Exploring Southern Sri Lanka: Bentota and Galle

This summer, I visited Sri Lanka for my internship and had the opportunity to explore the fantastic island nation. I landed in Colombo when the Sri Lankan new year celebrations were going on (mid April) and therefore decided to take a trip down South to the beautiful little towns of Bentota and Galle.

How to Reach

International Flights from Chennai take about an hour to reach Colombo. From Colombo, you may take a train from the Colombo Fort railway station to Bentota. There are many options in terms of the International Airlines, with Sri Lankan Airlines providing jumbo jets for the journey.

Sri Lanka - Two Months On!

It has been almost two months in Sri Lanka, after Unilever decided to send me to conquer this nation for the internship (just kidding!) And here I am with yet another blog post about the experience in a South Asian country unlike any other!

Sri Lanka: First Thoughts

It has been such a long time since I blogged that I feel something like this Led Zeppelin song - "been a long time, been a long time, been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time!"

As I was racing towards the other terminal in Chennai, I suddenly realised what I had in store for me. Two months in a foreign country all alone - as if that was not enough, I hadn't slept the night earlier chatting up with some old friends and I was practically in a trance state. By this time, I realize the earlier sentence is getting too long and I need to abort, or risk failing the Flesch test.

Cutting to the chase, I am in Sri Lanka for my internship with Unilever (and I have been given a palatial bungalow - more on that in a later post). I will directly go down to the crux of the matter and let you know what surprised me the most (or least).

The WearYourStyle.in - TrendzVenue Scam - DO NOT BUY

A few weeks go, I saw an ad on Facebook for WearYourStyle.in and order 5 T-shirts for Rs. 1700. It took some time to get them, but to my surprise, I was shipped only 4 (even though the invoice mentioned 5 of them!)

I contacted their customer care through email (when you email contact@wearyourstyle.in, contact@trendvenue.com replies) they asked me which item was missing from my shipment. That was a week ago, and there has been no reply from this on this matter hence.

Kolkata #BergerXP IndiBlogger meet, Marketing Insights, and some Blogging Tips

4 years, 4 long years. That's how long Kolkata bloggers have been waited for a blogger meet. Thankfully, I am more of a Nomad and I visited the Kose IndiBlogger Meet, which coincided with my IIM Indore interview. Being that pseudo Kolkatan that I am, I knew about the rich heritage of the Oberoi Grand. Add to it the spice of an IB meet, and I knew missing it would be stupid. What's more? I got my mother into it too.

If you know me, you would probably know that I am a developer (yes, I still consider myself one!) and developers are introverts. Introverts are good at blending into a crowd, and not stand out. In the previous meet, I had done so successfully, and managed to talk to others too, but this time I had Mamma with me, which changed the dynamics.

I got Published!

The title says it all.

Wait, what?!? Published? Not self-published, I got published published. If memory serves me correctly, not long ago, I was struggling to complete those writing skill questions back in 12th standard. It's been a long journey since then!

How to use request.PUT or request.DELETE in Django

Those of you who use Django might know that using request.PUT or request.DELETE on Django doesn't work. This is because Django doesn't construct dictionaries for such "verbs", and you need to work with request.raw_post_data or request.body and parse it to get your data (Go ahead, give it a try, while I have a cookie!)

If you are creating a simple REST API, you are not going to have a good time unless you are working with a framework.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could use request.PUT just like the dicts request.POST and request.GET After finally searching online, I have stumbled upon a way to do just that.

You can find the code on BitBucket.

    if request.method == "PUT":
        if hasattr(request, '_post'):
            del request._post
            del request._files
       
        try:
            request.method = "POST"
            request._load_post_and_files()
            request.method = "PUT"
        except AttributeError:
            request.META['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'POST'
            request._load_post_and_files()
            request.META['REQUEST_METHOD'] = 'PUT'
           
        request.PUT = request.POST

What you do here is simply change the request method back to POST, reload the variables and rename the request method and request.POST dictionary. A nice hack to get your job done.

Zico, the ISL and ATK

Zico might have been a great footballer, but the White Pele is perhaps one of the best players not to have won a World Cup ever. Maybe that's why he considers qualifying to the semi finals of the ISL as one of the greatest moments of his career. It's commendable how he has engineered the uphill task after a poor start by FC Goa to the tournament.

The moment I entered the Salt Lake Stadium, I knew the crowd wasn't going to let Zico go away with a victory, a result that would eliminate the home team Atletico de Kolkata out of the tournament. As the starting XI was being announced, the stadium cheered every name. The presence of 36 year old marquee signing Luis Garcia on the bench, raised doubts on his fitness, but Kolkata seemed to go with whatever they had.

And I'm back!

It's been a long time. A very long time indeed...

It's been so long that the once familiar Blogger interface seems alien to me. Due to my sabbatical, I must admit that I had thoughts of leaving this blog altogether and moving on to a new one, but recent events have convinced me otherwise.

Random people have asked me why I have stopped blogging. I had no idea so many people read this blog - and that they would miss my posts. But the one thing that wanted me to start writing again on this blog was during a job interview.

I had cleared the first level of interviews in a company, and the moment I walked into the room, one of the interviewers asked me - "How is your blog?" (The fact that I have neglected this blog in recent times might have contributed to me not making it to the said company.)

Apart from my readers reaching out to me in real life, I am going to start writing again because I am fresh out of the placement season at IIT Roorkee - a place where students are only as good as the packages they bag. I have a lot of things in mind - about the placement process, the selection procedure and a lot of other things - and I am going to share them on this blog soon (albeit in a safe way- to make sure I don't get in trouble with certain people).

To the readers, I would like to sincerely apologize because I have been away for a long time due to my own selfish reasons (the freelancing pays well, you know!) But watch this space, I am going to share my experience soon.

Swelling in your Galaxy S4's battery- here's how to get it replaced in India

Although the S5 is out, Samsung is probably still working hard to get the S4 issues fixed. After a rather late upgrade to Android Kit Kat, you must wonder how important this ex-flagship device is for Samsung. I usually write on cribbing issues, but here's one about a good thing- how I got my Galaxy S4 battery replaced in India.

The battery swelling issue has been well known in case of the S4 and Samsung has acknowledged this issue. In fact, it has been giving free replacements in some parts of Europe. Why not India then? Perhaps, the customers are spoilt kids who couldn't care less for a few thousand bucks?