You are NOT the car you drive. Hell yes! However, you WILL be judged by the car you drive.

Is buying used car the new smart choice!

So if you can afford an 18L used car which will allow you to carry the look of a 30L, as compared to brand new 18L car, what is the right choice? Go for the bigger one. Make the right judgement, because others DON’T.

If you are anything like me, you will pet your car, moon over your car, ensure no scratches on your car; basically be excited about your NEW car for 3 months to 6 months; before the girlfriend starts feeling like a wife.

And again if you are anything like me, you like that spark, that feeling of newness, that feeling of excitement, gives life a new spin.

But it’s NOT just that, Research shows that people who opt for a USED Luxury Car as compared to a NEW luxury car saves on an average save INR 5.08 Cr over a lifetime! ‘Itne mein to note se bani car aa jaye!’

An average person buys around 11 cars over a lifetime from the age of 25 to 75, every 5 years. A used car on an average is 40% cheaper as compared to a brand new virgin car, and the frequency of purchase shoots up to maybe a 4 years instead of 5 years, allowing you the NEW car feel that many more times.  A 30L new car vis-à-vis an 18L used car of the same quality saves 5Cr!

Dimaag ki batti jalao! Paisa Bachao!

Lastly, for me it actually goes beyond just the excitement and the money saved.

In today’s modern day and age, would any smart person reject a really adorable and sexy woman as your partner, just because she's had another man in her life before.  Why should it be different for a car!

If you love cars, then look for your true love, a pre owned car just might be it.

Check out JaanCar and look for your true love. 

Homesteads

I travel a fair bit in my chosen career, and a fair bit means living out of a suitcase up to 10 days at a stretch. Different companies I work with choose different types of hotels for me to stay in.

And as a single gal traveller I’ve seen them all, business hotels, eco hotels, luxury hotels, home stays, hotel rooms so tiny, you could jump from the door to bed located at the end of the room, and a luxurious shower head placed right above the pooper, for your comfort of course, don’t let the lack of space bother you.

Rooms so plush and comfortable, work is the last thing on your mind to homes which rent out rooms and give you the opportunity to mingle with a family in a different state, hotels that are so shady, I check out as soon as time permits.

And that’s just on work trips!

As a person who also likes to travel for pleasure, and do my own hotel bookings, I am enamoured with the act of tracing the right hotel online, reading reviews, looking at pics, google maps to see places close to the hotel, as am sure most of the interweb sleuthing variety do. We are arm chair detectives scouting for the best deal, flexing the most powerful of all muscle, the Internet, but I digress.

Looking for a unique, comfortable, bright airy, hotel room to spend your vacation, that one works very hard to get, isn’t so easy to get.

And that’s why off late I’ve been very intrigued with non hotels. And by non hotels I mean any place to stay whose original intent was not to be a hotel. Whether a fort converted into a luxurious palace hotel or a British Army Barrack restored to a quaint cottage in the mountains. Someone’s second home in the country rented out for a weekend or a rustic farm house shared with the charming family who runs a homestead.

Finding a place like this whether in India or outside adds another dimension to your vacation, instead of lodging in a room with minimal functional personality (business hotels, whatever happened to imagination) or rooms which are clones of themselves (really 135 guest suites which all look the same) you reside in an experience, which was never designed for you, and that is thrilling.

At a recent stay in a 150 year old distillery (defunct now sadly, but the family who lives there, do make some very interesting liquors), I had the chance to step into someone else’s everyday life in Southern France. A bedroom, with wooden flooring that creaked at night, to a pigeon house converted to a romantic bedroom with rose bushes all around. Gathering fruit from the many many trees to make jam, to a drive around the neighbourhood to collect jam jars for the said jam. I got the chance to live an experience and not feel like a tourist with my fanny pack and walking shoes (which I did in Paris). I came back from my holiday with a fine appreciation of those who live in large old houses which are a piece of history and a much finer appreciation of those who popped bubbly before the sun is down. But most of all I came back with a feeling that I had truly vacated my life away into someone else’s beautiful reality.

