Destination Infinity's Blog, page 40

Vegan Gulab Jamun Recipe (Delicious Indian Sweet)

I hope you remember my post on why milk may not be an optimum diet. Consuming milk also contributes to cruelty towards animals. That’s why I feel Going Vegan is a healthy and ethical lifestyle option. (I am not a Vegan myself yet, but I am trying to become one.)

That doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice tasty foods. Today, I bring to you a guest post by Preethi Raghav, a passionate Vegan, who will share the recipe to make tasty vegan gulab jamuns (without using milk). Why not try making this delicious Indian sweet at your home this Deepavali?

Challenge: Selfie @ Taj Mahal and Back in 24 Hours

This week, we took an adventure-challenge: To go to Agra – Taj Mahal, take a Selfie, and come back to Chennai. All within 24 hours.

How? Catch a Flight to Delhi, Take a Train to Agra, Visit the Taj Mahal, Take a Train back to Delhi & Catch a Flight back to Chennai.

Our flight took off from Chennai to Delhi at 4 A.M. on Monday morning and we landed in Chennai at 6 A.M. on Tuesday morning. If you don’t consider our waiting time at the Chennai airport on the first day, we almost achieved our goal!

My Autobiography: When Life took a U-Turn in XI Std.

This is a difficult post for me to write. That’s because, my life took a U-Turn from the glories of Xth Std where I had finished second in my class and fourth in my school. In 6-8 months, I found my rank slip to 25+ in XIth Std., and even worse in XIIth Std.

I always took academics seriously and my results reflected that. One thing changed in XI – I shifted from CBSE to the *dreadful* Matric system where one had to memorize even Maths problems (Millions are forced to do just that in India).

I hated this new syllabus and this new board. When I hate something, I hate it with all my heart. I was sitting before books in the evenings, but was not able to study. I mean memorize. Maths, from being my favorite subject became my worst nightmare. Not that other subjects were faring any better. Computer Science was an exception though.

The more I tried to study, the more I ended up not studying. For someone who has always been focused on academics, this was a disaster.

I even remember when my Maths teacher from CBSE met my Maths teacher from Matric and I happened to pass by. The CBSE teacher said how good I was in Maths, and the Matric teacher was wondering why because I was (by then) put in a special coaching for slow learners!

My situation became that bad in such a short time. The worst thing was, I was helpless. The final results in XIIth were fine actually, but it was nowhere close to what I aimed and I did not get an admission into BITS Pilani – the primary reason why I shifted to Matric from CBSE.

***

In hindsight, I think, these difficult periods are very important in life. Nature has its own way of teaching life lessons and I learned a very important lesson: Academics is not the only thing in life!

This bad academic performance continued throughout the rest of my academic career. That meant only one thing – I couldn’t take up a traditional ‘techie’ career that most of my friends got into.

Thank God I didn’t.

That’s why the difficulties I went through this period were so important. They forced me to see that there is life beyond academics.

These difficult times were the foundation for all the risks that I would take later on.

Because, by then, I was used to failing. And I was no longer afraid of it.

Destination Infinity

My Autobiography: My College Friend

College friendships are always special. We can easily remember our college friends over a long time, without much of an effort. The above photo was taken 4-5 months back, but our friendship goes back to seventeen long years – all the way back to 1999 when I joined college.

This friend, Prasad, sat one bench behind me almost throughout the four years we studied Engineering. There was one more factor that quickly brought us close – along with another friend called Praveen, the three of us were batchmates during most of the Practical classes in those *wretched* electronics labs.

This guy – Prasad (now working as a scientist in Finland) was the nerd among the three of us. That meant he used to complete the lab sessions, he used to write the observation notes, and he used to write the record books. The remaining two of us will just copy from him! It’s important that every batch has one nerd, I tell you

Tree House @ Munnar, Kerala: Our Experience

Before a couple of months, me and my wife wanted to go to a themed tour, preferably somewhere near. After some research, we zeroed-in on Tree House & Boat House packaged tour offered by Sree’s Tours & Travels, Kerala. First, they arranged our stay at a Tree House in Nature Zone Resorts, Munnar, India.

This post is about our Tree House experience.

