Earlier there was an option to buy cars from Chandigarh, Punjab or Haryana as the dealers there used to offer handsome discount and freebies when buying a car. This used to pressure the dealers in Himachal also to offer schemes. Once the said decision was implemented, the dealers in Himachal have got a virtual monopoly and have stopped all schemes, discounts etc and are minting money at the cost of the buyer.

The government was not loosing any money as all central taxes like VAT etc. were already being charged by the dealers outside the state. As these vehicles used to get registered in Himachal and govt was getting it’s due in form of road tax etc.

This move has been done clearly to benefit the car dealers in the state. These dealers now give two hoots to the customer service. Goyal Motors customer service in Shimla is legendary. I underwent worst experience of my life when I went to buy an Alto car for my father. I vowed then and there never ever to enter this show room again in my life. Though I have been a fan of Maruti cars, my family later bought Toyota and TATA cars owing to third rate nightmarish experience with Goyal Motors, Shimla.

It is not that all other dealers provide great experience. They refuse to budge while negotiating for discounts. It is an open loot here in Himachal as the same car outside the state is available for a discount upto 20-30 thousand while we Himachalis are forced to shell out full amount for the same product.

This is a highly monopolist directive issued by the Himachal Government just to please it’s favorite dealer lobby. The state government is now doing business where as it should focus on it’s key area of governance. Even charges for choice numbers have been hiked beyond proportion. Earlier, a four digit choice number used to cost Rs. 2500/ which has been hiked to Rs. 20,000/

I fail to see the logic behind this hike. Buying a car is a life time decision and people used to associate any number associated with their lives with the car. What was the need for the government to nudge it’s finger in the matter and hike the rates?

I am sure that overall collections of the government has gone down once the new rates were announced. Why the bloody government has to intervene in each and everything when so many issues regarding governance are in a mess in the state.

Has anyone in the government seen the conditions of road in entire Himachal Pradesh?

Another intersting phenomenon I have noticed that Himachal Government has brought Luxury cars from Karantaka and Gujarat for it’s ministers and bada babus. These cars are running with Karnataka and Gujarat numbers within the government.

As such Himachal Government is itself evading the entry tax because once these cars are registered in Himachal, they will have to pay the entry tax.

Imagine the absurdness where a state government is itself involved in evasion of tax imposed by itself!!

It is high time that the chief minister Mr. Dhumal sheds the Musharraf style mindset of  ’My way or the highway’  and brings some sort of rationale to his decisions.

If any lawyers happen to read this article, I would like to hear point of view from consumer side. Can government create such monopolist policies?

Let’s discuss this in the comments below.

Here is something which I wanted to share about Himachal Live blog. The most common keyword to reach this blog has been ‘Himachal News’ on Google. I am happy to share that on Google India site (www.google.co.in) Himachal Live blog now appears on number three in the search results. Just check the screenshot below.

It means by default if one types google.com from India in his browser, he is automatically redirected to the google.co.in site. Since Himachal Live now appears in top three search result, the page views over the month have increased tremendously.

News on google.com front is also encouraging. On the default google.com site Himachal Live blog is appearing on number 4 result. See the result below.

Here if you do a search in your browser, the search page automatically opens on google.com website.

Himachal Live being a one man army outfit , where I work as an editor, reporter, proof reader, seo consultant, peon and cook myself, it gives me great pleasure to share this feat with all of you.

SEO and SERP has been something which I have been working on lately. Off late Himachal Live blog has been taking all my spare time and with a new full time job, performing all the above mentioned work has really been a daunting task.

Thanking you all my readers, contributors, well wishers and all those who threatened to sue me for not toeing their line lately. (Yes, I got threatened for a legal suit for writing against some high and mighty this year)

As I said earlier, I am not a trained journalist but I am looking for a few though to share some of my work load. If you wish to contribute do send me a line and we can take it forward.

Lastly, a big thanks to Varun from Himvani for giving Himachal Live a platform to run and Surender (ex Himvani) to keep the idea of Himachal Live floating.

