Personal Weblog of Deepak Vasudevan

Important Utility (TollFree) Numbers in India With the Hon'ble Telecommunication Minister of India, Sri Dayanidhi Maran, bringing revolutionary changes in the India Telecommunications fields, including the single STD code for the entire district, single STD tariff for the entire country from sometime January in 2006. Perhaps, we have also discussed sometime back about Number Portability in India which is also currently in research by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India). Somewhere in the hardcopy pamplet in Chennai, I got hold of a list of Utility Telephone Numbers to reach in case of emergencies and to avail services of service providers with a single telephone number all over India. I just thought instead of just keeping it as a small pamplet, I can share it with other readers for full use of the same. Please note that most of these numbers beginning with 1-600 would be restricted to BSNL or MTNL Network powered telephones only. Of late, I don't think other service p...

Weekly Triplicane Temple As part of my weekly Triplicane Temple, today I started and reached Triplicane sometime around 7 PM. Today, I started late so that we can enjoy the cool climate of Chennai, thanks to the monsoon and the intermittent rains that Chennai has been recieving. I was feeling bit tired and I remembered and got some vadas in a small restaurant. Kerala is very famous for these small restaurants and we call them as Thattukada . Kerala's Thattukada fame has even travelled overseas and you can check out this website http://www.thattukadadubai.com/  which illustrates the same. After worshipping the Lord, amidst the heavy crowd and some chakkara pongal , I came out and the book stall had photographs of Narasimha and I got two with four Narasimhas: Yadagiri Thirukotiyur Mattapalli Thiruvallikeni I think I can add these to my personal website Temple Network sometime next week and scheduling for release of v3.0 of the website in December 1st week. Thanks to the rai...

RBI comes with an iron hand on Private Banking Institutions... No further those private banking personnel or their touts can play mischief or pranks with you by providing you unsolicited credit cards, charging hidden tariffs and sending goondas to your residence. Check out these URLs for your quick reference: Posting in Consumer_Voice_India . Financial Express News Coverage . A brief extract of the points are mentioned here: Each bank sets up a Do-Not-Call Register. If the call center dials a number from these register, the bank would be held responsible. Any unsolicited credit card issued or activated means the bank is held liable with a penalty of twice the amount. Card holder's consent is mandatory before the credit limit on the card is enhanced. Customer has to be given enough breathing time to settle his dues before his credit history is marked as defaulter and released to other banking and financial institutions. Customer has to get at least 15 days of minimum paym...

Revisit of Monsoons... There is again a revisit of monsoon and the cyclonic depression to Tamil Nadu coast and Chennai, epicentered from near Pamban area. With the previous monsoon effects still ringing in through the city, this time, people were bit afraid and there were even widespread upheavals against the local civil administration authorities for not properly distributing the rehabilitation benefits initiated by the Government of Tamil Nadu. On Monday, while travelling to work, I had a chance to witness in direct, a road block near Velacherry and exactly at the road between Velacherry and Sri Balaji Dental College and Hospital, Pallikaranai (which is near Pallavaram - Thoraippakam Radial Road).  Actually this region has been given to the residents as a rehabilitation when they were evacutated from Mylapore, when MRTS was constructed. And hence this region is also colloqially called as Mylai Balaji nagar and predominantly occupied by LIG (Low Income Group) citizens. With thi...

Improved Traffic Management in Velacherry The legendary traffic snarl at Velacherry Checkpost, has finally met its sweet climax with the Chennai City Traffic Police meticulously planning out and installing automatic signals near Checkpost (Gurunanak College) to ease the heavy traffic snarls at Racecourse-Checkpost junction. We need to take this junction to extend our appreciation for the team effort undertaken by them. Now they need to concenterate and focus on the users who adhere to the road signals and be stern and strict on the offenders instead of letting them off the hook and scott free to damage the fine fabric and the hard work that has gone in through.

