After a longish, fat filled vacation at home, I returned to Hyderabad (Hyd, in short) almost three months ago. I have since started working, rented a house, and bought all kinds of things to make it livable. The experience of living in the city (i.e. in the real Hyd and not inside the walls of ISB) so far has been okay at best. And that is after living in Banjara Hills, one of the better parts of the city and working in Somajiguda, the city center. 

Based on my interactions with the shop owners/attendants, auto drivers, service reps, people offering their apartments on rent and some general public, I find most people in Hyd to be lazy, unhelpful and a tad incompetent. But then maybe it’s too early to form an opinion. I am open to giving the city a chance to redeem itself.

Things are good otherwise. I have started working out again, determined to los all the excess fat that I have accumulated in the last couple of months. My parents are visiting me right now and life is fun. The brilliant weather adds to it. Oh, and I love my house! 

I plan to start lots of new things/activities soon to make life interesting again (the title probably gave away the non-imaginative state I’m in) because I really miss my life before MBA that I left behind in Bangalore. And I need to do enough to justify having done whatever I did in the last two years. And I need to do it fast!

First, a little background on the title. I wrote the first posts of last year and the year before that on 22nd January and named them similarily.I do feel a little sad about not updating the blog much but then the readership has dwindled anyway so not too many people miss new posts on the blog. Of course, writing more would be a good way to win new readers and I plan to do that in the new future.

Life’s been hectic but good and I am progressing well on my resolutions for the year. 

Also, in store is a major facelift for the blog. It has stayed this way for too long and it deserves a new look. I’ll start working on the reboot this long weekend itself so expect something soon. 

Ah, the last day of the year! Always a good day for introspection. Fortunately for me, I’ve been introspecting for the past 1-2 months and though I am mostly satisfied with how things have been so far, I feel the need to do more in life. So the plan is to continue learning new things.

This means I’ll continue learning German (I recently completed German A1 level exam! Yay!), take up guitar lessons again, learn to swim, continue learning to cook and much more. Also, I had kinda loosened up on the fitness regime but no slacking from tomorrow. The fitness freak is back! The only new (and important) resolution for the new year is to spend as much money as necessary as opposed to spending as much as I can which is what I have been doing till now! 

Coming to the things I liked about the year, there were some movies that I really liked: Wall-E (of course!), Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Aamir and Dasvidaniya.

I didn’t find as much great music as I found last year but some of it was awesome. Few soundtracks (Wall-E, Juno) , some new (for me!) bands (Hellogoodbye, Goldspot) and some good Hindi movie songs (Aamir, Ada, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, all songs sung by Mohit Chauhan) worked for me.

Television took a backseat this year for me. I think my TV watching time was less than halved. Lost remained at the top of its game. Family Guy and 30 Rock continued to entertain. I discovered The IT Crowd and Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia and ensured that I watched each and every episode available.

Like I wrote in my birthday post, it was a mixed bag as far as my life is concerned, but the sum total of everything that happened is definitely positive. Also, I travelled much more this year than previous years and my first journey was on 1st January. Maybe its true what they say. What you do on the first day the year….

I look forward to 2009 and I hope it will bring the best of everything with it.

Wish you a very Happy New Year!

The Indian retail industry is booming and lots of snazzy supermarkets have popped up in most cities. A lot of these are either owned or have been acquired by major business houses . There are 7 such stores within the 2 km radius of my house. But since I am planning to move to a different area, I decided to look up their websites and use the store locater to find a store in the new area. But what I soon discovered was that some of these supermarkets don’t even have any official site and the only way to find a store in an area is though local classifieds (Sulekha) , local search engines (Just Dial) , Google maps and Wikimapia. But the information on these sites can be wrong or outdated and not as reliable as an official site.

This got me interested and I decided to do a comparison of the online presence of all the major players in Bangalore (and in India).

Here’s how they fared:

• Reliance Fresh: Its one of the biggest players in the sector but surprisingly neither Fresh nor any other retail formats owned by Reliance (Footprint, Digital, Jewels, Timeout etc.) have any web presence. Just a one page summary of the company’s retail plans exists on RIL’s website. There are, however, many unofficial blogs dedicated to Reliance Retail.
• More: Fabmall, one of the largest supermarket chains in South India, was recently acquired by Aditya Birla Group’s More making it an important player in the market but again, except for a page mentioning the launch of its first store and news articles on the aforementioned acquisition on the group’s website, nothing much can be found online.
• Nilgiris: This South Indian chain recently acquired Daily’s supermarkets belonging to Valdel retail but I could not find company’s official website even though I found Valdel’s website.
• Subhiksha: They do have a website and the link “Store Locators”(locators??) did get my hopes up only to be met with a “Page in Under Construction[sic]” message. I am still hopeful that someday soon, they might have a real page there.
• Fresh@: Interestingly, the owner of this chain, Heritage Foods, has a website with a store locator but unless one knows the parent company and searches for it, there’s no way to find the website. Now that’s some bad search engine optimization (SEO) at work!
• Food Bazaar: They have an info page on Pantaloon’s site and there’s also a common Store Locator for all formats owned by the company. Good!
• Foodworld: They too have a website that seems alright and there is a list of all stores too but unfortunately, it is on the “Contact Us” page which is linked only in the footer.
• Spencer’s: They have a proper website (with the useless flash intro and all) and do have a “our stores” link which works well. Its definitely the most impressive of the lot!

What this proves is that a lot of Indian companies still don’t understand the power of Internet. Sure, most people would go to the nearby supermarkets rather than search for one on the internet but I think an online presence is an important part of brand development. Let’s hope they would realize this soon enough and make amends.

There used to be a time when no matter what I read or heard never moved me much. Not anymore! I seem to be in a place where most of the things I read affect me. I take in much more now. Even the music I listen to makes more impact now than ever before. I am unsure if this is good or bad but I think I should be more careful about what I read or listen to. I should filter out all the things that are unworthy of my time. Something that caught my attention in particular was this post which lists what really “determines whether someone has crossed from boyhood into manhood”.

During a visit to my hometown last week, I was just looking around and noticed how everything in and around my home, the places nearby and almost everything has a story. Its somehow connected to my life there which I will always remember. In fact, the place has changed a lot. Even my house isn’t the same. It has changed over the years. But I remember everything exactly the way it was when I was a kid. And that’s how it will forever remain etched in my memory.

I just added a new sidebar widget that shows my latest tweet posted on twitter. Its on sidebar 2 which means it will only be displayed on the home page (just below the latest sidenote). This was something I wanted to do last year when I moved to wordpress but for some reason unknown even to me, I just didn’t do it! But its on now so you can read my rants real time (and even follow me if you like the way I do it).

Remember the flying plastic bag scene from “American Beauty”? (No? Well, watch it here.) Some people loved it, some hated it. But the background music used in the scene is just mesmerizing and there’s no doubt about that. The music piece is “Any Other Name” by Thomas Newman and you can listen to the whole piece here.