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 !

Stranger Things renewed..for Season 2 !!

 

Yep. Its official.

And now, the wait begins. The director brother’s biggest worry seems to be the fact that the kids are growing up way too fast.

PS: I am hoping they don’t do a shoddy follow up like Mr Robot Season 2.

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.

 

Trivia ?

I read this on the news.

What are we celebrating

On 15th August, 2016, India celebrates its 70th Independence day. Not sure whether they counted from 1947 being the first, as in 1997, we celebrated the Golden jubilee of Indian independence. That was also the year A R Rahman released his landmark album Vande Mataram, and why I remember that year so much, apart from Jack and Rose.  But that's not the point. These many years from the read letter day, how far have we come ? Where do we see ourselves going ? And exactly what are we celebrating ?

Growing up in India, I read in our NCERT textbooks, that India is a developing country, while countries like America and Britain are developed countries. All the students in the class asked the question, when will India too become a developed country ? The naive teacher replied, “Soon, in a few more years”, or something like that. Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that that dream has now drifted farther away from reality.

Surprisingly, it is reporte that poverty levels have actually gone down.


But these are global parameters to measure a country’s development. India seems to be facing a bigger problem at the heart of its social fabric. Violence against women has been rising exponentially.

Communal violence is on the rise, specially agains dalits (lower caste members). There are more separatist movements and people are asking for the country to be further divided. The 29th state was created by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh, and there is actually a huge list of proposed further division of the country.  India is the second least corrupt country in the whole of South Asia.  With the advent of internet and social media, the country has found a new way to curb free speech, by censoring internet traffic.  As of this writing, the largest democracy in the world has still not been able to win a medal in the ongoing Rio Olympics. There have always been, and will be , natural calamities, but the country is becoming slower to respond to them, often leaving the job to citizen’s movements. And terrorism, the age old enemey of the country, is finding newer ways to intrude into the country.

So, what are we actually celebrating ? Independence day has just become one more reason to shop, and the ever-deal-chasing Indians are frantically trying to purchase more things before time runs out. People are worried to go out, fearing possible terrorist attacks in places where crowds congregate.

One thing is sure, the NCERT textbooks students learn from today will still be the same from over 30 years ago. Hardly anything has changed. We are still developing.