Manas Garg Speaks

Presenting Vimal Kumar - the man who has made searching for trains so much easier for everyone with his brilliant website eRail.in. I contacted him through email and he was kind enough to let me ask him a few questions. Here we go!

Hi Vimal! I know you as the creator of eRail.in. Please tell me more about yourself. 
I have done my MCA and live in New Delhi. I currently have 9+ years of experience in software industry
 
eRail.in has become very popular now, given its ease of use. What inspired  you to start this amazing site?
One day I was booking a rail ticket, and found that it is very difficult even for a technical guy like me to find the right information and so it would be far more difficult for other people to do the same! That was the time when I thought of making a site which would be useful to people. Also, I was always a fan of trains and always loved to read time tables :) But again it was difficult to find the trains in a time table. I knew a lot more could be done through nice software and that is when eRail.in was born. I have put in all my years of experience in the eRail.in website , it has been built with a passion. The idea was to make it as user friendly as possible.
 
We see that the Indian Railways site is so cluttered with advertisements and pops, and your site runs only a few text ads. Any comments? 
I do not find any reason for the railways to give ads on their site. They have such huge budgets at their disposal - they should not irritate their users. Earlier there were image ads on eRail but some users found them distracting so I discontinued them and have only text ads. I believe that all users who come to the site should get value for the time they spend there.
 
You must get a lot of thank you mails for starting this site. How does it feel? Any feedback that you have incorporated into your site?
Yes I get regular mails. People tell me that they save a lot of time by using eRail.in. It does feel great. There have been regular feedback and I have been incorporating it all. I would like to thank all users of eRail.in who have provided their regular feedback.
 
Many students dream of starting their own online portals. What is your advice to them?
If one wants to create a portal, they should first identify the NEED and should have passion to fulfill that need. India is a big market and anything which relates to the masses will always work. So if you find any idea just go for it. It is the right time. To see whether you are correct or not – just experiment. There is no one who can tell you if it is wrong or right. Follow your instinct and do it. At least you will have the satisfaction that you did what you wanted to do. You have one life and you have to do it in this one only!
 
What is the next project after erail.in? 
I plan to make eRail.in multilingual and another travel related website will be coming up which would help travelers even more!
 
What do you like to do in your spare time? 
Usually I do not get spare time, If I get some I like to think about how to improve my work :)

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Wow! This is great inspiration for all of us who want to start our own websites! Vimal says that there is one life and we should just go for it - so true! Thanks Vimal, thanks a lot for taking out the time and sharing your thoughts with us. We wish you all success!

It is unlikely that you have not visited eRail.in, but if you really haven’t, then you should definitely take a look. I’m sure you’ll go back to it again! 

What do you think of when you think about an auto-rickshaw driver? Tampered meters, wicked ways and bad sense of driving? Let me share one trip with you. I had to take an auto from Hyderabad airport to office - a long distance. I asked an auto wallah, and he quoted me the expected 250. That is their standard rate to go anywhere from the airport! I moved ahead, murmuring something to myself and looking for a better deal. I asked another one, and to my surprise this one said “I’ll go by the meter”.

Now, first of all, no auto driver in Hyderabad offers to take you by the meter. And if he does, it means his meter is especially tweaked to facilitate one way transfer of funds. I told him “Your meter must be rigged” He said “No Sir! This is an electronic meter - cannot be rigged”. I knew better - “Ha! Who are you kidding! I’m an engineer - I know that these can be rigged too” and went on to describe him how it could be rigged. I’ll spare you of the details of how to do it.

However, seeing no other better option, I hopped in.

Now, there is a simple way to determine if the auto meter is rigged or not. When the auto is running on a clean stretch of road at constant speed, if you observe the meter advancing, it should ideally advance after regular intervals of time. A rigged meter, on the other hand, doesn’t - sometimes it is normal and sometimes it is faster. I wanted to find out and so I tried observing as hard as I could.

Turned out that the meter was not rigged after all. Reached office and the meter showed Rs 114.60, which is the lowest I’ve ever paid. After paying him, I asked him -”So.. your meter is actually not rigged?” and he was like “Yes Sir - there is talk that the new meters get burnt out if you rig them - and moreover, its more satisfying to earn an honest living and  to drop off your passengers smiling!”

Wow, if only all auto-wallahs were like you my friend.. 

So many of us looking to make a quick buck by starting websites :) See this.

Thanks Murali for sharing the link :)

I feel at home at only two places in the world - one is Ghaziabad, where I have spent my formative years of my life and one in the campus of NIT Trichy - my alma mater. I don’t feel at home in Hyderabad where I stay currently or in Ahmedabad, where my parents stay.

I was in the bus from my campus to the railway station - and I was very uneasy. And suddenly, before I could do anything about it, hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I don’t want to go back. I’m sitting in the waiting room at the railway station typing this, and how I wish I could stay just one more day.

Its my friends - Hari, Preeti, Suren, Lavanya, Isli, Maruti… - I love you guys so much! It is so much fun hanging out with you guys, and I look forward to this happen again. You guys mean the world to me!

