India's worst city, Asia's worst village.

And I can do nothing to change it.
Because in the 3 months I've spent here, I've turned as apathetic as the rest of them.
Last month, we screeched to a halt when a half-drunk, half-dead man staggered across peak traffic, bleeding.
Apart from us, there was just the riff raff bunch of rickshaw wallas, paanwalasand sundry pedestrians who stopped to help him.
For an hour, if not more, we wrestled, slapped and nagged this drunkard to come with us to the hospital for first aid.
During which, not a single Honda City, SX4, BMW or Skoda stopped to help.
We took him to the nearest Police thana despite everyone's warning not to get involved.
When we reached the thana, we understood why.
The police put their hands up, ordering us to take him to the hospital on our own accord.
My oife gave them a dressing down they'll never forget, her West Asian fighting genes kicking in.
The police relented. And carried the man to the hospital in their own gypsy.
Round one to the citizen.

Today, my oife relived the experience, as a biker was rudely nudged off the road by a speeding autowalla.
His pillion, a woman holding a child, fell off the bike.
Once more the missus was the only one stupid enough to stop.
Thankfully, the woman and child were unhurt.
And the passerbyes just looked on, grinning like brainless primates usually seen only north of the Vindhyas.

If I weren't a Bengali, I'd have loved to knock their molars in.
Instead I turned the volume up and sped away, contemplating this blog.

Doctors here are so damn expensive...

... you can rack up Asia Miles simply by falling ill.

Static

My most ancient of television was adjusting the antenna.
Perched on our roof's ledge. Moving the steel rods this way and that. Hollering to my mom one floor down.

"Kichhu aash chhe?" (See anything?)


"Ebaar?" (Now?)

Point it towards the hill, urged my friend Tipu. Hills transmit further, because of the Echo Effect. Tipu was elder to me by a year, and therefore, a scientist.

Obediently I would try. But to no avail.
All we got on the screen, was snow.
Just snow.
After 20 fidgety attempts, we used to go back down and watch whatever appeared on screen (basically, snow.)
Because hey, at least there was a box to stare into.

The weekend is a bit like that.
I already know that nothing will ever happen, save for random and rarely rewarding binges.
Snow.
And yet I'm looking forward to it.
A box to gaze at.

Middling life

I used to be a rebel without a cause. Now I'm just 31.
Too late to be a rebel, too early to find a cause, but just in time to catch something on the telly.

Julie Garfunkel nee Andrews

It’s been years since I last saw a movie. Well, a month.
Curiously enough, it was titled“Once".
The movie stars Glen Hansard, who, as I later discovered, fronts an Irish band called The Frames, and the irresistibly insecure Marketa Irglova, a Czech popstar who, contrary to name, is lesser known in the trade.

Once is an interesting narrative of 2 people in Dublin who discover each other and a common love for song, then inspire each other to rediscover life, then record an album and then, ultimately, walk away from each other towards their own respective nirvanas. The interesting bit is that Glen and marketa, who are also the producers of the movie, actually started dating each other during the course of the shoot. The autobiographical element came through.
But it was only the arresting and instantly uplifting music that kept alive an otherwise meandering plot. The film in the end amounted to very little.
Music does that to you, though. Gives meaning. Fills gaps and blah.
Lacking it, my days drift. Yet stand still.
Without it, life is a perfectly designed violin, lying lifeless for want of a song.

Looking back, there’s so much that I don’t know or haven’t tasted in life. Music has been the gravest of these omissions. Will buying an iPod change things? But then I wouldn’t know what to download. I miss my more musically-inclined friends who once supplied me my dosage.

Of all the people I envy, and there are absolutely billions of them, it’s the minstrel I envy the most. I can draw, I sometimes write, I can whistle and hum, doodle and drum, but there isn’t anything I can strum. Which makes things very inconvenient. You’re sitting around lacking inspiration, searching ways to stretch time and tether, or just trying to perk up a depressing Sunday sundown. And that’s when I find myself wishing for the gift. Like Manoj Jacob does here . Or Raghu Dixit, one-time radio jinglemeister and fulltime lunatic, now selling his CD online.

