On Sunday I went to the Surajkund Handicraft Fair 2010, along with a few BCMTians.

Although being a weekend, Surajkund Fair was expected to attract a lot of crowd, we manage to avoid it somewhat by going a little early and leaving at around 2pm, when more and more people started pouring in.

Result, I came with memory card full of beautiful photographs, which I will be posting during the next few days.

For starters, here are couple of photographs and video from Surajkund Fair 2010:

Rajasthani dancers posing after performance (click to enlarge)

One of the many decorative items on sale at Surajkund Mela

Video of a folk dance performance

Watch this space for more photographs from Surajkund Fair 2010…

A quick shout out or rather link out to the Top 5 Travelogues of 2009. These five travelogues were the ones which were chosen from hundreds of travelogue posted on BCMTouring during the course of 2009 and were chosen by fellow BCMTians because they found these to be the most interesting or rather memorable of them all (not that rest weren’t great, but these were exceptional).

Destination Unknown…

A different Spiti

Har-ki-Dun & Juda lake Winter trek: An adventurous Himalayan Siesta !!

STOK KANGRI … unending adventure !

20 days, 5000kms… The tale of a wild wild ride on the roof of the world!

Today I woke up in the morning and found this email from Paypal:

Hello Yogesh Sarkar,

Your payment of xx.x has been sent back to the sender of the payment.

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

This despite the fact that I own a Premier Verified account with Paypal for past several years and have done numerous transactions, without even a single one of them going bad/sour. Add to this, the payment which was reversed, came in from a well-known and large US based advertisement network, which I am guessing owns a business account with Paypal!

Still Paypal felt that this payment should be reversed as it is probably fraud transaction, because I am an Indian and from the looks of their new policy, all Indians are fraudsters.

If this isn’t textbook racial/regional profiling/discrimination, then i don’t know what is.

And this is not like this thing is only happening to me, this is happening to all the Indian businesses, who are using paypal for transactions, here is a 360 post long thread on Digital Point, over the recent racist behavior of Paypal!

I know one thing for certain, if paypal does not promptly apologizes for this racial behavior and makes certain that this does not happens ever again, I will never again do business with Paypal or any Merchant/Website/Business which solely uses Paypal as the payment portal and will take my business to a company, which respects it for what it is, without any racial/regional prejudices.