Cheers everyone and wishing you all a very Happy Diwali in advance.

Treat this post as a rambling as I am simply testing the apps. Hopefully all goes well and shall be regular to post on blog.

Governor of the state is known as the first citizen of the state. ND Tiwari by his actions reduced the office of His Excellency to His Sexellency. His antics were aired on television and the entire country watched the Sexellency in disbelief!! Reports which have come out is even more shocking. His OSD Arvind Sharma would fix girls through pimps and brokers who would then be sneaked into the Rajbhavan as temporary employees. One such girl named Radhika with two other girls approached the media with proof including video footage which showed the country of happenings behind the four walls of Raj Bhawan.

ND Tiwari has long been in news. During his tenure as Uttrakhand Chief Minister, his tenure was marked with similar allegations. A folk singer, Narinder Singh Negi came out with a video, Nauchami Narayana which ultimately proved doom for his party in elections later. Watch the video.

Rathore was shielded all these years by the very establishment which has lost it’s ability to differentiate a wrong from right. This is the very same Talibani mindset which is so infatuated by power. The complaint against Rathore was made in August 1990, departmental inquiry completed in September 1990 but the FIR was registered in 1999 only after a CBI inquiry.

In the mean time Rathore became the DGP of Haryana Police. Not that the politicians and bureaucrats of Haryana were not aware of him being a child molester but they considered this as a harmless fun on the side. So much so that none even bothered to even give a thought that this man was becoming the custodian of law in the state.

Even more disturbing is the conduct of the school where Ruchika studied. Under pressure from Rathore the school expelled the girl from school. So much so for the school authorities which have taken vows in the name of God! The school showed no remorse being a party to intimidation to Ruchika’s family. This incident demands an explanation from the Church; whom do their institutions serve? God or a child molester!!

The danger is we are ruled by sexual perverts. People who are supposed to make and uphold law in this country are perverts of the highest order. And sadly the ‘system’ in this country takes good care of them all.

Clickjacking, in which an attacker slips a malicious link or malware onto a legitimate Web page that appears to contain normal content, is an emerging threat experts have been warning about. The attack on Facebook was in the form of a comment on a user’s account with a photo that lured the victim to click on it. The embedded link took the victim to a Web page that presented like a CAPTCHA or Turing test, and asked the user to click on a blue "Share" button on the Facebook page.

Once clicked, the victim is redirected to a YouTube video, and then the same post shows up on the victim’s account and thus tries to infect his or her friends. Security experts say the attack appeared to be more of a prank or trial balloon, and it affects only Firefox and Chrome browsers, according to security expert Krzysztof Kotowicz, who blogged about the attack this week.

Facebook has now blocked the URL to the malicious site, [fb.59.to] "This problem isn’t specific to Facebook, but we’re always working to improve our systems and are building additional protections against this type of behavior. We’ve blocked the URL associated with this site, and we’re cleaning up the relatively few cases where it was posted — something email providers, for example, can’t do," a Facebook spokesperson says.

Read more on DarkReading.com

Hootsuite is one such service which lets you add your (multiple) Facebook and Twitter accounts. Above all nothing needs to be downloaded as it works in the browser. Simply register and log on to the Hootsuite site, add your accounts and you are done!  Switching between tabs in the browser is quite painless while on the Internet. Here is a screenshot of my Hootsuite page.

Please click on the image for a bigger view. I have mentioned box 1,2,3,4 to understand how the tool works.

Box 1 shows all the accounts. It mentions whether it is a Twitter or a Facebook account. The message is written in box 2. It has it’s own URL shortener ow.ly. After writing a message one can simply select the accounts in box 1 from which the message need to be sent and that’s all. It also gives an option to schedule posting of the message later. Very useful if you don’t want to post 5 messages in succession or have multiple accounts.

Box 3 has the tabs for the Twitter and Facebook accounts where you can switch between accounts effortlessly. Box 4 has the messages where you can read and reply to them. The first column has all the tweets from your followers. The second one has the mentions where you find messages from people who have replied to you (@reply). Third column has direct messages from your followers. The interface makes it very easy to follow all the tweets.

