First Flight Couriers – absolutely miserable shipping

First Flight Couriers‘ shipping time is absolutely miserable. It might be good for other places in India, but at least not for North East India.
I ordered an item from Bazee.com for delivery to Imphal, Manipur. It was shipped by the seller on Oct 9 from Mumbai. After that, the item was never received. I sent various emails to First Flight and finally got a reply after many days saying that they were “looking into it”. I assumed that my packet was lost. Finally, I was informed that the packet arrived yesterday (Oct 28). The packet took 19 days to deliver! According to the First Flight website, it was supposed to be delivered in 3 days. And it seems that FirstFlight has only *one* courier person for the whole of Manipur.
If you would like to send items by courier to Manipur from other parts of India, I would say use DTDC or BlueDart, but NEVER First Flight! Their service is absolutely miserable!
And oh, their online tracking service, it still says – “09-Oct-2004: Despatched from Origin”. No other information. Great, huh?
Update (9:46 PM 12/24/2004): I recently ordered an item online from a seller in Mumbai. The destination was Delhi. The package was delivered in 3 days. So, it seems that FirstFlight service is good for delivery between main cities in India.

RelianceIndiaCall.com

Review:
RelianceIndiaCall.com is great for making long distance calls to India. I started using it at the beginning of July and I must admit that I am really satisfied with the service. Call quality is excellent.
The rate is 11.9 cents per minute for calls to anywhere in India. Payment options are pre-paid and post-paid. The nice thing about it is that I can make calls for 2 minutes and I will be only charged for that. I don’t have to worry about connection fees etc.
Two of my other friends are using the service and they are also really satisfied with it. If the quality stays like this, I will be using their service for a pretty long time.
Note: If you are not calling ALL INDIA i.e. if you are calling cities like Hyderabad and Chennai, then I think other calling cards will be better for you. I heard that with some of the calling cards, you get about 6 cents per minute rate for calls to Hyderabad.