Online Shopping ? Stay smart.

 

Online shopping is a rage nowadays, I see people looking up prices of watches to motorcycles on computers and smartphones. Everyone is searching for that elusive deal. Its the online version of window shopping. You know, when you are just comparing prices, but not really buying anything.

Turns out , there are apps which will help you do this window shopping , compare prices, and even alert you to other price drops in the category. In India, the extension called Buyhatke is the leader and the best. They have chrome extensions, which will turn active if you are at a shopping site, and show you price trends from the past. It works on Flipkart, Amazon, eBay  and many other sites too.

The extension automatically adds a price trend graph in a simple line graph on the page. Also tries to predict if it is a good decision to buy the product today.

Its amazing being able to see how they fluctuate the price of the same product over time. Here is a graph alerting me that the product on sale is actually  priced higher today than yesterday.

 

Here is how crazily the price fluctuates on some products. Its almost as if there was an earthquake a few days ago.

Also works on Amazon.

But the best feature is that it alerts you if the same product is available at a lower price somewhere else.

Now thats cool. It only calculates base price, and there might be an additional shipping charge.

Another extension you can use the Flipkart Advantage detector.  Flipkart does not metion on the grid view if the product has express shipping. This extension detects that and puts an icon on the product page if it can be delivered on the same day or next day. Here is has placed a red star on the first product.

 

Things have not been good for shopping sites in India. With the festival season coming up, there will surely be many deals for the customers coming in.

Be smart. And happy shopping !

Girl Power

 

What a month it was. Olympics was the number one topic for the whole month. Even now, I see people watching recordings of some of the olympic events. But for India, there was the great Irony.

Women athletes from India saved the nation’s face at the recently concluded 2016 Olympics at Rio. After all the promotions, and goodwill ambassadors and selfies, three girls stole the thunder and showed what sheer determination can do.

 

A news which was not widely reported was that squash player Deepika Palikkal took the Australian open, in the same weeks.

Squash, as I couldn’t-believe-it found out, is not part of the Olympics, but there is a huge campaign for it.

So that means Indian women athletes were winning accolades for the country, while back home, crime against women is rising. I find that highly ironical. In a country were free speech is oppressed, and patirachal rules are more powerful than the consitution, it was finally women who saved the country’s face. The male athletes on the other hand, were out in the knockouts, or were banned for doping.

Not sure how long the focus will be on these athletes. And thanks to their brave life choices, many more girls can dream of making a huge splash in the world of sports.

In a cricket crazy nation, it will only be till the next cricket match. Hope here things change for the better.

 

Electric vehicles in India

 

Last months’ terrible traffic jam and worsening climate got me thinking about greener modes of transport. What are the non-fossil fuels based transport avaiable to us Indians ? Turns out, not very much. Whatever options are available today are way more expensive and cumbersome than the simple petrol/diesel engine based vehicles. But still, there are quite a lot of options, the general public is not aware of them.

For instance, take electric bicycles. These are the standard pedal cycles, but with an additional electric motor which can be used to further the distance that can be covered. The only company currently seen selling such bikes is Hullikal, and the bikes are priced way high.

Around Rs 30,000/-. For this price, one can easily buy a second hand petrol engine bike. And this pricing is the biggest problem which will hamper early adoption of this novel new technology.

For the same price, or slightly more, one can buy a full fledged two wheeler, which looks like any one of those million scooters on the road. And it says it can travel double the distance.

The company every e-bike enthusiast is watching right now is Ather. They have promised to deliver a futuristic looking smart bike, with full integration to smartphones and gps. But this bike will be priced > Rs 75,000/-

But those few who can afford these vehicles , and their monthly electricity bills, and care for the planet, are surely buying and using them. In Bangalore, I see a lot of electric cars from Mahindra on the road. It was initially priced at ~7 lakhs, but now the price is down to  ~5 lakhs.

I didn’t know this, but it seems one can buy an electric sedan too.

 

Going green is definitely expensive. That and the non-availability of charging stations around town is going to slow down this even more.

Aug 7, 2016

Today I read this in my news.

It just proves that every state does not have the guts to implement rules which ensures saftety of its people. The no-helmet-no-petrol initiative was started some time back in some districts of Kerala state with immense success. Petrol bunk operators were asked to refuse fuel to two wheeler riders not wearing helmets. Soon other state governments started copying the initiative and decided to implement the law at a state level. But then came the opposition from the citizens and opposition parties. In some states, Public Interest Litigations were filed against the law, and in other states, people’s protests lead the government to drop the policy.

Just goes to confirm that Indians are lazy, but not concerned about safety.

Living in India is getting more expensive

 

Well, prices of things are always going up, but now the Indian citizen is getting crushed under a new set of taxes. After introducing the 0.5% Swachh Bharat Cess in November, the Union Finance Minister announced in this year’s Budget that the government would levy a Krishi Kalyan Cess to finance activities related to agriculture and build a fund for the welfare of the farmers. Indirect taxes and charges such as these are an important part of the government’s income from taxation. Of the Rs14.4 lakh crore ($213 billion) of taxes collected by the Indian government in the last financial year, 44.4% came from indirect taxes.

Meanwhile, prices of petrol and diesel were hiked on June 1. Petrol will become costly by Rs2.58 per litre and diesel by Rs2.26 a litre. This means transport costs will rise, affecting the prices of vegetables, fruits, milk and other food products, among others. To add to household woes, the cost of an LPG cylinder—used for cooking across the country—was also increased by Rs21.

Travelling in airconditioned buses will be costlier from today with the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) increasing its fare by 6%, thanks to union finance minister Arun Jaitley, who has imposed service tax on state-carriage AC buses. Not just tickets, daily and monthly passes will also cost more. Monthly passes of AC buses which operate within the city are likely to cost `135 more, and passes of AC buses to and from Kempegowda International Airport will cost `201.

What a fantastic time to be living in India. And the reality of all this is that after all these taxes and charges, nothing  is going to change in the country.

Thrissur is India’s chit fund capital

 

 

Kerala's banking sector had its roots in local 'kuris' and when RBI started regulating banks, their numbers came down from 163 to a mere handful by 1970s. However, during the same time, Kerala witnessed a mushrooming of kuri companies - especially in Thrissur, which could be called the chit fund capital of India as one among every six chit funds in India is from Thrissur.

Two decades ago, chit funds from Kerala had shifted their registered offices to other states as the state legislation was tough. "They first moved to Bengaluru and when Karnataka started implementing the Central Chit Funds Act, they shifted to Faridabad," said Mathew Puthukattukaren, director, Dharmmodayam, which was registered in 1919 as a company with the then Cochin state.

"Those companies operating out of Faridabad had opened a namesake office. According to local rules, they were able to register the companies under the Local Shops Act, just like any other shop," he said. This reached such a farcical level that few years ago a British newspaper Daily Mail had reported that a two-storey building in sector 7 of Faridabad was home to 130 chit funds from Kerala.

Once Haryana was brought under the central act in 2012, the exodus of registered offices reversed. According to the documents of the ministry of corporate affairs, by the end of October 2014, India had 5,836 chit fund companies and 2,148 were registered in Kerala. Thrissur had the maximum : 1,090 firms.

India Experienced Its Hottest Ever Recorded Temperature of 51C

 

It just got in here.