Similarly for Facebook you will find all messages in the similar fashion as on Facebook site. You can read, reply, like and unlike the messages. I find this interface very useful as on the Facebook site you get many requests to chat with friends while you just log in to quickly browse through the messages.

The @reply is a killer function. Even if someone replies to your tweet though he is not your follower you get to see the tweet; making your @reply back more timely and effective. This is not available on Twitter page. Since Hootsuite uses it’s own url shortner ow.ly you can trace the click through from the Stats tab. The Stats show clicks by region, broken out by country, top referrers by click, most popular tweets and a click graph. HootSuite also has a Search feature, so you can perform Twitter searches from within the tool, and it even saves the keywords you’ve searched.

This is a clear winner tool and I have been using this for past 3 months. If you have a single account or many accounts I would recommend to give Hootsuite a try. With the latest update you can also manage your Linkedin and Ping.fm account from this tool.

If you have used Hootsuite or any other tool for Facebook and Twitter please share your experience. How much time you spend on social media sites?

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Offline typing tool for Indian languages

Typing in Indian languages was taken to another level by the Google transliteration tools which made blogging in Indian languages very easy and offering Gmail in Indian languages. Only drawback of the transliteration tool is one has to be online to use this tool.

Now Google has launched an offline typing tool for Indian languages called the Google Transliteration IME. One can now type in majority of Indian languages namely, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. The transliteration IME tool can be installed to any XP/Vista/Windows 7 based computer. Simply select the IME language and download the tool.

The tool offers suggestions for spellings while typing just as in the online version and remembers the spelling which is chosen the first time. One installed on the computer it resides in the shortcut bar on the desktop as shown in the screen below. Once you need to type in Indian language, simply select the Google key board and start typing.

On XP based computers one can change the keyboards by going to Control options > Regional and Language Options > Keyboard and Languages and change the keyboard to Google Hindi Input or the language of your choice as per screen shot below.

You can use this tool to type in MS word if you have the corresponding font installed on your computer. You can also type directly on any web bases application like Twitter and Facebook.

Google DNS

Google DNS is another service launched by Google recently. By using Google DNS you can bypass your ISP DNS server. I had earlier written about another great DNS service, Open DNS. Follow the steps mentioned in the post and change the Google DNS server settings as following.

Primary DNS Server:        8.8.8.8

Secondary DNS Server:   8.8.4.4

Google Short URL

The new short url service is Goo.gl from Google.  This has been launched in the Google tool bar and Firefox and Chrome extension. In case you are using IE, Safari or Opera you can bookmark this link for Goo.gl url shortener service.

Goo.gl has also been integrated to Feedburner feed with Twitter. If you have a blog, every time your blog feed is updated on Feedburner, it sends a Tweet to the linked account about the new article using the Goo.gl url shoterner. This saves a lot of time posting manually tweets about the new post. By integrating the feed to your twitter account, a tweet is automatically sent about new post to all your twitter followers.

Go to your Feedburner account. Under Publicize, choose Socialize and add a twitter account to your feed. Check the screenshot below.

By launching new services and tools Google very soon is going to change the very DNA of the internet. In case you have tried any of these services do let me know your experiences and do you think we are getting dependent on Google for everything on Internet?

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Nothing gives more pleasure when you have visitors coming to your site and commenting. I found apart from the 2 news sites, very few people comment on other Himachal blogs. This despite Google analytics showing daily page views of 600. I don’t know why our readers are so ‘miser’ with comments? Good, bad, ugly, c**p. Come on.. please let us know!! This was a major problem earlier on Shimla Hangout Yahoo group too. More than 2300 members and just handful of members participating in discussions. Give us Himachalis some political news and readers simply love to  jump into these discussions.

The challenge here is to create content which is appealing to the non resident readers other than posting daily news. While surfing for Himachal blogs/sites I found there are now a number of news sites. A refreshing change comes out in these three blogs, a picture-card blog, a tech blog from Shimla based blogger and a marvelous blog which should be in everyone’s bookmarks.

