Income tax: Are salaried people innocent?

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague. He was quite unhappy as government is not rolling back the hike in petrol price. He explained how petrol is costly in India and state and center government almost put 100 percent tax on it.

I explained reducing petrol price will affect the oil companies. Government will anyway collect tax. Reducing tax to maintain the price is one of the options. But it has other implications such as fiscal deficit. Then he explained how only salaried class is only paying tax where as others are evading it. And how government spends money for freebies which adds to fiscal deficit. And the talk went on.


I agree with him that government should ensure people pay right tax, but do not agree with him that salaried people are honest in paying tax. As there is deduction at source, most salaried people can't do much in evading tax. However many company structure their salary, so that the tax paid will be less. Some of the money they pay as fringe benefits in stead of salary. People forge their rent receipt to evade tax. People go and make forge medical bills to avoid tax and so on. So salaried employee evade the limited amount of tax that they can and businessmen do it with more as they have a better scope of evading tax.

We the salaried people make bulk of the purchase from the shop. My personal observation is most people prefer not to pay sales tax and get the duplicate bill/no bill. By doing so, we encourage the businessman not to show his income and go ahead cheat.

Astrology is an engineering act

This is subject which needs some understanding of astrology. It is not about getting the prediction, rather it is the prediction methodology is mature engineering methods and how astrology is part of engineering.

As an engineer I have the habit of looking details in an engineers eye. I found astrology uses many of the engineering techniques. This is the list of things why I think astrology is an engineering subject

1) Horoscope: What is horoscope? It is the snapshot of the universe when a person is born with the place of birth being the center of the universe. It tells you the relative position of planets with respect to the place where the person is born. Engineers use the maps more than others, so astrologers use engineering to get somebody's details. The same goes for prediction of a year or horray astrology. The crux of prediction is the relative position of planets.

2) Pattern recognition: Astrology uses pattern matching to predict the details. It uses patterns to figure out which house belongs to whom and how to predict based on the position of a planet at a specific position. This is pattern which is defined and its practiced based on pattern matching.

3) Separation of concern: Astrology uses separation of concern to predict the certain details. If you want to look at the age of a person look at 8th house, for property look at the 4th house and so on.

4) Derivation: It uses derivation to find out the responsibility of each house. 12th house is the house for expenditure. 12th to 12th is 11th house is the house of expenditure of expenditure (savings). 5th house is the house for first child. So 5th to 5th 9th house is the house of grand children and so on.

I will add more details in future.

Is India for Indians?

Rahul Gandhi said India is for Indians, and 99 percent people think it. I am with him in the first statement. I have no idea about the second statement and wish it were true. I want to know a little more deeper about his thought. Whether he is meaning Mumbai is for Biharis(No insult to Bihari brothers, you are fantastic set of people) or India is for Indians? In case he is talking India is for Indians, what are the places belong to India?

I know Kashmir is not for Indians, and for Kashmiris. Article 370 separates it from rest of India. Kashmir is even not for Kashmir Hindus who were thrown out from the place. Mr Syama Prasad Mookerjee was killed in Kashmir for visiting it. Does Mr Gandhi think in line with Mr Mukerjee? Or he just thinks Mr Abdullah was right in impriosioning Mr Mukerjee and Kashmir is not for Indians.

Mr Gandhi is more interested about Bihar and UP votes (Congress performed very badly in UP and Bihar since 1993). He is least interested with India is for Indians. I would salute him, if he can tell the same thing in Kashmir or Nagaland.

Phishing a threat to Internet security

I recently get a mail from a spammer From: "Bank Of India" to upgrade my Bank of India account. I do not have any account, so thought of checking how phishing works in internet. And what are the common steps that needs to be taken to protect yourself.

I clicked on the link, chrome is able to detect the phishing, where as Windows took me to the log in page. It has the proper security certificate. It has the image that it secured by verisign. Where you can log in using your user details. And when I provided any user details, it gives me an error message saying account details is not correct. Clicking on any link gives me 404 page not found error. The Phisher takes the user id and password information put by me and uses it to do any activity in the bank. I was safe as I don't have any account in bank of India and was aware it is an attempt to phish.