Newer Perspectives in India Telecom... Thanks to TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India), previous year, BSNL brought in its entire network of numbers beginning with 2 for uniformity. It was then Reliance was also asked to streamline its numbering system. This year, it is the turn of Airtel (Bharti Televentures) and Tata Teleservices to regulate thier numbering strategies. To recap in an easy format for the readers: BSNL/MTNL: 2<number> Reliance:93<number> Airtel:4<number> Only the first number is being changed. Perhaps a reader could update the number system that is being adopted for Tata Teleservices also as a comment for the benefit of other readers. Perhaps, if you check out http://www.trai.gov.in/ website, there are innovating research projects going on, even to bring Number Portabiliy in India. This is still in nascent stages and still a long way to go in India. But once this would be implemented, it would be promote a more healthy compe...

Use of Sacred Hymns in Public Sometime back there was an article in Sri Nrisimha Priya , which is published on behalf of Sri Ahobila Mutt , stating that some form of objection or law must be enacted by the statutory authorities to restrain uncontrolled playing of sacred hymns which are restrained to be used and chanted in camera and only in select times of the day. Perhaps, this article in HinduNet , I think explains this is more depth for the benefit of the readers. It has become like a blatant advertising to see the following sacred hymns being played from even a roadside tea shop: Gayatri Mantra,  Astaksharam etc. I think it would be the right time for the HR&CE (Hindu Religion and Charitable Endowments) Departments of the respective state governments in India and Government of India to check into this menace and bring spiritual discipline in the country. What are your comments? Do share it with other readers.

Mobile Jammers -- Utility Value for People Sometime late we were discussing about good Mobile Phone Etiquette right. Perhaps this The Hindu archive takes this one step ahead and gives a more complete narration on devices like Mobile Jammers . Check out MetroPlus . Perhaps would like to share some important points alone from this and other compiled sources: Whatz a Jammer? A small handheld device, almost even comes to the tune of a cellphone size, which emits low-level radio frequency signals, causing the mobile phones in the preset radius area to be inoperable. Best Candidates for Mobile Jammers Airports and High Security Zones Temples and Religious Places Hospitals Banks and Financial Institutions

Today, being the start of month of Karthikai and also signifies an importance for the starting of Ayyappa 40-day vratham. I was planning to get to a temple in my vicinity but due to time constraints, needed to travel to Nungambakkam and had the Mala sworn in from Mahalingapuram temple. The schedule and the itinary of our travel would be published soon. Stay Tuned!!!

The Holy Pathinettam Padi Among the most revered thing in Sabarimala pilgrimage is climbing by the Holy 18 Steps (called as Ponnu Pathinettam Padi ). As the devotees get up each step towards the Lord on the 18 steps, they get eternal joy pouring into them undescribed any language in the universe. All the pains taken travelling to the place through the 49 or 7 km trekking,  get forgetten as the climb the 18 steps. Till years ago, the pilgrims can also break cocunut on the steps. But after the steps were coated with the 5-metal cover ( Panchaloha ), this was banned and the cocunuts have to be broken down in a stone at the start of the steps. Breaking of the cocunut meaning sundering the barrier and blending with the Ultimate Lord. To this direction, a devotee in his 19th pilgrimage, carries a cocunut sapling and plants it near the temple premises. There are different legendary quotes for the 18 steps. One version is that they indicate the 18 mountains in the vicinity...

Financial Security -- Banks and Investments With number of private banks mushrooming in our cities and literally our GSM handsets flooded with solicitations to open relationship with a private financial institutions almost every second, it would be wiser to think a bit before investing. These guidelines best apply from within Chennai Metropolitan of India. Some of them apply to other countries as well and partially to other cities/towns of India. Perhaps if a reader wishes to share his experiences, publish the same as a comment for others to read and benefit. All financial institutions employ some form of Telemarketing executives. Their only job is to keep doing outbound calls and getting some leads for new account holders. It is wise to open a good savings account. But it would be more wiser to have an account in a good stable financial institution, rather than lamenting at a later stage, rather than being carried away by sweet, sweeter, sweetest words of the telemarketer. Of late, IC...

