Exciting times ahead

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Photo credit: Ochinko)

I have always dreamt of studying at the great institutions of the world like Stanford & MIT. Till now, it has just been a dream. But now the dream has come true atleast virtually.

Now great universities like MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley have their courses online. Yes we had open courseware from MIT before but we now have courses which are even more interesting and captivating.

Thanks Khan Academy for starting this revolution. Though just a humble beginning, you have inspired many others and showed the way.

The most exciting ones are Udacity, edX and coursera. Just browse through them and pick your courses. I have taken web application engineering course in Udacity and learnt many things which I could have learnt with great difficulty very easily. It was taught by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and was really useful. I learnt about MemCached, Replication & Sharding from there in context. I am very very excited to take the new courses and courses unrelated to our work but which we are interested in from the very best in the world. Exciting times ahead indeed.

If you are are student, then I don't think there are better times than this :) . If you have read till here, do yourself a favour and just check out the below sites.

Udacity
edX
coursera

My efforts to get a house in Hyderabad

So after 5 years of staying in rented places in Hyderabad, I decided I should have a place I can call my own. Keeping in mind all the good times I had at my grandparents place during my childhood, I longed to have a similar house. A house with lot of open space in the backyard and in front of the house.

So with that thought in mind, I began searching for plots around Hyderabad, mainly around Madhapur area, where my office is located. After a long search, where every place I saw was about 20km from my office, I thought that my dream will remain just that after all. Luckily, one of my friends recommended a place called Bandlaguda, which comes to 17 km from my office. I was exhilarated and paid a token amount for the land.

The cost per sq yard of the land was 10k. It is an open plot. Now the problem was that I didn't have enough money to pay for the plot completely. Not a problem, I thought. I will easily get loan for that. With this, I started going to banks for loan. First up, was LIC housing finance. And they gave me the first shock. They said they will give me loan on the SRO (Sub Registrar Office) rate which is another word for government rate. To know why I was shocked, just consider this point. The cost of the land per sq yard in the market is 10k, where as the SRO rate was just 3.5k. So considering this, I was getting far less loan than I expected to. So this kind of lessened my excitement for the plot. I told this to the agent who was kind of helping me buy the land. He said it should be possible for me to get the loan from other banks too. So I went to another bank, ICICI. They said they won't fund for areas outside the main city. But this area was outside.. so no loan. same with HDFC, Axis bank and so many others. One of my friends friend works in IDBI bank. So I went to that bank and enquired. They said I will get good amount of loan. That amount will be enough for me to purchase the land. Awesome I thought. But when I went with the documents to them, they said they will fund only if I have HMDA approval for the plot. To get approval for a plot, first the layout has to be regularized and approved. But my layout was not, so no question of getting approval. By this time, I was losing hope fast that I will be able to buy it. In a final effort, I contacted DHFL, who give loans exclusively in panchayat regions on market rates. They said they can process my loan, but the amount was less and I will have a shortfall during construction.

So I had to forget my dream home.....