What about the users who does not know about it? How does one differentiate genuine mail from that of a phisher?
1) Banks send personalized mail where as phishers send bulk mail.
2) Bank has domain name registered for their bank, where as phishers use name or the mail id as bank but not the domain name. Sometimes they use domain names which are close (instead of icici.com they use icicibank.org or something simillar). So if the domain name is not right, then it is possible from some phisher
3)Use mozzilla or chrome in stead of IE. One more reason why I am a Google fan. Chrome is able to figure out a phishing site from a genuine site.
4) Do not go by verisign security from the image. The image is publicly available. Check if the site is really using https and certificates are valid. In this case verisign secured page was coming from a http page.
5) Do not provide your user name and password and click on upgrade, rather check some other functionalities, and whether the pages are there.
6) Don't go to the bank site by clicking on the link from mail, rather go to it by bookmarking it. It ensures you go to where you need to.

A question: Understanding the Business of airline agents

I was booking a flight ticket from Bhubaneswar to Bangalore. I looked for the flight details in makemytrip.com. It gave kingfisher as the cheapest flight (cost was my primary concern and time being the second one).

I checked the same in Yatra.com. It also provided Kingfisher flight IT3446 starting at 12.40 PM is the cheapest one. Fairs are almost comparable. Yatra was quoting 5,660 where as makemytrip.com was quoting Rs 5663. I was looking the price at kingfisher. It was quiting 5,649 with 250 flying miles. So I decided to book the ticket using kingfisher as it is the cheapest one for the same service.

I look at the business model of makemytrip.com or yatra.com. They do spend money in writing the software, buying hardware and getting all the data and maintaining it in their database. And providing high availability (high availability costs a lot, its not cheap). What ended up is I used their service to route to the appropriate site. Had the Indian airlines cheaper in Yatra,com, I would have looked at the price in Indian airlines in stead of kingfisher.

As a business user I may not be doing the right stuff for makemytrip or yatra, but as a rational user I look for lowest price for the same service. I believe there will be many users like me who uses Yatra or makemytrip for search but not to book.

If that is the case, then mykemytrip.com or Yatra.com is not going to be profitable business. They need to provide tickets at cheaper price than the airline itself. They do provide hotel bookings at cheaper price, but I don't need it either in Bangalore or at Bhubaneswar. I am not sure if the hotel bookings can be done at the hotel's site at a cheaper price.

I am confused how the business runs for them? How do they beat up price competition from the airline itself? What are the added advantage they provide to customer, so that customer uses their site, not that of the airline.

I have no clue, if anybody has some idea, please put them forward

IPL and Pakistani Players

None of the IPL teams bid for Pakistani players for the 3rd IPL. As a cricket lover I was disappointed. As a Bangalorean I would have liked Afridi in Bangalore team. Pakistani players deserved better than being left alone.

As an Indian I am happy. Pakistan needs more than one way to be humiliated. When Pakistan does not listen to India and Indian government is incapable of taking any action, it is better to give the message in one form or other. Let the pakistani people get the humiliation. Let the message be in economic than that of a military. Lat Pakistan feel how it feels to be alienated.

IPL, Shivsena and Australian player

Currently The Shiv Sena has threatened not to allow Australian players to play in Mumbai. I am fully with Shiv Sena about we should not be silent about attacks on Indian on Australia. I am fully with Shiv Sena IPL should be patriotic. The money is spent by Indians.

But what is patriotic? Not allowing world class players play in Mumbai? handling racist with more racist way? What will be the outcome? More racist attack on Indians by Shiv Sena equivalent people in Australia. Hey Shiv Sena guys, are you not attacking on Tamil, Bihari and UP guys in Maharashtra? If so, how are the Australian guys different than you or you are better than them? The Australian attackers and you do have the same thought and represent different people. Hey Thackrey, you are worse than the Australian as you are followed by a group of people and can make your statements public. There are racists and attackers in Australia, but nobody dared to say, let us attack any Indians as they take our job. Whoever are doing it and for whatever reason are violating the law and do not have guts to make it public. You dare to violate the law and justify your statement.

I am not a fan of Australian players for their attitude. But they are the best when it comes to entertainment. IPL is more of entertainment than anything. Why should we stop them?