You see, music makes things ‘simple’. You don’t need to coerce your mind to gush, or your pen to rush. Music simply flows. Manoj used to hold his guitar and start playing a chord. Then he would put words to it. And then we would stand around and listen, sometimes mocking him, sometimes suppressing sarcasm, but always grateful for such sudden lilts of levity.

Music is the simplest joy in life. No wonder this has been such a depressing blog. A prescription, anyone?

head lines

Couldn't help but notice 2 news headlines, scrolling past on the TV screen, one right after the other:

Arthur C. Clarke passes away.

The first ever all-girls hostel opens in Saudi Arabia.

Spectrums

Q.1 Is it judgmental to think of women as being judgmental?
Most women have a harder time reconciling the grey areas in life than do men. They tend to have points of view that are clearly flagged in either end of any debatable spectrum. Especially on 'issues'. Child labour is either good or evil. Dams are either good or evil. Guys are either good or jerks. 'And' is never an option.
Men prefer to sit on the fence. Getting off takes too much effort. Choosing a side takes too much commitment.

Which begs the question...
Q.2 Is that why Greys are more popular with men than women?
Pondering this very question, a Swiss graphic design student has spent a rather lot of time analyzing the color palettes of 1500 photos from the Sartorialist. What he's basically creating is a database of clothing colors. A Dresstionary, if you will.

And while on Culture-Bashing...

The Danish press has accused Ikea of “symbolically portraying Denmark as the doormat of Sweden”.
All because of a humble doormat.
A Copenhagen University academic has just produced some research that has shaken every Dane to his irreducible Viking core. He analysed all the products in an Ikea catalogue according to name. What he found was startling. It seems that Sweden's all-conquering furniture firm quite shamelessly names its fanciest futons, tables and chairs after Swedish, Finnish or Norwegian places, while reserving Danish place names for doormats, draught-excluders and cheap carpets.
That chimes with a conversation I once had with a Danish friend, whom I accused of being jealous to the point of paranoia about the Swedes. “Jealous?” he yelled, his eyes bulging. “What, just because their cars are faster, their lifestyle better, their scenery prettier, their economy stronger, their pop stars glitzier and their blondes sexier? Why should that make me jealous?”

Alas. Just when you thought that the Danes had absolutely nothing to be unhappy about.

Us versus Them

Ever since I cut down on the drinking, my mind seems to have dried up a wee bit. Or perhaps it's the other way around: it's ordinarily a wasteland intermittently irrigated by sporadic sprinklings.
Either way, I'm feeling a little juiced up.
Yesterday, I found myself debating with a person over whether Hong Kong-ers were indeed less gifted in academic brilliance. In fact, the word she used was 'intelligence'. I found it hard to believe that a thriving business city with a per capita income of nearly US$25,000 could be built on a bedrock of stupidity, but I let it pass.
In the very same breath, however, she expressed a personal wish to acquire a local HK passport so she could travel everywhere without the need for tiresome visas that her Indian passport thrust upon her. Now this seemed a bit rich.
You can't slag off a people or a city while hoping to ride on the advantages it gives you at the time.
It's the same problem I have with all the America-bashing that many NRIs resort to. They live there reveling in its wealth and material comforts, without trying to assimilate themselves in that culture.
But my wife had an interesting angle to the argument: she said that it's simply 'reverse imperialism' at work. When the Brits lorded over India, or anywhere else for that matter, it was all take and little give. They came in as a foreigner and left as one too.
Now the boot's in the other foot. Indians are thriving all around the world, and just like the 19th century colonialists, they have learnt to exploit the system without feeling any obligation to contribute back to it. Arrive, exploit, hoard, leave: same scheme, different skin.

Has the Junta gone too far? The pressure is building.
On the streets of manila... In Jakarta... Even Tokyo's baring its voice...

This weekend I myself atended an hour long candle-lit vigil in Hong Kong. (Although clearly the organizers hadn't thought this through: The SASA Last Day Sale was happening just a block away from the park. Plus some of the 'protestors' had brought along their fidgety 1-year-olds.)

The loudest protests ring from Bangkok...

In India, people have taken to the streets in their thousands...

"The seemingly impossible is possible."

