Month: February 2021

A Treat!

Amul is a famous dairy products organisation of India offering a variety of products which are household names. It is also famous for its hoarding advertising which are humorous and topical. If you follow the link given earlier, there is a special column for its advertising which will be interesting for strangers to read.

Amul has constantly been innovating and launching new products and customers are delighted with the range and reach via all traditional and non traditional distribution channels. My family and I are great fans of it and its products.

Amul’s Camel Milk Chocolate was launched three years ago and I came to know of it only last year through an advertisement in a magazine that I normally do not read. Since then, I have been wanting to taste it but thanks to Covid, had to wait for it till earlier today when my son on an outing found it in a store, remembered my craving for it and bought it for me.

(If you look at the image carefully, you will see an embossed image of a camel and pieces of chocolate at the bottom right corner.)

I am delighted. It is everything that I expected from an unusual source. It tastes kind of strange but still very addictive. Now that I know where it can be bought from, it will regularly feature in my snacks.

Anything exotic like this recently in your life?

Eating The Indian Sun.

During winters many Indians  sit in their gardens in the sunlight to get some warmth in their ageing bones. This is called Dhoop Khana in Hindi which translates to ‘eating the sun’.
My GP had recently suggested that I sit in the sun for some time every day to get some Vitamin D which I do every afternoon when we get some sunlight in our verandah. The photo above was taken by an amused well wisher recently during one such session when I was musing over matters of great import while warming my ancient bones.  Pleas click on the image for a larger resolution if you wish to see how lost I was!

The point of this post however is not to show off my musing skills or to talk about my ancient bones but, to talk about something else.

In one of my earlier posts, I had written about our garden abutting a major avenue of our neighbourhood where I get to see many morning exercisers. Those early morning observations however are vastly different in quality as, the overall silence is not broken except for the chirping of birds.

During my afternoon sessions at the verandah however, the quality is different as, for some strange reason our mock picket fence abutting the road seems to attract many people to stop and converse on their mobile phones or, sometimes even to each other. The latter incidents can be quite tense as often major quarrels take place and I have had to shout to get the characters involved to take their quarrels elsewhere.

While I do appreciate the two wheeler drivers who stop to take phone calls instead of talking while riding, why choose the spot just outside our garden baffles me.  Similarly, quarrelling on the road while may be justified, why choose that particular spot is too.

Do such baffling disturbances trouble you too?

Nothing Like A Sister.

“My brother Ramana Rajgopaul can be described with both these words!😎🥰”

The comment and the image was posted on Facebook by my one and only sister who comes up with some astonishing posts there.

This must be one of the most astonishing as, it is true and teaches her brother another word to describe himself.

Normalcy Returns.

A friend, all of 83 years old, had a recent adventure despite the Covid 19 restrictions and health issues and also against advise of friends like me. He successfully accomplished a long cherished dream of doing the Narmada Parikrama.

To honour him, the informal group that we have operated over the last few years called The Mauli Discussion Group, or MDG for short, organised a meeting to felicitate him as well as meet personally for the first time since the Covid Lockdown. The last meeting that the group held was on March 5, 2020. So almost a year since we had met last.

One regular member could not attend but there were five of us plus the honouree and here is a selfie taken after the meeting. Please note how young all of us are!

Here is one of mine with the honouree.

The felicitation was done our traditional way by wrapping an angavastra around the honouree’s shoulders, giving him gifts to commemorate the occasion and to put on a traditional cap on his head.

The meeting was held as usual at another member’s home who too was felicitated with  a gamucha as an expression of the group’s gratitude for his hosting the meetings.

During the meeting it was also decided that by the middle of March, the group would go on an outing to a couple of places of pilgrimage close by to Pune and it was left to yours truly to organise the details.

Meeting over, the group adjourned to a famous club next door for a sumptuous lunch.

The point of this post is to emphasise the return to some semblance of normalcy in our ancient lives.

New Telephone Connection.


In my previous post, I had mentioned that I recently got a new cell phone connection. This post is about the amazing experience that I had in getting it.

I remember having to go through a major bureaucratic process before I could get my landline number thirty years ago. I got my cell phone connection seventeen years ago with less hassle but I still had to go through an application with self authenticated photograph submission, verification and proof of address processes before I could get a connection.

This time however, I simply asked for a connection by pressing a few buttons on an online portal and I was advised that I would get email advise on further course of action.

I got an email the next day advising me that a representative will call on me at my residence to give me a connection and that I had to be present at home and also that I should have some proof of address.

I got the call the next day, the representative fixed an appointment with me and duly arrived at the appointed time. He asked me if I had an Aadhaar card which is somewhat the equivalent of the Social Security Number Card of the USA,.

On production of the card, he simply pulled out two cell phones from his pocket, took photographs of both sides of the card, requested me to pose for another photograph, sent some messages from one of his phones and made just one telephone call to his base office. He asked for payment for the connection which I digitally did and that was that. He said that the process is over and that I would get a number within twenty four hours and left.

The whole process took less than ten minutes.

I got the new number the next morning well before the 24 hours mentioned by him.

I am still to recover from the efficiency experienced.

I can’t stop marvelling at the modern methods of extending service to the citizens of this country using the Aadhar Card.

My Comedy Of Errors.

For the past four months, I had not been getting OTPs sent by my bank whenever I entered into any net banking transaction with it. It was not a major issue as I would just ask the alternative method of getting the OTP via a telephone call.

I recently made a wrong password entry while trying to access my account and my old password was therefore made invalid and I had to reset my password. For resetting the password however, there is no second option of getting the OTP via a telephone call and I simply could not access my account as I could not log in.

Service personnel from the bank came over to my residence to try and help me and were baffled to see that the OTP was not coming whenever I asked for it. They therefore suggested that I change my telephone number and apply for a change in the registered number with them. They assured me that it would solve the problem and after some time I could ask to revert to the original telephone number.

I duly did this by getting a new cellphone connection about which I shall write in my next blot post.

I duly applied for change of registered telephone number in my account with the bank on last Friday. I got messages both in my phone via the messaging application and through emails acknowledging receipt of my application and eventually on Sunday even advising me that my new number has been registered while deregistering my old number.

On receipt of these messaging application messages I started to wonder why while I was getting those messages, I was not getting the OTPs and it occurred to me that perhaps I had inadvertently blocked the OTP number. I sought the help of our resident geek to try and find if I had done that and in no time he found that I had indeed blocked the number four months ago. Not only that, I had also blocked a few others including some family members’ numbers.

I had been getting hundreds of spam messages and I would ruthlessly block them from future messages and perhaps in the process had inadvertently blocked some numbers which should not have been blocked in my haste to get rid of a number of messages in the message box.

I duly unblocked the numbers that should not have been blocked and tried to access my bank account to reset my password. And bingo, I could, as I got the OTP through the messaging system without any problems.

It now remains for me to go back to the bank with a request to revert to the old telephone number but, I think that I will wait for a while before I do that to check the efficiency of the new connection. And perhaps to enable the efficient fellows who obliged me in changing the number to forget my name so that when I request them again, they will be as efficient as they were during the first request for their service.