Ravi's Blog

I have a pretty decent computer that any computer freak would envy. Four numbers of quad core processor, that is 16 cores, and about 32 GB of RAM, and a huge array of hard drives, and the whole setup draws over 1.5kVA of power from the mains. I do have applications for it, but I also can watch high definition videos on this computer, and I’m pretty sure that my computer can reproduce quality that is much better than any commercially available Blu Ray player for homes. I’d like to say I can watch Studio quality videos on my computer, but I don’t really have any benchmarks to compare.

Still, for some reason, I have this fixation towards captured images instead of pictures in motion. And when I look at a picture, I imagine myself holding a Canon camera and eliminating all ambient distractions, and focusing on the target object, and trying to make the picture better.

Well, these are to do only with banks in India, and with a few foreign banks in India.

I have been into business almost all my independent life. My income doesn’t come in a single pay check from an employer, but it comes through various payments remitted into my accounts by clients. You know how businesses work. That has meant that i have several accounts with several banks for the several lines of businesses I am into.

On this post I wish to give a rough summary of my views of banks in India.

Private Banks:
Though backed by the Reserve Bank of India, almost all private banks in India charge a lot of fees for every service they provide. For example, if you make a cash deposit even in your home branch into your current account, they charge you a fee of Rs 50 plus service tax. Same goes for cash withdrawals from current accounts at the home branches of HDFC.

At ICICI bank, you can never pay cash at the counter. You have to put it in en envelope and fill in the denominations in it, and drop it in a drop box, and the bank will count the money later and credit it into your account by the evening of the same day or by the next morning. Until the money gets credited into the account, I have found myself worrying about it and nothing else. What if a guy puts a 100 rupee note into his pocket and claims that the denominations are wrong? How should I go to the bank and pay the Rs 100 and get the money credited into the account in time for my cheque to get passed? And if I go ahead and pay that Rs 100 without fighting, how would I know this won’t happen again and again?

Ing Vysya bank charges Rs 5 per cheque leaf for current account, and when you have just used 50 leaves on your current cheque book, they send you another Rs 100 and charge you Rs 500 and service tax, and when you use the 100th leaf of the old book, they would send you another 100, and charge you another Rs 500 for it, so when you use about 5 books with them, you would end up having about 10 unused books in your hand, and after spending Rs 5000 on cheque books, you start worrying about issuing another cheque. If this had happened just once I would have passed it off as some error, but this did happen 5 times for me, and I ended up having 10 books. Phone banking just said that they have taken a request and that I won’t be getting anoter cheque book until I make a request, but this never happened, and I had to stop working with them so that they won’t send me any more cheque books in the future.

Axis bank, owned by the major insurance companies of the country, is classified as private. They never clear the cheques that I want them to clear into my accounts in time. They take about 15 to 20 days to clear a local cheque. Maybe that was just a problem with the Pondicherry branch, but I stopped using them too. Their internet banking sucks for a private bank.

Government Owned Banks:
The staff of the State Bank of India are arrogant. They are too proud of themselves, and they expect us to consider everything that they do for us a favor, and not their duty to a client. Ask them questions, and they look away. Customer service sucks unless you are a multi crore business. But as of now, I do my banking with them. Unlike most other banks who have only 1 SWIFT code for all their banks, SBI has it for almost every branch, this makes credit of funds that come in almost instantaneous. This is perhaps the only reason I’m sticking to SBI, and they charge only Rs 25 as fee while private banks would charge like Rs 500 per credit.

Union Bank of India, Bank of India and Central Bank of India, the other government owned banks in the country are only good for government employees and shopkeepers who dont’ need extensive services like I do. And they are banks owned by the government, business comes to them, and they don’t have to go look for business and make attractive schemes.

I will be updating this post about Nationalized banks soon, have to get back to work now.

Most cars come with huge boots these days. But that is not being enough. For example, lets say you want to transport a bike to a remote area to do some mountain biking, and thi particular area is not where you would find shops that would sell bikes. Thats when your brain starts whirring and starts trying to come up with ideas. Then you think about getting a thule roof rack for your car, and though it would make your car look less prettier than it was before, and would cost a lot more than your bicycle, in te long run, it would end up carrying a lot more stuff in its life. Just make sure you don’t cross any low lying wires and keep the rubber side down.

Keywords don’t cost anything themselves. All keywords are the same as the others. But to get them to rank on a search engine, thats what makes it expensive. When I was into hosting, there was not much competition, but I quit when there was too much competition out there, and as I always do, I moved out to areas that would pay more for lesser stress. When I checked recently for the keywords that i used to use for hosting, the prices on advertising sites had sky rocketed. There is so much competition in there, and to list your ads, you need to have the highest bid of all others in the same market.

Another example is this. During the world war, Americans used a lot of asbestos in everything, and this mobilized a lot of labourers to handle it. But little was known then that asbestos dust would cause a lung disease called Mesothelioma, and when the government started offering grants for people suffering from this, it became a very expensive keyword, the most expensive out there if I am right.

Such people are said to be ‘reserved’. Guess who I am talking about now. You guessed right. So, I love to drive around, preferably alone, but I never feel safe to go beyond city limits. No I’m not afraid of ghosts, or masked bandits, but am afraid of potholes and breakdowns.

So to overcome this fear, lately I am unable to go for long drives alone, and am having to take someone to accompany me, and am having to listen to all the useless stuff the person says.

And all of a sudden, I got this idea of starting a roadside assistance club, if you face problems, you just call someone in te club and they will send you help. Brilliant isn’t it.