MTDC Open Deck Bus Tour Experience

In the month of March when my Mother was in Mumbai for two weeks, I had a plan to show her a few signature places of South Mumbai. She was also very enthusiastic as some of the places were recently in news due to 26/11 attacks. Considering her endurance levels it was not a good idea to cover the places on foot and the alternative way of covering places in a rickety fiat taxis was not desirable.

Therefore, we opted for a conducted tour by MTDC Open-Deck-Bus Nilambari. The bus tour is scheduled twice in evenings, only on weekends. As suggested by the person at MTDC phone enquiry, we didn’t do any advance bookings, and got the tickets easily at the booking counter near Gateway-of-India just an hour before the start of first trip(at 7 pm).

Brand Equity Quiz 2010: Mumbai round

The Mumbai edition of Brand Equity Quiz was conducted at St Andrew Auditorium(Bandra), the same venue  where Landmark quiz was held two weeks back. The winner of quiz was Pradeep Ramanathan’s team from HUL,  co-incidentally he was part of winning team Haseena-ka-Paseena in Landmark quiz also. The major highlight of the quiz was the thrilling last round between HUL and Pramerica(lead by enthusiastic Megashyam). The quizmaster Derek O’Brein made it more exciting with his usual masalas.

Landmark Quiz 2010, Mumbai

The second edition of Landmark Quiz(mumbai) was conducted at St Andrew’s Audi, Bandra. As always it was a good experience, came across many interesting question and got to know about new facts. Since all of my Mumbai friends were busy with other high priority commitments, my plan was just to witness the quiz as a spectator. But at the venue, organizers didn’t allow me inside as the first priority was for participants and mentioned that spectators will be allowed if there are any free seats left before start of the quiz. Therefore, I decided to form a team on-the-spot to avoid taking any chances and end up missing the quiz. At the registration desk I met a group of two, Puneet Jain(alum of IIMC) and Akash Tiwari(alum of NITIE) who were hunting for a third partner. Without any second thoughts I joined them to form a team.

Need a flagship train b/w Mumbai and Bangalore

There's a need for a super-fast train service between Mumbai and Bangalore for the segment who cannot afford air travel every-fine-day and will definitely pay a premium for fast and convenient train service. The present so called flagship train connection two cities is Udyan Express and it covers the distance of 1153 kms in 25 hrs! A very poor speed when compared to other inter city trains. For example Jaipur-Mumbai superfast express completes distance of 1159 kms in 17h 40m. Mamta Aunty are you listening ? There's no need to think out-of-the-box for this problem, just introducing a Garib-Rath service should be sufficient.

My opinion on this appeared in 'letters to editors' section of Deccan Herald on Monday, 21st Dec 2009.

Core South Indian Food at Mumbai

Cafe Madras, Matunga

After trying out all major eat-outs at Andheri, somehow I couldn't not quench the desire to have core south Indian food. Finally it when I went to Cafe Madras, Cafe Mysore at Matunga twice in a weekend, once with my friend Tassa and other time with my batchmates. Not only one can get the proper south-indian taste, but also w.r.t price the food is very affordable.

Cafe Mysore - Oldest Restaurant in Mumbai for South Indian Delicacies.

Mysore Masala Dosa.

To have food in a darshini style compartment plates after a long time was a different feeling altogether.

Filter Coffee

Mysore Paak

To get there from Andheri:
Going Matunga from Andheri is relatively easy. One can take Harbour Line trains which start from Andheri at platform 6 and 7, get down at King Circle's station. From King's circle one has to walk(5-10 mins) towards Arora theatre to reach a park-cum-circle. At the junction one can find both Cafe Madras and Cafe Mysore. There are other famous eat-outs at the same place. Will try those in next visits.


View Matunga in a larger map

Brand Equity Quiz 2009 finals

[image source]

Rohan Khanna and Sandeepan Chaudhuri of Accenture(Delhi) lived up all the hype and emerged as clear winners of Brand Equity Quiz. The margin of victory was so high that the last buzzer round was played just to decide who is 2nd, 3rd and 4th. The venue of the quiz was Leela Kempinski's Grand Ballroom and the host of the evening was Asia's No.1 quizmaster Derek O'Brien. The evening started with two semi-finals(buzzer round) in which ten regional winners were filtered into four finalists Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore & Chennai.

Overall a decent quiz, but the suspense and intensity as it was in Mumbai regional round was missing due to over domination of Accenture(Delhi) team. IBM(Bangalore) came second in contrast to speculations done by media i.e. it's going to be contest between Mumbai v/s Delhi.

