Why the hate? Its an interesting read. Thinking about and discussing awful systems like this can help in figuribg out how to better make non-awful systems.
And why exactly is it relavant that he is a college student?
Awful system ? yes, but a massively scaled. think about the scale of the system. One single backend is serving kiosks at thousands of railway stations, lakhs of booking counters and several agent terminals. True that there are downtimes and slowness - but consider this system as a classic usecase and study of how massive a system can be. The student who wrote this rant just talks about the downsides and how bad the whole system is. I would appreciate a few ideas on how he in his great might would do to fix this massive system. Are there any constructive ideas in this article ? do we learn from this article ? It is very easy to rant about everything...if you don't like my views and downvote my comment, you are free to do so.
Awful is still awful :) And from that description it is a truly awful system. And saying "if your so great why don't you fix it yourself" is a really stupid response to criticism. Why be so defensive about a bad system, YOU didn't write it, right?
Oh come on, your originally comment was a nasty little dig at someone for writing up their experiences and a suggestion that they don't count because they're "just a college student". You made that comment from a new account so you either are new here (in which case, what's with the complaining about the discussion going down hill?) or you where not prepared to stand behind your comment so used a throw-away account.
I have no idea why you consider the Indian internet rail booking system a subject above criticism, it just seems bizarre.
