The Yaxis Live by Rajesh Kumar

I remember my very first trip to Mumbai. The year was 1993, and among my prized possession from that trip is a photograph of me standing next to the Gateway with the heritage section of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in the background.I was a student a that time and was home for a vacation when the family had to go to Mumbai. I have been to Mumbai numerous times after that have visited that spot for the awe inspiring view several time sometimes even for a few minutes. I had great curiosity to see this hotel from inside and last year I got my chance, when I went to meet someone on work. I loved the corridors and the interiors of this hotel. In recent times they showed this hotel on the TV as part of some travel series and me and my wife loved watching it. We even discussed jokingly that we should save enough for a vacation in which we stay in a sea facing room at the Taj Mahal Hotel. One day, we said.

I hardly enjoyed the coverage this hotel got in last 3 days over TV. This time I wanted to switch off the TV not because I could not bear the sight of the fire, the sound of the gun and pain inflicted by a bunch of mad men. The walls will be rebuilt, the furniture and draperies and the chandeliers would be back too but the sight of Taj Mahal Hotel has changed forever. 200 people have died. The ‘common man’ died.

It brought the worst of some men and it brought the best out of others. I would never have known NSG Major Sandep Unnikrishnan or Havaldar Gajendra Singh, but after their supreme sacrifice in this Mumbai tragedy, I felt connected to both of them. The Fire Service men, the policemen, the soldiers, the staff at the hotels. I personally felt very-very small, almost miniscule, resulting from by my sofa set view of TV vs their action on the ground. You guys live, we are dead.

India lives on. And remembers its dead. We will be back in business soon. Jai Hind.

A year back, when Chandrayaan was a less known item, I happened to read about it somewhere, and wrote a critical post doubting its journey to the moon. Some folks left comments calling me names (mostly anonymous, which I rejected). Others were more charitable, who merely doubted the knowledge of my imbecile self. I even picked up issues with one of them till I decided to put a tap on my own mouth.

Post the success of Chandrayaan, there is yet another set of comments that have poured in, on that old post, this time rightfully cheering hurrah for Chandrayaan and more scorn for me. I have allowed most of them to go through, except those in which I had concerns on decency. I want to let all those folks know that I am as thrilled on Chandrayan success as they are. In fact, I have written a subsequent post on Chandrayaan launch that they may want to check out. Cheers to Chandrayan.

Links:

• The offending post
• My recent post on Chandrayaan launch.

A man once visited a temple under construction where he saw a sculptor making an idol of a deity. Suddenly he noticed a similar idol lying nearby.

Surprised, he asked the sculptor “Do you need two statues of the same deity?”

“No,” said the sculptor without looking up, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.”

The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage.

“Where is the damage?”, he asked.

“There is a scratch on the nose of the idol”, said the sculptor, still busy with his work.

“Where are you going to install the idol?”, asked the passer by.

The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high.

“If the idol is that far, who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?”, the gentleman asked.

The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, “I will know!”

I am no great fan of pre-stitched clothes. I prefer the old Indian way of buying the dress material from one shop and then going to my favourite tailor, who would usually give my trousers or shirt after a week or two, depending on his load. Everytime he insists on talking out an old notebook that has the age old measurements,which he compares with real measurements and writes again on another sheet of paper before stapling it onto the dress material and lobbing across to someone in the mezzanine.  I keep wondering why the old ‘master’ refers to the age old measurements at all, especially when it takes in more than few minutes locating the wrinkled & dirty notebook with my records! I have given this suggestion to the ‘master’ quite a few times, but that gives considerable discomfort to him. Is the old ‘master’ Prisoner of information insecurity??

I noticed an excellent slideshow on YouTube via Edelman Digital blog. It is quite an eye opener on the kind of information overload we are suffering. Perhaps not just suffering, but the mindless bytes of data we are creating all around.

I have been a great fan of Amul’s topical ads, which create a connect with an event that happened recently and Amul Butter. The brand has followed decade old practice of creatively staying contemporary connected to the common theme in India. Here are two of them that caught my attention.

(To those who do not follow cricket – Sourav Ganguly is a cricketer who retired recently, he was labelled the Prince of Kolkota by the media)

My another recent favourite is on, you guessed it.

More Amul topicals can be seen here. And of course, I remain a happy customer of Amul Butter and the topicals have played a key role in that .  The oldest topical I remember is on 1984 LA Olympics when PT Usha missed the Olympic bronze by whisker and the nation could not sleep for days.Wonder if anyone has a copy.

Meanwhile, keep going, Amul.

Having grown up traveling long distances in trains in India (Since 1989 kms, have stayed more than a thousand kms away from the city my parents lived in). As a student, I used trains extensively for the travel and if you have travelled even half as much as I have done, you would know that ascertaining the location of a train in India can be such a problem.

