As everyone knows, the Indian Premier League (IPL) is a limited overs game with both teams bowling just 20 overs to decide the game. This year, because of the simultaneous holding of the General Elections for Indian Parliament, the venue of the IPL was shifted to South Africa instead of India. Well, the round robin league is over, and so are the semifinals ... and today, on this warm Sunday evening, Deccan Chargers and Royal Challengers will play the final for the cup and the glory. Within a few days, the Congress Party's cabinet will be in place too, and India will begin a glorious chapter of politics with the ruling party in full strength; no more coalition style politics, thank you. And, as an Indian, I wish MMS (Manmohan Singhji) has a very fruitful run as a PM (his second tenure), and India prospers as a result.
In other news, Murtuza's family and mine, are treating Dad on his just passed 75th birthday (he turned 75 on the 20th of May). We have invited him and mom to my place for dinner and to gift him a little token of our love. Murtuza's daughter Umme-Salma continues to run a slight fever since the past three days. My aunty Asma Sawliwala had a stroke last week, and is admitted at Prince Aly Khan hospital ICU as a result. She is unconscious and is being artificially ventilated. Inas keeps running for her duties to the Taj, and Hannah is at home, reading books or whiling away her time seeing television or playing a game on the computer. Nishrin's work is going fine, and mine is too.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Almost a month gone
It's been some time that I have written in the blogs that I own, including this one. It isn't that I don't enjoy blogging; of course, I do. If I did not, would I start so many blogs? However, it is also true that life sometimes just does not permit you to write ... time runs short, motivation runs short, or at times, there just isn't anything happening enough in your life to write to the world about! In my case, it never is the case that nothing is happening. So much is! If nothing else, my medical experiences would be enough to write so much about!
Since I last wrote in here, my elder daughter Inas has begun her industrial training at the Hotel Taj at Mumbai. For those not aware, Inas is in the second year of the Hotel Management (three-year degree) course of the Mumbai University. As part of the course, students are required to complete a six-month hands-on training at any of the designated hotels in the city. As Inas was one of the best students in the course, she got a chance to take the training at the famed Taj Group Hotel located at the Gateway of India ... the very same hotel that was attacked by Pakistani terrorists in November 2008. Initially, we were wary of sending her to that spot, but in the end, common sense prevailed. She began her training on the 2nd of May. Every day, she is required to be there for 8-9 hours, and her first 1 1/2 months' posting is in the Kitchen Department. This is one department that she dislikes. However, she is in, whether she likes it or not. Just yesterday, she told us that she had to peel over 250 onions! In the process, she accidentally nicked three of the five fingers of her right hand, and had to apply "Band Aid"s on the tips of all these! She has been called the "Chop Chop Queen" in honor of her "accident" :-)
Okay, Hannah continued going to school for a fortnight more, and her last school day was the 1st of May. Her results came that day, and I am happy to inform you that she did well, scoring 77 % marks in Marathi ... for the first time in her career. Her overall percentage climbed a healthy 7 % ... from the earlier 59 % to over 66 % this time. Within a few days, her tuitions for the Xth standard have also started, and she is barely able to enjoy 2 free days every week, the rest being interspersed with tuitions in Hindi, Marathi, Math and Science. Once her school restarts, she will have tuitions in French as well. This will be her final year in school, and then, it will be college life for her from June 2010.
Nishrin continues to work solo in her parlour after having removed her one and only assistant in November-December 2008. This is taking its toll on her mental peace. There are days when there is a rush of clients and she has to refuse some; there are days when there are hardly any, and she sulks around at the parlour and even weeps at times on her misfortune. To inform the readers, I should add here that she had to remove her assistant because the latter was stealing her work and attending to her clients outside the parlour at the clients' residence by doing home visits after finishing her work at the parlour.
What about me, you ask? Oh, well. My practice picked up a lot more than I had expected, but still, I was doing worse than what I did last year in April. I finally got a letter allowing me to admit patients in the 'general' class at Noor Hospital, and to date, I have admitted quite a few patients there! I am sure that the hospital trustees will have to consider giving me full privileges in the year to come. My writing work at WDC attracted prizes again. My gymming had to take an unscheduled break when I developed severe back spasm in mid-April ... then I re-joined in late April, took yet another break as the spasm acted up again, and have now re-joined and have resumed muscle training since the past four to five days.
That's all for now ... but I would like to end this post with a small bit of news: May is a month full of birthdays in my extended family. My youngest brother's both children, my own Hannah, and my dad, all have their birthdays in May! My nephew Shabbir was born on the 7th of May in 2002; my niece Umme-Salma on the 8th of May in 2008; Hannah on the 14th, in 1994, and my dad, on the 20th, in 1934. My brother Murtuza invited us all for cake-cutting and dinner on the eve of the 8th. My brother's wife Sakina had cooked the dinner, and it was okay. My other brother Kaizar, did not attend owing to some problems.
Hannah will turn 15 this year, and Nish and I plan to give her 15 gifts, of which one will be sponsored by Inas. We are also planning a surprise party for her and are inviting 7-8 of her best friends for an evening of fun and frolic. Let us see how this goes ...
