Chirag Desai

I had a chance to visit Sula Vineyards thanks to a cousin’s location wedding and was suitably impressed with the locale. I’ve been to the Chaddsford Winery in Pennsylvania, USA a few years ago with a full tour so I was looking forward to this, especially since India isn’t really known for producing wine.

Opening with the fact that India is a “new world” wine country, our tour guide took us around the Sula Vineyard production facility, from the crushers to the fermentation tanks. The process seemed pretty similar to what I remember although this time around the tour guide had to deal with some gruelling questions on the quality of the wine and how it is maintained in India. I don’t think many were really satisfied with his answer, but I’ll tell you this, the vineyard is beautiful to be in.

While harvesting season is mostly in and around April, we had to deal with empty crushers and no bottling, but the weather on the other hand is probably a lot better this time of the year. After the tour, we stopped by the tasting room and the brownie just had to be tried. Sadly I was a bit disappointed — it was more a chocolate cake than a brownie, and looked way better than it tasted. However the overall atmosphere and feel weren’t dampened much.

The rest of the team nearby offered to try the house red wine of Sula — the Dindori Shiraz — which the tour guide raved about. I wasn’t fantastically impressed, in the sense, it didn’t give me the “Wow, that is a great wine” feeling, but it was a good wine — smooth and tasted good. There was a hint of berry as promised.

Overall, you should visit this place once, especially if you are in India. The tour and area seemed quite popular, with people swarming in over the weekend, with tons of little kids, much to our surprise. I’ll tell you this though, it makes a great wedding location.

This post is way overdue (months and months). This was my first attempt to make Black Forest Cupcakes and it was a success! Of course, there were those moments where I walked impatiently in the kitchen looking into the microwave while it was still on to see if the concoction of flour, eggs, cherries, melted chocolate etc was rising up in each cupcake cover. The cakes, surprisingly turned out to be soft and fluffy. Not to boast, but they literally melted in the mouth. Not sure if cupcakes are supposed to be that way, but who cares! I didn’t go with the conventional icing and instead changed it to a very light version of cherry icing. So there you have it, mission accomplished.

P.S. Please note that I am not that grand of a photographer like Dee or Chirag and hence my pictures are sad.

If you’re reading this, and want to catch up, here’s Part I and Part II.

Right, after realizing towards the end of the previous scenario that there was no hope in the angle I was taking, nor does a company like Reliance care much for the complaints of a dissatisfied customer, or his blog posts. However, the social media push somehow (details left out intentionally, sorry!) got me in touch with their head of enterprise services. I sent him this:

Dear Punit,

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read through this e-mail.

I’m writing with regards to my frustration by Reliance Support and Reliance Customer Care over the last month.

After only recently signing up with your broadband services, both at home and at our offices, my modem at home failed on 8th November. I filed a complaint …

[The details and facts specified here are pretty much outlined in Part I and Part II, so I’ll skip it here]

… and that I would need to e-mail broadband@relianceada.com to state my case and claim.

I have now had (3) e-mail communications back, each stating that no waiver would be approved because the problems had all been resolved within the committed time.

Sir, as an extremely frustrated customer, I wish to highlight:

• As a fellow IT person operating a NOC environment, I cannot understand how Reliance Support engineers can close complaints without (a) showing up (b) contacting a customer and most importantly © solving the issue
• I cannot understand why Customer Care are unable to do anything beyond reading that the technical/someone closed my complaint and that it is solved, and opening newer complaint numbers
• Repeatedly e-mailing broadband@relianceada.com only results in being told that the issue has been resolved even though it should be clear that I would not have had to make multiple repeated complaints in the same week had that actually been the case, and that failure of Support System to continue running on the same case number is the reason I have 3 separate ones.

After dealing with this unprofessional attitude, I request that

1. An explanation be available as to why customer complaints are being closed without problems being solved or at least some notification to the customer
2. I should not be paying for the period wherein Reliance technical team & support failed to restore my services (Nov 08-Nov 16)
3. Any additional charges that are incurred because of the delay in my resolution due to Reliance’s billing and support teams past the billing date be waived as well.

I believe that such a request is both fair and just considering the circumstances, and I hope we reach a speedy resolution; one that is not my cancellation of Reliance services from any of my locations.

Sincerely,
Chirag Desai

Summary:

• Original complaint: 140684488, 8th nov
• Second complaint: 140803041: 10th nov
• Final complaint (Durghesh): 141112992: 15 nov
• Billing complaint: 142081510 — filed nov. 30, 1.51 p.m.

I got 5 or 6 calls from different technical guys, all asking me what was the status of my problem. Seriously? After 5 or 6 re-explanations, I got wonderful sympathy from each one, “Yea that should not have happened” or “Yes that makes perfect sense, you should get a refund” and one going to the “Yea that part of support is outsourced to a third party and we pressure them to meet targets so sometimes they do that.” Are you kidding me.

