Just happened to find this somewhere in my forwarded mails collection. Doesn’t it speak for itself?

Those following fuel price hikes in India would often remember the drama that happens on the day the fuel price hike comes into effect. If the price increase is significant, petrol bunks close early. Typical reasons include a lot of people rushing to re-fuel their vehicles to save a bit on fuel costs and some (very few) really silly minded petrol bunks trying to sell their stock at a higher cost on the next day.

This time we also had a Rs. 50 hike in the gas cylinder price. I happened to come across the drama played by the gas agency with people at my own home. This is what happened

We had a cylinder booked 2 days before the price hike. It was delivered the day after the price hike. The gas agency guys had the old price on the bill ( it was booked earlier right ). So far so good. However , they asked for the new price. Trained to handle such situations, we refused to pay. We gave the gas agency two choices. 1) accept old price 2) give us a new bill with new price. They refused to comply with both options and took the cylinder back.

We called up HP and promptly complained the cheating attempt by the gas agency. After couple of calls, the gas agency brought a new cylinder ( of course with a new bill ).

While we did lose 3 days in the process, at the end of it there was a satisfaction that we refused to accept bad behaviour.

What do YOU do in such situations????

Chutti TV has the TV show Dora the Explorer running in Tamil everyday. Having watched the effect of Dora on kids, I think it’s a healthy, wonderful show for children.

Each episode brings a new problem ( though similar most of the times ), that Dora and Bujji needs to resolve. The problem is typically finding way, tracking someone etc. What makes the show interesting is the interaction that it forces in children. For example, Dora would say “The little fox is going to steal. Tell the fox not to steal.” In tamil ( you need tamil unicode fonts ) , “குள்ள நரிகிட்ட திருட கூடாதுன்னு சொல்லுங்க” , and give it a pause, waiting for the kids watching the show to repeat after her. The good thing? kids register in mind “stealing is wrong”.

Few more things worth mentioning

• “Can you help to identify where fox is”(நீங்க நரிய பார்த்தால் சொல்றீங்களா?) -> helps to stimulate paying attention to detail
• “Lake, Bridge, Party house” (ஏரி, பாலம் , பார்ட்டி நடக்கும் வீடு ) -> repeating instructions and visual identification of objects make it easy for kids to follow, and make it easy to associate objects and their names in reality.

If you have kids ages < 6, you might want to consider letting them watch Dora on Chutti TV ( for Tamil version ), or buy the media ( I hope it should be available ). I often hum “டோரா டோரா டோராவோட பயணம் , புஜ்ஜியோட நீங்க கொஞ்சம் வரணும்” ( or something like that ).

Hats off to the designers of the show ( and to Chutti TV for an unobtrusive, helpful translated version).