Obtaining the connection itself was not so bad, once I had the right application form and had figured out  the documents they need (address proof, PAN number – it seems you will soon need a PAN number to be able to even breathe!) and the SIM was handed over across the counter after paying the activation fee in cash.

MTNL offers limited 3G coverage in Delhi and it at the moment covers only a large part the british built, government babu infested “New Delhi” – which of course offers not much joy to someone like me who works out of South Delhi and lives in Gurgaon. A few google searches let me not only get a list of coverage areas,  but I also found this  3G map of Delhi. Of course testing the 3G meant that I would need to be in one of this areas -  so I inserted the MTNL SIM in my Nokia E71 and drove to South Extension which seemed to be the closest point from office.

Here are my findings :

• My phone was able to switch automatically from GPRS / EDGE to 3G as soon as it found the 3G signal.
• Overall internet browsing experience on the handset was good with a noticebale  improvement in the time taken for images to load.
• A quick speed test at www.dslreports.com showed a speed of 170 kbps, as compared to the 60 – 80 kbps that I get over GPRS.
• Browsed a few more sites, and immediately noticed that the phone seemed much warmer in the hand than usual. The phone battery was definitely heating up.
• Did a skype to skype voice call (using Fring on my mobile). Though there was still a perceptible lag, I was still able to make a reasonable conversation.
• Radio streams from last.fm using Mobbler played without a hiccup.
• Connected the handset to my laptop and speed tests showed 250 kbps download and 150 kbps upload speeds.

I haven’t been able to try MTNLs mobile TV – the settings didn’t work and MTNLs customer care has not been of much help so far. Also I am keen to try out the video call over 3G but I guess I will need to find another 3G customer willing to experiment.

Overall, while the “jadoo” works, limited coverage area is a big limitation. Also, the tariff needs to be rationalized. For someone like me, used to Airtel’s unlimited data GPRS plan,  the Rs. 5.00 per MB  tariff may not work.

I discovered that the Sportstracker software allows the export of the information related to speed, distance, time etc in various formats; one of them being Google Earth. While I was able to upload this file to My Google Maps, a quick web search revealed a host of plugin that allow the exported KML files to be displayed as a customized google map within a WordPress post. I have downloaded and activated a plugin called XML Google Maps to show my morning walk track on a map of my neighbourhood below:

Map A

Here is another KML file showing the route that I took from home to work, again captured using Nokia Sportstracker, except that I did not walk or run but sat comfortably in the car:

Map B

Yet another exciting use for my E71 !

Check out the maps above in the “Earth” view. You will need a Google Earth plugin for the browser. Works currently only with IE6, IE7 and Firefox, but the 3D view rocks.

Chicken and Bear (?) ...at a Bar in Amritsar

More pics of Amritsar visit on my Picasa web album

I did a quick trip to Amritsar with my family last weekend.

Of all the places, why Amritsar? I have been asked this question many times since by friends. Well, the only reasons I had was that I had wanted to visit the Golden Temple and also to taste Amritsar’s famous street food for a long while. Also, given the distance from Delhi and the rail connection, Amritsar seemed like a perfect quick 2 day getaway.

So, we boarded the Shatabdi Express from Delhi early morning on Saturday. I for one was hoping to get some sleep on the 6 hour journey, as I did not sleep well the previous night. But a bunch a noisy college kids in the row ahead of us made sure that I could not sleep a wink. The train reached half an hour late and thanks to Hotel Shiraz Regency goofing up on our bookings; it was almost 3 pm by the time we were settled in our room – tired and famished. My plans of hitting the streets and checking out the dhabha food had to be put on hold as none of us had the energy to venture out. We ordered room service instead and the food, though nothing extraordinary, was extremely satisfying.

