Month: January 2009

Categories
My Fiction

Recycled: Spooky?

Surrounded by the dilemmas of whether recycling my blog posts from my older blog here is inherently good or evil, I post this. Good, because it’s recycling. Because, let’s face it, recycling is good. Right? Bad because it wastes pixels. The content is already on the old blog, why post it here again? Well, while the dilemma continues, you can proceed to enjoy the following.
–

… you wake from a bone-chilling nightmare, to find yourself sleeping on the middle berth of a sleeper compartment on a train from Howrah. Still shivering under the nightmare’s effect, you try to wake someone up so that atleast the fear can be reduced if the dream can’t be shared, but no one wants to be bothered at this hour.

You sit for some minutes trying to figure out the storyline of the nightmare or trying to forget the gory details… when you hear nature’s call. Time to go to the loo. So you step down, and head towards the end of the coach, counting the number of compartments you cross in the way so that you return to your own berth… 1… 2… 3… 4… 5.

After answering the call, you return the same way… 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… and the berth you were sleeping in seems to be occupied… you move closer to wake him up, when you notice the person’s face… and you realise… it is YOUR body!!!

Hypnos

Categories
Rides

Thunder!

It’s official today. I’m going here.

After the sleepless nights once I found out that registrations had closed on 6th, and that gatecrashing would not be an option unless you want to pitch a tent outside the venue and sleep there, it feels like heaven knowing that I’m in!!

So those of you who can’t make it, too bad for you. I’m gonna be there when it happens!

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong?

Wish Karo, Dish Karo

Have you seen Shah Rukh Khan on TV sitting on a terrace in a couch, hair flowing back in the wind, asking the world why they are content with their current cable connection, and aren’t switching to DishTV immediately?

Remember what he’s been telling us lately? “Aasman me live Dish TV…”

So?

So, in India the only airline which offers in-flight television is Kingfisher, and what I see there is no live TV. No sir.

KF’s in-flight entertainment list contains NDTV Good Times, a Hindi movie (on air premiere), a channel showing Star One or Star World, an animation channel, an English soap, maybe one or two visual channels and some ten radio channels while the screen shows a map or information screen.

And none of those channels are showing anything “live”, that is what the people down there on the ground are able to see through their cables, Dish TVs, Tata Skys, Big TVs etc. It is programming that is pre-set for the flight. And what is worse? The content repeats. For each flight that flies in a day, the content is identical.

How do I know this? At times I have to fly Kingfisher twice or thrice in a day, and I find the same Friends/Khichdi/Sarabhai vs Sarabhai episode running on the Star entertainment channel, or the same feature on the NDTV Good Times channel, the same “premiere” movie, the same cartoon film. So the entertainment is entertaining in the first flight, but in subsequent flights during the day, it gets stale.

Anyways, the point is why advertise something (and give the public guilt over it), when it is obviously not true? Why lose credibility?

Categories
Internet What's wrong? WTF

Stop spamming me!

What is the problem with Just Dial?

I have never visited their site before today. Nor have I ever called on their number and left my email address.

Yet, everyday I get three to four emails from them which would be titled “Response to your call for X-Y-Z”. And for around 80% of the time, I would never have even heard of X-Y-Z. The mail starts with a section on what the media is writing about Just Dial, and then “the information I requested”, which would be the name of the company – X-Y-Z, and then their address.

This company is being covered by newspapers and such is the problem with them.

I checked their site, and there is no “don’t send me these emails” link.

From one of their articles: “Just Dial connects the seeker to the sought”. Why is it trying to connect me, when I am neither the seeker nor the sought?

I think I should send them an email with the “information” they didn’t request but require direly.

Categories
Uncategorized

It’s Complicated

freshen upMe: So this Facebook thing of yours. You’re no longer single, it’s now complex, eh?

Mandrake: Not complex. Complicated.

Me: Aaah! Because in complex situations, there are imaginary people in the equation?

Mandrake: Yes, and there is no ‘I’ in W-E or R-E-A-L.

Me: And ‘I’ am alone and lonely in complex situations.

Mandrake: And when ‘I’ meet another ‘I’, things cease being imaginary, and it’s no more complex.

Me: We’re so smart!

Mandrake: We should publish this.

Me: Stop dreaming.

–
Inspired by a tea-time conversation with my friend Mandar.

Categories
What's wrong? WTF

Upgradability

I have a branded laptop from a renowned company.

It has 1 GB of RAM.

Now I need to upgrade, and want 2 GB of RAM.

I should be able to buy one more stick of 1 GB and have 2 GB of RAM, right?

Wrong.