This is the Treehouse where we stayed in. The resort was a few K.M. away from Munnar and we had to go in their jeep for about 30 minutes on ‘rough’ roads, to reach there.

We were not sure what to expect in a ‘treehouse’ as our research showed few treehouses inside jungles on which one had to climb using a ladder or rope. Fortunately, these tree houses had wooden steps or pathways. However, this pathway was slippery during rains. 

This is how the treehouse looks from below. Don’t you think it’s a challenging construction, with just ropes and wood? No wonder they charge good money for staying in this – they need to maintain it also! Packaged tour operators may offer you better rates than booking directly – that’s what happened with us. Be sure to check both options.

This is one of our neighboring treehouses. These treehouses have electric connections – so they come with lights, water heater, mosquito repellent, tea kettle, etc. There is no fan inside – it it not required because of the extreme cold temperature of the hills of Munnar. One air heater might have been useful, at least for me – as I cannot stand too much of cold!

The net over the bed has been arranged nicely, don’t you think? The net is required because insects are frequent guests, perhaps due to the location. One stick insect was as long as a long-ruler! There are abundant birds around the area and they keep chirping. The room service is good – we got our tea/milk refills even when it was raining.

The view from the balcony was excellent. I am not showing it here because it’s similar to the last photo shown below. I guess since treehouses need to built around a tree, the trunk passes right through the room. Here is a photo of the trunk from inside the room –

Overall, we were happy with our stay in Nature Zone treehouse. Their food was great and they even had a campfire. They had some activities and games, but because of the constant rains in the evenings we were not able to explore much of those.

This pathway from our room to the reception/restaurant will always be memorable to us, especially during the nights when we had to walk up and down. Sometimes, during light rain, and we had to be so careful not to trip and fall! Also, there were all kinds of sounds by insects around us and we were not sure when one will choose to fall on us! We loved the mystery element added by this long sloping pathway

Freecharge App: Bill Payments are Fast, Convenient & Secure

Freecharge app enables consumers to pay/recharge their mobile bills, data card bills, DTH subscriptions, metro, utility bills like electricity, gas, broadband/landline, etc., using a single app. This post is about the highlights of a bloggers meet organized by Freecharge at their premises to explain the various features of the app.

Welcome: The Monday morning kicked off with the bloggers being served delicious breakfast in the Freecharge cafeteria. They were welcomed with goodie bags having a Freecharge Tee Shirt, a coffee mug, some tasty cookies and stationary for the day.

Freecharge Tour: The group of bloggers were taken around the work space and were introduced to various teams running the show at Freecharge. They were introduced to the Mission Control team which includes SRE, Dev Ops, cloud automation, cloud security & IT, the marketing group, the Analytics team, QA, The Design Mafia (UI & UX), the product managers, the payments team, the technology team, the mobile team!

Up, close and candid: Post the tour, the bloggers were welcomed by the CEO of Freecharge, Mr.Govid Rajan and the group had a long candid session. Govind spoke on two key areas – user interface & experience (UI/UX) and security – and how his team of 300 odd people are working round the clock to deliver consumers “first class experience”.

UI & UX:

The fundamental principles that dictates UI/UX strategy for Freecharge is ‘No typing only tapping’ and the transaction should happen in less than 10 secs. The emphasis is on ‘faster checkouts’ in anything and everything consumer does in relation to payments.

Govind demonstrated this by doing a recharge on his phone in less than 10 secs, you heard it right – he uses a prepaid connection just like the majority of Indian consumers to understand their psyche.

He spoke about the features like ‘Bill Payment Reminder’ and ‘Auto Pay’ that have been a direct outcome of the fundamental principles mentioned above.

Security

Govind spoke extensively on the aspect of security – the systems that are in place – so that consumers can have a secure payment experience.

He said that Freecharge has built its own (in-house) risky transactions management platform and has a dedicated risk & security team that looks at patterns so that they are always ready to respond to any and every kind of fraudulent actions possible. The platform has been built purely on the basis of Indian data and not global data – which makes it even more robust and trustworthy.

He added that passwords of users are never stored in the Freecharge system. All passwords are encrypted using one way non-reversible keys which makes it impossible for abuse. Freecharge has actually assigned every single bank account of the country to pin codes and have a database of risky transaction pin codes.

