Why is fixing broken things so hard in India?

I’m a die-hard optimist and proponent of living in India. But something tells me if I continue talking to customer care executives of various companies 6-hours-a-day as if it were a part-time job, I would soon end up as a nervous wreck.

Last week Monday through Saturday, I clocked about three hours over 35 calls talking to Su-kam Power systems, Tudor India Limited - marketers of Prestolite Inverter batteries in India, a local real estate agent responsible for getting Khata transfer done, CAT enterprises - a water-proofing solutions company in Bangalore, and finally Domino’s Pizza. The common thread across all these calls - they had offered me a service which was fully paid for; that is still under warranty but the product is now broken and needs to be fixed.

Something seriously ails the customer service industry in India. People in metros such as Bangalore often don’t follow up vigorously to mend broken things because it’s not worth their time and effort. So they are more prone to replace it with a new item. After my repeated calls to Su-Kam and promises of sending an engineer went in vain for over five days, the first reaction from V was to get a new one than go through the inconvenience of a power cut and the torture of waiting endlessly for someone to show up. But I wanted to try so long I could before I gave up because the feeling of trying-hard-and-getting-frustrated is better than the feeling of being cheated. From the dealer who supplied us to the guys who fixed it here to Prestolite, I tried everything under the sun before something positive came out of Tudor India. There was finally a ray of hope on Friday evening to get the faulty inverter battery replaced before the warranty expires in 15 days. But the Tudor gentleman was forthright in saying that uder some premise the warranty will not be granted because there’s just a fortnight left before it expires. So he said he will get it fixed (read: pay me and I will get it done). Knowing how things work around here or having seen it the past few days, I relented to cough up more money and have it replaced than spend another Rs.9,000 for a new battery the right way. Sometimes you can’t be too staright-forward to get work done; you have to work with the system (read: corruption)! Su-Kam gentleman who visited was kind enough to tell me that the Bangalore in-charge is on leave 10 days a month. No wonder I kept calling him and one good thing came of it - LG was entertained to listen to “Jee Karda” song from “Singh is Kinng” movie which was his caller tune so much so that I have the song memorized now from the dozen times I’ve called him with no response.

The bright side of the week is the count stands at one down with inverter hopefully fixed. Now it’s 3 more jobs to get done over the next week; I have my hands full and can’t be more excited to talk to parrots trained to say, “This will be fixed within 2-3 days. Positively!”

It’s 10:00 p.m. right now. And, I’m waiting for my pizza from Domino’s (remember the monthly-once—eating-outside excitement) which was ordered at 7:06 p.m. Oh! they did deliver but the wrong one and I paid for the right one. Hunger pangs killing! The optimist in me tells me to hang on before heating up the leftovers of lunch!

Doing the odd jobs and being a super-mom!

“Please is frame ko yahaan par taang do!” : One of the frequent requests from me to my husband on random Saturday mornings until a few months ago. For the uninitiated, weekend mornings were meant for lounging on the sofa with breakfast in one hand and Economic Times newspaper in the other.

Two hours later when everything stays where it was and not an inch of movable/immovable objects has been displaced - Sigh.

“Please is frame ko yahaan par taang do!“, I repeat in an emphatic tone with extra effort for showing no signs of irritability. More often than not, the job gets done. Sometimes when the Husband is on a roll, more than what I had requested for.

Fast forward to now. I’m afraid the Husband has been officially liberated of such mundane chores as drilling holes in the walls to put up year old pictures or that odd collectible picked from an equally obscure place god knows when! Of late, I’ve donned the hat for doing odd jobs around the house from drilling holes (with a drilling machine of course) to fixing leaking pipes, removing a faulty fan regulator, securing velcros of mosquito netlons with adhesives and transporting stuff on and off from the lofts.

For people who live outside India, it might sound strange as to why such a mundane task calls for an elaborate post. Well, to begin with in India, atleast the people I know hire people for such services and never do such tasks themselves. There’s always a electrician or a plumber to be summoned who are more than happy to get things done for as low as Rs.50. But I just realised that it saves me immense time by doing it myself rather than calling the required person for such small things and finally getting it done the way I want. So here I am equipping my tool box replacing old star screw drivers and broken drill bits. Strangely, it also works as a great therapy taking my mind off things that I’d worry about if I were not doing anything. So when I’m stressed out I take to cleaning and fixing things around the house with recycling stuff being the latest fad.