Each one told me they would put in a request from someone in billing to call me. Three days later, my account is now suspended.

Hi Punit,

I’m hoping that the numerous calls I got from reliance last Thursday were a result of my e-mail to you. However it seems that no one really read my complaints, so the only people I got calls from were from the technical team. After I explained the case over and over again to some 5–6 different people, each person told me someone from billing would contact me because what I’m asking for makes perfect sense, and that it should be sorted out.

No one from billing has called and my account has since been suspended.

I’m sure you can’t blame me much when I say that not only am I dissatisfied with the service (and the complete lack of anyone in the team spending 3 minutes *reading* my complaints), but I really do not even wish to continue this conversation further.

Chirag

Not that it matters or anything.

Update, 20 Jan 2011: The issue was eventually resolved, and my last email got me a call from Billing who eventually sorted me out with a refund.

After writing a long & annoyed letter to Reliance, here’s what they offered:

Dear Customer,

We regret the inconvenience caused to you.

This is with reference to your e-mail regarding “Waiver For Service Faults”, registered under the Service Request ID 142081510. Please note that your complaint has been resolved with the resolution, the net not working complaint registered has been resolved within the given time period.

Hence we are unable to process the waiver.

Looking forward to serve you in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Siddhesh Pawaskar

Broadband Customer Care

Reliance Communications.

You may contact us through any of the following means:

Phone: 1800 3000 7777 from any phone (Toll free) or,

022–3033 7777 from any phone.

Email: broadband@relianceada.com

Website: www.rcom.co.in

You can book your service complaints online at http://cnm.reliancecommunications.co.in/cnm/web/genTTCreation.jsp OR through IVR while calling at contact center.

You can view your bills and make payments online through http://myservices.relianceada.com/launchAMSS.do for all RCOM services. Please register yourself on the portal. For difficulties in registration please write to myservices@relianceada.com

Please note that your message will not be delivered if it exceeds the size limit of 5 MB per mail (including attachments).

Requesting you to please create a shorter message (including attachments) with size less than or equal to the allowed mail limit in all your future communication.

The information provided is based on prevailing terms and conditions of the company, which are subject to change without prior notice.

This electronic message transmission contains information from Reliance Communications & is confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, beware that any disclosure, copy distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received the electronic transmission in error please notify us immediately.

Yes, their signature is that long, including their pleading request to keep our attachments small. Aaanyway, here’s what I responded:

The fact that I had to register multiple complaints during the same week is indicative of the fact that my problem was NOT resolved.

Your engineers fill out and close complaints as they please with no consultation with the customer; just because they say it’s closed doesn’t mean the problem is resolved or that your customer is satisfied. I would not have to register 3 separate complaints if the problem had been resolved in 24 hours and it amuses me to read such rubbish.

I have, as a result, posted my grievance against Reliance online on my blogs and elsewhere and intend to take this further.

Please have a manager call me to discuss disconnection of my service at home and office (I have 2 connections) as I do not wish to deal with Reliance any further if this is the attitude.

Suggest you speak to your team leader Durgesh and Supervisor Ujvala as I have spoken to both of them during this problem and I’m confident that they were not contacted to get information at all.

I do NOT consider this problem resolved, and I expect a manager to contact me by PHONE if you have any hope. I will contact your customer care to set up disconnection of my services tomorrow morning. I’m guessing you must be glad to lose customers this way.

Chirag

I wonder…but yea.

There is no regret in the inconvenience they caused me.

Finally, this morning:

Dear Customer,

We regret the inconvenience caused.

This is with reference to your e-mail regarding “Waiver For Service Faults”, registered under the Service Request ID 142081510. Kindly note that as informed earlier your complaint has been resolved with the resolution, the net not working complaint registered has been resolved within the given time period.

Hence, we are unable to process the waiver.

Yours sincerely,
Abhijit Athavale
Broadband Customer Care
Reliance Communications

How does one deal with such friggin’ brilliance? I don’t believe they are looking beyond a ticket closed by an incompetent engineer saying he fixed the problem without budging from his seat.

Part I of this saga is here.

Update: Part III is here.

My e-mail to Reliance broadband this morning following my issue. The issue might seem simple, but the principle bothers the hell out of me. I know what it’s like to run a Service Delivery team, with targets and closing times and whatnot. But the deplorable service some (read: many) ISPs take on makes me really wonder.

Is it because you’re pretty stuck with using them once you sign up that they don’t really have to worry about after-sales support and services?

This e-mail is only mildly edited from the original to remove personal account information.

My name is Chirag Desai and we have internet broadband from reliance at our home.