The 1 GB of RAM in my laptop is not in one stick of 1 gigabyte. It is in two sticks of half a gigabyte each. If I now buy a 1 GB stick, I’ll have to take out one half-gig stick and replace it with the new 1-gig stick. Which leaves me with 1.5 gigs.

I could buy two sticks of 1 gig each and replace both the half-gig sticks. But then I have bought the entire RAM anew, and I have two half-gig sticks which are of no use to me. I cannot sell those easily, because if I need 2 gigs on my machine today, there would hardly be anyone in the market who would want a stick with capacity below 1 gig. With passing time, these half-gig sticks would become more obsolete and less in demand.

And this is not just my story. All laptops come with just two slots for RAM, and both sticks are occupied with contemporary capacity sticks. Which means that upgradability goes out of the window when laptops are designed/made.

I remember when I had a replacement VC820 motherboard shipped from Intel, because the CC820 I had bought was defective, they gave me one stick of 128MB RAM and an empty CRIMM (because the memory technology being used, RDRAM, did not work with empty slots). In short, if I wanted to double my memory I had to buy another 128MB stick and replace the CRIMM with the new stick.

How difficult is it to leave one slot empty, or ship laptops with three memory slots, so that users do not have to face such situations when they want to upgrade? Or is it a tactic to force users to either spend more by either wasting money on memory that’d be useless to them, or buy a new laptop?

Categories
Branding & Advertising What's wrong?

Earn it, Cadbury’s!

Cadbury’s relaunched their premium chocolate bars, Bournville recently. With new rich packaging and a new format, reminiscent of their other premium range, Temptations, Bournville looked promising.

But then, advertising happened.

Take a look at the following two print ads for the brand:
And then, this TV spot:
Link courtesy aFaqs!

All this has left me befuddled. With such finishing and the obvious amount of money spent on the campaign, what is the level of thought and creativity that’s gone behind it?

The positioning is simple: You don’t buy a Bournville, you earn it. So far so good. Shall we see what the “creative” has done with the idea?

In the first one, “Booker, Oscars, Nobel, Bournville… Hope you get the drift”, it took me a while to understand that they are trying to hook on to the “earn it like an award” idea. Oh right, Bournville is such an earnable thing as a Nobel Prize or a Booker.! And then “hope you get the drift”. No I don’t. You have to do better than that. Preposterous at its worst, unimaginative at its best.

Then I saw the TV ad, where a reporter tells us that the way to eat it is to break the bar (trying to own the sound), smell it (like wine) and then tells us of the “legend of Bournville”, again that “you earn it”, which according to him is British mumbo-jumbo. Then he proceeds to eat it without having earnt it, and gets lifted off by a giant bird, reinforcing the idea that “you dare not eat it without earning it first”. Hence, we know the agency is short of ideas.

And in the end, you have “The food of the gods and other top management”. Had it just been “The food of the gods” it’d still have been okay. A bent enough headline, though dated. But “… other top management”? What does that mean? It doesn’t add to the “earn it” idea, neither is it funny.

Neither of the three ads have been able to give me any impression that Bournville is a premium product or that the advertising is smart,or at least clever.

To Cadbury’s: you earn your place in the consumer’s mind and in the advertising world, and this time you haven’t. Sorry.

Categories
Uncategorized

Random musings from a class… guess which one

“Depreciation, block of assets, purchase value, residual value, scrap value, kick-ud the bucket of the beenis… I wish you could able to understand.”
“Don’t you need to make an adjustment.”<- this is NOT a question.

Now with all these ever-increasing acronyms denoting various forms or levels of profit thrown at us everyday, I have decided to coin the mother of all profit acronyms, the ultimate profit acronym… PBCODIT: Profit before CoGS, Operating Expenses, Depreciation, Interest and Taxes… go figure.

feeling amortized,
Hypnos

—

This was a post I had written over four years ago in the earlier version of my blog. Though it’s more like an IIM Indore internal thing, I still enjoyed reading it again today.

Categories
Uncategorized

Bad 2009

The year couldn’t have had a worse start. Truly.

When I started writing this post I was going to talk about JPG magazine closing down because of lack of sustaining funds. And I kept thinking if such a reaction is worth it. I mean so many things could have happened that could be worse than a favourite and inspiring magazine closing down.

And while I was thinking of that, I got a SMS from a friend, telling us that another friend has passed away.

It was in the papers. I wish I believed in souls, the afterlife and prayers so I could speak to Nikhil and pray for his soul.

Now this year has officially started on a very bad note.

I already cannot tolerate people who drive without caring for their or other people’s lives. They’ve given me another reason today.

I can’t think of words to tag this post with.

Categories
Photography

The Joy of Sweetness


The Joy of Sweetness
Originally uploaded by recaptured

A happy new year to all you lovely people.