An SMS

Got a SMS this morning from “Vodafone”, my service provider. The message read “Dear customer as per Govt. regulation, sending commercial / promotional SMS will lead to disconnection of your service if you are not registered as a Telemarketer”

If it was my any other day I could have ignored this and get going with my work. But I was not at work; and maybe that made me think what does this message mean?

It means I might get less calls as the telemarketers need to register themselves first or they will be disconnected… Happy 🙂

Change the shoes…

Does this mean if I do my business (however small it is.. say I’m a broker for rented house) and I do not register I will be out of my business. I wonder how are they defining “Commercial / promotion”. 

Curious to know more I searched and found that the registration cost is Rs. 1000 and Rs 9000 of customer education. Not sure if this is correct as I got it from non-govt website. But if it is then “MY GOVERNMENT” has just invented one more way to mint money.

And sad is these “telemarketers” will be helpless.. they need to pay government…. and to get what ? When they register (by paying) they will get the list of phone numbers to whom they SHOULD NOT CALL…. hahaha 🙂

I ask myself …. how much are we controlled & manipulated by the government…. and we get nothing in return 😦

 

The men in black

Being a software professional, we usually live distant from the reality what a common man faces in India. Yesterday, when I went to the Civil court of Hyderabad, accompanying my brother for the hearing of his case I had experienced one such common pratha (practice) of our country, the bribe. 

The matter was of returning of the Advance amount which we (my brother) paid to the flat owner, which we planned to buy back in November 2011. We cancelled it because the legal verification of documents revealed it to be construction on government land. After a long wait and lot of phone calls from Janurary 2012 to April 2012, when the flat owner denied of giving back money, we were left with no option but to send him a legal notice.

We contacted an advocate and filed the case against him in April 2012. The advocate, who could be in his 80s [from his white hairs and looks], with his provocative words ensured us that he will have to “Pay for it”.

On 8th July 2012, the day of first hearing, the defending party did not appear to court and the case hearing was postponed to 9th Aug 2012 [Yesterday].

Yesterday :

8:00 am Defending party (flat owner) calls my brother, agreeing for settlement.
11:00 am : We reach Civil Court (I accompanied just because we wanted to close it out)
11:15 am – Discussion started to come to mutual understanding. We quoted Rs. 1.50 Lac for settlement (which was sum of balance the flat owner has to pay & court, advocate expenses… BTW, our advocate told us to quote this figure).
11:20 am – The flat owner disappears with his advocate for discussion…
12:00 noon – Flat owners advocate comes and says 1.15 as settlement amount. We disagreed. But suddenly our advocate (who should not have interfered) reduced to Rs 1.35 Lac. Seeing his seniority… our willingness to settle down, we agreed.
12:05 pm – Defending party + their advocate disappears for another round of discussion.
1:00 pm – Another advocate (colleague of our advocate) comes and discusses our matter with our advocate.
2:00 pm – Definding party comes back (after multiple phone calls).
2:05 pm – They took another advocate (advocate # 4) and went for discussion again
2:20 pm – Advocate # 4 and Advocate # 3 (our advocate’s colleague), have discussion and come to agreement for settling at 1.25 (further 10 thousand reduced without our concent.. in front of us. And yes! they still say it is our decision which matters…. donno how). We disagreed for 1.25
2:30 pm – We both (me & brother) had discussion and thought of agreeing for Rs. 1.25 lac just because we do not want the court mess in our lives.
2:35 pm – We told our decision to our advocate. Advocate applauded our decision, and immediately said they (the 4 advocates) need Rs 20 thousand off that settlement amount of 1.25 as settlement fees.
2:40 pm – We left the court saying we’ll fight

The picture was clear to us now. Why the advocates were convincing us. When we already paid 15000 as advocate fee, why is the settlement fees? Why the hell did those two unknown lawyers come into picture ?

 

Development in the cloud

Cloud9. This was the thing which I was waiting for since long time. A place where I can write & save the code directly into the cloud. I needed this not for any company specific private code but to have a place where I have all my private code (simple scripts which help me do things faster).

Then I found BitBucket, which provides private repositories using Git & Mercurial. And with cloud9 allowing bitbucket repositories to be integrated, I can manage my private code better 🙂

And cloud9 is soon going to have sync of projects from local machine. What more can I ask for keeping my those code snippets in organized way so that I need not write them again & again.

I am all set to move my code from my hard disk to cloud… and as my friend suggested, I will be making it public once I have clean code. These are custom scripts (< 100 lines code per file) but most of them are taken from the internet and customized. So why not share it back!

 

 

 

Understand Monthly Gold Scheme

With the recent surge in the gold prices, which reduced the physical demand of jewelry in India, Jewelers have come up with monthly plans for the gold.  The schemes vary in nature with core concept being to deposit fixed / variable  amount with the jeweler periodically  for a fixed number of months and you shall be able to purchase the gold worth more than what amount you deposited totally till end of period. One such scheme I shall be analyzing here works as follows “You pay 11 installments and we pay one for you”.

The getting one EMI fully free from the jeweler attracts everyone. Who do not want ‘FREE’ goodies. Getting a free installment, and that too for purchase of GOLD, attracts many who cannot afford to buy the precious metal at its current value.  The enthusiasm to understand the offer and find who is the beneficiary resulted in below analysis.

If I start investing Rs. 10,000 per month from 1 Sep 2011  and pay Rs. 1,10,000 in eleven installments.  The next installment is paid by the jeweler, so that means on 1 Sep 2012 I can buy gold worth Rs. 1, 20,000 from the jeweler.

Had I invested Rs. 10,000 every month for 12 months in a recurring deposit with 10% of interest rate compounding quarterly the amount would have been Rs. 126646.  Here I invested for 12 months to get Rs. 6646 interest whereas I got 10,000 for investing 11 months.  Approximately 15% of the interest without risk.  I am a perfect gainer (at least not loser) on paper so far.

Now if jeweler is giving 15% interest on my money, what is he earning and how?

In numbers, he is paying 5% more than a fixed income scheme (Recurring deposit) so he must be definitely putting my money into a money instrument which gives him more than 15% gain in an year. What else than ‘GOLD’ will he invest.  From the last 3 years (since I started following gold price), Gold has given returns more than 15% per annum. So simply said my money will be invested today in Gold for me to purchase at end of term.

On the other hand the jeweler would know his customer base for next year. Thus even if price of gold on 1 Sep 2012 is 40000 per 10 gram, he still has a customer because I had invested my money into his plan.

Will I go for the it ? Well before jumping in, I want to know few more as listed:

• Will I be eligible to drop in between ? If yes will I be getting the share of the free installment on pro-rata basis ?
• If there is a great offer I am interested to purchase before I pay all the installments, will I be able to purchase ? What conditions apply here ?
• After the completion of installments (12 months), is there any limited period within which I need to purchase the gold ?
• Will I be allowed to bargain ?
• Can I en-cash the amount after 12 months instead of purchasing ( there are no silly questions) ?
• Can I gift that amount to someone who can then purchase gold (like gift card)
• If I paid installments in bangalore, can I buy the gold in Delhi’s branch ?(Remember… gold rates differ in cities)
• Can I buy coins instead of jewelry ?
• Will the amount paid by jeweler (i.e., one installment) taxed to me ?

I shall be finding out the details now ! Be ready for my next post with answers.

DISCLAIMER : Opinions given in this blog solely belong to my understanding. They are not intended towards favor or against any product or company as such.