A friend of mine once described his job as "the exciting time between getting two squiggly worms to meet". This is for him. Hans Rosling, the Orson Welles of Statisticians, presenting for TED. Brilliant. How it should be done.

In the professor's own words "I have a neighbour who knows 200 types of wine. The temperature, the grapes, everything. I know only two types of wine - the red and the white. But i know 200 types of economies."

What a finish. See it once, then again. Hans the mans.

Citizen oxygen

Just struck me.
The MTR sucks us from our homes, and deposits us in our rightful cubicles. Then, 9 hours later, it picks us up from our offices, deoxygenated and all, and back right into our homes. Out, in, repeat.

Hollowood

Sometimes, hollywood gives me the shivers. Despite unreasonably large quantities of warm, pungent Nu Er Hong consumed, my first viewing of Anger Management left me cold with apathy at how low movies have sunk in scooping dregs from wrecks.
The humour is so contrived, so abysmally warmbeerflat, you want to asphyxiate Adam Sandler to death by gagging him with sheet after sheet of lame scriptwriting.
This, after a respectful afternoon of watching Blame it on Rio for the nth time, applauding Larry Gelbart’s Tootsiesque genius, unfolding as always in the nervous wiggly brows of Joseph Bologna and the stiff upper cranium of Michael Caine.
The only saving grace was Marisa Tomeri, who remains to this day, god bless her half Lebanese soul, the foremost whiteskinned actress I’d like to share a meaningless conversation with.
Her birthday falls on December 4th, and do remember to send her a wish.

Marumushi versus Minu

Eons ago, there used to be a newsreader on Doordarshan called Minu. And she really hated the news. It showed. Presenting with a scowl, she would narrate every news with a bitterness that furrowed brows into my impressionable mind. I really liked her.

It seemed like she was as worried about the world as I was.

It also made news sexy for me.

Because her expressions would determine how grave the day had been. If there was bad news she would lower her voice and tighten her mouth. If it was happy news,like Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi visiting a northeastern state in weird ethnic headgear, she would allow a grimace on her face. Stern as a spinster, she took the fluff out of the news.

Far cry from the today's excessively hyperbolic newsreaders.

That's why I REALLY REALLY recommendyou try Marumushi. It's a site that aggregates news feeds in a manner such that the most read news occupies the biggest space, and so on. Marumushi is a designer, and his site is powered by the classic Treeshaped Algorithm called Newsmap , an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

"A treemap visualization algorithm provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands"

In other words, at first glance, you can tell the biggest headlines from the smallest ones.
In other words, more power to the lazy.

Google versus Hello

I'd wanted to track this, but got completely swept aside amidst work.

Google has audaciously bid for the US 700MHZ spectrum but with open standards requirements. This should scare the heck out of any telco. Skype and Google would get a serious foothold on the communications market and change it dramatically.

As you'd know, 700 mhz is the old analog TV spectrum which will be available as TV goes digital. And since it penetrates walls without any problem my guess is that the usage will be for pure mobile broadband in the US (so hastalavista Wimax in the US).

As far as I remember only Alcatel-Lucent have mobile equipment in the 700Mhz-spectrum and since most of the networks will are 800 Mhz in the US this might be the start of a fullblown war between internet calls vs. Mobile telephony.So what will happen next? Expect a major device/hardware/chip manufacturer to come out saying that they will support 700 Mhz devices. Another box ticked for Google's world domination.

Covering arse

How often do you find a doctor who prescribes just one single medicine?
You kind of get cured by his confidence alone.

I'm feel so much better now. Tomorrow's a big day, we' ll be presenting 4 alternative campaigns to the client to pick from.

Rum Boy

I had vowed not to touch a drop this week. Unfortunately the weekend arrived on a Monday. Battered by a hailstorm of ice and dark insidious rum I found a visitor at my door, a stranger I know, a reaper of misery, a writer of scorn and diviner of detritus floating around in smelly bogs of sarcasm.
He calls himself Byker, a writer I used to work with and a pensman I still learn from. Years ago, he had joined my office and would constantly hack his way to frustration, coming up with some occasional gems - I still remember a line he wrote for a Kerala Tourism ad "Standing seven feet away from an elephant, you won't forget the moment either" (expressed more succintly, ofcourse) - and then losing them in the muck of a Trainee Writer's creek.
Today he runs an agency of his own. I'm pretty sure he still doesn't get to write the way he wants. But at least he has a blog. And if it's you, Chetan Bhagat, then this is the blog you ought to read.

