odzer's blog

Eat, drink and gamble! Have fun spend and get the economy going again please! Its time to throw away all your restraints for a night or two and enjoy yourselves. I hope that all of you will enjoy the coming holidays and not end up blinding each other with various fireworks

Personally I plan to eat plenty of nuts, raisins and other goodies. Gorge a bit on the good old Cashew nut burfi and and get bored to tears due to the absolute one time of the year when I feel really pissed at the world in general. When the madness is over I shall be back to posting here but till that time. Happy Diwali!!

ਖਾਓ ਿਪਓ ਤੇ ਅੈਸ਼ ਕਰੋ, ਿਦਵਾਲੀ ਦੇ ਪੂਰੇ ਮਜੈ ਲੌ! ਸਾਰੇ ਲੌਕਾੰ ਨੂੰ ਮੇਰੇ ਵਲੌੰ ਿਦਵਾਲੀ ਿਦਅਾੰ ਬਹੁੱਤ ਮੁਬਾਰਕਾੰ!!

I came home after being out most of the day today and at first I was quite tired and not so hungry but around eight I did feel the rumblings. So I have made a simple spaghetti dinner. One of the things I love about India is the way the Tomatoes taste here. In many other countries tomatoes are just atrocious unless you buy rather expensive varieties. The sauce came out rather nice and I added a generous amount of garlic because I like it that way. I had no basil though, all my herb plants have been eaten away by bugs and I haven’t planted any new ones. Although my mother did that for me now and I have a new set of Indian useful plants now. Curry leaves, coriander, mint etc.

So coming back to the subject at hand….the sauce had only dried herbs. I added some parmesan cheese later on for some more taste. One of my curious habits is that I usually use chopsticks when I boil noodles to stir them around so most of the times when I eat by myself I just use the same chopsticks to eat up. It saves on the washing up. However now I always mostly end up eating Spaghetti etc with chopsticks. After all noodles are just noodles!

This post is in response and in protest of Chandigarh Administration and its Department of Environment. I will continue to put updates periodically unless the notification to ban plastic bags is either withdrawn by the Administration or is struck down by the courts. It is now my intention to fight the government on this online because I see this as a mega downgrade in my quality of life. All of those who are affected by this ban in any way are requested to use the contact me form (opens in a new window) so that we can formulate strategy to fight this ban. Regular posts will continue on this blog as usual.

A corrupt and inefficient administration can only make inefficient laws.

What is the quality of your government? It is a question that people often do not ask themselves. What exactly do you get in return for your tax rupee? If you are going to pay for the entire show, should you accept poor service from the government? Government is not funded by some magic fund, it extracts its pound of flesh. If it then passes laws that are basically inefficient the working of such administration requires greater scrutiny. I am a busy man and I have had no time yet to to ask the administration of chandigarh any direct questions.  I am pondering about doing that later and the fact that my previous questions are still unanswered by the Department of Environment of Chandigarh Administration does not motivate me to demand answers from them directly at the moment. So I used the tools available to me and found some answers on my own.

1. Why did my letter to the department of environment go unanswered?

Answer: Most likely because they have no system in place to answer questions of their constituents or the people they rule through e-mail. Apparently the Municipal Corporation of Chandigarh has spent thousands if not hundreds of thousands on computers, laptops, information technology equipment but has nothing in place to answer e-mails. This was made apparent by a news story I found here.

2. How serious is the Chandigarh Administration  and Municipal Corporation when it comes to planning and execution of various projects? What is their general track record?

   300 Million Rupee Garbage Processing Plant : Doomed from Day 1. This project is basically non functional. The municipal government is responsible for its working. Just to make that clear. The Tribune story on that can be found here.

   Mechanical Sweeping Machines : Purchased for 30 Million Rupees these parking lot cleaning machines are supposed to clean our roads. These were supposed to be used at night time when there is no traffic but they are being deployed during full rush hour traffic. The people who purchased these machines apparently traveled all the way to Italy to inspect them when similar machines were available down a 3 hour train ride in Delhi! More on useless foreign trips of our corrupt and dishonest bureaucratic oligarchy type rulers later on in this post.

   Underpasses : Not one has been constructed! Although enough funds were spent in Belgium while investigating how to build them, where and how to even maintain them. Maintenance for non existing underpasses!

