Much has been happening. As you guys probably know, I’m busy with my son, Nisarga these days. I do write about him, but its on his own blog.

He just 3 months old, so I’m still at home and have not started working yet. Honestly, I’m enjoying motherhood so much, that I don’t know if I want to start working again.

In the meanwhile, to remain occupied, I’m doing a lot of redesign work for my websites – Wide Aware and here, designing some themes, maybe and in general living more with softwares than society, so be prepared for a change in direction on this blog, which essentially follows my life. Over the coming period, its likely I may share my learnings and discoveries in the web design part of my life, as well as share any code I may write.

Also stay tuned for a new look that may suddenly turn up here any time after a couple of weeks.

If you have suggestions as to what you would find attractive, or something you find irritating here, let me know.

Now, the thing is, I have never paid for a slow connection as such. One of the main reasons for signing up for Triband was MTNL’s clear statement that cable internet providers provide speeds less than 256kbps, and speeds under 256kbps don’t qualify as broadband.

SO I signed up for 512kbps, and when it still seemed slow, upgraded to 1mbps Still, no change in performance. At which point, I tested the speeds I was actually getting. My modem shows 256kbps, while any online test shows around 100 +/- 5. So where is all this money I’ve paid MTNL for 4 years gone?

Apparently, I’m not the only one. Almost every person, regardless of what plan they choose seems to begin from slow speeds and it takes complaints about slow speeds to get them to raise your limits to what you paid for. Out of 17 people I spoke with, only 3 began their internet connections with the speeds they paid for. 4 of them complained about slow speeds a couple of times, and it was increased. 1 has a recurring problem with speed on a connection that should give him 512kbps. He complains, it goes up, and is slow again after some days. 6 others with the 512kbps night unlimited plan had never checked the speeds they got since they mostly used them for surfing and downloading when they were sleeping, but on my insistence checked and were angry to discover that they were not even getting half the speed the plan charges them for. The others were miscellaneous cases with complicated stories of plan changes/problems and not much relevant to speed.

My husband thinks I should go to the consumer courts. However, the problem with this is that consumer courts would like you to first approach MTNL, at which point they readily increase your speed – so then you don’t really have a complaint left for the court.

What I am looking at is this default “setting” that cheats people on a regular basis till they complain. If their billing system can refer to their records of my plan and bill according to that, why can’t their speed system refer to the same plan and provide according to that?

In MTNL’s own words, they are not providing a broadband service, since their speeds are not exceeding 256kbps.

Oh, they have the capacity – I’ve seen lightening fast MTNL connections. Incredible speeds, and real value for money. The thing is, you have to not just pay for it, but make sure that you test the speed you get and insist that they give you what you paid for.

What would be the electricity bill for the additional usage of the computer when my downloads took over 5 times the time they should for over 3 years? Who compensates me for this? Maybe we need a PIL.

I had been meaning to submit my site to online directories for a long time, as many people said its good to be listed, and links and all that.

Some surfing brought me to Submit Edge, which offers submissions to 750 high PR directories for 60$. The site really looks like these guys know what they are doing, and have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, etc. Kush Infosys Pvt.Ltd. which runs the site and service are based in Mumbai, so I thought that I’d be giving business to someone from our town. Sounded good, so I paid them, filled in their form with the link I wanted submitted and careful descriptions.

Done, right? Wrong!

Once I received acknowledgement of my payment, there was complete silence on their end.

As you see, the submissions should have been done in two weeks. As the duration came to a close, I started wondering what happened of the services I had booked, and wrote them an email. I got a response saying that it will happen soon.

Finally, about 3-4 days after their stated time was up, I got my “submission report”. Imagine my horror to see:

1. The main page of the first site I was submitted to (PR7) had links to adult sites!!! Checking a couple of days later, the entire directory was gone and replaced by some video site in some language I don’t understand.
2. The second site in the list doesn’t have a category for where they claimed they submitted by link to.
3. The third site has a domain name with random letters, and is listed as a PR6 site, when in reality it has no PR at all.
4. In fact, many of the sites had random letter domain names.
5. Their High PR list has exactly 21 directories that state a PR of 5 and above. Please note that these also aren’t really all actually High PR, as the third point shows.
6. From there on, it is PR4 and PR3 till 41 and goes downhill from there.
7. Not a single incoming link from these sites points to the link that was submitted (which I guess is a good thing, though it defeats the entire purpose of the exercise)

Aghast at what I had paid for, what I was getting, and what it could potentially mean to my site, I emailed them with my findings to receive no response at all. I tried calling them, but kept getting through to an automated mailbox.

I filed a dispute under PayPal, upon which I got a response within hours from them offering to replace links with problems or provide new links.

