I recently shifted to New Delhi which would explain the long absence from this blog and I owe you apologies. However, shifting here was imperative because I was not getting the required exposure there in Ludhiana.

Life can be very drab in a metro specially when one is not keyed in to the “night life”. Hiding behind dollops of artificial life and make believe, Delhi is a contrast of many different worlds in a single place. I have been to the poshest of the posh places, stayed there with family friends and pass by the hovels that pass for a “shelter”. Generations of family members remain cramped in a place running aground with stench and open drains with piles of human excreta strewed around. The definition of “aam aadmi” does not change here and I keep on wondering about the well intentioned affirmative action of the Government.

I work in an ISO certified hospital (and training to be an Oncologist). I see people die under ISO branded doctors. Everyday is a battle with the life and death and unfortunately it is a loosing battle. Patients become “case studies” much to my chagrin because it is difficult to keep an impassioned attitude all the time. Yet, there are scores of nuts who seem to be overtly caring about their near and dear ones expecting miracles.

Delhi does not value human life at all.

I see scores of people running after the buses; an abject failure of the public transport. Metro has eased the hassles to a large extent but it touches roughly 6% of the population. There is a constant tussle of the civic agencies and a perfect example of passing the buck.

The traffic lights abound and at times I wonder whether Delhi is a big red light area. The whole traffic seems to move as if there is a huge amount of pent up energy waiting to be released. There are a large number of nuts racing their vehicles like wannabe Formula one drivers only to break 10 feet ahead at the next red light.

I read about the various prostitution rings and the massage parlours; about the casting couches, about pseduo celebrities et al. The ones who make it the much vaunted page 3 of Delhi Times.

Yet, this place retains it’s eminence for exposure to varying oppurtunities. Being close to the corridors of power opens up a lot of oppurtunites for a person on the social ladder.

I shall be trying to be regular in posting the entries; yet I cannot promise. Life is very hectic. However, I shall be posting anything significant related to the telecom sector here; as usual.

Meanwhile, I signed up for Airtel. There is nothing extraordinary about this service except for the fact that it has a good upload speed. This is a far cry from BSNL. Airtel is plain vanilla broadband without any differentiation for it’s subscribers. MTNL still scores ahead of Airtel solely because of it’s reach. Airtel sucks in many quarters because it has not been able to spread it’s network far and wide as yet.

What has happened to TRAI? All of a sudden, it seems to have jumped from an IQ of deliquency to IQ of supranormal intelligence. There is a definite transformation of the dumb dodos into normal thinking human beings.

First salvo fired by TRAI was related to specturm allocation. It did not go well with the industry majors for obvious reasons. So far, there has been no true headcount of the number of subscribers for the operators tend to issue a huge number of fake connections; many people own multiple connections; there are a huge number of people who sparingly use their mobiles and so on and so forth.

TRAI has recently proposed that M&A in the same circle cannot be achieved if it exceeds 40% market cap. In layman’s terms it means that if the market share of the combined entities exceeds 40% then the two companies cannot be merged. This is ostensibly to avoid the monopolies; it is difficult to fight a monopoly than oligopolies. A bunch of crazed idiots is better than having a madman around.

I would expect the reaction from Ramachandran on expected lines. I am sure he is going to breathe fire from one of his orifices and all of them are going to lobby to Department of Telecom to override this clause.

Still, I write in this to say that there is definite change of pace. If only someone were reading this blog and change over the definition of Broadband to 2 mbps unlimited; it would really kick ass. Of course, we’d be greedy for more anyway.