Some Questions: [in a random order, interesting ones]

• Why is the roulette wheel on a casino table is commonly known as "Devil's ring" ? --- sum of all the numbers on it (from 1 to 36) is 666, which is the 'Number of the Beast'.


• Cicardium rhythm stress is commonly known as ? --- Jetlag


• If RoI = return on investment, then what is RoTI ? --- Return on Training Investment


• Which company operates most playgrounds in United States ? --- McDonald's


• What is "Client Golf" ? --- Deliberately losing a golf game against a client for winning a business deal.


• Which five letter proper noun(as a part of username) was banned by yahoo mail for a brief period ? --- Allah


• What's so special about the company which has Australian Stock Exhchange ticker DPL ? -- Daily Planet is one of the first brothels(establishment dedicated to prostitution) to be listed on a stock exchange [read more].


• What are “chicken cutlets.” ? --- It's the common term used for a silicone bra insert that is used to create the illusion of larger breasts.[read more]


• What special thing was done when Pope John Paul II visited Hollywood in 1987 ? ---They removed the one 'L' from the sign to make it HOLYwood.


• What is Fong Kong ? -- Products with fake designer lables.


• This Russian has a European patent for a "Method of playing a lottery game" ? --- Gary Kasparov.


• Why for a brief period in 2003, banks in China quarantined currency notes ? -- SARS outbreak.


• Why in Oct 2008 a clock at Manhattan ran out of digits ? --- The 'National Debt Clock' ran out of digits because US National Debt debt exceeded $10 trillion for the first time.


• In the world of business, what is ABCD ? --- ABCD (Aaya, Bai, Cook, Driver) is a customer segment.


• One can find free ads of which organization in NCERT Class XI textbooks ? --- Indian Army.


• In early dot-com era five rivals of Microsoft were represented by an acronym NOISE N-Netspace, O-Oracle, I-IBM, S-Sun Microsystems, What is E ? --- Everybody Else.


• Which type of Mangoes are used to make Frooti drink ? --- Totapuri.

Landmark Quiz 2009, Mumbai

The first edition of Landmark Quiz Mumbai was held on May 1st 2009 at St. Andrew's Auditorium - Bandra. The quizmaster of the show was Navin Jayakumar. The quiz started off with preliminary round of 40 questions. For the final round out of 164 teams, eight teams were shortlisted . The winners of the quiz were the team by name -"Swami and friends". Overall the quiz was good but unfortunately there were minor goof ups and also there were some boring moments also.



Some highlights:

• It was first landrmark quiz at Mumbai. The annual city open quiz has been conducted since 1988 in Chennai. From there it was moved to Bangalore, Pune and now to Mumbai.
• Many questions in the quiz were related to Mumbai. There a few questions on common mumbai slangs and one-liners. Some of those questions turned out to be bouncers to us.
• The cut-off score for final round was 32. We were very far from it !
• Navin Jayakumar did the job well. But somehow he could not match the flair of Derek O'Brien. The spontaneous humor, suspense build in the last round, as done by Derek were missing in this quiz.
• The end goof up bit silly. The quizmaster had forgot that he has give trophy to the winners.
• 'Swine flu' was the buzz of the evening. Many teams had name their team based on it. In fact best team name was "Pigs Fly .. Swine Flew".

Winners

Questions:
[ I have noted that most of the questions .. will update here after composing it properly].

Brand Equity Quiz 2009: Mumbai leg

The Mumbai leg of Brand Equity quiz was held at Chavan Center(Nariman Point). The quiz was open only to working professionals in India Inc. So being part of student community(this year) the only option to experience the live quizing as an audience. The quiz master was Derek O'Brein. He kept the audience entertained with his usual spontaneous humour.


The format of quiz was similar to Landmark open quiz which had attended previously. The difference was that questions had something do with business. Overall it was a good quiz and Derek brought the house down many times keeping janta entertained.

Some highlights of the show

• Generosity in giving away audience prizes. Sometimes the entire row used to get hampers.
• Advice to Unilever team as they failed to qualifying for finals by 1 point : For next two years take a transfer to Indore as qualifying would be a cakewalk there.
• When AXIS Bank gave away some clues for a question without answering it, and SUN capitalized on the mistake to extend their lead. Derek said " AXIS bank is making sure that ICICI Bank(who were second) should not win this quiz!".
• The build up of tension and suspense by Derek when there were only two teams in the race. Without even acknowledging whether the answer of ICICI Bank was right or wrong, Derek called upon chief quest and his prize distribution volunteers to give away prizes to ICICI bank. Then he announced the show is still on as the answer of ICICI bank was right.