Mobile Phone -- When and When not to use... No doubt, handheld mobile phones are no longer fancy items to attract people. It has been an inevitable part of day-to-day life, thanks to the modern technology advancement for the most cheapest mobile phones being manufactured and lowest tariffs by competitive pricing among the various service providers. Nevertheless, it does not waive the good ethics to follow while using mobile phones. Just would like to present a brief summary of tips on good mobile phone use: Health is Wealth: Mobile phones does not operate with a magic wand. They use IR (Infra Red) Radiations, quantities of which cause wreckage of your health. Kick start your vehicle and stop your mobile number. Missing a call will not kill you. (-- Quoted from a advertisement from CCTP -- Chennai City Traffic Police) Avoid your handheld phone in sensitive places. You may like to check out a partial list as below: Hospitals: All hospitals have very sensitive equipments which ...

Saying a big 'NO' to SPAM in any format... The most disgusting material that comes into any emailsystem would be Internet Spam. The acuteness and disgust rate would differ for each spam some just saying 'Get Free Credit Card' to some providing an unwarranted or unethical solicitation. Nevertheless, this presents an enormous waste of Internet Bandwidth for all the servers involved in relaying and delivery of the messages. And it also involves a latent danger of viruses/worms lurking out of them, when an innocent user opens the email. I came across this nice tool called SpamPal -- a freeware downloadable from http://www.spampal.org/ . Configuration wise, it is quite easy to configure and your email client, communicates to this server rather than your email server. SpamPal opens a connection to the POP3 host, downloads the email, decides a rating on the scale of 1 to 10 and depending upon the severity of the rating, the message is branded with a a header 'Spam' ...

Birthday Resolutions... Today being the DOB-based birthday of mine, there was a good spurt of text messages and incoming calls to greet birthday greetings to me. And now with the command to have a blog item on a streamlined Birthday Resolution. But the actual crux of birthday resolution remains in the upholding it in the spirit of it. Starting about the wee hours of today, whilst the draft of the resolution has been prepared, it would take a while before having it published in my weblog. Perhaps here comes the utility of Todolist from CodeProject, to track the progress and streamlining it.

Life of a Software Engineer Just a humourous way of looking at a life of a software engineer, which was circulating in our Yahoo discussion group. The poems are in Tamil but.

Boating at Velacherry The incessant rains in Chennai have caused several parts of the city from being inundated with knee-deep and waist-deep water. With Met department further forecasting windspeeds to the tune of 45 mph and thunderstorms, it is setting shockwaves to people dwelling in low-lying areas. With all these, the suburban Velacherry, my friend was saying was giving a different picture altogether. People have chosen boat service too commute from residence to Vijayanagar terminus and back. Also, the traffic snarls at Velacherry checkpost to Guindy too seems to have heightened greatly. While it takes less than 35 minutes for a travel from Tambaram to Velacherry, journey from Velacherry to Tambaram takes an hour and a half, for a distance which is 45% less than the former. Rain is a blessing definitely, but with poor storm water drains and poor receptive mechanisms in Chennai, it seems to be a mixed blessing for the people.

Murugan Idli Shop > Serving Cockroaches? Sometime back we were discussing about the good features of Murugan Idli Shop and regarding the good features of it like serving nice good food on a plaintain leaf. All is well and also the hotel keeps expanding its network and they had also opened one more branch of them near Ranganathan Street, taking the full count to three within the realm of T.Nagar itself. So far so good. But the quality comes under serious question mark as today, one of my colleague observed a Periplaneta americana (cockroach) in the Cocunut chutney ( side dish ) which was being served. When this was taken to the attention of the store person incharge, he was quite indifferent to the incident as if they had already converted Murugan Idli Shop into a chinese type restaurant in Chennai serving cockroach, cobra and all other things. Just a word of caution to other readers -> Be wary of the food item that is being served in the job. As their network expands, their att...

Sabarimala Temple Opening and Closing Dates for 2005-06 For the benefit of the pilgrims to Sabarimala, I would like to share the temple opening and closing date for the year 2005-06. I got this from one sri Roy, referred from Yahoo discussion group. For further details and clarifications, you need to contact the nearest Ayyappa Temple to you. You can also check out ABASS (Akhil Bharatiya Ayyappa Seva Sangam) Website or sriayyappan@yahoogroups.com Yahoo discussion group.