   Firefighting equipment : Apparently a ladder was purchased for 25.1 million Rupees from Finland which is never deployed for the fire department! The details of all these sordid purchases can be found here.

Answer :The more I searched the more disappointed I got. Apparently they have a whole media trail leading up to them that proves that they are basically excuse the term pissing away public wealth. It is so terrible that there is even no finesse even when it comes to covering up their tracks.

3. Are the officers of the Administration squandering away public wealth?

Answer : Unfortunately yes. Between 2005-07, Krishna Mohan a former Home Secretary of the Administration spent an amazing Rs. 1.9 million, former Finance Secretary S.K. Sandhu spent almost a cool one million and junior officers like the Tourism Director for this disgusting and vile administration Vivek Atray spent Rs 1.6 million! So now you might ask what did they spent it all on. Foreign trips!!! They travelled business class or First Class. Stayed at the best hotels and even billed their theater tickets, entertainment expenses etc to the government. Details about their adventures in Europe and elsewhere can be found by clicking here, here and here.

So now you might ask me what does all of the above have to do with the ban on plastic bags. It is very simple. Lets just have a rough calculation of the money that was squandered away by our environment conscious administration on the topics we covered in this post alone. Here we go.

Chandigarh Administration’s Wasteful Expenditure Bill According to Odzer.Com

Projects that never paid off or took off

Garbage Disposal Plant : Rs. 300,000,000.00

Street Sweeping Machines : Rs. 30,000,000.00

Hydraulic Ladder : Rs. 25,100,000.00

Foreign trips made by various city officials with the Administration  : Rs. 5,000,000.00

Grand TOTAL : Rs. 360,100,00.00 or around US$ 727,041.90

So now lets see what you can do with that kind of money? Can you buy a plant to recycle the whole cities plastic? Well one idea can be that you should use plastic as a construction material which is already being considered by Cochi in Kerala. The price tag around 25 million rupees. 5 million less than the non functional garbage processing unit we have in place right now! Even the Chinese seem to have been putting in plastic recycling plants a country that is notorious for its pollution. Beijing just put in one at the cost of US$ 37.5 million.The Chinese are aiming to recycle plastic back in to polyster though instead of using it as contruction material. In fact the plant being considered by Kochi is far cheaper and made in India! I am not even sure we need such a huge plant to recycle our plastic in this city. In fact I am not in to the business of running the government but even I can see that in the amount of money they have just thrown away in the last few years they could have effectively solved this city’s plastic problem effectively. They might even have had some surplus funds to educate people regarding not littering the streets and seperating their garbage! In fact I am going to do next week’s post on garbage seperation. So for now all I will say is that to me it is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Chandigarh Administration and the Municipal government are guilty of a misinformation and a deception campaign. They had the means and the ability to solve environmental problems in another way except imposing this stupid ban that is leading to such agony.

I have stopped myself from writing about this subject for a while. In any case I think it should be written about. The reason for not writing about it for so long has been that many of the people who visit this blog are vegetarian and I do not want to give anyone an impression that this post relates to them. It is about these little brown and green stickers or marks that you find usually on packaged food in India. A green dot sticker supposedly means that the food is vegetarian and a brown dot means it is not. Now for someone like me who does not care about whether food is vegetarian or not it means precious little. However even I can see that how pointless all this is. Vegetarians in India are not vegetarian anyway since they consume milk and its by products. Anyone who has ever been on a farm knows that milk comes from a cow or such animals and not from a packet. In order to get the milk to you the calf has to go hungry especially if its a male calf. In the villages it is a common tradition either to starve the calf or to poison it using Abrus seeds or Rati as it is called here. I do not even want to get in to the debate that milk is not vegetarian. How can they mark that as vegetarian in India!

In any case vegetarians are the one’s that put restrictions on their own diet. They should do the research to find out what is vegetarian or not. It should not be the responsibility of the manufacturer or the retailers to mark products. Some of the retailers certainly seem to be over enthusiastic about marking things anyway, I even found this apple with a little green dot! I am looking forward to some non-vegetarian apples now possibly made of mince

I think it is time we all look at food objectively. There is no virtue in being vegetarian, whenever humans eat we are killing. Whether directly or indirectly. In fact I often observe that some vegetarian people think that they have some sort of moral high ground over people who eat meat. I really do not have anything against vegetarians though, people should just eat whatever they please. However the truth is there is a lot of misinformation that comes from organisations such as PETA. They are responsible for spreading a host of lies and half truths that are doing far more damage than benefit even for the animals that they claim to represent.