Meanwhile in India, the hills are alive with the sounds of homesteads, Himachal and Uttarakhand in my opinion and some experience are a haven for Homesteads, quaint cottages run by some of the nicest people you ever met, whether its chilling in a stream with their pet dogs or listening to stories around the fire with a granny as old as the hills. With simple but hearty home cooked fare and why don’t you explore the area pieces of wisdom, a bond is formed and what you thought was just a vacation, a getaway from work and life and traffic, is enhanced. And you would willingly trade your sophisticated urban, 3 am Chinese food kinda of life to experience the simplicity of country life, with its own rules and definitely its own wonders.

The idea of a wholesome vacation to me is this experience; it’s not the detached experience one has as a stranger in a strange land, but one of experiencing life in a strange land.

And I must recommend to every person who has ever been bitten by the bug of Wanderlust, definitely more potent than an arrow struck by cupid, chase your own experience, don’t just look for a vacation, look beyond. I guarantee it, you will find much more.

Health Care, Where?

We live in a world, where heath, healthcare, health problems are one giant Pandora’s Box or so I hear.

Now I’m not an expert of any sort on medicine, the practice, the perils, the facilities or lack thereof, my “expertise” is limited to vague dreams of a child to be a doctor when I grew up. But one trip to the hospital to meet my Dadi, after her 3^rd (I think) heart attack, she had a few of them in her time, cured me of my ailment to try and be a doctor. I saw a man in a neighbouring room, covered in plaster from head to toe, I am sure, hindsight makes me embellish, but there he was groaning in pain, and I burst into tears.  Doctor dream “hashtag” ended.

Back to present day, and my reason for writing this down, my conversations, in recent times, with people regarding their experiences with health problems of any kind, sound more like horror stories from the dark ages.

From prestigious hospitals, misdiagnosing a viral fever and admitting the patient into ICU, to an endoscopy leading to a broken jaw and a punctured lung and yes subsequent death of the patient (RIP Dada).

And as a Human Being, I believe we have the right to fair heath care practices, when one is ill, no matter what sort of illness, the drain, emotional, physical and monetary is a sad truth. The severity is directly proportional to the drain, and why, why but why would health care providers try to add to your woes? Aren’t they there to make them go away?

Not according to the buzz in every society, outside every hospital, every dinner table where, someone’s health problem is discussed, indignant at the horrors faced when getting treated.

We trust a doctor to prescribe the best possible medicine to make it go away as quickly as possible (or the time it takes, sometimes work schedules will have to suffer due to an illness, go figure).

But we don’t expect, to be prescribed with 1728 tests, 265 different medicines and 3 sachets of albumin, for the survival of a patient. We don’t expect to be harmed by the hands of those who are meant to heal. I know it’s called a medical practice; but it’s getting a bit ridiculous, no?

Of course, I have some faith, because not all stories out there are horror stories, some people do manage to escape not just unscathed, but healed and well recovered from the experience of recovering their health.

The burning question though, is who does one trust, where does one go when one is unwell, for general ailments we have our GP, a trusted guy, with a small practice, who is probably walking distance from home (what I’m the only one???), but what about when the going gets tough, and that’s not unheard of, in times where stress is the only thing you live with from the time you get admission into a good school; where 15 minutes of sleep is more important than a good breakfast at home, where fast cars, zip through streets with no consequence of who might be hurt. I could write a thousand and one reasons of why you could need someone more than a GP.

What do you do then?

Where and how do you go about finding which place to go to, where are the reviews of hospitals, I don’t trust a place just because its big and fancy, or made buy an industrialist family or acquired by one. Or conveniently use the one closest to home and fingers crossed, it’ll be a wise decision. 

I don’t want to make any sort of allegations, or slanderous statements, but my experience so far hasn’t endeared me to the idea of dealing with a harrowing hospital, where running from floor to floor to figure out who needs to proceed with the next medieval torture, masquerading as modern day medicine, designed to rob you of your sanity, money and faith in the human race.

The question remains, how you go about finding the best healthcare for what ails you?

For now technology seems like the answer, some sleuthing of the arm chair variety, some time on the Internet and websites like BuzzHospitals and apps like BuzzPharma, help you out to find out pertinent information that can be helpful in you hour of need.