On the 8th of November, our modem failed. I filed a complaint number 140684488 with customer care, who told me the problem would be resolved within 24 hours. After waiting almost 48 hours, I called customer care again. I was informed that my complaint had been closed. I told the agent that no one even visited me, nobody fixed anything and I was still without internet. He told me he could not do anything about the previous complaint, and so was forced to open a new complaint, number 140803041 (opened nov. 10) and that the problem would be resolved within 24 hours.

I waited 5 days for someone to call me, follow up or even visit our house. No one did.

On the 15th of November, I called customer care again, frustrated that I was without internet for a week. I was told by the agent that my previous complaints had been closed and that the problem was resolved. I told him to please re-open them, but NO ONE HAD VISITED, I WAS STILL WITHOUT INTERNET. I then asked to be transferred to a supervisor.

I spoke to team leader Durghesh, based in Mumbai who told me he was extremely sorry for the inconvenience and that he would set up a new complaint (now complaint number 141112992, 15 Nov) and that he would make sure that my problem was resolved and investigate why my complaints had been getting closed without anyone showing up or actually fixing my issue. In the morning I finally received a call from a tech support engineer who told me he would visit. The following day, they replaced my modem (the previous one was completely faulty the engineer informed me).

When I spoke to Durghesh, I asked him how I could go about getting a waiver on my bill because I was without internet for over a week with pure failure on the part of Reliance. He told me that nothing could be done until the bill was generated but definitely I would get a waiver for the lack of internet. I called in after my bill was generated, filed a complaint number 142081510 and was told I would be notified within 72 hours. No one called back, SMS’d me or anything since then.

I called again today (Dec. 14) to figure out the status because I did not pay my bill since I expect a resolution to be reached first. I was told by Supervisor Ujvala to e-mail my issues in because my waiver had not been passed because my problem was resolved within 24 hours. This is rubbish. The line of multiple complaints is enough evidence in itself to show that my issue had never been resolved. The notes made by Durgesh should support this statement.

Please note that it is unfair to expect me to, and I do not intend to pay:

1. additional charges that should be waived because of a lack of internet which was the failure on reliance’s support team to solve my issue and
2. any additional charges that are incurred because of the delay in my resolution from reliance’s biliing and support teams, past the billing due date.

I expect a speedy resolution so that problems might be resolved otherwise I will be looking to cancel my account with reliance (both my own and that at our offices) because of extremely poor service, poor support, and poor engineers who close out complaints regardless of whether the issues have been solved or not purely to keep their closing times within their range despite not solving problems.

I expect a speedy reply with a resolution and a waiver. For a follow up, you may reach me on the number listed below.

Chirag Desai

Summary:

• Original complaint: 140684488, 8th nov
• Second complaint: 140803041: 10th nov
• Final complaint (Durghesh): 141112992: 15 nov
• Billing complaint: 142081510 — filed nov. 30, 1.51 p.m.

Update, not that it seems to matter:

Part II of this saga is here.

Part III is here.

Yes, geniuses, I do know that IE8 requires Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

However:

• They should mention that up front somewhere, not in itsy bitsy letters at the bottom
• The error message should say so — you need to upgrade to SP2 for example. To me, this reads like Server 2003 is not supported period, which is just infuriating.
• Finally, having to download this install using Google Chrome is just absolutely beyond me. (IE 6 on this machine, and IE7 on another one just kept crashing if I attempted to download IE7 and IE8 respectively).

So yea, I consider that a fail.

Finally, people should stop building IE only applications so I wouldn’t have to go through this at all.

Trying to get work done in India is…well, a mess. People here though really should work on ‘planning’ — thinking things through so that you’re preparing for the next step while you’re finishing up this one. So that, you know, you don’t drill a hole in one side of the wall only to realize there’s a column set on the other side and you can’t drill though, and now need to drill two meters away instead. Sigh.

Emily Shardlow

Last Updated: Dec 1, 2010

Select a subject, and you can pretty much guarantee that someone, somewhere, is blogging about it. One of the most popular worldwide topics is food, and here in the UAE, we have our own burgeoning community of food bloggers — people of different ages and nationalities who share an ardent dedication to all things foodie, from tried and tested recipes to local restaurant reviews and essays on memorable gourmet experiences.

Sally Prosser mycustardpie.com

“I’ve always liked writing, and find my style and rhythm when writing about things I adore: food, eating and cooking for friends and family,” says Sally Prosser, whose blog My Custard Pie offers a peek into the kitchen of a food-loving Dubai family. Prosser cooks attractive, inviting food, and peppers her posts with interesting observations in an open and conversational tone. The blog is updated regularly, with Prosser selecting recipes from her extensive collection of cookbooks, then adjusting them slightly to suit the demands of her family or the produce available in Dubai. She often accompanies the recipes with an anecdote, explaining why she has chosen them.

