How to book separate air tickets for minor kids accompanying their parents/grandparents, on return journey

Suppose you want to send your kids with their grand parents who are visiting and they have their return tickets already booked. Airlines won't allow to book tickets for kids (less than 12 years) alone or without 'unaccompanied minor' option. Unfortunately you cannot do it online, so you need to call the Airline call center and book directly with them. Before calling them make sure that you have the following details ready:
1. PNR number of the round trip ticket. (This is the one which the airline will tag the new ticket along with)
2. Flight number, date and time of the flight that you need to link the new ticket with.

Airline will create a new ticket and block for 24 hours for payment. There is option to pay via credit card over phone. But do remember that if you have the OTP enabled for credit card, make sure that you make the call from a different phone than the one tied to your credit card. Added advantage of paying over phone is that there is no convenience charge (300 per ticket for CC) involved. 

How to pay BESCOM ASD (Additional Security Deposit) online

If you have registered for online payment of BESCOM bills, you can pay the ASD amount online. Here are the steps:

1. Log on to http://bescom.co.in/
2. Proceed for "Pay Bill"
3. In the Pay Bill page, choose the "ASD" radio button.
4. The pending ASD amount will be listed.
5. Proceed for payment.

Kerala state Driving Licence renewal procedure

My license was issued in Ernakulam RTO, Kerala. I live in Bangalore and the normal procedure to renew is to submit for the transfer and renewal in Bangalore RTO. Since my license expires in Nov 2014, I did not have much time to get it transferred to Bangalore. So I decided to get it done from Ernakulam itself while I was on vacation in Kerala. My license had an old address so I had to change it to the permanent address (in Kochi, where I had address proof). Here is the procedure for the license renewal (and address change) at Kerala RTO. Note that the renewal can be done only within 1 month of expiry.

Requirements:
1. Pay the fees online, download the application and print it. You can also visit Akshaya e-centers at various places to do the same. You also have the option to pay fees by cash at the counter in RTO office.
2. Paste passport size photos on all the forms (On Main application form, Eye test form, Medical test form)
3. Get the eye test done from an ophthalmologist.
4. Get a medical certificate from a Govt doctor.
5. If you need address change, Get the address proof attested from Gazetted officer/Notary.
6. Original driving license.
7. Self addressed envelope with ₹40 stamp. (For normal process opting for postal dispatch)

Armed with all the documents I went to the RTO office in Civil Station, Kakkanad. Reached there by 9:30 and had to wait till 10:00AM to get in. Went to the RTO office in the second floor and went to the enquiry counter to find out the procedure.

If you plan to do address change, you need to get an 'order' from a Motor Vehicle Inspector(MVI). You need to write an application on a white paper for address change and the inspector will verify the attested document and sign off in the application. This need to be submitted along with the documents at the counter. The MVIs are available only during 11AM-1PM, so plan accordingly.

If you already have a card type license, you can get the license renewed within one hour by visiting the fast track counter with all the documents. For Fast Track, you need to go to the same RTO office where your original license was issued from.

I had a book type license, so had to do normal process. You need to submit a self-addressed envelope for them to dispatch the new license. There is an option to collect the new license by hand also. Went to counter 5 (fee counter) to submit the application. There were a lot of people queued up and many were agents, having tens of bulk applications. I requested them to allow me to submit ahead of queue and they agreed (I guess this is normal, since I saw many people doing it) Submitted the application and I was asked to go to the 'Inward' counter, where I got the acknowledgement receipt. You need to mention about whether the license is collected by hand or send by post. The receipt number can be used to track the file status online ("RTO File Status" link here. There is a service guarantee (RIGHT TO SERVICE ACT 2012, details available here) of 15 working days for license renewal.


I paid fee of ₹250 for address change and ₹300 for renewal. Apart from it I paid ₹150 for the Eye test and ₹100 to the Notary.

I was tracking the progress in the RTO website and here are the various stages it went through.

04Oct status changed to  Application Received
14Oct status changed to  Process Started
15Oct status changed to  Approved
17Oct status changed to  Printed


There was no change after 'Printed' and had to call up the RTO office and get to know that they had dispatched by Speedpost on 25th. Finally got the license on 27th October.

The license is a laminated colour print slightly bigger than a credit card. Not very convenient to keep in the wallet.