I am not going to write anything about which diet is healthy or not. Personally I believe each person has a different requirement and they should eat what is suitable for them. There are people out there who can benefit immensely from not eating meat and that is why they choose to be vegetarian. However I am not really fond of the preachy “I am a Vegetarian, so should be you” type vegetarians who are just vegetarian because it is the latest fad.

Can you live without a mobile phone for a few days? What about a few hours? Its strange that I am not a very telephone type of a person, I usually can just not keep up long conversations on the phone and I often forget in between what I am text messaging to someone about and lose track of the ‘conversation’ but as it happened today the phone did not ring at the usual time when I expect a call from my mother. I just thought she must be busy and then I started doing my work. Around two hours later finally I decided to give her a call instead and I saw that my telephone had no network. Puzzled I turned it off and then I turned it on and it would still not connect. I just tossed it aside and called my mother from my landphone. After that I again glanced at my mobile and there was still no network. Frustrated I dialled the customer support for the mobile company from my landphone and the following ensued :-

Me : I have no network on my telephone.

Airtel Rep. : Sir, there is a maintainence under progress your phone will work in 2 hours.

Me : No one informed me about the maintainence.

Airtel Rep : Sir, this is an urgent maintainence which we had to undertake immediately, we had no time to send advance notification.

Me : Oh I see, Thank you. (End of conversation)

In my mind I went hmmmmmmm! Maintainence in the middle of the day? Most likely they have some problems but they do not want to say what it is. Is it not unfair that you keep your customers in the dark? I mean these are the people that you rely upon to run your company? Okay I will be honest I have never had the mobile phone network just vanish before but would it not be nice to at least call the spade a spade instead of giving me all that bull about “maintainence“. So the network was restored after an hour or so after the call and they did not even have the courtesy to send a text message to apologise! I feel really taken for granted, I mean I pay these people thousands of rupees every year, do I not desvere at least an apoplogy if not a rational explanation. I wonder how many people missed out on something important due to them, I wonder how many people were in trouble and they could not call for help. Interesting thought. I wonder how difficult it is to send an apology message considering they ordinarily spam you with useless promotional text messages that are difficult to get rid off.

Today I haven’t had any time to go for a walk or make dinner. So I was hungry towards the evening and I decided to make some Egg paranthas. Now this is a very interesting dish for me simply because I am rather bad at making paranthas. In fact I learnt how to make this particular type of paranthas from Hedonist while she was living in India and she is not even Indian! Khelljuhg who is Japanese makes far better paranthas than I do! He is specially an expert at making Gobhi (cauliflower) Paranthas. In fact if you want to learn how to make paranthas just head over to Hedonists blog which has an excellent post complete with schematic diagrams about how to shape them.

Egg paranthas are excellent with Indian mango pickle though I skip it because of the horrendous amounts of salt in pickles. I enjoy them with Chai. The beauty of these is that they have beaten egg in them so they make a complete meal by themselves. I usually use desi ghee to shallow fry them though oil can be used. Although I find processed oil far more unhealtheir as an option personally. Now that I have finished eating my paranthas I am enjoying my chai while writing this post. Although paranthas are horribly addictive and as a person who lives in Chandigarh it is difficult to escape them since you can eat them here 24 hours a day. In fact I try to restrict myself to eating them only about once a week but not only because of health issues also because I would like to eat other things for breakfast. Oh did I mention they are typical breakfast food? So there you are, I added that as an after thought.

E-tickets are convenient, all you need is a printout just before you fly. Even if you lose your ticket you can simply print out a new one any time. Great is it not? Wait till you read this all. In January of this year I purchased an Air India ticket to Tokyo for around 48,000 Rupees. I purchased this ticket from a travel agent that was actually known to me and a neighbour of mine. The day after I had purchased this ticket I was due to appear at the honourable Japanese Embassy for submission of my Visa form. When I asked the man who owned the travel agency about payment he said he could not charge my credit card at his office because his point of sale machine was broken. He offered that we could go to another store to pay for the ticket, since I had no time and my neighbour and one of my former employees had been regularly buying tickets from this man I trusted him. That was such a big mistake. He took me to a clothing retailer who swiped my card twice once for 19,000 Rupees and once for 20,000 Rupees. I was issued a ticket, however while collecting the ticket I noticed a huge commotion at this man’s travel agency and I was suspicious. I called up my neighbour and we went to Air India office in sector 17. Air India assured me that my ticket was in good order. I told them that I was not satisfied and they should convert my E-ticket in to a paper ticket. They refused.