When the Husband gets back, we would be pretty much an independent family and one less thing to argue on as to if the nail should have been 2 mm above the pencil mark or below!

No job? Isn’t that a RISK?

saleLast Saturday evening, Lil’ General and I were invited to a two-year-old’s birthday party. Not many people know us around here. After exchanging pleasantries, the conversation drifted to the “What does your husband do?” part.

“He is studying.” I replied. A pause. “He’s doing an MBA course actually.” I responded in an excited and matter-of-factly tone.

“Oh!” came the response. “Where?” came next almost spontaneously. Pat came the response from me out of experience in a nonchalant tone.

It’s tough to digest the information from a lady as old as I am with a toddler in tow whose husband is away studying. So I always leave the topic at that without encouraging any further discussion unless specifically prodded.

I am used to the drill now. So I gave it time before moving on to other topics knowing only too well that we’ll restart the discussion with renewed fervor in a while. After the usual small talk about how-much-does-yours-on-sleep, which-school-are-you-seeking-admission-in, came the “So how do did he get in? GMAT?” round of questions. Now again the kind of questions depend on the gender and interest. In this case, it was a male so I went about satisfying his curiosity in detail. The topic almost always ends in a gender-neutral question, “Has he quit his job or is he on a sabbatical? Isn’t that a big risk to quit and study?” How do you answer convincingly to such a question? That we each drew  $100,000 salaries a year for a decade and stashed away our incomes in hedge funds earning handsome returns; that we were smart enough to withdrew before they went bust so we can afford to sit on our a**es now while my husband earns a fancy degree from an equally fancy college. I don’t have the wits or the presence of mind to answer so I usually resort to a light-hearted “Considering that we are an unemployed family, I bet it is!” I have received varied responses to this one ranging from, “It’s worth it to live off your resources while he studies” to “you can afford; you have large reserves.” I’m at a loss of words to carry on the discussion any further. No offense, though. We are all entitled to our own inferences.

So here it is to all of you who have been wondering but were too modest to prod further. Yes, V quit his full-time job to study. He is not on a sabbatical and I don’t work for a corporate either. I just do a bit of freelancing that pays me to meet any miscellaneous expenditure. Anything that trickles in is always good, no? That qualifies for us to be called an unemployed family, I guess. It was as simple as this when we decided to put V through school again: it was now or never! I say “we” because we are in this business of studying and unemployment together as a family.  Anytime in the future wouldn’t have been any better than we are today. With Lil’ General not starting school yet and not old enough to comprehend a parent being away for longer periods of time, this was the best window we had. Ofcourse, 2-3 years earlier would have been ideal.

We’d always toyed with the idea of me going back to work full-time when V goes to school. But that was before LG had come along. With LG around, I didn’t entertain the thought even if it meant using all our savings accumulated over the years and losing a year’s income. It just didn’t feel right to leave LG in someone else’s care. I know there are working parents who manage the show with nannies taking care of their kids or by sending them to day care. We are what we are by the choices we make. If I had to choose a career over my son, then I wouldn’t have taken a break and would’ve started long back.

Coming back to the RISK part, yes it is. It means a lot more than what it appears superficially. It calls for a change in lifestyle - if only moderately, for we were never spendthrifts or pub-hoppers. It means making a budget and living within the allotted money, ordering pizzas once a month and not eating out on the pretext oh-i-don’t-feel-like-cooking-today, shopping for quality groceries economically at the beginning of the month when the best deals are available. It means not forgetting to pay your credit card bills on time thereby inviting a penalty. It means air travel is a luxury when one can do with a second-class a/c train travel. It means not wasting food, vegetables, and in general cooking with alert senses. It means learning how to drive because a driver is unaffordable. It means sitting up late at nights to complete writing assignments even on exhausted days because there’s no way one can turn down the only source of income. It also means not to be foolish with the stock market - not the time to take more RISKs. It also means no compromise for LG come what may. So yes, the kid does get his quota of new monthly toys and Gini and Jony dresses - just that now his mom keeps an eye on the sale going on! You may call it a frugal living. I’d call it cutting down on wasteful expenditure for once and living modestly.

And what do you know, it’s been a fun two months being accountable for everything you do. I know the shops that stock the best rice at the lowest prices or the stores that sell quality clothes and toys for LG. The only area where I’m extraordinarily lavish is with my phone bills. They do run into thousands thereby offsetting the savings on everything else. But that’s what keeps me going! Here’s to an opportunity for changing careers and living frugally!