Not desiring new links of this kind, I asked for a refund, and escalated my claim out of an unnecessarily overdeveloped sense of responsibility so that PayPal could see what their services were being used for, and other buyers could be protected. Turns out, PayPal wasn’t particularly interested if their sellers use their services to cheat people, as long as there are no goods involved. What is more, they did no investigation of any kind, but automatically shut down my claim because:

As stated in our User
Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It
does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods
received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a
refund.

This is mentioned in the PayPal policy as intangibles not being eligible for consumer protection.

However, the payment in my account allowed me to create a dispute, even though there was no shipping address provided, and I clearly mentioned “services” as the transaction type and the dispute was successfully created about something PayPal had no intention of looking into, or resolving. It allowed me to escalate the dispute into a claim, upon which it was automatically closed.

This is clearly a strange and problematic service from PayPal that unscrupulous providers can exploit to their advantage, because it gives the illusion that the dispute will be investigated, when in reality what happens is that it gets discarded and finalized as closed. No investigation happens, and while justice is implied, it actually removes all options a claimant has in the system. Thus, even when the seller might have initiated some kind of compensation, he is actually released and essentially set scot-free to lather, rinse, repeat with some other gullible consumer.

Additionally, the fake service provider actually gets the credibility of having disputes against them dismissed by the “authority”.

So, to summarize:

• Don’t pay anyone for any service online, unless you trust them.
• DON’T trust PayPal’s dispute system unless you are dealing with tangible goods, regardless of what their dispute form says.
• Don’t know about other submission services, but SubmitEdge is clearly a fraud.

For whoever is interested, this is a sample report of submissions made, and if you want something like this associated with your site, go ahead:

The Horror Submissions Report from Submit Edge

People agreed, disagreed, but had something to say.

Many of my feminist friends didn’t agree with the ’sympathy’ I had for the menfolk. According to them, it was this softness that kept men dominating women. I disagree. I think, if I react with fear or rebellion, I’m still negatively impacted by the dominance. If I have my own opinion that is irrelevant to what a “man” might want me to think, I am me. Free.

Today, a friend passed on an article in Tehelka by Nisha Susan on this subject, and I was once again in that discussion space, where we talk about women, and men and other things great and small.

It echoes so much with what I want to say. She puts it far better.

The fact of the matter is, as a society, we handicap our men and women. We no longer live in a world where the physical “weakness” of women is an issue, yet we continue measuring our worth by those scales. Today, we need all kinds of skills to be functional people. Communication is no longer a woman’s realm. Neither is earning for the home. Yet, a man entering a kitchen is a cause for wonder. An exception rather than the rule, as though one area of his home is not a natural place for him to be in.

I’d love to say that men do this to women and subjugate them and all that, but on a subtle level, I see women encouraging this stereotype (particularly in home matters) far more than the poor men, who never were in to have any say on the matter. It is often the mother who will coddle her sons and keep them from developing that competence.

The age-old power struggle between men and women is entering a new era. One where women call the shots, and men don’t even realize it. It is quite narrow minded to see things in black and white. No one is an island, and all relationships, ecstatic or unhappy evolve from a series of choices, attitudes and transactions.

I used to be active on a few online forums for ‘abused women’, where the pattern seemed to be that women in despair could have anonymous conversations with other women in similar conditions or people who wished to make their lives better. After spending some time there, I realized that the moderators of the forum were decided that women were abused and needed saving, and were inclined to assume that often without any rational evidence.

To them, it was evidence enough that the woman was unhappy and talking about it over there.

While I understand that people feel deeply about the ‘underdog’ which in this case seems to be indentified as women in general, we are not helping matters by encouraging people to simply cry about their circumstances. In fact, we disable the women from looking at workable solutions by firmly categorizing them as victims.

The problems with this kind of “blind support”:

• No one knows the other side of the coin – is the woman really abused, or does she see all conflict where she doesn’t get her way as abuse?
• Every action from the husband is attributed evil intent. Yet, a fact of life is that most men (particularly Indian men) have no clue how to go about communicating in close relationships. What seems like a deliberate attack on the woman is also quite likely an inability to come up with productive means of communication.
• By calling the husband the villain, we are polarizing an already difficult situation by removing all middle ground and calling things black and white.
• By speaking of the husband in such villainous terms, we encourage the woman to see herself as helpless against overwhelming odds, and take away her belief in her own power to diagnose her situation and take appropriate action (other than leaving the husband)
• In many cases, leaving the husband is not a very practical or useful suggestion to the woman, particularly if she has an unsupportive family, children, lack of money/skills relevant to financial independence, etc.
• It can take a heavy duty quarrel between a husband and wife and turn it into something insurmountable. In other words, a healthy verbal expression of differences can be turned into the end of a relationship through blind advice.

What bothers me the most is the assumption that not only men are insensitive and cruel clods, they are evil in intent.

From what I see in life around me, I see men more handicapped than evil. Our culture has rarely taught a man to say “I feel insecure when you look attractive in public” – they are far more likely to throw out a cliched “you shouldn’t wear clothes like that”. This, while quite irritating to the woman on a symptomatic level, holds undertones of a man’s desire for his wife, his wish that she see him as her only option, because he thinks that she could find far worthier options, etc. While it is confining on one level, on another, non-verbal level, it is an incredible compliment to his wife.

The challenge is not in breaking relationships. That happens all over the place, all the time. The challenge is in empowering people to life in freedom and openness, in helping them be happy. It is in assisting people to see beyond stereotypes, and recognize that there is strength in women, there is gentleness in men, there is bossiness in women, there is jealousy in men…. It is time to get the full scope of being human in all its vibrant colours out from the shadow.

Its time to see that as women, we have all the choices men have and men don’t have the same. It is time to let those choices truly empower us, rather than become tools in petty struggles of power that hurt. It is time for men to find help in looking at more productive ways to express themselves before those bottled emotions burst out as unreasoning aggression.

It is a tremendous burden today’s man bears. Unknowing, softly, somewhere the tables are turning in a very threatening way. Women are smart, they earn well, they are confident, they don’t really have any needs of survival and safety they need men for, they are not intimidated by the basic survival tasks like figuring out food, they are often smarter, more attractive…. on the other hand, with women doing so much, it is getting more and more difficult to be the “MALE” when they are overwhelmed by domestic matters, exist as equals in the outside world, earn about the same, etc. It is difficult maintaining an image of superiority that is deemed essential to be acknowledged as a man in society when in most cases they are pretty much equals.

It gets worse, because women taking on typical men roles are seen as strong and in increasing numbers, while a man taking on a woman’s role is seen as weak. The social stereotype is still swinging from prehistoric branches. Everywhere a man goes, there is an abundance of strong, confident, capable women leading their lives just fine without needing any protection – the protector is largely redundant.

There are few places to express their superiority. Often, this makes men very unsure of themselves as men. I have heard clients call themselves eunuchs because their wives earn more than them and expect more from them, which they feel unable to handle. I have heard women clients call their husbands insensitive and themselves victims because they have no way to deal with the unreasoning bursts of anger.

Its sad, that as a society, we have both men and women living in fear of the other gender. For isn’t it fear that makes a woman shut her mouth when a man raises his voice or hand? And isn’t it fear of not being listened to, of not being acknowledged that makes agression necessary to make a point?

It takes a lot of courage for a couple to evolve into a space where a husband may decide to work (or not) from home if he wishes while his wife takes on a job. Or for a wife to sit and watch cricket while the husband cooks a meal as a matter of routine. It is equally difficult for a woman to stop thinking of herself as infinitely superior for earning more than her husband (because she believes the stereotype – the man should earn more and thinks she is great, or her husband is worthless). Or for a man to look at his own higher salary as a matter of his worth as a competent professional rather than a husband.

Gender and identity are closely linked. To truly evolve as a society, we need to question our assumptions.

Just woken up and discovered that I’m not going to get anything to eat and drink till I have a bath first. You’d think a pregnant woman would get a discount when it comes to strict rules on food and drink, but not so. The rules are even more strict for me, so that the evil rays of the sun don’t mess up my unborn child.

I woke up in a sour mood, and hunted for some reading on this eclipse. I found this article in the Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/City/Mumbai/Solar-spectacle-marks-Sun-day-for-Mumbai/articleshow/4804912.cms

I enjoyed reading it. The ‘pregnant pause’ where women don’t want delivery or discharge during an eclipse, really sums up the attitude of our relatives. It was embarrassing to get advice about when to eat and what time to avoid peeing! For God’s sake – pregnant women have little choice in the matter. Does anyone think I go to that special room all the time as a hobby?

Other gems include not looking out of the window and not looking at a computer screen for fear of the rays harming the baby. Where is anything written that it is so? Some guru pulled it out of his hat, and the gullible masses swallowed it whole.

My mother-in-law was utterly serious as she told me that not following all this will result in a deformed baby with a cleft lip and what not!

As I wait for the bath water to fill….. another side effect of this eclipse is that there seems to be a water shortage – the water seems to have run out 3 hours before usual…. so filling the water takes longer on the back up tank. Looks like everyone and his cousin is washing off all kinds of bizarre influences from their bodies.

I’m getting itchy about all the meaningless fear floating around. I need a bath too!