Banking adventures, earthquake and bollywood

I dont know why but today, I logged into statcounter site which keeps a log of the visitor activity on my blog. It was quite heartening to see that my blog is now featuring prominently(relatively speaking) in google searches and I am registering a few random hits on this webpage. However looking at the hits closely, I found a pattern that most of the random hits were on the issues I have raised in this blog rather than my usual random bollocks. But, I can only pity the plight of those visitors after they have read through one or two of my posts.

I have enough ammunition to write a blog today but not enough time, so I will try to flick through these random bits rather quickly and then in the end come to a more serious topic. First of all, for a change I had a happening morning today. We in Gurgaon, experienced a rather "mild earthquake" today morning around 4:30 AM IST. According to news articles, they quote the intensity of quake around 4.3 on richter scale. However, I must confess that of all the quakes I have experienced in my life, this was the time I was most scared. One of the reason for my fear was that I was sleeping on the 4th floor of a multi storey building. And given the fact that the rules and safety precautions are thrown out of the window by real estate developers, I did not have much trust in the buildings to hold for longer/more intensive earthquake. But, everybody is fine now, thats all what matters now.

Then I watched Goal starring John Abraham, Bipasha Basu and Arshad Warsi. I do not know names of other blokes who were in the movie. It was a typical bollywood movie without any imagination, full of clichés and uber predictable. Bollywood movies would never understand what team spirit is, and why is it important in football? Bollywood will always throw in random superhuman players/heroes which is so untrue for football. Cricket is a game of 11 individuals where football is game of 11 team members playing for a common goal.

Finally, the most important rambling of the day - In the first week of this month, I deposited a cheque in the name of my land lord as my monthly rent. I filled the cheque deposit slip with name and ICICI account number of my land lord. I also wrote down my phone number on the cheque and the deposit slip so that i can be contacted in case of problems. Then, about a week ago, I received a message from my landlord that he hasn't received any payments for this month. I checked my bank account, the payment was deducted from my account with the name of my landlord on the transaction details. I, then, checked the account number of my landlord and account number on the copy of the payment slip. They were not matching. I had writeten wrong account number while depositing the cheque. This rang bells in my mind. Ideally, the payment should not have been processed if the account number and name of the account holder do not match. I went to nearest ICICI bank and checked with them on the issue. However, I was told that only the cheque beneficiary can talk to bank about this issue. I asked my landlord to kindly check with the bank. It turned out that since account number and name were mismatching they had withdrawn the money from my HDFC account in the name written on the cheque and put the money in their "hidden account". They duly credited the cheque amount in his account. But the real question is what if he hadn't noticed that rent payment is due this month. What the fuck, if the cheque beneficiary hadn't noticed it, which I am sure happens in quite few cases, they would have kept all this money for themselves. I would call this as an act of sophisticated fraud. Large, public/private organization involved in this kind of corporate frauds should not be condoned. Corporate frauds are one of worst kind of crimes and should attract stricter punishments than other individual crimes of violence because corporate crimes are committed by educated people who know the consequences and effects of their actions.

Thats the end of my ammunition. Thanks for reading.