I have created a group for Himachal bloggers on Friendfeed (FF). One just have to log in and leave the address of your blog. Blog feeds will be added to this group. Every time a post is published the feed will be automatically updated. Friendfeed is a great medium to publicise your blog. It is promoted by Facebook. You can add your feeds from FF to your Facebook account. Unlike Twitter, you don’t have to be online on FF to post a link. Remember there are more Himachalis on Facebook than Twitter.

This is an attempt to let people find Himachal blogs and bloggers. If you are a professional writer or some one writing a personal blog or even maintaining tripod pages simply leave a link. Please mention a link to the Himachal blogger Friendfeed group on your blog once you join in. Not to mention just pass on the link to other fellow bloggers.

As a blogger do share your experiences and if you are a reader let us know how you search for Himachal blogs. I would like to hear from the horses mouth.

In a previous post, Air India – The Cashless Maharajah I had mentioned the problems ailing the Air India. The Airlines in an attempt to trim costs announced to cut the productivity-linked incentive (PLI) of all 31,000 employees by 50 per cent, which was objected by the unions. Later, the airline management announced to cut the PLI ranging from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, which was objected by executive pilots. The airline then had to roll back the cut for executive pilots and a committee was set to look into the same.

In a candid interview with Businessworld, Arun Jadhav, the Chairman and Managing Director of Air India mentioned the problems facing the airline. To sum up these are:

-   Air India has 32,000 employees compared with 12,000 “in any like-to-like company”.
-   Employees are not conscious of working for a business in crisis.
-   Pilots “sitting at home” are paid “80 hours of flying allowances”.
-   Despite a freeze on recruitment, “we have recruited”.
-  “There is a duplication of every activity and no single chain of command”.
-  “Revenues are 14,000 crore and costs are Rs19,000 crore” (approx $2.9bn and $3.9bn)
-  “We have 22 offline stations where we no longer fly”.
-  “We have an alarming number of aircraft (25) and engines (33) on standby”.
-   For 800 business class seats from Delhi, 750 meals are ordered but there are only 400 travelers – “no-one knows” where the other 350-400 go.

Can such problems be sorted out in near future remains the question? The govt’s bail out package is based on six months of survival and recovery starting in the next nine months followed by profitability to be achieved.

Airlines have been loosing money across the world. In private sector when an airlines looses money, it is driven out of business and the shareholders bear the losses. But when Air India looses money this is paid by the general public. Not even 1 percent of India’s population has ever used Air India’s services. The major funding will now come from the rest of 99 percent Indians and from the pocket of poorest of the poor in this country. It is not that private companies are not running airlines or are not capable of operating airlines.  It is just that our rulers in their need to have a personal airline at their disposal have put a cost on the general public.

Why should government be involved in running an airline company in the first place?

Next day, I kept on calling the retailer who in turn gave me the number of the dealer in Shimla, who in turn gave me the number of the call center. Between the four of us, the dish was finally activated on Friday, October 9, 2009. It was an terrible ordeal for 4 days and I ended spending almost Rs. 500/ on phone calls alone.

What I found that the retailer and the dealer had no idea about the product at all. At one point of time, I was talking to the dealer helpline number 12149 from my Airtel cell phone and then took the dealer on conference with the call center. The dealer had no idea what the call center was telling him about the steps for activation. The dealer here was Excel Marketing in Shimla.

The procedure of subscribing to Airtel DTH is not simple. They have lots of inline processes. Add to this a novice and an untrained dealer and it is a recipe for disaster. I also spoke to the company executives of Airtel Digital TV. They sounded completely disinterested and one of them even told me he was a sales person and could not do anything about activation.

At least here in Himachal Pradesh, be prepared to deal with untrained people having no knowledge about the product and services. The dealer Excel Marketing in Shimla is a clown. Airtel executives responsible for this product are no less than jokers themselves!!

Cross posted on Mouthshut.com