The eye opening fact was that in terms of risky transactions Freecharge is at 1/7th of the Indian benchmark which is better than many top financial institutions.

Govind explained that the systems at Freecharge are designed to study 500-600 parameters of the mobile phone and over time have become robust to raise flags when a suspicious transaction are recorded. Elaborating more, he gave example of the attack on Yahoo wherein Freecharge reached out to all its users who have a registered Yahoo account and made them to change their passwords.

He said that there are systems in place wherein ‘lock-out’ can happen if a consumer tries beyond ‘x’ times to login and is not able to login.

Freecharge has deployed a number of proprietary technologies to deliver best in class security. It is compliant with all major security standards such as PCI-DSS compliance. The wallet has very stringent protocols on wallet velocity, device fingerprinting, device encryption and identification and hold limits which are designed to trap and eliminate fraud.

The proprietary technology ‘On-the-Go-Pin’ (OTP) fulfills the RBI’S mandate for two-factor authentication and does not require even a single additional investment by retailers or a customer, making the transaction secure, swifter and in less than 10 seconds!

Govind concluded the elaborate discussion on security by saying “security is our number 1 priority! We have been voted as India’s most secure start-up and the 2nd most preferred wallet”.

Following Govind’s session, there was a panel discussion with Ishan Vaish Director-Products, Fareed Jawad Vice President and Principle Product Architect and Varun Arora, Sr. Product Manager for Risk and Frauds. The trio touched upon various features in the Freecharge app like WhatsApp money through Freecharge, Speed Pay etc.

An upcoming feature, ‘AutoPay’ was also introduced. Users can now activate AutoPay and completely forget about their recharge and bill due dates. Also, the category of ‘donations’ was introduced wherein users would be able to donate money to various NGOs using the Freecharge wallet and also get the certificate to claim tax exemptions.

Varun Arora covered ‘Fraud and Risk’ in the next segment and how Credit Card theft and Account Theft are part of the game. He explained how we at Freecharge are performing high level fraud checks to minimize and tackle these attacks.

The group broke out for lunch post this. The day ended after a visit to the Customer Service team in the building across the road. They were told by Mr Velu, AVP Operations that most of the customer queries and complaints were addressed within 20 minutes that they came in throughout 24 hours of the day and 7 days a week.

Conclusion: This was a session to get up, close and personal with Freecharge and led by the CEO the team at Freecharge shared lot of interesting facts about Freecharge and how they are relentlessly working to give consumers the best digital payment experience in the most secured way.

A Few Interesting Photos from #UrbanTreeJourney

Urban Tree is a construction company based in Chennai. Today, a few of us bloggers were invited to the #UrbanTreeJourney event where their staff showed us around few of their upcoming projects. In this post, I present to you a few photos taken from three of Urban Tree’s upcoming residential properties in Chennai – Wow (Medavakkam), Oxygen (Perumbakkam) & Fantastic (Vanagaram). I will write a detailed blog post about this visit, the company, and their apartments in my other blog – Chennai.buzz. I will link it from here once it is ready.

For now, enjoy a few interesting pics clicked by me in this event:)

Destination Infinity

Chocolate Sculptures @ AAHAR Expo 2016

Today we went to the AAHAR 2016 exhibition at Chennai Trade Center, Nandambakkam. Here are the pictures of some interesting chocolate sculptures displayed there for a contest. Yes, these objects were made using CHOCOLATE :)

























































Destination Infinity PS: How's the new layout and animation? I am using a plugin called Elementor for these frills!

Selfie with Kabali!!

And you thought taking a selfie with Kabali is very very difficult?

Eka Dantaya Vakra Thundaya Deemahi (Cute Dance by KG Kids)

On the occasion of Vinayaka Chathurthi (Ganesh Chathurthi), have a look at a cute dance performance by KG kids for the song, ‘Eka dantaya vakra thundaya.. deemahi’ sung by Shankar Mahadevan. According to the Youtube video description, this dance was performed by Blooming Buds Montessory Palakkad kids.

Isn’t the dance well choreographed? I wonder how little kids are able to remember and perform all the steps for such a long time!

Happy Vinayaka Chathurthi/Ganesh Jayanthi to you all!