Prosser also has a quest to find “food with good provenance” in the UAE, sharing little nuggets of information about local food developments and detailed information on restaurants (not so much reviews, more descriptions).

Despite saying that she is still pinching herself over the positive response, it’s easy to see why this blog has garnered numerous local and international fans. It is for good reason, after all, that Prosser is regarded as something of a local food guru by her fellow UAE bloggers.

Dalia Soubra daliaskitchen.com

When you are already the co-founder and head baker at a successful bakery (Kitsch Cupcakes), writing a food blog in your spare time shows real passion. Yet Dalia Soubra adds to her site frequently and says she was inspired to start blogging when customers began making requests for her recipes.

Now Dalia’s Kitchen, which she describes as her “own little online food journal”, is filled with simple, achievable recipes that have a fresh, modern feel to them. Soubra draws on her Syrian roots and her time spent in New York and Paris for inspiration, and the dishes featured range from healthy dinners to interesting breakfasts, with some seriously indulgent cakes in between. Each recipe is accompanied by a few lines of text and it seems that Soubra is something of a home food stylist; many of the photographs are stunning — clean, appetising shots, with a hint of Donna Hay about them. This blog is well worth a browse, even if you don’t end up making a dish from it (although I suspect you might).

Laila el Baghdadi lailablogs.com

Spurred on by the belief that people underestimate Arab food, or simply don’t look beyond the hummus and tabbouleh staples, Laila el Baghdadi started lailablogs.com two years ago. Originally from Pakistan, but born and raised in the UAE, el Baghdadi has a wealth of knowledge to draw on, and her blog features recipes that have been passed down through the generations. The really impressive thing about this blog is its comprehensive nature. El Baghdadi posts pictures of each step of the cooking process, which is very helpful if you are making an unfamiliar dish for the first time. In a nice interactive touch, she also has a “recipe requests” section, which allows readers to suggest dishes that they would like her to experiment with and provide recipes for.

El Baghdadi has big plans for the future of the blog: “I’d like to translate everything into Arabic so that my site is fully bilingual,” she says. “Over time, I’d like to make it possible for users to create a personal profile so that the site can predict their tastes and make recipe suggestions”.

Arva Ahmed I Live in a Frying Pan foodonymph.com

The header on this blog reads: “Turning up the heat on my crazy obsession with the world of food” and Ahmed is certainly true to her theme. I Live in a Frying Pan reads like a diary of culinary experiences, featuring tried and tested recipes, restaurant reviews and details of the food sampled on her travels.

Having previously lived in New York, Ahmed says the experience opened her eyes to the multitude of ways in which food can be experienced: “not just eating and appreciating it, but reviewing, discussing, describing, debating, visualising, photographing”. As a result, when she moved back to Dubai, she decided a blog was the best way to keep these conversations alive — “to chronicle them over time and share them with others”.

She seems to have achieved her aim because her personality and dedication shine through. Her detailed posts are fascinating to delve into.

Rajani Mani eatwritethink.com

Rajani Mani describes her exclusively vegetarian blog as a means of sharing “food that tells you stories, food that’s handed down by generations of grandmothers, happy food that revolves around conversations and laughter”.

Although it does feature a fair few recipes (from a variety of different cultures), this blog is about far more than that. There are links to food-related articles written by Mani, photo essays and contributions from different culinary enthusiasts currently travelling the globe.

The blog has an intimate style: “With the food and the recipes came slices of my life laid out to be picked bare by people I don’t know,” she says. You learn about her reasons for being a vegetarian, or how a certain dish made its way into the family repertoire, and it is precisely these opinionated, personal snippets that make the blog so absorbing.

Anja Schwerin anjasfood4thought.com

If you are in search of interesting, inventive recipes, with the emphasis on health, then Schwerin’s blog, Anja’s Food for Thought, is a great place to visit. Motivated by a desire to eat more healthily, in 2008 the mother of two made a conscious decision to cut refined sugar and flour out of her diet. She began scouting the internet for nutritious, wholesome recipes and was inspired by the food blogs she discovered. With an increased desire to experiment with natural ingredients, Schwerin started her own “personal food journal and cookbook” and began posting recipes and pictures, often experimenting with vegan, vegetarian, low-sugar or raw food.

Her 15 years’ experience as a picture editor are certainly reflected in the quality of her photography; dishes are beautifully presented and many of the photos are striking. She tends to add to the blog two or three recipes a week (estimating that each post takes around two hours, plus cooking time) and says that it is “a hobby that I really love”. The blog has around 10,000 visitors per month, and Schwerin puts its success down to “posting healthy and tasty recipes regularly, together with mouth-watering pictures”. It’s certainly worth browsing through if you want to cook up some restorative, nutritious and unusual fare.

via thenational.ae

Yowza.

This morning’s Analytics report caused a well-founded exclamation.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking :)