This is my experience with Tata-Docomo.

About five or six years ago (I am not sure when) I bought a CDMA phone from Tata-Indicom with an inbuilt SIM card. To tell the truth I did not have too many complaints about the service.

Then a few months ago the phone began to run down and eventually neither the speaker nor the microphone would work and all the phone could do was send SMS messages. So on 21 April I walked to a nearby Tata Docomo centre to try and get a new SIM card with the same number so that I could put it in another phone. The office was being mopped when I walked in and the cleaning woman looked at me as if I was something a hyena brought in. (I should have thought the office would be cleaned before it opened so that customers did not make a mess of it, but let that go.) When I put forward my request I was curtly told that SIM cards were out of stock and I had to go a couple of kilometres to the next centre. Not so much as a courteous apology. Well, I thought, if this is how Tata Indicom treated its customers I would take my business elsewhere.

I walked to the nearby office of another mobile operator and from there put in a porting request. I was told I would get an answer within 15 minutes to an hour. When that did not happen I went home and put in another request. This time I got an answer: "Dear Customer, Your Unique Porting Code xxxxx already exists and is valid upto 06-05-2012. Thank you." I forwarded this message to the mobile operator to whom I wanted to transfer the number. Later, however, I got another SMS saying: "Hi. You are not eligible for Mobile Number Portability. Continue enjoying TATA DOCOMO with Fantastic offers."

When the number was not ported I filed an online complaint with TATA DOCOMO on 30 April. I promptly got an automated reply saying: "We have received your complaint about your Tata DOCOMO number 9249868082. Your complaint has been registered with our customer service team. The Reference No. is 490085. You will be receiving a call from our customer representative, within 48 business hours, who shall attend to your complaint and provide a resolution at the earliest. It is our aim to provide you a satisfactory resolution as early as possible."

Of course there was no reply within 48 hours.

On 9 May I got an email saying: "Thank you for reaching out to the Tata DOCOMO Customer Care Team. We trust your complaint, docket no: xxxxx, has been addressed to your complete satisfaction."

When I wrote back saying that it had not addressed my complaint at all, I got a reply on 10 May: "Please be informed that your MNP port out request has been retained as you have delayed in contacting other operator for port in request within 7 days. Hence, request you to send the port out sms once again and contact the other operator with in the given time lines to get the number activated."

With so many contradictory messages being sent to me I obviously don't want to go through the whole rigmarole all over again. So I am stuck with a phone which is useless except for sending SMS messages.

Tata-Docomo has a television campaign going on now whose punch line is: What if everyone treated you like your mobile operator? My question of course is: What if everyone treated you like TATA-DOCOMO?

Just a few days into this experience I received a call from TATA AIG touting their insurance schemes. No prizes for guessing what my response was.

All eyes are turned on Greece. And for the life of me I cannot understand why. Greece is a tiny country and its debt, even if all of it goes unpaid, is not large compared with the size of the global economy.

The graph below, showing Corrected Money Supply from 2001 to March 2012 for the US, paints quite a different picture. It shows that US monetary expansion is at unprecedented levels, which can be explained only if US financial institutions have piled money into financial assets and pushed up their prices to unsustainable levels. The prices of these assets, since they are at unsustainable levels, have got to crash. J.P. Morgan's reported losses of $2 billion are only the tip of the iceberg. The coming crash will follow the same trajectory as the Great Depression, Japans's Lost Decade and the Great Recession. First prices will collapse in one or more financial asset markets. This will be followed by the collapse of some financial institutions and then by the economy. Of course it could happen that US financial institutions have created derivatives based on Greek or other financial assets, whose combined size is tens or hundreds of times bigger than the size of the underlying assets.

I hope that at least then the foolishness of judging the health of the economy by inflation will become apparent, although I have very dim hopes that this will happen.

Explanations of the above graph can be found in The General Theory of Money, my ebook which is available on Kindle.

My new ebook The General Theory of Money is available on the Kindle ebook store at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0080WPK2I

Here is the product description:

Three times in the past century - before the Great Depression, before the start of Japan's lost decade, and before the Great Recession - central banks have committed a fatal error. From the fact that economic growth was on track and inflation low they concluded that the economy was in fine fettle. Today central banks are committing the same error and setting the stage for another Great Crash.

This book demonstrates that the root of this fatal error is a misconception of money common to the Keynesians, monetarists and Austrians that has vitiated all of economics for nearly a century.

The exposition begins by disproving the idea of money multiplication through fractional reserve banking, an idea that is regarded as so obvious that it is taught to every undergraduate. Taking this as its starting point the book then draws up an operational measure of money, which faithfully mirrors every turn of the economy since 1960. Along the way it shows that the velocity of money is stable and that the mainstream view of money as one form of wealth is erroneous. It also lays bare the errors of John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and the Austrians, all of whom have one thing in common: they completely disregard financial assets.

The book is targeted at economists. But the simple measure of money that it draws up is of vital importance to every investor. If you are a mutual fund this book could save you millions of dollars. If you are a hedge fund it could save you tens of millions of dollars. And if you are the president of the United States it could save you a trillion dollars.

It's amazing how a sharp rise in the stockmarket can change people's opinions about the economy. With the S&P 500 at its highest level since May 2008, even votaries of doom have turned into cheerful optimists.

Alas, our graph for the velocity of M_c shows quite the opposite. It shows the velocity at its lowest level in the past decade, indicating that the US (and with it no doubt a large part of the world) is heading for a crash followed by a recession. Or will it be a Depression?

Three years ago The Guardian carried a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.

Many of them are available for free on Gutenberg.org in html, Kindle, epub and other formats.

Here is a listing:

Comedy

Queen Lucia by EF Benson
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Just William by Richmal Crompton
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Bouvard et Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Brewster's Millions by Richard Greaves (George Barr McCutcheon)
Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
The Unbearable Bassington by Saki
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett
The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
Penrod by Booth Tarkington
The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain
Tono Bungay by HG Wells
Something Fresh by PG Wodehouse
Piccadilly Jim by PG Wodehouse

Crime

Trent's Last Case by EC Bentley
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary E Braddon
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
Greenmantle by John Buchan
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
The Great Impersonation by E Phillips Oppenheim
Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola

Family and Self

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac
Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
Evelina by Fanny Burney
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Roxana by Daniel Defoe (The Fortunate Mistress)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Howards End by EM Forster
The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes
The Ambassadors by Henry James
Washington Square by Henry James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Ulysses by James Joyce
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
Martin Eden by Jack London
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
The Three Sisters by May Sinclair
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Love

Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Victory: An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad
The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
Adam Bede by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Room with a View by EM Forster
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest by WH Hudson
Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
Women in Love by DH Lawrence
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
The Egoist by George Meredith
Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost
Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
East Lynne by Ellen Wood

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Vathek by William Beckford
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
The Coming Race by EGEL Bulwer-Lytton
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
After London; or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
News from Nowhere by William Morris
(to be completed)