Coping up with the Challenged Speech Abilities Of late, I wanted to discuss this item particularly for freshers just out of colleges and also for persons who are physiologically challenged with respect to fluent speaking, which may depict as stammering and or stuttering as different people call different way. I don't think this is an handicap in any way, unless you are planning to engage yourself as a Television Newsreader, Programme Anchor or a Lecturer in a college. Of course, with a disciplined approach to presentation, even these fields can be conquered without much ordeal. The foremost prerequisite would be building enough of confidence and ensuring from within that it would'nt be a handicap but a feature. Dams and reservoirs are not handicap to the river, rather they discipline thier flow! With (1) in place, do not try to suppress it. With more suppressing in place, the dam may breach causing widespread havoc. With a more planned approach, this can be taken care of. ...

Tips for Good and Sound Sleep Cellular phones need a bit of recharge of battery on a periodic basis, depending upon the standby time and talktime. Mechanical instruments need a bit of downtime for overhauling and maintanence. And so would be the regular night sleep for humans, which has been bestowed on us as a routine schedule by the Nature. Of course, with these days of working for the other hemisphere and in the age of BPO and KPO, people adopt day sleep compared to night sleep. Whatever, be it, the sleep we take need to ensure, is sound and recharges and rejuvenates us, to welcome us back into the next round of active work in full vigor. Somewhere around the web, I found some collection and that coupled with cross references to books in library, I would like present the following bulllet points targetted towards a good and sound sleep for healthy life. Relax before bedtime. Try to unload all the mental activities that are running before the system shuts down for the day. Compa...

Tiruvallikeni Trip Today As part of the usual weekly Tiruvallikeni Trip, today myself and Redhy started sometime around four o clock in the evening. The climate was cool and monsoon showers were there making it a pleasant journey. While normally I offer pranams to Sri Parthasarathy swamy from outside and enter only the sanctum sanctorums of Vedavalli Thayar and Sri Azhagiya Singer . Today while during the circumambulation, we observed that the queue was relatively empty and we entered there. Perhaps after a long long time of literal laziness, I entered and had a worship of the diety too. Interestingly in the afternoon myself and Redhy were visiting this website maintained by the Hindu Religion and Charitable Endowments (HR &CE) department of the Government of Tamilnadu at: http://tntemple.org:8080/temple/homepage.do?menuid=0046  and I was saying we had worship of the Lord at the desktop itself. Check out the website.

Temples on the Web While you are away from your home for work or other reasons, perhaps in a different country, would no longer mean that you don't enjoy the privileges of worshipping your favorite diety here. Thanks to the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department of the Government of TamilNadu  that all significant temples are available on the web. Furthermore, without just giving details, the website also offers personalizations with user registrations and there are links for ordering poojas from the selected temples as well. All these at the click of your mouse button. Check out their website at: http://www.tntemple.org/ and be sure that you have turned on your Audio systems, since almost all significant pages have sweet melodius music streaming on the webpages. Posted at 02:04 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan Original BlogDrive Post on Saturday, November 05, 2005

Alma Mater Just casually clicking on a couple of links and landed up in my College website http://www.vit.ac.in/ . Erstwhile, Vellore Engineering College and now it is prestigious deemed university, Vellore Institute of Technology. Fondly recalling my college days...

Birthday Month of November The month of November witnesses a large number of birthdays both in my friends network and also certain significant celebrities birthday. This blog post to greet them all a Wish you many many happy returns of the day. Aravinthan Narayanan -> 9th November http://aravinthan911.blogspot.com/ Vasudevan Deepak Kumar -> 10th November (This blogger) http://deepakvasudevan.blogspot.com/ Arulvendan Srinivasan -> 26th November Sumitha Satheesh Balakrishna Nair -> 29th November Besides this, 14th November earns the pride of celebrity birthday of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, which is celebrated worldwide as Children's Day . Turn on your speakers to listen to nice birthday song/melody. You may need to have a Fast DSL to listen to this MP3 Stream and have Windows Media Player 9 installed in your system. Music Link Disclaimer : The link is purely for personal listening pleasure. You may visit the parent page here: http://www.tamilbeat.com/tamilsongs/selections/...