Twenty- five Seven

Personally speaking

Recent Posts

  • Why do countries need to issue visas ?

    The other day I had to apply for a Pakistani visa, a task which took me all of three hours and left me with a distinct soreness that prevented me from doing Yoga all of last week . The whole application was a veritable thesis which ran into several pages with the required number of copies.

    All visa application forms are like attempting lie detector tests with the strange questions you have to answer to prove the genuineness of your intent to visit for peaceful purposes. I mean this is outright ridiculous . Did Kasab and gang apply for Indian Visas? Not at all. Yet these men managed to make an entry into Mumbai harbour , enter the poshest hotels in town and do exactly as they pleased. In fact every terrorist manages to get into whichever country he wants without the slightest hitch.

    I would have thought that countries are dying to have people like me visit them : the ones who actually stimulate their moribund economies by consuming vast quantities of food if not other consumables. We are the people who want to visit every nook and cranny, who actually support the local  arts and crafts by buying kitschy knick knacks for either ourselves or friends and relatives back home.  If it weren’t for people like me, there wouldn’t be any Hop On Hop Off Buses on the road. Nor for that matter would there be tour guides and touts not to mention the hospitality industry run by small entrepreneurs with their cute B&Bs. 
    So why do countries need to issue visas ?  The people who are out to create havoc in the world are definitely not going to announce their intentions to do so. Nor is any criminal going to answer questions relating to his imprisonment, crime etc.  So why do ordinary tourists have to answer such questions?  As for personal information, what difference does it make what my mother’ name is and what her profession is? 
    And why can’t the process be more streamlined ? Each country asks for photos of different sizes, some countries require the applicant to produce IT returns as proof of solvency or a bank certificate verifying a minimum balance that runs into hundreds of thousands…..
    Granted we do need permission to enter countries but surely the process of applying for a visa can be less painful. 

  • Looking for technical support

    Online support

    One of the most frustrating things is to find technical support on the net. This is simply because everyone who is a techie thinks that others speak the same language . For instance I have installed Zemanta on my blog and expect to get the links for related content below the media gallery. Try as I might, this is not happening and so my posts remain orphans without any links to the outside world.

    I have also been searching for better blogging templates since I’ve been told that my template is old fashioned and unresponsive to search engines etc etc and that if I need to boost up traffic to my blog I should go in for a better template. Now this sounds easy enough but quite hard to implement because how do I identify the best template for my blog? Should it have one column or two? What is a slider? And the more templates I look at, the harder it gets for me to decide which one I should use especially when the details are all in technicalese.

    Offline support

    But it is equally difficult getting technical support over the phone. This morning I wanted to hook up my LAN cable to another computer so I called in the 24×7 helpline of my service provider. I got the customary recorded message asking me to punch in the relevant numbers which I assiduously did till I realised that the punched number did not register on my landline. So I switched to my mobile phone which has a tenuous connection made even more difficult with the back ground noise of my whirring ceiling fan and rumbling washing machine which though supposedly silent, gets noisier with age. After finally getting through all the layers of  numbers I had to punch in, I managed to talk to a human and luckily at least he spoke the same spoken language ( i.e English ). Then he took me through the drill of how to make the connection and said Press Windows and R together and then type in  abcd.xyz and proceeded to enunciate the letters phonetically saying “c” as in Kalyan. Sensing my obvious disbelief at Kalyan beginning with a c, he began to stammer and stutter till eventually I took over the phonics and said things like a as in apple, b as in bed, c as in candy and d as in dead.

    AAAAAAAAAAAH ! Some one please help. All I’m looking for is some simple advice in language I can understand.

    Should I just go down to the bookshop and buy a Blogging for Dummies????????

  • Eleven minutes of pleasure?

    A bad marriage is a bad marriage and especially for the Indian
    woman who is trapped in such a situation there is little choice but to endure it. But
    does she really?
    In the normal course of events, boy meets girl either through
    parental intervention (in an  arranged
    marriage) or divine intervention (in a love marriage), the wedding is fixed and
    they live happily ever after. This is what every Indian girl aspires for and
    Rihana Bajwa, a sexy young Punjabi girl growing up as the cosseted only
    daughter of a wealthy business family in Jaipur is no different. Surprisingly,
    Veer Rathore, a dashing Rajput who also comes from a family with related
    interests and who grows up in Jaipur, and with a dear friend in common, only
    meets Rihana Bajwa while both were on holiday to Thailand. While Rihana is
    quite indifferent to Veer’s attention, he apparently falls madly in love with
    her and persuades her to join him for coffee if he could swim 100 laps of the
    pool. Naturally, he completes the self declared challenge after a few meetings
    persuades Rihana to marry him.  The parents
    meet; the two get engaged and settle down to a long distance relationship with
    Veer trying to set up shop in Delhi while Rihana stays back in Jaipur. With this
    seemingly dull courtship it is no wonder that Rihana begins to wonder if all
    was right with the world especially when Veer all but ignores her while he is
    away.  But pressured by her mother to go
    ahead with the engagement and subsequently the wedding, Rihana marries Veer. On
    their way to Delhi, they are abducted by four goons who it turns out were
    Veer’s friends who under his instructions staged and filmed the whole scene to
    be presented as a “film” to the couple at their Delhi reception! From this
    point on the book becomes even more and more absurd. Despite being newly wed,
    Veer seems to feel no attraction to Rihana and fails to fulfill her sexual
    urges. Typically, Rihana becomes increasingly frustrated and Veer becomes the
    husband who turns to alcohol, violence and even infidelity while all the time
    expecting Rihana to continue playing the good wife, good daughter and good
    daughter-in-law. With no one really to turn to, Rihana tries to make a go of a
    bad marriage by taking up a job but essentially nothing really helps and Rihana
    appeals to both sets of parents to help her out of a marriage that is decidedly
    bad. When Rihana’s mother flatly refuses to help her escape this hell-hole,
    Rihana goes off to Bombay where she nurtures her talent for fashion designing
    and re-invents herself as a fashion designer to the stars. Once again Veer
    tries to get his wife back ( for what reason one can’t really figure out) and follows her to Bombay. But this time round, Rihana refuses to toe his line and is specially cut up by his intrusive questioning of her servants. But despite her wanting a divorce, Veer refuses so Rihana has no choice but to force his hand with a staged adulterous dalliance that she manages to contrive with the help of her friends. Ultimately , Rihana gets her divorce and her character tarred with the brush of infidelity but is greatly relieved because all she really wanted was a more gratifying sex life!

    “The Deliberate Sinner”, is an attempt to question the stereotype of an Indian marriage where women are vassals of their husbands and have to do as they ask. Bhaavana Arora challenges this basic premise and feels that women and men have an equal right to  expect  and attain sexual fulfillment and personal
    ambition.   According to her, most people are conditioned to adapt and maintain
    the façade of a loveless and sexually unsatisfying  marriage but not Rihana, the heroine of the
    story, who wants out. However laudable the message may be, the narration of the
    story which is ho hum and it is only the bold and graphic details of Rihana’s
    sexual encounters that differentiates it from the run of the mill novellas. However,
    this too is a poor attempt at erotica and doesn’t really do much to alleviate the
    tedium. Further compounded with characters
     that are stereotypical and shallow and a
    storyline vacillating from trite to preposterous “The deliberate sinner” is an
    agonizing read from start to finish and quite frankly I was embarrassed to read it.

    This review is a part of the biggest Book Review Program for Indian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books!

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