This guy’s going to be get­ting a lot of calls for sure. 

Meet Sam­son, an auto dri­ver from Chen­nai, who has his own web­site, and incred­i­bly (yes, yes!) also turns on the meter!

When I think Chen­nai and auto dri­ver, my mind wan­ders to a jour­ney we under­took a few years ago — my sis­ter and I. We were just vis­it­ing South India then and decided that Chen­nai would form a part of our tour plan. We made the mis­take of try­ing to bar­gain with a auto dri­ver who was intent on rob­bing us. We paid him a per­fectly decent amount. 

What he did next, left us scarred for­ever. Despite my abil­ity to com­pletely for­get small details, I still remem­ber this inci­dent. He threw the money out of the rick­shaw and abused us. I thank God that we didn’t under­stand a word of Tamil. Phew! After that, I approach all auto dri­vers in Chen­nai with some amount of fear.

Sam­son there­fore comes as a breath of fresh air.

A Japan­ese tourist set up an email ID for him, a Brit tourist set up his web­site and a Dutch client gave him a lap­top! Only going to prove that nice things hap­pen to nice people! 

Okay, so I know who I’m call­ing on my next visit to Chen­nai. Though I have a feel­ing Samson’s cal­en­dar might be a lit­tle full. 

(And here’s another inter­est­ing auto dri­ver from Mum­bai via Twit­ter — he offers a 10% dis­count to newly mar­ried cou­ples and has a first aid kit in his auto!). 

I hope auto dri­vers in Ban­ga­lore, who don’t want to go any­where (and I mean, any­where except where you want to go) take a hint! 

Had quite a bad expe­ri­ence with makemytrip.com today. 

I booked a ticket online for a bus to Chen­nai in the morn­ing. After the pay­ment was done, the screen blanked out and I didn’t get a con­fir­ma­tion for my ticket. 

Then I receive an SMS with my book­ing ID and a mes­sage that my credit card had been charged. But there was no ticket for me in my mailbox.

When these kind of gaffes hap­pens, I also realised that they don’t call to tell you that some­thing went wrong. I had to wait for around 10 min­utes on their toll free num­ber try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened. The lady apol­o­gised and asked me to try after an hour. 

Later in the after­noon, I try again. After another 12 min­utes of hold­ing for some­one to answer, I get told that my book­ing is not done. My card is charged (!). And could I make the book­ing again? And not only that, pay again? 

Why would I want to book my tick­ets again on a web­site which can’t get it right? 

(Mean­while, I stum­bled across this when going through the Open Social Media Chal­lenge.)

It was a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence in Mum­bai this time around – we played tourists to the hilt. When you live in a city, I think you tend to miss a lot of things – fine details you don’t really notice as you rush about your daily work. Like that lovely Church behind Fort where I worked for a year or so – why had I never seen it? The beau­ti­ful old her­itage build­ings in Kalaghoda and Fort – never looked at them closely before. I had lit­tle time to stand and stare back then. 

The trip was a lot about food – vis­it­ing a few of my old time favourites and check­ing out some new ones. I think we packed in much more than we intended.

It’s become a bit of a tra­di­tion for me. Even if I don’t update the blog as fre­quently as I should, I make sure I do an end of the year post :-)

It’s that time of the year after all! The time to look back, relive good mem­o­ries, learn from the bad ones and move on to shinier, hap­pier days! There’s no time (or band­width) left now to look back on 2009 (I’m sure there will be more occa­sions!) but here’s wish­ing every­one a grand New Year! And as they say here in Sri Lanka — “ayubowan”! 

The misty moun­tains from Knuck­les Range, 27 kms from Kandy, Sri Lanka

More pics from Sri Lanka