Yes. I activated it yesterday also. It depends on the executive. 99 percent of them will agree. So just call again and tell them you need only base pack and you will take the add-on yourself from self care.
Yes, they will. Airtel's cc can do anything. Yesterday, I called them to deactivate a topup which was having 30 days lock-in. He said that this topup can't be removed before 30 days then I said him that today's the 30 day although it was 26th day & he deactivated it without asking anything.
In HD STB, you need to connect pendrive/HDD for recording. Max limit is 2 TB and yes, it is chargeable. Rs.33 per month.
It was free for Infinity users.
And if you go for Internet Tv STB, you get 500 GB free cloud space for recording, but all channels not support it.