Oh NIT Trichy - you’re a piece of my heart. A thousand salutes to you!

A thousand splendid Suns is the second book by Khaled Hosseini, the amazing author of The Kite Runner.

I read this book recently, and can’t help but write about it. The style of writing is again, amazingly descriptive. You can actually see the streets of Kabul, the house where Laila lives, the time when the rocket explodes… Hosseini makes his characters so real that by the time you reach the middle of the book, you actually have a face associated with them in mind. This resembles the way Arudhanti Roy wrote in The God of Small Things, or like the great Hindi poetess Mahadevi Verma used to describe her characters in her short stories.

As his first book is about the war Afghanistan fights, this book’s plot, though affected by the war, is more about the lives of two women. Laila and Mariam. How they come close, how their lives get intwined and how they fight their common foe.

Khaled Hosseini’s writing has this novel, terrible but splendid trait - he spends a hundred pages building up a character. He gives them a name, a face, a life, a dream and hope. Then suddenly, he destroys them. Utterly and completely. You need to be steel not to cry out aloud.

The central theme that connects both the books is friendship, trust and loyality. A very satisfying read. I picked it up just before bed time, and slept only after I finished it. You’d do the same.

Here is a list of things that change as you move out of college (a residential campus) to a full fledged job :

1. Money : Suddenly your financial condition changes. Your previous total monthly expenditure becomes you typical weekend expenditure. You can buy many things you want to without thinking too much. You get a credit card. You realize that you are not making enough money.

2. Phone : Your phone changes from a 1100 to N series. The prepaid connection is the thing of the past, and you get a post-paid corporate connection.

3. Phone Bills : Don’t ask.

4. Room : Finally a bathroom all for yourself! (Yes!). Though not very furnished initially, there are NO course books to be seen, the flooring is marble, and the walls don’t speak the history for who all have lived in the room for the last 17 years. Oh yes! There are cupboards where you can actually hang clothes AND lock them too!

5. Transport : From a Hercules Thriller, you upgrade to a Bajaj Pulsar. Or  the company cab, as the case may be.

6. Washing : No more washing clothes yourself! You get a washing machine. You actually wear clean clothes everyday.

7. Trips to home : Become exceedingly rare. Once in 6 months is the average.

8. Holidays : Become the most precious thing. People would give blood to get a holiday. You get about 12 every year excluding weekends. Add 20 Casual leaves to that. Thats it. No more.

9. Travel : No more Sleeper class, Air Deccan and Indigo become your best friends. Even when you want to travel by train and save some money, you cant coz you cant afford to take that extra day off. 

10. Bunks : If your office has swiping system, forget it. If it doesn’t, you feel so guilty if you bunk that you don’t.

11. Cleaning : A ‘bai’ comes to clean up your room and kitchen. But! She won’t clean the bathrooms! So the bathrooms and toilets (that you’re supposed to clean yourself now) resemble the hostel bathrooms.

12. Food : One pain in the ass! Breakfast and lunch @ office usually. Dinner outside. You get bored with outside food (and hate to pay so much for food, everyday!). Weekends are terrible, when you’re left to scavenge for your own 3 meals. You miss the comfort of the mess at times.

13. Treatment : For a change, people treat you nicely. The guards and support staff instead of telling you to ‘Poda’ call you ‘Sir’. Sweet sounding females call you everyday and offer you miscellaneous financial accessories ranging from credit cards, personal loans to health insurance. You tell them that you’re not interested and bang the phone. In their disappointed faces.

14. Internet : You download a 1 GB movie in an hour in office. You use office laptop to watch movies at home. You get Airtel broadband and a netgear wifi router at home.

15. Tax : You start worrying about tax. As March comes closer, you get well aquanted with the provisions of section 80c, 80cc and 80ccc of the Indian constitution. You buy insurance policies and pray to God to call you soon so that at least you won’t have to pay tax.

16. Immunity : Your immunity goes down suddenly. A glass of water outside, if  not branded Kinley or Aquafina, gives you throat infection. So does any chicken curry priced below Rs 135.

I’m sure I’ve missed many, help me increase this list :)

Just as a great poet is known by the poems he writes, a great institue if known by the students that come out of it.

NIT Trichy is blessed to have some of the most enthusiastic and energetic young minds, who are not scared to do difficult things. RECTians and NITTians are to be found in every great company around the globe. Still, NIT Trichy does not have the brand recall that IITs have.

Why?

We have been unsuccessful to keep our alumni interested. We have not been able to keep them attached to NITT. RECAL, the official alumni association is a red tape association, sending out emails only when they require donations for yet another project. This is not the way you involve alumni. Alumni are a way to get more money for the institute agreed, but the real power of alumni is in the knowledge and experience they have gained outside of NIT Trichy. They would love to share this knowledge, experience, tips and tricks with the students still studying.

The best way to involve alumni would be to have to common platform where they and the current students can interact. NITTians.com is a big step towards this goal. As of now a blog aggregator, NITTians.com picks up blog posts written by fellow NITTians from around the globe and puts them together at a common place. What an amazing way to make one feel attached to NITT! I congratulate students who have taken this initiative, spent their own money, and put up this website.