Since I last wrote in here, my elder daughter Inas has begun her industrial training at the Hotel Taj at Mumbai. For those not aware, Inas is in the second year of the Hotel Management (three-year degree) course of the Mumbai University. As part of the course, students are required to complete a six-month hands-on training at any of the designated hotels in the city. As Inas was one of the best students in the course, she got a chance to take the training at the famed Taj Group Hotel located at the Gateway of India ... the very same hotel that was attacked by Pakistani terrorists in November 2008. Initially, we were wary of sending her to that spot, but in the end, common sense prevailed. She began her training on the 2nd of May. Every day, she is required to be there for 8-9 hours, and her first 1 1/2 months' posting is in the Kitchen Department. This is one department that she dislikes. However, she is in, whether she likes it or not. Just yesterday, she told us that she had to peel over 250 onions! In the process, she accidentally nicked three of the five fingers of her right hand, and had to apply "Band Aid"s on the tips of all these! She has been called the "Chop Chop Queen" in honor of her "accident" :-)
Okay, Hannah continued going to school for a fortnight more, and her last school day was the 1st of May. Her results came that day, and I am happy to inform you that she did well, scoring 77 % marks in Marathi ... for the first time in her career. Her overall percentage climbed a healthy 7 % ... from the earlier 59 % to over 66 % this time. Within a few days, her tuitions for the Xth standard have also started, and she is barely able to enjoy 2 free days every week, the rest being interspersed with tuitions in Hindi, Marathi, Math and Science. Once her school restarts, she will have tuitions in French as well. This will be her final year in school, and then, it will be college life for her from June 2010.
Nishrin continues to work solo in her parlour after having removed her one and only assistant in November-December 2008. This is taking its toll on her mental peace. There are days when there is a rush of clients and she has to refuse some; there are days when there are hardly any, and she sulks around at the parlour and even weeps at times on her misfortune. To inform the readers, I should add here that she had to remove her assistant because the latter was stealing her work and attending to her clients outside the parlour at the clients' residence by doing home visits after finishing her work at the parlour.
What about me, you ask? Oh, well. My practice picked up a lot more than I had expected, but still, I was doing worse than what I did last year in April. I finally got a letter allowing me to admit patients in the 'general' class at Noor Hospital, and to date, I have admitted quite a few patients there! I am sure that the hospital trustees will have to consider giving me full privileges in the year to come. My writing work at WDC attracted prizes again. My gymming had to take an unscheduled break when I developed severe back spasm in mid-April ... then I re-joined in late April, took yet another break as the spasm acted up again, and have now re-joined and have resumed muscle training since the past four to five days.
That's all for now ... but I would like to end this post with a small bit of news: May is a month full of birthdays in my extended family. My youngest brother's both children, my own Hannah, and my dad, all have their birthdays in May! My nephew Shabbir was born on the 7th of May in 2002; my niece Umme-Salma on the 8th of May in 2008; Hannah on the 14th, in 1994, and my dad, on the 20th, in 1934. My brother Murtuza invited us all for cake-cutting and dinner on the eve of the 8th. My brother's wife Sakina had cooked the dinner, and it was okay. My other brother Kaizar, did not attend owing to some problems.
Hannah will turn 15 this year, and Nish and I plan to give her 15 gifts, of which one will be sponsored by Inas. We are also planning a surprise party for her and are inviting 7-8 of her best friends for an evening of fun and frolic. Let us see how this goes ...
Monday, April 13, 2009
Recently, I read about a friend's bad experience with Citi Financial due to mistaken identity. This reminded me of my own bad experience with Citibank due to their publishing a wrong telephone number in their advertisement.
I want to share my experience with Citibank ...
the bank that never (let me) sleep (s)!
About fourteen years ago, I used to live in a locality that had telephone numbers beginning with 371. My number was 3712484. Now, as most of you know, -2484 are the last four digits of Citibank call centres, as CITI codes as 2484. No matter. Then, one fine day, Citibank published a half page ad on page 1 of the Mumbai edition of ET (Economic Times). The ad simply said: Get Loans at Low rates
against your shares. Call (you guessed it!) 3712484 NOW!
I remember that this was during the second stock market boom after Harshad Mehta's stint ,,, the KP10 boom, if you will. Mumbaikars were sitting with penny stocks like Himachal Futuristic, Silverline Industries, Pentamedia Graphics etc ... and all these were priced above 1000-1500 per share, with PG being priced at 2700 per share!(Today, barring HFCL, the other stocks, including Mazda, (KP's darling stock) have all sunk or vanished.)
Phir kya ... the home phone started ringing non-stop from 7.00 a.m. onwards! I looked at my own number on the front page of ET at 8.30, by which time, my wife and I had already fielded not less than 70-75 calls. We tried calling Mumbai's own citi call center, which we knew was 2022484 ( I had a credit card from citi, so I had the call center no), but we could not connect. And, our own phone never gave us a second chance to use it for an outgoing call!
Remember, there were no cell phones back then.
By about 10, our patience had reached breaking point. Finally, I connected to the citi phone center. They were as surprised as we were, and one of them immediately recognised the number to be citi's number for New Delhi. I demanded rectification on an immediate basis, but they, obviously, could not do anything right away. About 11.30, I got a call from their head, one female officer called Anjali something. She was profusely apologetic, and said that they would publish the new number in the next day's newspaper, and in the meanwhile, we should just wait and suffer in silence.
I was shouting at her by then. I asked her to send someone "decent" to take all my calls, and to stay with me till the menace receded. She was willing to do even that, but then, she had a brilliant thought:she sent me a box pack of an advanced telephone answering machine manufactured by Philips. The person who accompanied the box was knowledgeable and helped us to set up the whole thing. He also handed me a letter signed by ?Anjali, and then left.
Over the next few days, the calls gradually stopped. However, citi never sent to take the machine back. We used it for the next five or six years, before it malfunctioned and had to be thrown away.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)