Photos

Deep fried beans, Egg-and-tomato

Good Thai Tom Yam (vegetarian) soup

Stained with dragon-fruit juice

Using a Matrix sim card

User experience with using a Matrix SIM for foreign travel.
When I moved to Singapore, I brought with me a Matrix SIM card. While my experience leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, I'm not a fan of random badmouthing of companies that I see on the web. Below is my experience. Its only 1 persons' experience, and its spiced up a little bit for drama. There is also negligence on my part that contributed to the final outcome.

I had bought a plan for 1000 free minutes calling to India at approximately 2,500/- Rs. I expected I would spend this amount on the card. The final amount I spent over 3 weeks is upward of 19,000/- Rs.
In India I did not have knowledge of Singapore calling rates as also data usage, so I was not able to evaluate the plan I took properly. After coming to Singapore, I got busy in settling in at the school, visa matters etc. here and didn't pay sufficient attention to understanding how the phone charges were going. I realized too late that the data and local calling charges on the card were very expensive. I probably even crossed the 1000 Min limit on calling India.

The critical problem is that there is no convenient way to track usage (local calling, free minutes to India, data). This is mindbogglingly bad. To be on this kind of a plan, and not to give people a way to know where exactly they are in their usage is such a bad customer experience, that it crosses the line to where it merits an investigation by the government. After 2 weeks, and multiple phone calls to customer support, I started getting SMSes and recorded phone messages telling me what my balance was, but even then it didn't tell me the breakup for various services. And why did it start only 2 weeks into my trip ?
When one has some number of free minutes but doesn't know when it going to get over, its very problematic. Its hardly practical to keep noting the duration of every call you make.
The other thing that wasn't nice was that local calling rates were very expensive. Again its something that you can't evaluate very well back in India. The calling cards seem to be set up so that you get attracted by the free India calling minutes and then get screwed by the local calls.

The Matrix experience is quite schizophrenic. Any aspect of their service that has to do with generating revenue is extraordinarily good. Any aspect that might lead to revenue erosion is extraordinarily bad.
On the plus side:
1.) When I first contacted a salesperson in Bangalore, he was very knowledgeable, pleasant and courteous. He was also extremely responsive and reliable in follow-up to get me to purchase the card. 
2.) They ran ads on TV and cable sometime back. I found those extraordinarily entertaining and well-made. They also have a cute little box in which they give you the SIM card and usage instructions. These guys remind me of Indigo, the airline, for their branding and marketing ideas. And check out their website.
3.) When I had some trouble getting data service on my phone, the customer service was extraordinarily response in giving me detailed instructions and following up with me over a period of 2 hours until I got it resolved.
4.) The service worked well and call quality etc was all good. I would give them good marks for this.
5.)The most annoying thing is that its remarkably easy to get a phone connection here in Singapore. All it takes is your passport and you can get a SIM at any number of convenience stores around the city. But because I had the convenient Matrix SIM available, I postponed getting a local Singapore SIM. I also postponed setting up WiFi in the apartment properly so I could use WiFi data. These really cost me dear.

Two other people that I consulted about Matrix told me that they had the same kind of experience. That's a total of 3/3 bad customer experiences! 

If you are going ahead with Matrix anyways, things to keep in mind:
Of course the basic thing is that you have to keep an eagle eye on your call usage!
Understand the local calling rate. Check whether the local calling rate applies to incoming too.
Know your data usage. I had an unlimited connection back in India, so didn't really know how much was my average usage. Found out after I came here and paid through my nose, that it is much higher than I thought!

Note: Happy to get feedback from Matrix and hear their side of it. I did send them the substance of the above as a customer complaint and didn't hear back (Oh, yeah, that's another thing, they opened three customer complaints as a result of my calls, and I never heard back on any of them).


Their ads were so good, I will link them in here :-)

Vibhat is reading well !

Jacob Ballas Childrens' Garden

The Jacob Ballas Childrens Garden is a nice play park for children

Newater

 

And a visit to the famed Newater visitors center which lived up to its reputation. For those who don't know, Newater is treated wastewater that is reused in industry. For a industrial luddlite like me, the sight of all that high technology is scary and awe-inspiring (couldn't get good photos of the actual plant as the glass windows distorted them). And the graph (2nd picture above) is the most impressive: between 2003 and 2012, Singapore increased the contribution of Newater to its water supply system from 2% to 30%. Now that is a major shift in a single decade. These guys here *really* have their act together.  