On that very day in the evening I went online to check the status of my air ticket and I found that my ticket had been cancelled. Cancelled!!! How can someone cancel a ticket that belongs to me without my permission? Well apparently it can happen only with E-tickets because no physical ticket or signatures are required of the person in whose name it has been issued! I went back to Air India and they just shrugged their shoulders for a while. They were helpful enough in the sense to suggest to me that I buy another ticket from an IATA approved agency. I believe the station manager told me, “Oh you went to a jhola-jhap agent”. This agent of course being one of the largest travel agencies in this city! I was shocked and I went back to the agency where this guy had nothing to say to me except he would return back my money which he did not have at the moment. His office now was flooded with people who had been sold  cancelled or fake tickets some of them even having been evicted from the airport!

Ultimately to cut a long story to short the travel agent ended up in prison after absconding for a couple of months. The only solution I had for my problem was to buy a completely new ticket from an agent for the same flight. I also filed a credit card dispute with Citibank and apprised them of the situation. It took ten months of sustained correspondence with the bank to convince them to refund the charge to my card. It seems that in India you are not protected if someone makes a fradulent charge on your card and you have swiped and signed for the item. The delivery and the quality of the product is not something that you can use as a point to dispute a transaction. However I could still convince the bank that I never received any product or service but the merchant where my card was swiped also provided the bank with some fictious bills for apparel that I had never purchased. This month this dispute was  resolved after the bank contiously refused the 20,000 rupee transaction in my favour and I ended up writing to the head of grievance redressal at Citibank telling them that I would finally have to move the Reserve Bank of India with my dispute. All in all through this blog post I would still like to thank Citibank for keeping up with this case and replying to my each e-mail, fax and phone call. They were courteous and overall understanding of the situation. I am happy that they at least listen to their customers. I can not say the same for Air India though. They just washed their hands off me as fast they could. So here are some pointers for someone who wants to buy an air-ticket :-

1. Always go to an IATA approved agent. Even if the agent cancels your ticket or does something wrong the agency has a deposit with IATA and the airline can take action on your behalf.
2. Cross check the ticket a couple of times with online reservation systems like Amadeus and Galileo etc before you actually travel.
3. If possible never pay cash for an air ticket. If I had paid cash I would have lost all my money but keep in mind that your credit card issuing bank may not be as co-operative since credit cards in India offer only a limited amount of consumer protection.
4. Keep your airlines local as well as destination phone number in your mobile phone.
5. Do not fall for any phone call from any travel agency if you have been making inquiries that they can offer you a better price. Many travel agents actually pay fat commissions to employees of rival travel agencies for “leads”.

I hope that someone or the other will find this post useful. It is only from the school of hard knocks that we often learn new things. I have come to terribly distrust the E-ticket system as it exists today and I hope that they will make some changes to how airline reservations can be cancelled. However I must say that overall there is precious little that airlines are doing today to protect their customers.

This post is in response and in protest of Chandigarh Administration and its Department of Environment. I will continue to put updates periodically unless the notification to ban plastic bags is either withdrawn by the Administration or is struck down by the courts. It is now my intention to fight the government on this online because I see this as a mega downgrade in my quality of life. All of those who are affected by this ban in any way are requested to use the contact me form (opens in a new window) so that we can formulate strategy to fight this ban. Regular posts will continue on this blog as usual.

Plastic ban results in more plastic!

Writing about a plastic ban in Chandigarh can result in some curious reactions. I have observed some on my blog as well as in life. I am going to share some now. Some common things that people have told me so far have been : -

1. Why don’t you simply use a cloth bag?

Well because I do not want to, though somehow it does not seem to be reason enough for some people. I find them inconvenient and constricting. They are also impractical for my shopping style. Actually I have noticed I have just stopped enjoying shopping because it means I have to do it as a chore instead of being able to do it spontaneously whenever I wanted to.

2. Plastic is not biodegradable, paper is.

True, but plastic is recyclable. In any case since plastic is not TOTALLY banned it needs to be recycled anyway so why don’t you just recycle carry bags as well?

