Hmm, I seem to have made a small but fundamental error: I've spent £610 in the last 48 hours, which isn't quite within my usual budgetary limits...
The repairs to the camera (RS.1,500 : £19.50) were annoying but justified, and I slipped into the repair shop again this morning (just about morning, anyway; not sleeping before about 2/3am still) and the little repair man took it and confirmed the freeness of his impending repair, which was nice. No more costs there unless something's actually buggered, and he damn well should have spotted it the first time, really 
The plane ticket out of India; this Saturday; is justified but bloody annoying. My ticket to Bombay, India from the London Heathrow, UK - a distance of about 4450 miles - cost me £290.
A flight from Chennai (Madras) on India's East coast just to Bangkok, Thailand - about 1300 miles - costs £140, almost half as much.
I can well appreciate economies of scale and the minimum cost of these things, but even still something just a fraction under the 100 quid mark was what I would think is reasonable.
Bear in mind that I am using every one of the following sites when I look for flights and go with the cheapest, between them you should be able to find some spectacular deals. Try them yourself - all of them if you want the best price, because they all searcc differently and they put different fees on varying flights and itineraries.
As it happens, SkyScanner is often the best of these, and most actual bookings seem to be going through eBookers (the actual seller of the ticket: these following sites are all what they call `screenscrapers` and they trawl through dozens of different airlines for you) -
http://www.travelsupermarket.com/travelmerge/travelsearch.aspx?package=4 (theis one is just for UK departures so no good for me for a couplea years!)
http://www.foundem.co.uk/search/flights.jsp
http://travel.kelkoo.co.uk/c-172201-flights.html
http://www.expedia.co.uk/default.aspx?eapid=737-3&AFFCID=expe.uk.001.000.995083
http://www.mobissimo.com/search_airfare.php
http://www.opodo.co.uk/opodo/HomeServlet?locale=en_GB&CMP=uk-aff-gen-000000
http://www.ebookers.com/shop/home?tduid=983fec690784d65167b00b1b17d116a8
http://www.airline-network.co.uk/?partner=affiliate&AID=10460889&PID=1658918 (Uk departure only).
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Hopefully the above lot might be useful to someone 
Onto the meat of the thing though, I went and bought that laptop didn't I?
The sharp mathematicians and most accomplished liars
amongst you will have worked out what this cost already: £Too,Bloody,Much,Pounds.00p
I went just a little bit overboard and bought an AMD Turion Dual Core wotsit processor in this flat, shiny computery thing I now own, with 2GB things of memory stuffage, a graphics card that hopefully is capable of playing all the cheap, ripped-off DVDs available here of which I intend to buy a monumentally inhuman amount
and the usual assortment of DVD rewritable drives, supra-100GB hard drives and with that shiny new Windows Vista that I've heard so many complaints about already 
which is probably par for the course in desktops these days or possibly even old hat (it is so hard to keep up to date with the advances in computers, isn't it?) but for me, being a cheapskate, and for a laptop, being essentially a compromise by very definition, this makes me very very smiley
i) DVDs in this part of India cost Rs. 70 or Rs. 80 for a single film, or even a 6-films-in-1 disc thingy! That's either about £0.92 or £1.00 each, for many new-ish films not yet on DVD I imagine (such as, maybe, Jumper, HP & the Order of the Phoenix, Hitman, War, sveral dozen others. I have no idea if these actually are available yet on DVD in the UK, but I had only heard of War, Hitman and HP before I left 5 months ago, and there are loads more big-name films I've not been aware of).
I think you can probably hear me say "sweeeeeet" from over there in England
ii) Yes, I had to look up `supra-`. Intended for use as the opposite of `sub-` I hope Mother and Father dearest can tell me if this is even appropriate 
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If you want to be even more confused than you thought you were already by the way, have a look at the Wikipedia page for this processor. And that's just the processor - one chip of hundreds in there (admittedly the most sophisticated, but you get the point). And Wikipedia is supposed to be an accessible resource, even aside from the debacle that is the debate 
surrounding its reliability.
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Anyway, right, well I wrote the above yesterday but got lost in a mire of moviedom after, predictably enough, I started watching films! The good films are of course the ones you pay more for. Regular DVD players have no trouble with the 6-in-1 or 8-in-1 discs but it appears my shiny new Microsoft flagship rules & regulations enforcement, genuine "advantage" bollocks, overly-legal, goody-two-shoes operating system isn't having any of it.
Happily enough I've swapped all the mutiple-film discs with regular single movie versions this morning, so, I now have 10 films to watch which should keep me slightly out of trouble for a day or three
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I did get to watch a couple of movies last night though, which was very nice indeed, and if I may play at being Jonathon Ross/Barry Norman for a minute....
I can reliably inform you that War, with Jason Statham and Jet Li is a great action film with an excellent story that I'm sure must be an adaptation of an older Hong Kong movie, such is the thematic motivation of all the players and the pleasing supply of clever (although slightly dumbed down in this one I'm sure) plot twists. they were wholly predictable by about the halfway mark, but I put this down to Westernised dumbing-down, rather than any lameness on the part of the originator
It should entertain you for more or less the whole duration, it is rather good all the way except perhaps until the last 5 or 6 minutes, in fact, and if until then and no longer only because the details of that vital closing act don't really have time to sink in. You need the story to be continuing along a little for the events revealed there to have proper meaning.
It is, however, very disappointing throughout in that Li does pretty much no fighting but rather a lot of shooting instead - for anyone who doesn't know or hasn't heard of Jet li, then I ask you: have you heard of Bruce Lee?
Well, Jet Li is a far better, more accomplished martial artist with a vastly superior variety of disciplines at his disposal - contest this if you will, fight fans, but whether due to advances in cinematography and film quality and the understanding of how we mere human audiences watch and comprehend things, or whether it's down to sheer skill and adaptability and more highly accomplished & wide ranging styles, Jet Li's films are far, far more impressive. Even Especially discounting any of the ridiculous wire-work so beloved of our so beloved Yuen Wu Ping
2nd on the hit list, the `new` Haydn Christiansen film Jumper is, well, it's watchable but in the end it is very, very shallow. Really, the whole way through it seemed like they had rented each character from another movie, even the casual addition of Samuel L. Jackson couldn't properly revive this spluttering beast of a picture.
Wonderful premise, truly superb as an idea and as an accomplished special effect, and there are some great bits in the first half of the film, but the complete lack of any explanation - of anything - makes it all very superficial.
You can actually predict the film's level of thoughtfulness very accurately from the short, swaggering and incongruent opening voice-over
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Anyway that's quite enough from me: I have to negotiate the bloody minefield that is the new Windos Vista and try to make some sense of it. It's not easy, as anyone used to XP and its predecessors who now grapples with the weirdness of Vista will probably testify.
Ho-hum!