Jan Peter Balkenende

He was the ex-Prime Minister of Netherlands and now at Erasmus University.
To be frank, the thing that stuck most in my mind from his talk was a joke about the Singapore heat - "It is better to be a tropical fish than a tropical bird".
Profound.

Guest post - Suman Maradani

My friend Suman Maradani sent me this mail recently:

This is an idea that sprung up during the last of the load shedding hours for the day yesterday, so don't take it that seriously.  It was an interesting thought exercise I had and thought I'll share to see if there's any merit/potential.

• The core idea is to build a 'massive collaborative social game' - essentially around the power situation, especially for places like Bangalore.
• Has shades of the pitting citizens against citizens by the Joker in Dark Knight :)
• Essentially, there's an app, which uses location based info, realtime info from Bescom etc, shows locality/sector wise current usage, whether a power cut is looming, the threshold for hitting it etc - I guess you see the point
• Really pit people collectively in a sector/group against other such groups - so they can reduce their own power usage appropriately (in their own small ways, but all that adds up) and avoid the dreaded load shedding or gain enough credits etc to reduce the duration, hence the pain etc.
• There's obviously a massive social aspect/element to it - collective gains, social psychology etc
• Situation about power etc will always be under crunch even in the future (even water for that matter)
• Volumes (of users) are obviously massive
• Today, there aren't any solutions and it's pretty unidirectional - bescom decides (has no choice) and flips switches.  Maybe the collective social wisdom can evolve to solve it collectively in a fun and engaging way, which is a win-win for all involved

The Garbage Can model of organisational choice

Experimenting with posting some of my readings.

I got a lot of good-natured teasing from some of my classmates for liking this paper, which they hated.

This is one of our readings in Organisation theory. Its a somewhat extreme model of organisations which are anarchic. A good description and context for the paper can be found here:
https://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/gloss/g.html

and the paper itself here:
www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/articles/Cohen_March_Olsen_1972.pdf 

The Haze

This last week here we've had the 'Haze'. Farmers or plantation owners burning forest to clear land for agriculture in Indonesia, cause severe pollution in Singapore and Malaysia from the smoke. It shows up as a thick haze in the air, down to ground level, that reduces visibility severely. It causes respiratory and other problems in people, especially with prolonged outdoors expsoure.  The Delhi-ites in our batch and others from similarly polluted cities were being very blase about it but as Rajesh Rangarajan (one of my classmates) was explaining  "...this is normal vehicular pollution, combined with particulate matter from the smoke, and with dioxins from the burning coating the particulates ... ". Or some such. Not Good.

Photo taken off the Straits Times website.

On China

This is a post that will hopefully keep getting updated and republished as I learn more (and correct my earlier knowledge).

One of the big new things that I've been exposed to here is all things Chinese.

One of the 'aha' moments in that matter has been, that China is a significant portion of the ethnic origin of many countries around it. Singapore of course is 75% ethnic Chinese, Malaysia has a significant minority, Thailand has a significant minority (though the Chinese component has now assimilated deeply and is not so distinct, for eg. in the names. Many Thai PMs including Thaksin Shinawatra have some Chinese in their blood).  Indonesia has a 1% which is relatively small but a decent chunk of numbers. Will update as I find info about other countries too. And looking wider there are significant Chinese pockets in many major cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco and so on. The point is that it must give a great deal of national confidence to see your spread and impact outside your borders. It must give you a different almost paternalistic perspective on the world or atleast portions of it (the mothership kind of thing).
In contrast India has precious little such populations. And interestingly, where there are such populations they are Tamil! Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia. (Though no doubt the Andhraites will soon form a significant minority in the US.)

Another fairly simple fact that I didn't know, is the way Chinese write their names, the family name or last name comes first. Lee Kuan Yew for eg. , Lee is the family name. I haven't yet found out how the other two names work, if one of them is a 'primary' first name or what. Sometimes the Chinese take on a 'Western' name , and then they write their name like so 'Rebecca Lee' .