When Hamne Dekha “Jab We Met”

Jab we metWhat happens when you see a movie three times every day for 9 months without any break? To begin with, you remember every dialogue, lyrics of all the songs, every set, every sequence, every costume like the back of your hand. There is another extreme possibility which is either you love the movie very much (with a lot of time to sit on your a**) or you hate the sight of even its poster and swear never to see it again during this lifetime. I’ll go with the ‘loving’ part for “Jab We Met” because I must be totally crazy to see it at 10:40 p.m. on a Sunday night on TV too when I just saw it on DVD a few hours earlier over dinner.

We have 2 copies in DVDs of the movie JWM  at home. The first one wore out because of playing repeatedly. After all, no DVD is designed to be viewed like a five hundred times or more, right? I’m afraid the second one has also begun to show signs of wear and tear and might need a quick replacement. Navratri shopping can wait, a new copy of JWM takes a higher priority. Just kidding..no more DVDs of JWM.

So, how did this obsession began? It started off as an accident; back in January when LG was going through a very tough fussy-eating phase the only distraction that made him eat was the song “Mauji hi Mauja”. It played on different chanells through the day that he grew fond of the song and gyrated to it while having his food. When the frequency of the number decreased on TV, I got a DVD of the movie for Rs.30 (thank you Moser Baer!). Initially he finished his dinner by the time “Mauja hi Mauja” and “Nagada, Nagada” numbers finished playing. When he grew bored of it, it moved on to the other songs and with time different parts of the movie (minus the swearing or objectionable scenes). Soon we were seeing a good chunk of the movie (about 30 minutes in all) through the day which was the only TV viewing allowed. I know it’s bad parenting..very bad rather. But let’s just forget that for a while and keep in mind kids outgrow nursery rhymes too. Anyways this post is about the movie and not about my parenting ways, remember?

There’s something so refreshing about this movie that I think no review of it so far has done enough justice. The only other movie before this one that I claim to have seen more than once is “Dil Hai Ki Mantha Nahin“. Ironically, both the movies have similar story lines of boy-meets-girl-in-journey, falls in love with a happily-lived-ever-after ending. JWM exudes a positive energy every time you watch it; there’s so much enthusiasm to live life on one’s terms, a feel-good romance and a story freshly dealt like never before in recent times that it puts all the romantic movies to shame. It has raised the bar for Hindi movies with its realistic, no-hype approach that doesn’t go over-the-top in costumes or make-up making you connect with the characters. I remember the dialogue of almost every scene and yet I see it with the same anticipation as a first-time viewer every time I see the movie. This is one movie when you wouldn’t need a DVD remote after playing for there’s no need to skip any section or song. Imtiaz Ali must have done a fabulous job for viewers to consider Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapur among their favorite actors especially when the latter was considered more of a female actor than male because of his looks and roles in earlier movies such as Dil Maange More .  The chemistry between the lead pair couldn’t have been better and I can’t believe myself to be writing about a movie at this time of the night!

Why ‘Love Story’ is an amazing book?

Book shelfIt’s late afternoon; I’m browsing mindlessly on my Laptop in the dining room with LG fast asleep in the bedroom. There can’t be more peace than these stolen moments to get my work done and out of the way. And, unless you were in my shoes you wouldn’t understand how precious ‘an hour of LG’s nap’ is. It will be a good seven hours before I get another opportunity to think about work. With the maid not turning up for work today, my domestic responsibilities are not sparing either - cleaning, moping, you know the works!
Love StoryI have a deadline to meet on an article before tomorrow and the first draft seems like a dream. Hit by a bad bout of writer’s block, the words just refuse to take shape for the opening sentence. I turned to my favorite blogs hoping to take my mind off the work on hand for a while. Didn’t work! So, I just shutdown the goddamn machine (sorry for the profanity) , walked around the house, tried to nap for a while in vain before picking up a book from the bookshelf.  And, what do I choose - Erich Segal’s Love Story : an amazing book full of emotions, packed with drama and most importantly one that can be finished in one sitting. Just about what I needed for an afternoon like this ..lost count of the no. of times I’ve read the book.  ‘Bozo’ is a favorite name in the family so much so that a teddy character in LG’s family goes by the name “Bozo Brother”. I just put the book back in its designated spot on the bookshelf with “liquid eyes”, as Ol says. With LG still asleep, I’m in the mood to get back to work with the hope of turning in the assignment by evening.