Saturday, February 21, 2009

Destiny

The other day , I walked into a SBI branch to buy a credit card. People were obviously bewildered. You don't buy a cc, it is shoved into your face.  But yes, I have some experience in this feat, since I was attempting it for the second time, the antagonist the last time was hdfc bank. 

I told them I am self employed and all that. No, they will not be able to do a reference check in my office, none exists. 

The dude on the other end made a couple of calls and gave me the form to fill. I said, everything said and done will I get a CC. He said why not. For chrissake, confirm it. 

OK, he confirmed to me he will give me a cc, I need to put before an FD of 10k with them, and my credit limit will be 90 % of the fd amount.  Perfect. And what I knew and perhaps he didn't was that the fd would not be clean but would carry a lien.  

It's been more than a couple of months since I have been trying to extract a cc from HDFC also , so my whole argument was, I will walk into a psu bank, show them the savings account I hold, the education loan I am repaying and ..Eureka, they will give me a cc. Simple.

They simply said, no. Categorical. 

I made another attempt today. I directly went and met the branch manager. He said kiddo, well actually he did not, but I am a student of gonzo journalism so He said, kiddo, the SBI branch and SBI cards are two different companies and if they say no, I can do nothing about it. Bye. 

On the count of the OD against FD, I recall the LC I had sold to my client thrice. Yes I sold him the same product thrice, because both of us were doing that for the first time and were equally clueless. Each believed the other was knowledgeable, on a 110 % FD margin and he had screwed my happiness, and so had his wife. There was a post I guess on these pages where I had described that experience of woman shouting on me in a 15th floor apartment. 

Life has come one full circle. And pretty quickly at that. Irony is my word of the moment. 

My general response is to call somebody in Bombay and ask them to arrange for a cc, i don't know how. But I am keeping the jugad option as a last resort. 

Somebody asked me, do you believe in Destiny. And my impulsive response was ...sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. It depends on the ambient temperature. Now if you are someone who understand drifts and relative velocities and Kaplan turbines and mass flow rates and that jerk is actually the rate of change of acceleration, you will understand that well , to me it just doesn't matter what I believe and its correlation to how this world moves, changes, goes forward, steps backwards, improves and disintegrates. 

I am just a speck. Today. 

Another conversation the other day revolved around servo motors and stepper motors. I kept my peace without letting anyone know about a degree I hold in a particular branch of engineering, electrical. 

No comments:

Followers