A Taste of Patriotism

We had heard a lot about the “retreat” ceremony at the Atari-Wagah border, some 28 kms from Amritsar, the only road border crossing between India and Pakistan. The hotel reception advised us to leave by 4 pm to get some good seats for the ceremony that starts at 5:30 pm. While we did take the hotel’s advice, we had not factored in the weekend crowd and just about managed to squeeze into a crowded stand which only had a partial view of the gates. The mood was soon set by large group of school girls dancing to some bollywood style patriotic songs. It was a great setting – the evening sunset, a few Indian flags in the crowd, smartly turned out BSF jawans and a lot of patriotic slogans, song and dance – soon had me feeling proud as an Indian as never before. Keen to take some shots with my new camera, I pushed through the crowd and managed to reach as close I could to the balcony railing. I could see the other side of the border – the Pakistani Rangers in their black salwar kameez and also the audience on the other side of the border. The ceremony started with some smart drill and marching by the BSF, the jawans kicking their heels incredibly high and putting on a show of mock face-off with the Pak rangers, much to the delight of the crowd. After the first few minutes though, I found the entire ceremony to be repetitive and farfetched. Or maybe I had had enough of the hot humid weather and the milling crowd and I just wanted to get back to the air conditioned comfort of the cab. But there was no way out from the jam packed stands and I had no option but to wait for the ceremony to finish. As I walked back to the parking after the ceremony I could not help wondering about what the soldiers would do once the crowds had melted away. Would some of them casually saunter off across the border and share a drink with their counterparts? Or, what if the border had actually been drawn a few more miles north. Wouldn’t some of the soldiers guarding the frontier, be probably guarding it from the other side? What choice does an individual have in choosing his Nationality?

These thoughts soon vanished as we headed back to Amritsar, having picked up a chilled bottle of Coke and a hot “bhutta” on the way back to the cab.

Jalianwala Bagh

The cab promised to drop us at the Golden Temple on the way back from the border. But it dropped us at a point which seemed like a long walk to the Golden Temple, as no 4 wheeler traffic was apparently allowed further. As we walked slowly through the crowded bazaar full of food stalls and shops selling punjabi juttis and clothes, I spotted a building which looked like a gurudwara or a government office from the outside. However, on reaching closer I read a board which proclaimed that this was the Jalianwala Bagh. I was surprised as I had imagined the Jalianwala bagh to be a large maidan or park of some sorts. But passing through the narrow alley, the only entrance to the grounds and the exact place from where General Dyer marshalled his troops to fire upon a group of peaceful protesters, I understood the significance of this place. The place is illuminated at night, has a memorial for the martyrs and prominent signages and placards which give you a taste of the history. I slowly walked out from the Jalianwala bagh filled with a sense of reverence to the hundreds who had laid down their lives here.

The Golden Temple

The Golden Temple proved to be all that I had heard about and more. Large, bustling with activity, crowded yet everything had a sense of peace and calm. The shabad kirtan had a soothing effect and after pausing to take in the beauty of the Harmandir Sahib, we soon joined to queue to enter the inner sanctorum. I am always amazed with the cleanliness and discipline exhibited at Sikh gurudwaras. The marble flooring was spotlessly clean and irrespective of the size of the crowd nobody pushes or tries to get ahead – quite unlike some of the temples that I have visited. I was quite impressed with the intricate carvings and detail on the walls and with the fact that everybody tries to do some seva or selfless service. We had initially planned to stay on to taste the famous langar but the humid weather and the crowd made us decide to give it a try at another time.

The quest for street food

Once outside, we were determined to sample the best of street food that Amritsar had to offer. Exhausted after a long and eventful day, I decided to seek expert advice and called Gunjan Goela – my sister in law and a renowned expert on north Indian cuisine. We took her advice and hopped on to a cycle rickshaw heading for Kesar Ka Dhabha. After going past the equally famous, also recommended and better located Prahwan da Dhabha, the rickshaw puller dived into what seemed like endless lanes and bylanes, before finally arriving at a nondescript dhaba. I checked twice to ensure that this really was the place. The place itself was overflowing with loud punjabi families and while we were promised a table within 15 minutes, it seemed unlikely looking at the number of people waiting. I spotted a small mithai shop next door and we ordered a plate of phirni and rasmalai. Both were simply outstanding and it did appear that nothing in the shop – from the furniture to the method of serving had changed in the past hundred or so years.

The heat and exhaustion once again got the better of us and we decided against waiting at the dhabha and instead headed for the air-conditioned comfort of Crystal restaurant which was next door to our hotel. Street food would have to wait for another day.

The next morning I was woken up by a call from Yogesh, announcing that they had left Jalandhar and would join us at Amritsar within the next hour. We got dressed and soon after Yogesh and family arrived, we set out for our first experience of the much acclaimed Amritsari street food.

Our first stop was Kanha’s at Lawrence Road known for its puri-cholle and lassi. The food was simply great and reminded me of the punjabi puri-cholle I used to have in Karol Bagh as a kid. Renu decided to stock up on the famous amrisari sweets and shopped for some pinni and besan ka ladoo after taking advice and recommendations from the locals who were eating there. On the way to Kanha’s, we had spotted a shop called “Ram Lubhaya’s Old and Famous Aam Papar shop” and we simply had to stop there. Ram Lubhaya proved to be a suave salesman and before we knew we had ran up a bill of more than 500 rupees on various varieties of aam papar.

Our next stop was again the Golden Temple. The place was packed to capacity with the Sunday crowd. We decided to do a quick parikrama of the sarovar and after posing for a few photographs, decided to check out the famous amritsari kulcha at a shop on Maqbool Road. The shop is simply called “All India Fame” and the kulchas were out of the world – thin and crisp and unlike anything I had ever tasted before.

Yogesh mentioned a famous chuski wala but I protested vehemently saying that the ice that they use is suspect and as we always stick to bottled water while travelling, tasting a chuski was a bad idea. But before I could stop protesting, Yogesh drove to a cart selling chuskis of various flavours. As the rest in the car started enjoying the kala khatta chuski, I could not help myself and had to taste it, and I am glad that I did. I liked it so much that I refused to give it back, making the others order more stuff including Nimbu Lemon Gola – a kind of chilled lemonade with ice. Simply great stuff!

As it was already late afternoon, and nobody could even think of eating another morsel, we headed back to our hotel to pack and prepare to leave for the station to catch our train back to Delhi.

All told, I really enjoyed my trip to Amritsar. A few tips and advice – I think Amritsar is best visited in the winters and having your own car is highly recommended. Also, if you really must sample the non vegetarian food that Amritsar has to offer then make sure you do not plan a visit during the navratras as most non-veg food stallas and dhabha are shut during this time.

One last thought – I wonder why most of our non-metro cities look like such a mess. Chaotic traffic, crumbling infrastructure and an evident lack of sanitation. While the authorities obviously don’t care, it seems most of us have also started to quietly accept this sorry state of things.

Will things ever change for the better – or are they set to go from bad to worse?

Canon 450D

After a lot of deliberation, I have bought the Canon 450D (aka Rebel XSi) – my first Digital SLR.

I had almost bought the entry level lower priced new SLR – the Canon 1000D but thanks to the 0% EMI option, I decided to buy the 450D instead. After all one doesn’t buy a D-SLR everyday.

While I haven’t had time to do a field test, I am quite impressed with its 3 inch LCD display and overall handling. I also found the menu and controls to be quite intuitive and I could figure out most of the standard functions without having to open the instructions manual.  A couple of test shots fired indoors, at night with standard room lighting proved to be exciting and I could see that the camera does a great job of determining both the exposure and ISO settings. Manually setting the ISO to 800 or 1600 yielded great results with acceptable “noise”, quite unlike my earlier Canon Powershot A620 which gives perceptible noise even at ISO 400. What I am already begining to miss however is the swivel LCD screen on the Powershot which is just so cool to take shots at some crazy angles.

The Canon 450D also offers a “live-view” mode which allows one to shoot while viewing the image on the LCD display without having to look through the view finder – quite like the digital compact cameras. While this took some figuring out, all shots taken by me so far in the live view mode have resulted in  camera shake, but I think this has nothing to do with the camera, I just need to get better at doing this. I had initally thought the “live view” will be a great feature to have, but given the weight and grip of a SLR, I find it more convenient to shoot while looking through the viewfinder.

The camera came with a standard 18-55 mm kit lens. While the lens itself is fine, I have already started enquiring about availability and prices of various telephoto lens options. I can see myself spending more money in the near future as my wish list already includes an external flash light, a couple of lenses and maybe a wireless remote.

All told, I am pretty excited with this new toy and I just can’t wait to go out and unleash the photographer in me. Watch this space for pics with my new camera!

1. No “Send Page / Send Link by email”. In other words – no email integration

2. While I still need to investigate this further, I think a page accessed via chrome on Windows Vista shows up as having been accessed by Safari 525.13 / Mac OS X

Weird, isn’t it? Maybe Google is too busy getting Android to rollout. Chrome can wait!

It has now been more than an hour since I have been using Chrome, and here are my first cut comments:

First, the positives:

Google’s no-clutter, minimalist interface is apparent. The tabs are above the address bar, which takes some getting used to but does seem like a great idea. No menus on top, no bottom status bar and just a Page and  Settings icon to manage stuff – overall quite intutive

Not only did it import my IE bookmarks without a problem, but also my browsing history, which was neat. Typing in the address bar has a refreshingly different feel. The text size is large, browser history is listed with  not only the full URL (like IE) but also the website name, and the same bar also lets you search your default search engine (in this case Google). 

Opening a new tab is where some cool Chrome innovations appear. The thumbnail view of most visited pages is great, so is the ability to see your bookmarks arranged by date and the ability to search browser history. The “bookmarks bar” is a new thing which lets you drag or add the more frequently used bookmarks for quick access.

Overall, web pages do seem to load faster. I think Google’s use of multi-process and webkit has made a difference. The “Task Manager” and “stats for Nerds” lets you take a peek under the hood – which is a definite first among browsers.

Now, some negatives:

It doesn’t seem to handle RSS feeds at all. No built in reader apparently and not even a neatly formatted IE style view. 

I have only visited a handfull of pages so far, and while there have been no apparent formatting or page layout issues, I did stumbled across issues with javascript based date calenders and javascript menus either not working at all, or rendering in a different font size. This may pose a serious problem as this can cause the browser to be unusable for some web sites or pages.

On some pages, tables appear with distinct borders which are otherwise not visible in IE. I also noticed text size and font changes on form list boxes.

The biggest issue so far – my WordPress spell checker did not work and came up with a javascript kind error message box. I will investigate this in detail, but if you do find typos in this post, you know whom to blame!

It is interesting to note all this buzz and activity around browser software – Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome. The next few weeks will be exciting. I will be keenly watching the browser war unfold – as it undoubtedly will.

Not to be left behind, Airtel soon sent out an SMS to proudly announce that the 3G iPhone will arrive in India at midnight of August 22, 2008. While the prices are the same as the ones announced by Vodafone, Airtel has extended an invitation  to attend a “midnight launch” at the Sahara Mall in Gurgaon.

I wonder what will actually drive people to turn up for the midnight launch…or to eventually buy the phone. Will it be price (at these prices, one must have some serious spare cash), features and functionality (just read some of the reviews and glitches that folks are talking about on the net)….or will it be just a style statement (I really have no comments to that !!)

I was using a Nokia E62 earlier, and the new phone gives me everything that was lacking in the E62. To being with, the form factor and the styling is a huge improvement. It is a much sleeker and better designed phone. The E62 felt as if one was holding a brick. Though the full qwerty keyboard is a bit cramped, the new design of the keys have an intuitive feel and make typing a breeze. Gone also is the sluggishness of the old E62.

The applications that I really dig on the phone are:

• Email – with great support for IMAP-IDLE for an almost Blackberry like push email experience. Support for multiple email accounts, although I haven’t discovered a way yet of download mail for all POP accounts with a single key press.
• Web browser and RSS reader – great experience now that I have a power of a WLAN enabled phone, I often don’t have to switch on my laptop at home.
• Voipbuster – I have set this up as my default VOIP service and am making full use of 120 day free calling feature. Beats the default application – Gizmo anyday.
• WorldMate – Great world clock, weather and currency convertor
• GPS– I have been experimenting with GPS for work and this is just great for capturing Latitude-Longitude coordinates.
• Nokia Maps – Used the voice navigation features ( I believe it is free for the first three months). Great novelty to show off to family and friends but with mixed results. I have seen the navigation feature get terribly confused with narrow parallel lanes and with the traffic diversions that Delhi Metro has created. Also, it can’t find a road to the new Hyderabad airport (Technically, the new airport is not in Hyderabad but in Shamshabad, maybe that’s why) – But overall a great app and I was surprised at the level of overall accuracy of Delhi maps.
• Google Maps
• Sportstracker – Great for tracking your walks / jogs. I actually went for a morning walk thanks to this app, though only once
• Fring – Great for Skype calls using the WLAN and for chat using the Airtel GPRS connection.

I haven’t tested the camera at all. As a serious amateur photographer, I do look down upon mobile phone camera’s, but it does have some nifty features like white balance control, flash modes, different scene modes including portrait, night and night portrait.

The only down side seems to be small screen size, but then life is all about compromises. Another minor peeve is that the screen and the back cover seem to attract fingerprints and I seem to be cleaning the phone first every time I pick it up. But, all in all, I think the Nokia E71 does offer great value for money.

The vanity domain – sharatjain.com, unavailable till some time ago, was available and I grabbed it. The rest was simple, thanks to the quick domain setup by Kishore Bhargava and an even quicker Word Press setup by Shekhar Govindarajan.

So here goes…watch this space for raves, rants and generally for few pieces of my mind on various subjects.

Cheers!