A Review of BSG Stay, Turtle Beach, Morjim Hotel in Goa

This past week, I went on a small, long-pending, post-Diwali vacation to Goa. It was splendid, and gave me a much-needed break from the routines. We spent our time in North Goa, in Morjim. Although the trip was fantastic, we had a terrible time at the hotel stay we had chosen, which was ‘BSG Stay, Turtle Beach, Morjim‘. While it’s a good-looking hotel in the pictures, the ground reality is vastly different. A whole lot of things went wrong in our experience and I wanted to post a review about it on Google. Unfortunately, Google won’t publish the review I wrote for this listing, so I’m posting it here instead. Hopefully it’ll help someone in case they are considering booking a stay at the BSG Stay Hotel at Morjim, Goa.

BSG Stay, Morjim (Goa) – A Detailed Review

Terrible place and piss poor service.

This place has decent quality rooms, but a lot of stuff is broken or not working and it goes unfixed for days due to the hotel’s bad service. Hot water system? Not working. Jet spray? Not working. Toilet seat? Broken. This is going to be a long and detailed review, so bear with me till the end as I cover some important points that you shouldn’t miss.

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Manish Singh, writing for TechCrunch:

Tata Group will start making iPhones in India for the local and global markets, India’s Deputy IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Friday, after the Taiwanese firm Wistron entered a deal with the salt-to-tech conglomerate.

Tata Group has acquired Wistron InfoComm Manufacturing (India) Pvt for $125 million, the Taiwanese firm said in a stock exchange filing. Wistron said it finalized the deal after strategic considerations in response to the reshaping of the firm’s global manufacturing strategy.

All of us were disturbed and shocked by the 15th film, The Kashmir Files. That felt like a propaganda, vulgar movie, inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival.

Yikes!

Apple reported their quarterly results for Q4’22 yesterday and the folks at Six Colors have published their transcript of the call that Tim Cook and Luca Maestri have with analysts.

During the call, Apple mentioned that the company saw double-digit grown in India and iPhone growth was “impressive”.

iPhone Revenue grew 10% year over year to a September quarter record of 42.6 billion despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. We set September quarter records in the vast majority of markets we track, and our performance was particularly impressive in several large emerging markets with India setting a new all-time revenue record and Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico more than doubling year over year. Thanks to our strong iPhone lineup, we set a quarterly record for upgraders and grew switchers double digits. This level of sales performance, along with unmatched customer loyalty, drove the active installed base of iPhones to a new all time high across all geographic segments.

(Emphasis mine.)

No surprises here. The iPhone continues to get more expensive in India, yet more people continue to buy it every year.

Jagmeet Singh, writing for TechCrunch:

Uber has started offering electric vehicles to customers in certain parts of the Delhi-NCR region and says it will be expanding its efforts over the coming months. The electric cabs are currently only available for pre-scheduled trips.

The company did not share how many EV cabs were operational on its platform in India, but insisted that it is working with multiple fleet partners, OEMs and charging infra providers “to gradually build the EV business in a sustainable manner.”

With fuel prices soaring in the country, Uber’s contractual drivers have already been raising their displeasure at making less than what the company had promised them. I just hope that the company doesn’t shaft them like they did with the ICE vehicles.

Aditya Kalra, reporting for Reuters:

Tinder-owner Match Group has filed an antitrust case against Apple with the competition regulator in India, accusing it of “monopolistic conduct” that forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases, a legal filing seen by Reuters shows.

Apple is fending off a raft of antitrust challenges around the globe and Match’s July filing adds to two other cases in India though Match is the first foreign company to mount such a challenge against the iPhone maker in the country.

Match notes in its filing that Indians prefer using a “state-backed online transfer system,” seemingly referring to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system promoted by the Indian Govt. that has swept the country in recent times.

The govt. has repeatedly shown how much it loves UPI, and if that’s any indication, Apple just might be in some trouble here.

Manish Singh, writing on Techcrunch:

Flipvolt Technologies, the India registered entity of Singapore-headquartered Vauld, was used to deposit 3.7 billion Indian rupees by 23 entities including non-banking financial companies and fintech firms into the wallets controlled by Yellow Tune Technologies, the Enforcement Directorate said Friday of its ongoing investigation.

The agency said the Indian entity of Vauld maintains “very lax KYC norms, no EDD mechanism, no check on the source of funds of the depositors, no mechanism of raising STRs, etc,” factors that led the accused firms in “avoiding regular banking channels” and “easily take out all the fraud money in the form of crypto assets.”

The Indian government has generally been against cryptocurrency, and cases like these are ensuring that doesn’t change for a long time.

ExpressVPN has just announced that they will be removing their physical servers located in India, refusing to comply with India’s new VPN law.

With a recent data law introduced in India requiring all VPN providers to store user information for at least five years, ExpressVPN has made the very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers.

Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India. These “virtual” India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the UK.

Under the new VPN law that is set to come into effect on Jun 27, 2022, the company states that they will be “required to store users’ real names, IP addresses assigned to them, usage patterns, and other identifying data” which effectively “is incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users’ online activity private.

The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it.

ExpressVPN refuses to participate in the Indian government’s attempts to limit internet freedom. As a company focused on protecting privacy and freedom of expression online, we will continue to fight to keep users connected to the open and free internet with privacy and security, no matter where they are located.

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN services in the market today and I had been a customer for a while, only switching to Mullvad because I wanted the flexibility in billing. I am certain that other VPN companies are going to follow in the same steps. Any company that doesn’t, is a company worth staying away from.