India

It had been quite sometime since I ordered books online. The books I ordered two days back with three different Indian online shopping websites reached here the same day and almost at the same time! Looks like there's some cut-throat competition between them now.
While flipkart was really quick and professional in shipping (and notifying about the shipment), indiaplaza had the books at best prices. Their notification system is quite good as well. However, their package is colossal addition to waste considering I had to throw away more than 8 dirty plastic covers for just four books that I ordered. Hope those will get recycled! The bubble wrap can be reused.
Flipkart's bubble wrap envelope reached clean. The bubble wrap envelope they packaged the book with, can be reused if torn open in a proper way.
It is nice to be able to order books after searching them or reading about those online, however it is sad that it adds up to as much plastic and packaging waste. Maybe sometime in future, jute bags would replace these.

After more than ten years spent in Bengaluru, we've learned as much to avoid food outside. Eating food outside hasn't been the same in Bengaluru as it was several years back. However, there are few exceptions. Maiya's is one such restaurant. At Maiya's you get the traditional flavors of Udupi, Mangalore. The food is of better quality. If the South Indian food gets boring, there are always pastries, some bakery stuff and Gujarathi style restaurant for a change.

Not just that, the restaurant is famous for the coffee served in real silver cups. And for the lunch and dinner, a drink is also usually served in silver cups.

Photo: Hari Prasad Nadig

Of late, whenever anyone throws a question asking which place (city) I'm from, there isn't by any means a ready answer. The confusion lies in the fact that I haven't lived for long in any place that I could call my home town and that I've lived major part of my life till now in the city of Bengaluru! Yes, I was born in Davanagere. The city famous for its Dosa and cotton mills. I was brought up in the lovely fort city of Chitradurga. Rocky hills, ponds and the truly mesmerizing channels of harvested rain water running into ponds that always made us wonder how the city even got into facing scarcity of water. It is said that a British officer who visited Chitradurga fort was quite relieved that they did not have to fight to win it. The historic fort is said to have been impenetrable.

Back in 2004, we used to have discussions on how to improve Indian language projects on Wikipedia and related projects. It was then that the discussions had also channeled towards a probable Indian Chapter that could provide support and backing for the local community and the local projects. At that time, there were just a few chapters worldwide.

We have since then had attempts almost every year to form an Indian Chapter. Most of us involved in each of these attempts were volunteers active in the Wikimedia community. I had coordinated most of the efforts except for the last one. Sadly though, we never had the resources or the backing needed to kick-start the formal process. So, the idea of an Indian Chapter never got realised. It was quite an ordeal to even arrange a meet-up back then.

Some of the earlier attempts failed either due to lack of consensus among the volunteers participating on varying issues or due to the natural processes of attenuation in the crowd that was interested. While the excitement was very much palpaple and the interest genuine among the people involved, we were unable to give the idea the time
and commitment it needed primarily because we lacked the critical mass.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better. Things changed drastically last year when Sunil from Center for Internet and Society brought several Wikimedians under one roof. Thanks to the invaluable efforts from Achala Prabhala in getting a few committed and responsible volunteers together back again to boot start the process during that time, we now are much closer in realising the Chapter idea than we were ever before. The team that had come together for this purpose has spent plenty of time towards this in the last one year.

People using Tata Indicom Broadband (and several other services here in India) seem to be affected by heavy packet loss in their Internet connections. When I called up the Tata Indicom Customer Care almost in what seemed to be the umpteenth time I was calling them in last two days, I was told about some "submarine cable damage", "main server issue" and few other such things. Earlier they had a reason to believe it was a local issue and they said they will get it rectified in "6 hours".

I don't know how many of us would remember the 501, Nirma and similar soap bars that had become so much a part of life back in those days when Rin, Surf Excel or the fancy German detergents had still not entered the market. I remember people taking those detergent bars with them to nearby water source to wash their clothes. Much has changed now, but I still remember the fragrance of 501 or even Nirma. It has been years since I last saw one, though.

Today, I stopped by a grocery store in a village on the way home. An auto driver was unloading his stock of "N S" bar. It was like glancing back at this historical, outdated soap but the shop owner and the auto driver had a different story to tell. In my curiosity, I ended up taking a photo of this while the auto driver, who looked pretty curious at my curiosity, went observing in pride - "This, saar, is still the best soap you can ever get! It used to cost just naalkaaNi" (25 paise).

And to my surprise, people in this village seem to have sticked to their brand for all these years and the shopkeeper confirmed that by telling me how people keep coming for more of this.