Monday, October 1, 2012

Current Reservation in Trains (Shatabdi)

Recently i had to catch "Shatabdi" trian from Kanpur with in just 2 hrs of making the plan for the trip. I was not having any reservation. Current reservation worked for me (Kanpur to N.Delhi). 

One can check the current reservation for a train on a specific station at this link;


Here you need to enter the station name you want to get current reservation from. Also there is no extra change for "Shatabdi" at least. One more thing current reservation can only be done from that station only from where the journey needs to be started. And the counter will be there on the station itself. In Kanpur the current reservation counter is on the entrance of Platform 1 only. (It might change in future, so better ask someone there on the platform itself.)

Friday, September 7, 2012

Leave so little for Rest of Us...

Are we getting prepared for serving big firms or should just say any firm? Why is it not that the society promotes owning the firms themselves? Not just one person, but the society as a whole. A cooperative, a democratic system where everyone has equal say. The profit is distributed in everyone not just to the persons who invested some valued paper in the firm. And even if they say they have, then have not the worker, the laborer invested his/her skills, his/her time in making or transforming things, bringing the value for which customers are ready to pay more.

How is it that capital is more important than people, then skills people have? Can only capital produce profit, without the help of people or should I say society? Then why is society giving more importance to one thing and none or equivalent to none to another.

Since the time, I am able to comprehend, I always thought today's society as an ideal society or an almost ideal one where people are treated equal, the society is just. But now when I have started delving into past (both the recent one and the farther old one)  I have come to realize we have not really covered much distance. We are still standing near the world where it was standing around 200-300 years ago.

Still the workers, the laborers or even the salesmen/women (in net the last in an organizational hierarchy) are called as "Dead Peasants" when they die. And the firms who employ them have insurance on their names with themselves as beneficiaries? Hmmm, so they have a capitalist motive to kill now. (from the movie "Capitalism A Love Story"). Why they are peasants it really amazes me, shocks me?

When making profits firms become private, but when sinking they need to be saved with public money? How can the walls built so permeable from one side and so rigid from the other? And permeable for what only money. And when the same people whose money they use ask to enter, they need permission, they need to take appointments (which they usually never get). I am not asking for allowing anyone to enter, but then I am also not asking for heaven. I am just telling you, if you are using my money better tell me where it is going, in whose pocket, in whose accounts.

I always thought, revolution was a past phenomena. Now it is a fiction, it exists only in movies, in well bound and sometimes not well written novels. But not any more. If we are standing where we were around 200-300 years ago then how can I say a revolution cannot happen. It happened in that era and it has been happening now too. Just look at the "Arab Spring".

Whenever I talk about this I remember the dialogue said in the movie The Dark Knight Rises 

"There is a storm coming... and when it hits you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us?"

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Book Read Recently


The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of IndiaThe Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good book, tells about the unheard stories of people who witnessed partition, who were ones partition really partitioned. Shows the human side of partition which was till now shown as just as the political battle and a war between two communities.
It tells the different views of people from different backgrounds, of different age (children, adults) and of different communities which otherwise doesn't figure in the usual history of partition. In all a good read.

View all my reviews