$urpri$e

There are small surprises in life that give us much more happiness than their monetary costs ... Getting a box of your favorite chocolates as gift ... finding the long forgotten 500 rupee note in the jacket pocket ... one can think of numerous examples ...

Today I had one such small-joys-of-life experience ... I got a cheque ... not too much in value ... but totally unexpected ... It was the payment for my piece in "Men's Health" ... I remember writing that stuff with no expectation of getting paid for it (Had I known maybe I would have written it more carefully) ... I was under the impression that people wrote such stuff just for the kick of it ... but then the cheque came ... and it gave me a high that no drug (at least none worth the cheque's value) could have managed ... :-)

Makes me wonder if one can sustain ones self just by writing opinion, insight and analysis pieces. There are a truck load of topics out there ... eco, Int relations and trade, health issues, climate issues, race/religion issues, rich-poor issues, moral-immoral issues ... If you can think about it , then you can write about it ... there can be many interesting pieces on many interesting topics ... but the point is - will people like to read them ??? will someone pay for them ??? does anybody apart from Vir Singhvi(or is it Sanghvi?) make a living by dishing out his style and guile, cheers and fears, vices and biases, fakes and takes ..et cetera et cetera for public consumption ... and then make a good life out of it ...

All you journalists out there ... tell me ... is it possible to make ends meet just by writing off your heart's content ???

(It's very unlikely that any journalist will ever read this post ... so the question passes to anybody who has foggiest idea about the publishing industry :-))

* I remember that I had promised a piece on Sudoku .. and I will definitely keep my promise some day ...

Radio Ga Ga

Sometime near the beginning of time, when I first started off blogging, Delhi was already a quasi-modern city. Even in the ancient days of 2004, the city boasted 3 or 4 FM stations. Some of those stations were passably good, some weren't. One knew which was which - There weren't too many alternates and each station had its musical leanings (broadly angrezi, punjaabi-based-khichdi, akaaswani-based-oldies+social-message-trash). They also had well separated frequencies- one knew them by heart (hardly surprising since there weren't too many channels ... moreover it helped if you receiver had the tendency to lose "stored stations list" on each power cut)

All this has changed now.

Delhi, these days, has well over 11 FM stations and the list is growing fast. I found this out when I sat down to configure FM channels on my mobile phone (small miracle of convergence ... sometime in near future I hope to write about configuring a few zillion TV channels on my "portable electronic sustenance thing" - PEST) . Now my phone also has the "feature" of assigning channel-names to stored frequencies - This forced me to spend about an hour trying to figure out the names of various FM Stations ... it was not a very difficult exercise, the RJs helped me in this ... every 5-10 minutes the RJs tend to announce something like "its a gloomy day and you are listening ABCXYZ FM". On the whole this might look like a huge waste of time, but it wasn't - my efforts revealed two well-hidden facts - that "Meaoon" is the only FM station which is "just for women" and that "Gyanvaani" is Delhi's only full time "educational" FM radio channel ("educational" should not be confused with "educational films" like the classic legend "mysore mallige" which used to be afloat in hostel LANs)

So here's the current list of Delhi's FM stations. (hope it helps you in configuring your PEST or in case your receiver has the habit of losing "stored stations list" helps you in tuning into your fav FM station)

91.10 MHz - Radio City
92.70 MHz - Big 92.7 FM
93.50 MHz - Red FM
94.30 MHz - Radio One
95.00 MHz - Hit 95 FM
98.30 MHz - Radio Mirchi
102.6 MHz - AIR FM "Rainbow"
104.0 MHz - Fever 104
104.8 MHz - "Meaoon" 104.8 FM
105.6 MHz - "Gyanvaani"
106.4 MHz - AIR FM "Gold"


Point to note ... While most channels are separated by multiples of 0.8 MHz ... this rule does have some exceptions ... I wonder if some sort of optimized-station-separation is mandated in the policy for spectrum distribution.