The next step would be to involve alumni in mentoring programs, forums, sending out newsletters from the campus, arranging visits for alumni and for students to alumni’s organizations, and so on. I’m so excited. This is an opportunity to change the face of our institute as the world knows it.

Come, join NITTians.com and offer whatever support you can. Its all yours.

I’m going to share a few of my childhood memories. Some of them pleasant, some of them unpleasant. I’ve hardly shared some of them with anyone else - because I’ve been so embarrassed about them. But here I am making them public.

Here goes the first one - and I think the one which affected me the most.

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 This happened (or started rather) when I was in III standard.  I was pretty bright and other kids and teachers held me in good regard. There was this guy in my class, named Musharib. A typical naughty and trouble making fellow. Fine with me. However, our class-teacher was quite concerned about him (Her name was Tanvi S Khan, if I remember correctly) and as you’d expect, changed his seat in class and made him sit next to me - hoping that he’d pick up a good quality or two from me. Fine with me.

This guy, happened to have a friend in class - her name was Diana, and both were good friends. Like kids in III standard are. Then I made that mistake.

One fine morning, I still vividly remember - it was the first period, Musharib had a chalk piece, and told me that he wanted to write ‘Musharib and Diana are friends’ on the desk. Of course, he said that to me in Hindi, as kids generally did not have great command over English. And that is why he wanted my help to write that in English.

Too mature for my age, my brain came up with a mischief - instead of writing ‘Diana and Musharib are friends’, I wrote ‘Diana weds Musharib’. I don’t know why.

Kids around asked me what it meant. So I told them. I just remember Musharib going ‘Hawwww’ and erasing what was written on the desk. And so began the most painful time of my childhood life.

Musharib was smart. Smarter then I could have imagined him to be. He did not go and complain to the teacher immediately, however, he asked me if he should go and complain. I could not believe it - he was blackmailing me!

He did tell the maths teacher and I was punished - made to stand in front of the class with my hands held straight up. However, I was scared that my parents would be very disappointed to know what a hideous crime their only child had committed.

Meanwhile, Musharib kept me in constant fear of telling my parents - I don’t remember him making me do or get anything for him, but he kept me in constant fear - that he would go ahead tell my parents.

Little did I know that the ‘crime’ I had committed was not really a crime - and that maybe my parents would just have laughed it off  - for me, it was the worst kind of crime that I had committed, and was too scared to even imagine what would my parents do if they found out.

Musharib scared me for a few months, and then the thing was old. But I had still not told my parents, and whenever Musharib asked me - “Manas, should I…”, my heart would skip a beat.

It ended when my dad got transferred and we moved to a new city. I was so relieved. I still havent told my parents.. It doesn’t matter now.

However, the thing to notice is, that a child’s mind is so innocent, that he can easily be scared, and even when my parents were the most understanding parents in the world, the fear of disappointing them made me hide something, which did not really mean anything.

I wish Musharib had gone ahead and told my parents on the first day itself - at least I would not have spent those months in constant fear.

I have hated him ever since - but now I realize - even if he was enjoying having the brightest kid in the class in constant fear, the real fault was mine - I wanted to hide my mistake. Since then, I make it a point to accept my faults out in the open - it makes you feel very light.

If you’re reading this, I’m sorry Musharib, for what I did. (Diana did not speak with him for a long long time after what I had said about the two).

Peace. 

The boyzone song Words starts like this:

“Smile, an everlasting smile,
a smile can bring you near to me…”

How do you break ice?

There are so many times in our adult lives when we are in a group where no one knows anyone, and you can feel discomfort standing in the air like mild fog. Few people are masters of this situation - they can find friends just anywhere. There always are a few universal topics - however clichéd, they seem to work - Weather, politics, Sachin’s performance in the recent one dayer,  the stock market boom, the USA - its a reasonably long list. A wedding dinner or a journey in the train is a great example where you can observe this happening.

Still more difficult is to break ice with people whom you don’t know at all, and in a formal setup. I found myself in this situation a few days back. I was at this formal buffet, with all places at the table already taken; except the one opposite to where I was sitting. A man, with a plate in hand, stood close by contemplating whether he should take it or not. I knew I was supposed to ask him to sit - by etiquette. I did not know how to address him - ‘Sir’ - nay, he wasn’t that old, ‘Hey’ - nay, he wasn’t that young, then what?

I did this - I just smiled. And he smiled back - instinctively. And without a word being uttered, the ice had already broken.

This is a poem by Emily Dickinson. It was in my course book in class XI / XII and left a mark on me: 

“Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!”

Dickinson tells us that it is not the winner who knows what success is, but it is the one who has failed and has been defeated who really understands how sweet success is. It is only when we fail that we think about how great it would have been to get admission to that college or to get that job. When we succeed, it is hard to actually value your accomplishment.

 I’ve had my fair share of being on both sides of the line. And I’m happy about it. It would be much less fun to always be on one side of this game.