The Mumbai monsoons hit the city badly on 26th. The view of the Andheri-Kurla road outside from my 5th floor office was very sad.
I took a few videos of how bad the flooding was, with water gushing out through open gutters; and how people were wading through neck high water levels and getting rescued from nearly submerged buses.
Note: The videos were taken with Nokia 6680, and are in the .3gp format. You would need Nokia multimedia player or Quicktime movie player to view them.
Video 1 - Check out the flow of water gushing out through gutters and nullahs. The flow was so strong, that people were getting drifted along with it. Ropes were used to rescue people stranded in buses.
Video 2 - People standing on roof of buses and cars. You can also see a lot of people forming human chains and wading through neck high water.
Video 3 - People atop the bus. Check out the flow of water.
Video 4 - Mumbai Halted. Total breakdown.
Video 5 - People getting rescued from the bus. You can see the ropes being used to help stand in the strong current. It was the general public (mostly people from the offices in our building), who took it upon themselves to rescue everyone. Had they waited for help, it would have ended up in vain. The rescue work started at 4:30pm and was completed (2 buses) by 7:30 pm. There were lots of ladies and children in the buses, and seeing them come out of the gushing water was a heartfelt sight.
Technorati Tags: mumbai, monsoon, video, nokia, andheri, bombay
Tuesday, 27th July 2005, would be remembered by nearly every Mumbai resident. The sudden rainfall (nearly 994 mm), the highest in the last hundred years, caused so much disaster and chaos in the city that there was no breathing space left for people and their kin. Mumbai was flooded and there was a total transporation break down; as if that was not enough, electricity went out and so did the most needed cell phone networks. Even the landline telephones went dead.
A city booming on the peak of technology was suddenly shadowed by a gloomy acceptance of this unfortunate breakdown. People ended up spending more than 15 hours in buses and rooftops, without food and water. Those who were lucky to be at home ended up being tensed about their near and dear ones who were stuck some place or the other. Disruption of communication networks resulted in increasing the panic and worries.
Incidentally, Mumbai has a Disaster Management Unit, which was created in the early nineties to bring a rapid action plan into play. But the existence of such a Unit seemed like a far fetched fantasy. With people stranded all over, there was hardly any presence of rescue teams. It is the sheer valur of the people of Mumbai that came out shining. Self driven rescue operations, people distributing biscuits and tea, providing shelter to the stranded - all this once again proved that the spirit of Mumbai lives high, come what may.
I was a part and parcel of the experience that millions of Mumbaikars underwent. I would not say that it was traumatic, as it was for many who were stranded far away from home; but it was full of amazement and thrill at the same time. I shall be putting up the videos of the rescue operations that took place outside our office on Andheri Kurla Road, which were captured live through Nokia 6680. Check them out to see what was it like from our office.
Note: The videos are in the .3gp format and you will need the nokia multimedia player or quicktime movie player to view these. You can share, distribute and download the videos, but it would be great if you can inform me about it.
Video 1 - This is taken from the fifth floor and gives a panoramic view of the chaos building up on the Andheri-Kurla road.
The PC market share of Apple has increased once again, overtaking Lenovo (formerly IBM), thanks to the popularity and sales of its iPod portable player. Gartner cites the market share at 4.3%. This is good news for the company, which has been struggling with its PC business since sometime. Lower PC shipments and OS bugs had marred the company revenues in the past. But Tiger OS looks promising, and the ever increasing popularity of its notebooks is making the company a rejevunated force to reckon with. Hail Apple !!!
I have used Qumana for a few days now, and am loving it. Though I did not like the functionality of their RSS reader, Lektora, much. I think that Pluck does a much better job of being an integrated RSS feed reader.
However, Qumana rocks. The first post that I posted using Qumana had technorati tags embedded in them, and my post zoomed to the first page in Google search results. I am finding the tool very interesting, as it also decreases the time I spend online for postings. The ability to post to multiple blogs is another plus for this wonderful tool.
My plans to buy an Apple Powerbook have been stalled as of now. After a lot of research on the laptops and pursuant feedback from people (including the Oohs and Aahs that I received as admiring replies when I told them that I am planning to buy an Apple notebook), I could not get it procured from the US. There were some logistics issues and further, the impending doubt of Apple coming out with G5 this year.
I have checked up the G4 1.5 GHz price here in Bombay, and the store in InOrbit at Goregaon is quoting around 1.09 lacs. This is for the standard configuration for the Powerbook 1.5 GHz model. It has a one year warranty. But this bears no comparison with the deal I was getting from US. The total cost for the laptop, if bought from US, was coming to INR 94,000. And this included additional 512 MB RAM (making it a total of 1 Gb), and three-year Apple Care International Warranty. This is a pretty neat deal compared to the prices in India.
I am wondering why there is so much margin and difference in prices for laptops and computers in India, as compared to the US. Further, there are hardly any educational discounts or company-sponsored financing schemes that I have come across till now. And on top of that, nobody wants to make an investment of 50-70k and end up with an average (mostly below average) laptop configuration, since this much amount makes a case for a long term investment in the product. I wonder when things would get cheaper here, and especially the ones which are the via media for sustaining the growth and pace of the Indian economy. The software services industry started early in India, but the growth can only be fuelled by making the tools of the trade easily accessible to people. At such high prices, people like me would need to do a double take on the buying decisions.
I went for the Tata Crucible Business Quiz competition, the Mumbai rounds for which were held yesterday. It was a good eye-opener as we could not manage to score very high.
The current mms craze that is filling up the first page of daily newspapers is the changing face of a new India. It is the biggest proof of how people are embracing technology. People who did not even know the difference between CDMA and GSM till date, can now give you a tutorial on mms messages. Whether the end result is the boom in revenue generation by telecom operators, or the excitement one gets in watching these widely circulated videos; the bottom line remains the same. MMS is the ‘in’ thing, and companies have started encashing on it. Free MMS have been converted into a paid service. The free lunch is over, thanks to the growing popularity of this new technology. Another catch-22 situation for the masses.
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