3. Plastic like bags are available and they are also recyclable.

Not here. The government here has banned plastic bags without providing any alternatives except paper bags. Paper bags are not suitable to carry heavy, wet, refrigerated or liquid products.

So on and so forth, moving on. The plastic ban is actually taking a curious turn. It turns out that the retailers have finally found a loophole! The administration has banned carry bags but not plastic bags that do not have “handles”. He he he. So now they are using inferior quality handleless plastic bags which are actually thinner than our previous carry bags to put heavy or leaky things. These bags though inconvenient because they can not be carried do save some people the inconvenience of cleaning their poor cloth or jute bags which might get soiled otherwise by dirty, leaky or runny produce. However this also means we are now using far more plastic bags than we were using before. I am posting a photo of my vegetable shopping the other day where we purchased vegetables and they packed and sealed them in individual plastic bags before selling us a 5 Rupee paper bag to carry it all to home in. The most part of the journey home I kept laughing hysterically at the irony of the situation. It seems to me the environment enthusiasts had not thought of this scenario. In fact they had not thought of the scenarios that would arise from such an impractical ban at all before imposing it. As such these type of people often enough do not think of convenience or practical approaches to life because they are mother earth fan boys/girls. Anyway I am sure the head of the government here is such a fan boy because I hear next they will be making every house owner in this city put on a solar water heating system that costs thousands of rupees! Whether you can afford it or not. As a property owner of course I will never do anything to deface my house. Though they do not care about what we want or not because for them the cost of such measures, nor the desire of the people is of any consideration. This is the type of idiotic government we have which rules by imposition, decree and without any democratic mandate.

Oyakodonbori is a Japanese bowl dish. Typically the Japanese do not put anything on their rice as we do in India while eating their meals. Rice is always eaten separately with a meal. I learnt some table manners thanks to some friends who reminded me of the do’s and dont’s occasionally. One of the exceptions seems to be this dish though. I think this is basically a whole meal at one go. I really like cooking this dish but I do not think I have reached the stage of perfection till now when it comes to cooking Oyakodonbori. Oyako means parent and child, since this dish uses both eggs and chicken so it is quite aptly named. Donbori means bowl.

I added some shiitake mushrooms and an onion in this dish. Typically this also calls for spring onions but it is still not apparently cold enough for spring onions in Chandigarh so I have to wait for them to arrive. As I have written before in a blog or two, finding greens in India is very tiresome. It takes some sort of special skill! Anyway the base of the dish is Japanese dashi or stock but since I have ran out of it, I used good old Maggi chicken stock courtsey an evil multi national corporation called Nestlé. It also requires mirin, sugar and good quality Japanese soy sauce. I hear this dish is also very popular in Hawaii. I used North-Indian rice for the dish though I can buy Japanese rice but its a bit pricey or use South-Indian rice which is a bit similar in texture to what they use in Japan but not entirely the same.

I have never been tagged before so I did not even know how to respond to this e-mail request I recieved from Sharad until I saw his blog! Anyway I have been asked to disclose six quirky things about me. My computer’s inbuilt dictionary tells me (I am far too lazy to consult a real dictionary) the following about the word ‘quirky’ :-

quirky |ˈkwərkē|
adjective ( quirkier , quirkiest )
characterized by peculiar or unexpected traits : her sense of humor was decidedly quirky.
DERIVATIVES
quirkily |-kəlē| |ˈkwərkəli| adverb
quirkiness |-kēnis| |ˈkwərkin1s| noun

So after some deliberation I would have to say that I am quirky overall but having to put six quirky things here I would say these would be my favourite:-

When as a kid I asked a neighbour who had a water supply problem if he used mango juice to clean his backside when the neighbour was complaining about having to drink juice instead of water all the time.

When I had a surgery and then ended up having a quarrel with my mother in the hospital after waking up from anesthesia about the fact that she did not know what kind of cookies I liked and then passed out again

I am sexually aroused by the smell of newly printed money (Seriously!)

I dumped my final year university Economics exam to go to Tibet

I have never worn the colour black, the closest I have come to it is wearing black socks

I love the sound that cash registers, credit card machines and ATM’s make. I also love elevator music, Japanese yamanote line station theme music especially this particular one (it is even the ringtone for my phone) and sounds vending machines make

I would love it if some of my other blog friends could do this tag, how about vinod, vikram and hedonist. Lets see how quirky you all are!