April 2008 Archives

India's inflation is increasing. To stop it or bring it down, the finance ministry and government of India is taking some what they themselves call "intelligent counter measures".

What they are doing is decreasing import duties, or making nil import duties so imports cost less, and banning or reducing some exports so more of goods are left within the country for indians to use.

While this might sound good measures for those who think "increase supply to meet demand and prices will reduce", it beats the idea that india has to be more richer to be self-sustaining and to absorb the costs of inflation and a growing economy... .because when you stop exports, you stop fund flow into india from other countries through trade.. and when you encourage imports, you increase the fund flow OUT of india to other countries in trade.

So, the government is technically just stopping India's growth or controlling the growth thinking that is what will bring down inflation.

There are a million ways to handle inflation financially, and I am surprised the "intelligence" of the ministers in the government can think of only two, one as discussed above, and two: to go beg all companies and industries to reduce their profit margins and bring down inflation.. which is actually the government's job and not the industry's or the company's.

This simply shows how much control the government has on the market and the economy of the country, that they have to beg the industry's or just stop the country's growth.. It is like either this extreme low level decisions, or that extreme high-level decisions to stop growth which is only done in case of emergencies.

By far it simply looks like we got a huge bunch lazy cats who don't want to spend time finding ways to solve problems, which is what governing is all about.

Next time, you pray to god, pray that god give some "intelligence" to all those ministers in the government to think more than talking more.. and do more than reacting to media more..

And Hence, in India, all big companies like Tata, Airtel, etc., and big industries like cement, banking, etc., are allowed to cost their products any high, looting money from people, and finally government will take a measure where all these companies push the money to people outside the country by importing lots and lots of goods. Your money and my money doesn't get rotated in trade within India, but as soon as we know, it gets out of the country.

What is happening is so gruesome a murder to the economy of the country, that this is all going to blow up big issues for the future, or, as usually it happens, the issues get pushed under the carpet and huge huge amounts of farmer loans are erased from the books further, as if India earns all the money in that sector.. agriculture.

Spider on their website..

this is a website of an active sports accessories company. They have done it so nice and different, you will think real good animation films on websites are not real far from happening.

venom.spyder.com

Animating 2D or 3D characters is a painful process.. very much so that Sir Walt Disney is said to have taken many years to create the Mickey Mouse films, and also those were the days of traditional animation, where every frame of a scene is painted or drawn on paper.

If you even have worked on softwares like photoshop or corel draw like a hobby to drawing or designing something, you know how much time and pain it is to even design a proper webpage.

So, after all that when you go and see a movie like "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc", or "Cars", you open your mouth and gape.

Because every single frame of the movie which plays only for 1/24th of a second (in digital filming there are 24 frames per second) , has the characters, the environment or background graphics, with color, texture.. and to add to the complexity, they have lighting and related object surface color and shadow variations.

To put it lighter, one frame of a scene in animation movies is equivalent to drawing what you see below on a computer or a sheet of paper with whatever tools you want on earth (except a copier and printer).

So, that explains how much work should be done to make a movie like what Pixar does .. and how much effort to be Pixar, because they are the best today.

Obviously for any animator their work is inspirations, and people look forward to learn from their experience. Knowing this Pixar has interestingly put-up a brief of their process of making animation films on their website. The page mentions only the core steps or milestones of the animation film making process, but that itself would overwhelm you.

Pixar - How We Do It

What I learnt New from their processes..
> The animators make the frames of a scene and have the animation as digitized sequences, but this is not the movie that gets released... what we see as a film is a video recording of the sequences played up on their computers.

> If in a scene, a character raises its hand, the animators probably create one or two steps of the action or only one or two frames of the scene and the computer generates the in-between frames that show the motion of the hand as a smooth one.. the animators of course fine tune these in-between frames manually as necessary.

This is one other major advantage digital animations have over traditional animations. The first advantage obviously being able to correct or modify the art work easily, instead of redrawing the whole thing on another paper again.

