Eighth wonder of the world - Bangalore Roads

I am amazed by the state of bangalore roads, I have to give it to the new government, they have been asphalting the roads at atleast a pace I have never seen before in my short life span...The last time I remember such frantic action was post the JH patel government was replaced, the state of roads then was something I will never forget...

So whats the problem? I think the average life of a Bangalore road is about 5 months, that is if it was laid before the monsoon, if during the monsoon as of now, then about 3 months, if post monsoon, maybe 6 months , but when you are on an average spending ~ > a crore / km for a stretch, dont you expect better life?

I dont buy the crap of rains, we are not the only country that experiences tropical rains and I dont buy the nonsense of lack of engineering talent, resources we are spending enough I think....

I am sick of this corruption, while maybe I should find out using Right to information if there was any independent quality check, was there any performance guarantee etc..... crores and crores of rupees spent on roads can be spent on education maybe, primary health more so, child nutrition or 100 other things...but am sure the road contractor lobby and all the ministers who are in cahoots with these guys will never let this happen.. I am depressed :(

In all why did I call Bangalore roads the eighth wonder - it represents the pits of public corruption, heights of public apathy, the engineering wonder of showing us the moon surface every single day, enriching the doctors due to slip disks, helping reduce population by creating accidents and teaching us the strength of chemical bonds ( or lack of) in bitumen !!!!

Its in the DNA to succeed for startups.....

I am a sucker for taking my transactions online. Some make my life simple, some give me grief and some just plain irritate me. But yes, some surprise me....

I travel by air nearly once every week.... I have nearly taken all my air bookings online...I have tried Cleartrip, yatra, makemytrip, flight raja, indiatimes at sometime or other. While some have got the front end right ( flight raja, cleartrip), some backend ( yatra) some have got the full package going.... I booked with cleartrip once and ended with a ticket/ invoice with no fare calculations. Unlucky for me, this was a business trip where I had to claim this fare. So off I went to hunt for this invoice. Hell begins.... it took me 9 mins in the customer care Q to speak to the executive, who would speak to me and assure they will send me the invoice but nothing happened. 6 calls, 4 mails later... I gave up. Lost Rs. 12000 due to this...

The other instance, I tried insurancemall to buy insurance, was not satisfied and posted on this blog. Manish Jaiswal the CEO and MD, commented and took note of my rants. I was surprised. If I were to compare cleartrip and Insurance mall, insurance mall stood out by miles, and even when I have not given them my business still...

I think its in the teams and the DNA to succeed... to take finicky customers and still serve them. You might get funding from the biggest funds , you might have fancy founders, you might have a fantastic technology, swanky offices but if it is not in the team, every single one of them to serve the customer - you cant succeed. In this liberalized environment , you will not survive. I might be one in a billion for you, but i am still the centre of my universe....

PS: Guys try out insurancemall, and let me know if you like the service. I might have been an aberration!!

Buying insurance online - my experience with insurance mall

I am generally not a good person to sell anything to. I have an inherent need to have lots of data and with financial products, due to my training and the time I have spent in the market, I usually ask a lot of questions. Most of the new age 'financial advisors' don't manage to answer me and my interactions with them are restricted to the first transaction only. The list of such transactions reads like the who is who of the financial advisors today

1) sharekhan - they have lost the opportunity to cross sell anything to me, the guy usually calls in the middle of a work day and doesn't follow up
2) HDFC bank - They still do not understand I have a salary account, my forex transactions, a loan account and a large amount of my funds which are in the FD form with them. So if they had a profiling software, I should come up high, but I doubt if they have anything. So when I approached them for investment, what does the dude do? ask me to invest in NFOs of mutual funds and gives me a list of new funds. While i have nothing against investing in new funds, they better fit my investing framework. And the person from HDFC bank just could not measure up.
3) ICICI direct - These guys are slightly better - when the person who interacts with me
understands he does not know what I am asking, he acknowledges the fact and gets back in 30 mins. Keep up the good work guys, most of my investing offline is shifting to these guys.
4) personalfn - these guys were good, but since I travel so much and insist on meeting guys mostly on saturday mornings , I think this guy gave up.

Ok, the reason for this post - My new company does not have a health insurance, so I was looking to buy one. So I land on the insurancemall site. It is supposedly the best site to buy insurance online and has got wide coverage. So off I went. They have a very nice feature to compare premium and some basic features. But since I wanted more information, I tried the live chat, but could not continue. So they followed up with a mail, so back I went. Tried the live chat, and wanted details about some of the policy fine print. So the person on live chat put me onto a customer care executive who called. He had a transcript of the chat till then ( which shows someone has thought a bit about the business process!!) and started out. While he had the basic information, I wanted to know about the fine print. He tells me it was not available and he would get back. Am still waiting.

So will I buy insurance online, no sir , I think I will stick to my friendly insurance agent and buy it through him. But I will use the insurancemall.in site to look up premiums. Now if only my agent can stop being an agent and convert to a broker and offer me choice of companies from whom I can buy insurance, I will appreciate it.

Maybe I should just give him this idea :)

Updates

Back after a long absence, courtesy my job shift. A quick update, I had applied through investorhelpline.com to get my unpaid principal back from lloyds bank and people, it works. I received the cheque in about 15 days. Am thrilled to bits, its a small amount, but still any money is welcome :), so if you have not got your dividend cheques, bonus shares, annual reports or any query approach the company first and if it is unresolved, approach these guys.

Pl spread the word around, its time someone held our corporates responsible.