Yahoo Email stopped working

On 28th September 2012 Friday morning around 10:30am my Yahoo email account stopped receiving new emails. I noticed this behavior immediately because everyday at 10:30 am I receive a bunch of daily update emails from a forum which I am member of. On this particular day, I received only the first email of the series and then stopped. Thereafter I never received any emails on that day. I was hoping that is is an intermittent problem and would get solved soon. But it was not the case and on Saturday also I did not receive any emails. I was supposed to get some important emails and this got me worried. I checked on the net and many folks reported the same in various forums. Finally as advised by someone, I contacted the Yahoo Classic email support by choosing the Live chat option on their support website. Chatted with the support person and after the identity confirmation, they did something to the account and I started receiving emails. But I was shocked to learn that the emails that I was supposed to get for past 2 days will not be retrieved.

Looks like something went wrong with some Yahoo account settings and Yahoo is not yet confirming the fiasco. I don't believe that the account were hacked, as someone else pointed out in the forums, since I did not see any unusual activity in my account. Also, there are emails in spam folder that were received during this period (though some of them could be with wrong 'future' dates')

Update:
Here is how you can contact/chat with the support staff.
Go to help.yahoo.com
Choose "Contact us" tab
Choose "Mail Classic"
Click on the "Live chat" yellow link. There might be backlog so you may have to wait. 

Indian Income Tax e-filing - An annoying experience

I have been e-filing my income tax returns for many years now. Each year, the MS Excel filing tool (ITR-2) incorporated new features and it is still going through a bug-fixing phase. Hard to believe that just one day to go for the deadline and still new tool is being released! For this year, I have been trying to use the ITR-2 tool from the beginning of July and I downloaded at least 4 versions of the tool from the website.
2012_ITR2_PR14.xls
2012_ITR2_PR16.xls
2012_ITR2_PR18.xls
2012_ITR2_PR21.xls

I do not see any release notes anywhere. Isn't this a basic courtesy to update the users about what was not working and what is being fixed?

Also I could not find any forums discussing the usage and experience of using the tool. Pretty strange.

The latest one as of today is 2012_ITR2_PR21.xls.
Things that does not work:

1. Import from previous version  -Does not work. This does not work with any versions. I have the data filled up in my previous file - 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls and I am not able to import this data. The message says "Import Ok" but I see no data. Very annoying. This would save a lot of time - re-entering the data from scratch.
2. In 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls, Calculate Tax - Calculate Interest does not work with 2012_ITR2_PR18.xls This is the reason I tried downloading the latest one.
   
3. In 2012_ITR2_PR14.xls, HOUSE_PROPERTY tab had issues when multiple ownership details had to be entered. This seem to be fixed in the later version.

New Yahoo Mail

I got an email from Yahoo about upgrading the account to the new beta service. Signed up for it because it seemed inevitable. The new look UI is refreshing and fast. They added a lot of features, competing with Gmail. However, after being spoilt by Google, I want more. For instance, there is no way to filter a set of emails based on an existing email. My inbox already has thousands of emails, thanks to the spam masters and I want to clean up now. For that, Iwant to move my important emails by selecting them and moving to a different folder. In Gmail, it is simple, by selecting the required email and creating a filter based on it. Couldn't figure out an easy way in Yahoo yet.

Fund Transfer using ICICI banking

ICICI net banking requires adding the payee account details for Fund transfer. However the only way to add an account number is by searching the City and then the Bank, Branch and so on. There is no way now to add the bank by the IFSC number or the MICR number.

The problem with this is the inconsistent database of Cities/Banks/Branches.

I wanted to add my Motherś HDFC bank account number and had a nightmare figuring out the correct Bank and branch. The account is in HDFC Kadavanthra, Ernakulam branch.

Weird thing is that you need to search Ernakulam, Kochi, Cochin to find out all the banks in Ernakulam. No luck.

Finally after finding the IFSC code of the Kadavanthra branch (after some googling), I found out the correct branch. And it turns out that the address listed is wrong.

Hereś how to add a HDFC Kadavanthra Branch to ICICI Payee:

Select Add Payee

Search for city ¨Ernakulam¨ -Validate

Select Ernakulam,Kochi from the list

Find Banks

Select HDFC Bank

Select Mather Square, with IFSC:HDFC0000295, MICR:68224004