online shopping on indian portals: a variation on finnegans wake

The experience I just had scrolling through the catalogue of VCDs on Rediff was not unlike the circularity of Joyce's incomprehensible literary masterpiece (Something has to be said about a novel that ends "and then a walk along the" leading you back to the opening: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's". If you thought the Jabberwocky was a task, you would probably classify this under unsurmountable. Rediff's VCD catalogue does not allow you to specify the number of results you want on each page. And several mouseclicks later, a strange sense of déjà vu hit me. Every list hence started featuring items I had seen before, except in a very random fashion. This is probably Rediff's undocumented implementation of a pseudo-random number generator transplanted to the domain of internet applications. The least they could do (if they had a sense of humour instead of the tardy laziness that results in a helpful error message like "Pls enter a valid query") is add a footnote of acknowledgement to the man who created Stephen Daedalus who "proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father".