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Showing posts from July, 2009

India Post

The rebranding exercise at the cost of tax payers for department of post is going on for quite some times. They have revamped some of their post offices from dilapidated shacks to decent looking outposts in association with Deutsche Post. But more things change, more they remain same. Has anything changed at the service level? simply nothing. Indian bureaucracy is one of the most inefficient and most corrupt, esp. at the lower levels and India Post is a very symbol of the same. I had speed posted one RTI application to income tax department twice, based on pin codes given for their Hyderabad office in their associated websites. Every Tom Dick and Harry knows the location of Income tax office, but not India post. The speed posts came back twice, after roaming around the city for a few days, the reason cited was "insufficient address". The post offices whose stamp was marked on the envelope were stones throw away from the Income Tax office and yet they did not know the address.

Nevil Chamberlain reincarnated

Does anybody remember who Nevil Chamberlain was? Oh yes! He is synonymous with a foreign policy of appeasement and weakness. To the uninitiated Chamberlain was a former British priminister, who signed the Munich agreement in Germany in 1938 conceding Sudetenland to Hitler, overlooking and overruling the concerns of Czechoslovakia republic. He praised Hitler and Musolini and was too anxious to buy peace with Germany, even at the expense of Czechs and Austrians. Probably he was handicapped by his domestic problems, probably he had a wishful thinking that by placating Germany and Hitler a war could be avoided, or probably he truly believed that Hitler and Musolini were gentlemen who did break agreements and Sudetenland would be the end to Germany's ambitions in Europe. Well, history shows that whatever his intentions were, however good a man he was, he was wrong. Similarly we have a good man at our helm, who is anxious to buy peace with Pakistan and China, to placate the "wounded