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Showing posts from August, 2026

Credit Cards: The EMI Marketing Craze!

No doubt, the EMI has been an integral part of modern living. The home loans , the car loans and the like are meaningless without the EMI tenures and installment calculations . However, of late, the Credit Card issuing banks seem to have gone crazy over marketing of the EMIs. Even for spends as low as a thousand bucks you get the message to 'convert'. They make it overpoweringly easy for you--just click yes and select the tenure, and it's done! Not only that! If your card bill consists of quite a few EMIs, some banks even give you the option of paying your bill in EMIs too! Yes! At certain times it's very useful to be able to split up a good amount, like when buying a consumer durable , into easy installments; but it gets downright irritating if you're reminded (repeatedly) to 'convert' for every possible spend.  It's obviously very profitable for the banks who at the present tumultuous times seem to believe that 'tiny drops can make the ocean...

The Ghosts That Haunt Books and Authors!

It’s only natural that in today’s digital world readers as well as writers know about many writers/authors, particularly those having international bestsellers, without even reading their books. Same here! One such author is James Patterson who has been a prolific writer of numerous novels quite a few of which are bestselling ones, although I’m yet to read any of his books. Now, why am I talking about this author? So suddenly and without any reference to the context? Nope! There’s indeed a reference and a very interesting one at that! I’ve received an email from him! James Patterson! I discovered that while checking the spam before deleting forever the mails inside! The name is there in full with a some added letters/numbers to it and, of course, sent from a Gmail account, as is the norm. From my experience for the last few years I immediately knew it was a scammer or a con book promoter. That it was directed to the Spam could well be due to my action over the years to mark so many...

Not Worth It!

  The contrast and the irony of a writer! Several years back I celebrated the achievement of a million views of the previous version of this blog. I just did the formality for formality’s sake as I was well aware of the real scenario. I started my blog in all sincerity and the zeal of a writer enthralled by the coming of a desktop to my writing table and the exciting opportunities of writing online. Back in 2006 when I had my personal computer I started contributing articles/stories/snippets to many of the online magazines and article directories. Then I started my blog the next year and for two years or so found little time to do justice to it. I really opened up from around 2010 and by that time views were increasing. I consider the year of 2012 to be the most productive when I think I wrote blogposts almost every day. At that time Google was having a very prestigious page-rank algorithm . The page-rank number for my blog was zero at first, then 2 and then it climbed to a respect...