No more, because someone has started this mashup that gives useful bytes of information. It gives fairly detailed position but not real time information which is still pretty good. I wish someone could give me a solution to an answer that I oh-so-frequently heard from the Railway Enquiry office which was that the train is almost in (In Hindi, the answer used to be ‘Outer par  khadi hai’). The same answer would be repeated for upto an hour sometimes!

The second must see site is this Mashup which mocks up Swiss Rail train movements. This site lets you almost travel with the train and see birds eye view of locations as a train passes along but does not use real data but only simulates the movements and the stoppages based on the time table.

And if you thought not having real time data is a bad idea, wait till you read the below notice available from the Swiss Rail mashup. You have obviously forgotten that Swiss Trains operate on time and hence real time data is inconsequential and so wasteful of money!

The newly launched Nokia 1202 does not have a music player, no camera, no radio, cannot connect to the internet by WiFi or GPRS. It does not have a slider, or touchpad and stylus. Chances are that it would not support your Bluetooth headphone either. Yet, this phone has the potential of being a winner, simply because it has beautifully identified the requirements of an ignored market segment, and translated them into a very promising product. Simply put, this phone is targetted to the demographically rural ( read poor) customer in markets such as India.

Instead of the high end and increasingly perceived must have features, this phone a flashlights- for anywhere applications in a village, the phone has five different phonebooks ( so that papa, mamma, Bunty, Gullu and Soni can all share the same phone).

The phone has been designed to work in dusty surroundings, and has an amazing standby stamina of 26 days so that even the most wretched  powercuts in the village do not debilitate the connection with the mandi (agri mart), or the son working in the nearby city or village. Smart. It will also capture the usage of individual users . What’s more, its price is a jaw dropping ~USD 32 (~ INR 1500) and it is targetted at Dr Prahalad’s BOP.

Incidentally, Nokia sold more than 200 million of a previous model of this series – the Nokia 1100. The ad below captures a typical environment in which the 1100 was targetted.

I was busy flipping channels looking for something different when I suddenly noticed CNNs Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin talking about the win, standing few feet apart inside the studio. Something appeared a little unusual about Jessica that made me wait, and then Wolf said she was a ‘hologram beamed into the studio’ a la Startrek, while she was hundreds of miles away in Chicago.

(If you don’t see a video above, pls click here )

I have read about CISCO’s Hologram technology before and seen regular 2D video conferences hundreds of times but when I saw this in action, I was awestruck. Wondering when this technology would start appearing in workplaces. Like getting a buzz on the desk at say, 4 PM and hearing an announcement, “Mr. So and so from Australia joining via the hologram “. Wow!

While Tata Tea campaigns for voter enlistment, Starbucks has an unambiguous offer – vote on Nov 4 and get free coffee. If someone needs to have a similar campaign in India, she needs to have a region specific differentiated strategy:

• * Bihar – Free khaini for those who prefer. Chai in a chukkad for others.[Khaini = powdered tobacco]

• * UP – Free paan, make it Banarasi patti

• * Gujarat – Gutkha unlimited [Gutkha = flavoured masala, eaten raw]

• * TN – Filter coffee in tumbler. You must not replace this tumbler with a cup.

• * Rajasthan – Butter milk in a BIG glass

• * Haryana – Butter milk in a still bigger glass, preferably made of brass

• * Punjab – Washing machine made lassi

• * J&K – Warm Kahwa

• * MP- Pohe with jalebi, wrapped in a dona

• * West Bengal: Just another place to talk. Maybe an adda. 

The list can go on. As you can see, a common strategy does not work across regions in India. That perhaps explains why we have a coalition powered by several parties!

I happened to see Tata Tea’s Hindi commercial so rightfully taunting folks who use the election day for anything but voting. The ad’s simplicity and optimism impressed me very much. The ad closes by a tea vendor pointing out to a website run by Tata Tea for enabling voter registration. The name of the website is also quite thought out – Jaagore.com (Approximately translatable as ‘Hey, wake up!’). The use of social messaging to promote a brand evokes a subtle and positive sentiment. Very neat.

Today, I noticed a StarBucks ad offering free coffee for Americans who cast their vote in Nov 4 elections in US( “A tall cup of brewed coffee”). I loved this ad too.

Wonder why only beverage companies take this line of election themed social advertising. The biggest spenders on TV including the mobile companies, the soaps and cosmetics have completely stayed away. It sure takes lot of guts to stand apart and Tata Tea and Starbucks surely remain the very few of them. My vote goes to Tata Tea and Starbucks. Three Cheers to them!