Some nice questions

• Corrections Corporation of America is the largest operator of _____ in the U.S.A
• You can win an ipod from the website nailthethief.com by throwing rotten eggs on whose face?
• Which district of Uttar Pradesh is nicknamed as Suhag Nagri because it fulfills everything a Suhagin wants?
• In 1983 Korean Airways flight was shot down by USSR for intruding into their airspace. After this incident what did then US president Ronald Reagan ordered the US military to be available for civilian use ?
• What is Poorism?
• What is wife acceptance factor ?

Find all prelims questions at
- The Curious Quizzer - BRAND EQUITY QUIZ -09 MUMBAI EDITION

Alibagh Trip

It was a holiday for Holi and my enthusiastic batchmates of PGPM planned for an outing to Alibagh, one of the nearest weekend getaway from Mumbai. After taking suggestions from mumbaites in our batch we decided to take a ferry to Gateway of India towards Alibagh.

As per plan we left Hostel at 6.30 am, took a fast local from Andheri to Churchgate and from took a taxi to Gateway to India. While some of us were standing in the queue, others including me roamed around the gateway of india doing photo sessions. 26/11 events have really changed our mentality. In contrast to my previous visit last year this time I chose to capture the image of Taj Hotel first, not the famous Gateway of India! Surely it was an effect of image getting burnt on my retina due to media coverage.

Ferry travel and Sea Eagles
At 8.30 am the ferry departed from the jetty and we were on the sea waters which were used by terrorist to enter into Mumbai. After 10 minutes of initial journey the ferry was followed by several sea eagles. They used to catch the food items thrown by generous travelers by using their maneuverability skills. Looked like it was a day-to-day activity for sea eagles. The phenomena turned out to be challenging task for me capture by camera. I managed to get a perfect composition after 25 attempts.

After an hour journey we reached Mandwa Jetty, from there we took a tempo to Alibagh. Our first obvious activity was having breakfast at an hotel near bus stand. The menu of the food items turned out to be very amusing. There were about 30-35 variants of masala dosas. After useless brainstorming I just ordered Masala dosa, Krishna and Sivaram ordered Idly Fry and Puri, just to minimize risk by diversifying. But in actual all three were not upto the mark. Then after getting suggestion from Kedar in second round I ordered for Misal Pav, a flagship product in many hotels of Maharastra. Takeaways from the breakfast activity, always have the flagship in an eatout.

Kashid Beach
After breakfast we took a bus to our final destination, Kashid Beach . The plan was to find an accommodation right next to the beach. But against our wishes the surroundings of the beach were deserted, I mean there were no concrete structures. Our accommodation hunting campaign ended after waking a km from the beach. After checking into the lodge we had light snacks and headed towards the beach skipping the lunch. Majority of the boys got into the beach immediately but I chose laze for a while on hammocks in front of one of snacks shop in the beach simultaneously enjoying scenic beauty of the beach.

Later when sunshine crossed its peak I decided to get into the water to enjoy the waves. But the water was hopelessly saline. I just spend an hour in waters and cameback to rest on the hammock. When the time was 5.30 pm, I got ready with my camera to capture sunset at the beach. In between we were regularly having solo-n-group photo session. After the sunset I handed the camera to Balaji and accompanied Puneet for a casual beach jog. It was an amazing experience on a nice, clean beach in dusk time. Later we were back to Lodge in order fresh up and desalt our bodies. Since we had decided to return by 12 midnight bus, we utilised buffer time to have dinner in a relaxed manner and also had ample time to play teen-patti.

Return journey
Just half an hour before the arrival of the bus, Sivaram came up with his theory that we won't be able get seats! As many people will be returning back to Mumbai after Holi vacation. The bus arrived at 12 midnight on dot and Sivaram was bang on with his theory. As the next bus was at 5 am in morning we decided to board the bus without any second thoughts. The bus was so crowded that we didn't had any room to stand. Initial part of the journey for half an hour I just stood on the footboard. Later we got standing at normal positions but no signs of getting seats. We made ourselves mentally and physically prepared to stand entire journey. To keep ourselves awake we engaged in some tit-bit discussion like 'As a manager what's the learning from this' etc. Even when we doze for a while, the jerky ride used to break our minimal sleep.

Finally we were back to Mumbai at 4 am and got down at Dadar. Then we decided to take first local train from Dadar station to Andheri, expected the train to be empty. But in contrast to our wishes the platform was fully crowded with people. We managed to get into one of compartment of the first train and again encountering a standing journey we got down at Andheri. We were back to hostel at 5 am concluding the memorable Alibagh trip.