I wrote this post a while ago before my impending trip to Canada. I often rant about the inept service industry back home only to be silently reminded that the customer is not treated any different here either. Below is my phone conversation and my follow-up rant. Let’s hope I am not deported for my rant.

Excerpt of my call to the US Consulate in Canada

Welcome to the US Consulate Services Live Representative Call Center. Your call may be monitored for training purposes. If you are calling from the United States you will be charged $1.59c per minute. (why am I being charged this fee?)

Please have your credit card information with you. Your card will be charged a $35 flat fee and adjusted according to your actual talk time. (they did charge me a sum of money for taking 2 minutes of their time and for not giving me any answers.)

(after keying in your credit card information you are immediately connected to a live person who asks for a reference number and passport information)

She: When do you need an appointment for?

Me: September

She: Umm sorry but there are no appointments for Septmeber. You’ll need to check back again.

Me: When can I check back?

She: Well it would be best for you to go back the website and refresh the calendar every 10 minutes.

Me: Every 10 minutes? Why?

She: Since appointments are added everyday for 8 weeks in advance.

Me: Is there a particular time I should be checking the site?

She: No, there is no set time. Appointments and cancellations are arbitrary but I think they are supposed to add an appointment availability today. So check every 10 minutes.

All I am thinking is after 2 hours of trying to fill an online form, pay fees for nothing gained, I am told that I need to check back a site for availability every 10 minutes.

Without going into too much detail I am sharing my own frustrations with a system that sucks in every way. Try filling a form online at a US Consulate site abroad, either you face errors or no explanations about what errors are. Form fields are ambiguous and there are no guarantees about the submission. So even after you have gone through an ordeal of filling out a very complex form there are no cues to inform you of what’s next.

In the past I have traveled to my home country and worked through details. Yes the process was cumbersome and the form extremely unusable. The overall experience of standing in long lines at the Consulate and being herded like cattle by your very own people is  humilating but all this pales in comparison to my experience in booking an appointment in a First World country.

Up until first grade I spoke and wrote in Punjabi when my parents decided to move back home and put me in an “English speaking” school. Teachers threatened to deny admission if I didn’t learn to speak in English in the first year of being there. Ever since then, my parents spoke to me in English at home and I began to write, speak and think in English. While I learnt to read and write Hindi as my second language in school, I never really attempted to improve my fluency in this alternative and poetic language.

So in a recent forum when Indian Usability & Information Architecture professionals began discussing Hindi translations for “interaction design” and emerging practices in their field, I was suddenly reminded of my lack of proficiency to think in Hindi. What would Usability or Information Architecture mean in Hindi? They can’t be literal translations as they would fail in meaning. But finding the right word is a challenge and the slew of posts have been discussing just that. I am curious to learn about the outcome if any. My sense is that this is going to be an ongoing discussion.

In the meantime, I’ll stick to English and hope that in some way I can practice my Hindi and begin to think in a language that offers a limitless ocean of creativity which when explored can create poetic intonations that English as a language fails to offer.

I just got back from India (well it has been almost 2 months but I need an excuse to post my first post of 2008) and while all the talk about burgeoning population, rising middle class and even bigger midriffs are certainly true, I was sadly reminded that India is going through an identity crisis. With every family’s dream to have their kids go to America and more Indians returning to India to live their king size, change is happening too fast. Emulating the west has become more important than finding what India can do best. Despite change some things are still the same. 2 weeks spent in my not-so “tiny” coastal hometown was enough time to immerse myself in the cog wheel of the Indian system and know that despite change, old habits die hard. Below is a peek into my version of the old India in 2008:

1. It still takes me a day to get home from a major city
2. Trains are never on time and air transportation is even better. They cancel without explanation
3. My mother still “saves” her money in a cash box at home
4. The cop outside my family’s business establishment continues to take bribes and let people park illegally
5. Movie theaters are still frequented by ruffians who guffaw at every love scene
6. Power cuts are unpredictable and part of everyday existence
7. Local courier service is still unreliable and you’ll be surprised if your package reaches a destination intact in 4 days
8. The cobbler who sewed my high school shoes continues to own his little shack
9. My nephew enjoys reading the same adventure books that I grew up on
10. Arranged marriages are still a common tradition

So while my India decides to have a makeover every year, with each year bringing new globalized chains springing all around my small coastal city and more English speaking youth with strange American accents frequenting these areas, the facade is just a lure. India is still young and will need another century to oust the first world and create it’s own identity. Eradicating red tapism and poverty needs to be more important than getting Walmart and Dolce & Gabbana to open up stores. I am hopeful that with this identity crisis will come a new approach and new way of looking at revitalizing India within it’s traditional boundaries and rich cultural heritage as opposed to changing it to be something that it’s not.

On my way to India I was stranded for over 12 hours on the runway due to bad weather. So what was to be a 4 hour flight turned out to be a 12 hour nightmare with a detour to another airport and 200 passengers just waiting to get home. While I can talk about the pains of being couped up in an aircraft with no food and small doses of water, I found reprieve and inspiration in WNYC’s Radio Lab podcasts that I had downloaded as a last minute effort to keep me company on the long haul. While podcasts have been gaining popularity around the world, I am a late adopter of this media. In fact I am a new podcast fan ever since I discovered the Radio Lab series. What Radio Lab does well is content and delivery, two key ingredients often lacking in podcasts. The content is intriguing and thought-provoking and the voices behind these series have a great style that keep you engaged for the 30 minute shorts. Each series is further broken up into 5-7 minute features that cover one aspect of the overall theme. My all-time favorite is the “Musical Language” series that breaks down music as a language spoken around the world. My favorite line “Music is touch at a distance” is what threads each feature into this podcast.

Download these podcasts

Every once in a while I am silently reminded of this thing called life. While I keep my instrospections away from public domain, this time I feel compelled to write, and forget that my life is compartmentalized into personal, public and private.

A father, a sister, a brother, a daughter - four deaths that have touched me in the last 4 weeks. Each week bringing a new wave of sorrow. Four incidents unrelated yet connected through me. I sense their pain and their loss yet there is nothing I can do. I continue to live my life the same way, just aware that there is life and there is this unexplained thing called death.

My work revolves around solving information problems and bringing meaning to information. Annotations are the lifeline of explaining these information islets with the goal of simplifing the blob. Emotions are high and patience a virtue and I sometimes forget that tied to every information problem is the sound of the beating heart.

And so I am reminded that outside the information microcosm that I am so consumed with, there is the meaning of life that I will never solve or comprehend.