> They use server farms just like all big software enterprises do.. they use a bulk of machines (farms) to render each frame. Probably this means redrawing the background, the characters, the lighting, etc., all into a frame, or integrating every other teams work into the final output.

Pixar says, on an average each frame with such bulk of servers, takes about 6 hours to render, and some complex frames take up to 90 hours too.

Interesting bit of information they had on their website.

Related link:
Blend it... its easy to make 3D graphics yourself

Living in a country like India could get very exciting especially with the way companies throw up bad to worse services for competitive to high costs for the Indian market. Most Indians, "these companies assume" are not people who know a great deal about the services and providing little call-center based customer service would do to keep them happy.

And not many Indians seem to know or bother that many services like mobile services, internet services, web hosting services are costlier in India than even some developed countries. Not because the technology is difficult here, but because the market demand is huge here and if not jack they can always sell to some harry.

And when you don't get proper services, or importantly correct and proper bills, all you try to do is call up a customer service number and ask. But most customer service numbers in India are run by executives who are themselves less informed and are not well trained to answer questions properly.. and to add to it, you will cry over most of their English and their understanding of your questions in English.

First steps when u have a problem with an Indian company:

1.
If you can, ask the customer executive whether he knows your local language like Tamil, kannada or Telugu, etc., and explain him the problem politely. No, Shouting you should do only when they don't understand what you are saying and wasting your time more than 30 mins on the phone and also not transferring your call to a senior officer after your repeated request.

2.
If the customer executive puts you on hold, or says senior officer is busy can you wait, or says senior officer will call you later, .. simply say you are willing to wait how much ever time it takes and wait for about 20 mins and then they will put you on to a proper guy.
Why that long?
Well like said before.. indian market has high demand on all daily life services like what I mentioned.. so the companies sign-up too many customers and since india is a rising country, the companies are learning having a huge customer base. this might take another 5-10 years for companies to ripen up and provide proper services and help to customers, though they showcase today itself as if they have everything in place.

Thought waiting on hold is a pain both by patience and money spent on phone call, if you are complaining for a mobile service problem to your mobile operator through the same mobile phone, you will most definitely not charged for the call, and most often your calls to such phone numbers will be toll-free.. verify this before your call, so you know you can wait on the line without worries.

3.
Call centers misunderstand their trade. Customer care numbers are all call-centers and the executives there, most of them atleast are not there for solving your problems, but for just a temporary job. so the executives at the first level of the call will try exciting things like cutting off the call if you shout, or putting you on hold and cutting off after 10 minutes.

If you survive through that, and call repeatedly, you will talk to some manager after sometime, and the manager will really most often resolve your complaint like a breeze... make sure you tell him that he take some effort to train his subordinates on the information on handling this complaint, so no other customer or not you again have to wait so long for a useful answer.

4.
Yes, If nothing helps.. or if you are frustrated beyond your limits, you raise a consumer complaint.

This below link will help you understand how to raise a consumer complaint in india, even provide you some links to find addresses of consumer redressal forums and courts near you.
ICRPC: Consumer Guidance for Filing Consumer Complaint with Consumer Court in India

I took you through these steps so long rather than telling you how you can raise a consumer complaint in court, because the process of making a case and submitting it to court and getting a resolution is for obvious reasons much much time-consuming than even the number of hours you are put on hold on a customer care call.

Also, you might be interested in website based consumer complaint forums.. like mouthshut.com, your own blog(if you are a popular blogger), or many other websites you can search from our favority on the dot search engine google.com

Finally, for more information on consumer redressal forums and processes, there are many useful links that will come up in a google search for "consumer india" or "consumer complaint india"

Important end note:
All the best.. but DONT give up.. or become tolerant to problems with services provided by indian companies or even indian government. There are always forums for redressal.. just because some people like us ignore the process because of laziness or willingness to spend the time seeing not much benefits off the result, we are encouraging the "bad service is not bad" attitude with indian companies, government and people.

Remember, more than you, your complaint and your struggle to resolve it is going to help future consumers from not having the same problem or at least not the same bad way like you had to go through.