the first visit, OYE Amritsar is the place. In short its full paisa vasool. Just ensure someone’s around to drive you back home, coz I dont think anyone would want to attend office after something like this as a meal. The charges are reasonable as well, so nothing incomparable with other restaurants. Eat your fill!

And while you are there dont forget to notice the posters, subtly hinting that our current prime minister is also a singh, RELAX SINGH to be precise 🙂

Ask a small kid and he would have given the solution. Ask an old man and his wiseness would have manifested as a solution. It took the Bengaluru infrastructure experts a few years to come up with a solution to the (stupid) KH Road flyover. What is wrong with the flyover many people might ask. Well I would ask – what is exactly right?

• Its the world’s only flyover with a signal light at the center
• Its the world’s only flyover where a cop sits managing traffic at this signal light
• Its the world’s only flyover which is mismanaged to such an extent that it has made proper roads crooked just because it exists
• Its the world’s only flyover (perhaps) which can crush an entire road beneath it and the people on it to death in seconds
• Its the world’s only flyover where the span of the column can be considered so huge to cause regular traffic jams
• Its perhaps the world’s only flyover that looks like an X in shape!

Yes we are talking about the great Double Road flyover. Finally atleast the mess it has created has been solved to some extent by keeping things the way they must be. See for yourself: (picture courtesy TOI)

Now for some questions on this way of traffic flow:

• Isn’t one of this enough either mission road to residency road or double road to richmond road, why both ways the traffic now needs to flow on the flyover?
• Is that design not silly ?
• The bigger question is whether this flyover is now required at all once you see the traffic flow 🙂 ?
• If they do decide next to remove this flyover, will it solve any issues if one ways are created accordingly?
• Must a small stretch of road between richmond circle and VGP junction on double road make life hell ?
• Will we never see architectural marvels in flyover making at all ?
• What about the maintenance of such a flyover, what will be its state after say 10 years more ? Would you travel on it or under it ?

The issue is not with building flyovers. The issue is with people designing them and the limited scope of the needs of such a construction, that these people have in their narrow mind. Money flow aside.  Any guesses what the next great architectural marvel would be ? How about an underpass on both sides of this flyover ? Or better still a metro train running under this flyover ? Infrastructure planning is an art. Experience must speak by itself, without even a single question asked. You want an example, see for yourself the better part of Bengaluru infrastucture:

Image courtesy: BMIC – NICE

Its was winter of 1999. JTM was one of Karnataka‘s best networks. Outgoing call rates were Rs.10/- per minute and incoming about Rs.3 a minute if I am not wrong. I was one of JTM’s customers at that time. Slowly JTM was taken over by Bharti Teleservices. That was the birth of AirTel, a company which would grow to be one of India’s most admired telcos over a period of a decade. They were the best when it came to customer services, while the nearest telcos Spice and Hutch (what is Vodafone now) were by no standards near airtel be it in infrastructure or in customer treatment. Airtel pioneered many a revolution down the line and its venture into landline services made it even more popular.

Spice’s mismanagement and Hutch’s troubled history of having bad networks and bad customer services only made it better and better for Airtel quite inorganically. Over the period of the last couple of years though, India and in particular Karnataka has seen a flurry of entries from many a new telco who are all vying to take a share of Airtel’s pie. Airtel’s troubles have started very recently, and they are compounding it by not brainstorming on the potential failures that are waiting to happen. Some of the key things about Airtel that are beginning to go wrong include and is not limited to the following:

• Peak hour call jams rendering the service useless
• Call drops that occur very often leading to frustration amongst users
• Caller tunes and the amount of agony it has been able to cause for people not really interested in them
• Ineffective blocking of Telemarketing calls and SMSes that disturb thousands of people day in and out

Of late some more laurels can rest with Airtel:

• Airtel’s mismanaged and inexperienced customer service centers
• Don’t care attitude that has set in among the franchisees managing these centers
• Low level executives making a mess out of technical situations which they are unable to understand or explain
• Higher level managers who do not follow up on these technical problems that people have
• Erosion of brand value due to the way these executives perform
• Airtel’s arrogance in maintaining the same call rates even when competition is eating into its flesh day by day

So then why are people still putting up with Airtel or for that matter any other operator? The answer is very simple to say the least. Its because they want to retain their mobile number without changing it.

For a moment lets then dwell into the case with other operators. Spice has gone one level up in capturing the youth market with a flurry of dual sim based phones and real low calling values. They are also busy fighting with their nearest and best rival Virgin mobile.  Airtel’s arch rival Vodafone is now one level ahead with its famed ZooZoo advertisements addressing the core values of branding in an effective way drawing huge crowds towards the service. Not to forget to mention their Pug ads were also so adorable. Vodafone’s prepaid plans now give you full talktime without any rentals or taxes even sometimes. Their low call quality and tower quality are now replenished to cover most of karnataka state.

Most of Vodafone’s calls don’t drop like before and their connectivity is at an all time high. Vodafone’s takeover of Hutch has only fuelled their appetite for competing with anyone coming their way to maintain their customer base.

With Aircel, MTS and Uninor into the picture now along with Tata Docomo, Airtel’s chances are only slimmer and slimmer day by day. Already Tata’s aggressive pricing plan has forced Airtel to realize its diminishing customer base though very late, and they have also launched the same per second billing plan to save their skin. With MTS being even more aggressive at 1/2 paise per second along with Uninor, Airtel has some serious competition breathing down its neck.

On the CDMA front, Reliance and Tata are ruling the roost and will continue to do so. The only thing then comes back to how to save your mobile number. With number portability in the offing at the year end, from TRAI, at a mere 19 bucks for a switch, its now very easy to retain your number and give your old operator a boot. This only spells more bad news for Airtel who are likely to lose their coveted tag of 10 million customers on India’s no more preferred network. Is it time then for Airtel, who were once FairTel, now unFairTel to go into history as a finishedTel ?

Only time will tell. And it will tell well enough.

If you like this post, please give it a rating!

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Its been a momentous achievement for me personally with any car I owned. I’ve cleared 30k kms with a vehicle which I can deem an asset. While most fuel inefficient vehicles and uncomfortable ones end up being liabilities, I can atleast feel proud to say that this car is every Indian’s asset for a long time to come. Before I proceed further, thanks FIAT for the wonderful engine, and thanks MARUTI for the great service that you have been known for all this while.

If you have read my earlier 10000 and 15000 kms review, by now you would know what the car is all about. The car still feels like showroom condition after 2.5 years every time I switch on the ignition. Generally the car is rugged to handle roads well as long as the roads are not too undulated. My car has gone through some real rough road patches but handled well, mostly due to the great Michelin tyres I’ve added onto the car. The car has been scratched on the mirrors and the underside of the bumper a few times. While the mirrors are too large to avoid getting scratched, the visibility issue while we sit within the car is another reason for misjudging a few manoeuvres.

Being a single user, and driving alone most times, sometimes with one or two other people, I must say this car has reasonable amount of power at the tap for a city user. The continuity in the accelerator response and the eagerness to pickup which occurs at all gears uniformly has made this beauty the darling of many a car owner in Benglauru. Just with the help of the torque of this car, I was able to negotiate the car upwards a ramp from the basement to the ground floor of the building, while in first gear with my foot off all pedals. Shows how much we can utilize the car to the best extent in city traffic to give some rest to those weary legs.

The front row comfort is good, cabin feels involving, dashboard soothing, and its generally airy. I would have felt great if the Swift VDi was a two door version. The back row is good so as not to cause too much body roll, but as far as space is concerned, Maruti will have to work quite hard to get to the level where TATA is currently with its Indica and Manza offerings. Generally I would include claustrophobia as one of the features of the Swift 🙂 The boot is good for not-much-luggage drivers and there ends the argument. If you want to transport truck loads worth of baggage, well – then buy yourself a truck! The rattling windows are a gift from Maruti for the Swift and I might just end up spending another 6-7 years more with these rattles. These rattles are like extra noises within the family life. 😀 Just got to put up with it. There is a lot of dust accumulation over a period of time on the dashboard but hey that’s part of growing old of any car isn’t it?

The mileage has dipped over time, and each time I service it to change the engine oil, it bounces back to a healthy 16kmpl. So this is a car that satisfies the FE hungry junta of India. I can stretch it upto 19kmpl but with normal tyres and mostly higher gear driving the latter being an impossibility in the city. The tyres seem great even after 30k of driving, and Michelin knows its business better than anyone else out there. It should be good for another 20k to go. I am you customer one more time after that Mich!

To summarize on the drive, the car has been extremely well mannered where required, has displayed enthusiasm required for a rally mood where required. Its agile, easy to manoeuvre in the city, good for two people, sturdy, great engine, FE and service and it will rock the Indian Car Scene for some more time until newer more well designed comfortable cars come up at this price. Till then enjoy the drive!

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Many of you might have noticed an email sent from Citibank very recently where they have increased the minimum account balance for non salary accounts that one has to maintain in order to be receiving the services of the bank. Citibank was known to be the pioneer in India to introduce online banking, and also for utility bill payments among other useful services. The bank’s image merged well with the minds of young engineers who adopted Citi as a part of their daily life since a decade.

There was also a point in time when Citibank was the new face of banking as against banks such as Canara Bank, SBI which our parents were accustomed to. While salary accounts of Citibank had the zero balance scheme, non salary accounts started off with a minimum account balance of Rs.1000/- in 1999, and grew to Rs.5000 and Rs.10000 subsequently. The email that most of us received a while ago, gave us nightmares when we saw that the new minimum balance for non salary accounts has now been increased to Rs.25000/-. While this kind of amount is perhaps the salary of many engineers across the country and perhaps the savings of a few wealthier folks, the mail also reflects the way Citibank is headed if they continue such tantrums.

Its about time that nationalized banks have increased their image in front of the public, and at a time when Citibank just came out of crisis in the USA, tantrums like these are bound to make people reject Citibank for banking and move to much more reasonable banks in the near future.

I happened to check out on Bank of Baroda, and was pleasantly left surprised at the kind of service they offered though they were still a bit naive to internet ways of banking. What mattered finally was that I could open an account in no time, and was a happy customer of theirs sooner than later. Canara Bank has lately restyled their logo trying to connect more to people as they continue their dream run forward. IDBI has now introduced banking for all to shed their image of only being a loan disbursement company. ICICI is already in the list of the not so good banks to deal with. HDFC and AXIS Banks have retained their image through tough times due to their consistent policies. SBI and its sister banking divisions have enhanced their images through beneficial loan schemes and exchange rates. ING Vysya is about to launch FD products giving 12% interest even in good economy upswings.

With all these banks vying hard to woo people, one wrong move that Citibank has done can start denting its Indian image pretty seriously. Today’s youth connect well with nationalized banks yet again and its only sooner than later that it will be the good old golden period of nationalized banking to the fore yet again.

As for me, I’ve decided to log off from Citibank for obvious reasons. Your choice is not yet made! Think for the longer term and make a wise choice.

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The last fortnight of political parleying around Delhi by the BJP has been nothing short of showing off gloriously, the filth inside the party. Money doing the rounds, resorts getting business, MLAs on their ‘fitness’ regimes and a bullied crying CM on the TV. Well what can I say, its enough to beat the TRPs of any soap on TV. Add to that the decoration, music, lighting and thrill that TV9 adds to all this, and you have a real box office hit.

Give the opponents some reason and they are always available to whine away and bite more of the CMs flesh than they can chew. Also seated on the knife are cool headed, least bothered stalwarts from the chaddi wearing RSS. Throw a brick or a boulder at them and they still do what they do best. Laze around. Citizens always do what they have been doing. Crying hoarse over infrastructure instead of asking for some better governance in the first place. Any development whether literal or metaphorical can happen only when the game is played right. What we have are the politicians from the 50s and 70s era who are experienced at mud slinging rather than any developmental politics.

What did not take a Sadananda Gowda or a Venkiah Naidu or a LK Advani or a Rajnath, took one Sushma to solve?  And must we all believe a mining baron of 5500+ crores of income will listen to a matrushri rather than his own intuition? This has not only shown that no one in the top level of the party is capable of handling a crisis and unless these are all laid off  (corporate management rejig if i may call so), one can say a goodbye to BJP in the next elections as well. This notwithstanding the ‘success’ they have had locally.

Sobha is out (she deserved to, didn’t she?). Why would a revenue minister managing revenues of a mining department owned by his brother take easily a lady of rural development ministry questioning the ongoings between the former two ministries? Not only did she interfere there, but also managed to say ‘cheese’ in every photo having the CM leading to some ridiculously obvious rumours which were all unwarranted. Whatever the stature of the RSS lady, the final verdict is there on the wall. The IAS officers can never escape a transfer in their lives. It will be news if even one completes the full term in one place.

Now to the speaker (how ironical!). How many times have you heard Shettar actually speak? Or for that matter how many times have you heard about him in the newspapers that otherwise crow about Yeddy and Sobha beside him? Not even once. There is a serious problem in understanding that he actually holds any clout at all in the present scenario. Finished is the turn of the Reddy’s in gunning for Yeddy’s head. Now common opposition, its your freaking turn! Enjoy.

Who won this game? There is only one answer – the media. They enjoyed making a mockery of everyone including the public (yes us!). All the way upto showing on TV Yeddy and Reddy eating cake after cake shamelessly without any explanation.

Alright now enough of this masala movie. Get back to your favourite soap on TV guys!

Alright, we do understand that the BJP wants to do something useful in the city in the five years they have got, so as to come to power again. One must appreciate they are atleast receptive to what people’s need maybe, whether they are able to fulfill them or not.

So here goes, currently the city is being strategically screwed up in the name of development. And alas, one must bear with this infrastructure torture for some more time until either they run out of any more ideas, or until they come with something more ingenious and decide to undo what they did in the first place.

The entire museum road stretch is now screwed up and this is causing atleast an additional 10 minutes to cross up this stretch by car every morning.

I did think, perhaps its atleast easier to come back home via the Palace Road stretch, but thanks to the great Airtel Championship Trophy Cricket, the entire cubbon road, mg road and surrounding stretches are completely screwed up during evenings. Manual signal handling only means more delays, and I now reach home atleast half hour to one hour more than usual. I think seamlessness is still a far fetched goal for Bangalore to achieve. The thought of avoiding a drive inside the city and using the ring road was saner, until the government decided to put a spoke in many a wheel there too. Two new flyovers which must statistically be over in six months from now, are hogging everyone’s time as I found out the hard way round.

Took a bus from North Bangalore at 6:15pm and reached HSR layout at 8pm. Reached koramangala at 9:30pm. Need I speak more? Add to this the entire 27th Main in HSR now serves dust and dirt on your face at any time of the day, with haphazard parking here and there. Makes me wonder why people still dont realize that a good walk for shopping or eating upto 1km does make wonderful sense rather than zipping by your cars. People please stop driving your cars for such small distances. If you think you cannot walk even less than a kilometre, then you perhaps cant eat too much either! Think twice!!

A month of two of ridiculous driving timings, has taken the toll on my free time. Sometimes I think buying a smaller laptop might help me atleast blog more regularly as I can lug it around more than usual! 🙂

If you a regular at the Manyata Business Park in north bengaluru, you would know how irritating it can get to have the same food for years together with the fact that it also degrades over time. Once in a while our palates need a different kind of treatment and for those in this business park, they know that the hotels around are hardly worth a mention.

This is when the first of them, MTR started up at Esteem Mall a good 4km away from the park. While the food here was really good, it used to come in from the center of the city every day. Also, the thought of traveling 4kms for some good food was not a great proposition on a day to day basis. Also, this is not like other restaurants and its more of a self service type of stuff. Though nowadays they have realized that lazy bums like us need help even to get ourselves food and for some tips, do this for you. MTR is a pretty small place and serves you some hot and nice karnataka dishes such as dosas, idlis, meals, all baths (including yours truly – chowchowbath!) and a variety of juices and ice creams and some sweets. If you are not on time the place could get filled up and leave you embarassed after having traveled 4kms.

Today I had the opportunity to visit the food court within Manyata, a really huge place for the ‘inmates’ of the complex if I may say so! 🙂 Its a good ten minutes walk away in the scorching sun thanks to no trees around (the crorepati’s of SEZs must have thought better). Past the IBM compex on the first floor is a food court that hides it size until you get in. You are greeted by no less than 3 ATM kiosks, some 20 odd shops all around and lets just say thousands of chairs in the large enclosure. No matter what these chairs never get filled at any point!

The lifts are at the middle of the hall and present a nice touch to the whole construction. The AC ducts are by and large bare and visible, but who cares! The food is on the expensive side, but definitely tasty to say the least. Nice Punjabi food, Andhra meals, Baskin Robbins ice creams, Chung wah from china, and Ruchi Sagar from our own city – these in essence act as attraction points within the court.

The wash rooms are decent, the cleaners present themselves in uniform, place is kept tidy all the time and at a corner is a feedback book in case you care about telling something to someone. To sum up, a great place to go, say once in a month, and indulge your heart and stomach out 🙂