The Siege of Japan

There has been a lot of Japan in my life lately. I returned last week from a short trip to Tokyo, but I have nothing of note to recollect from the city. I had gone expecting a world of strangeness but met with a city no dissimiliar to Hong Kong or Singapore with its sale-obsessed populace and explosion of consumerism. On the surface it was quite a boring place, really. The only things that caught my attention were the sight of 60yearolds packing slot machine parlours and game parlours, and the abundance of bluehaired teens dressed like schoolgirls. And of course, the Jinglish.

Truth be told I was slightly underwhelmed. Yes, I saw brilliant examples of graphic/product design wherever I looked, and there was a remarkable collection of creativity at the 2121designsight in Roppongi, including tablelamps made of dripping chocolate. But I had expected a culture more sinister, less fathomable. Everyone we met was almost too nice, too open, and too welcoming to be the freak I had hoped to encounter.

Maybe Japan, as a country , is like one of those more evolved organisms. For instance, as a firsttimer to India, you'll find the country daunting, but decipherable, much like a Buffalo. Big, slightly scary, but predictably clumsy and easier to touch, see and understand - almost primal in its bluntness. Japan is more like a Jellyfish. It reveals very little of itself on the surface, but I got the feeling there was lot more to experience underneath the calm. Less obvious and totally unremarkable until you begin to study its physionomy.

But the trip was helpful in another way.

I have recently begun to read a novel by Haruki Murakami, called "The Windup Bird Chronicle". It is a popular book to be seen with these days, but don't hold that against it.

The book is the story of a man who quits his job, whose wife runs away with another man, but also a story of a missing cat, a dysfunctional 16yearold, a prostitute, the Manchurian war, and the dark arts of occult. In short, it's very Japanese in its whole conception, wildly imaginative and inscrutable at the same time. It's peppered with references to popular districts of Tokyo, making it doubly easier to visualize - a joy not afforded to me by American novelists.

It's also 606 pages long.

Books as thick as this usually put me off, not because I'm impatient or have low attention spans, but because I know they will lay complete siege over me and my life for a very long time. I have not read the Russian Classics, so my standards for thickness are set low. But since the days of the MM Kaye's "Far Pavilions", which I had the privilege of recounting page for page to my girlfriend who was convalescing for a week, have I encountered a book so intent on imposing its will on me.

This was confirmed over the weekend as Murakami forced me to postpone a long list of To-do jobs that I had planned for - I still have around 100 pages to go and am wrestling against its hold over me. And once I finish, another whim will take over - the itch to reproduce the extracts I particulary fancied. Thankfully though, this novel seems to have run out of steam midway through, and the quality of his writing hasn't kept pace with the numerous twists and turns in the plot. Perhaps this is what keeps me reading without a pause -to see how the grand puppeteer will find his way out of the labyrinths he himself has created.

empty dempty

A thought landed gently
unannounced
quick! capture it!
lens it! word it! blog it!
ready?
it's gone.
like the big feathery black leathery
crow
that was perched on this stump

but flew away
now caged in my head
yet eluding capture

Was walking through the mall
casually strolling absent minded
past other people equally aimless
and i thought -
seems just like a park
except instead of trees, you have stores.

Bhot for Taj

16 years ago, they tore from limb to limb a mosque built by Babar.
Today they lend shoulder to a tomb built by his great-grandson.
Sadhus.
Loincloths-rolled up, trident-armed, hashish-induced bravado.
And it isn't just the sadhus.
Everyone wants the Taj to get the vote.
My kith and kin included.
Your vote could make the difference, clean up Yamuna, erase 'ILU ILU, Manju love sanju, call 45241677' from marble.
Your vote could restore Taj to its former glory.
If it doesn't, we will try getting it classified as a Scheduled Wonder.
And if that doesn't work out, then we'll go out there, Gujjus, Tams, Bongs, Jats, Punjus, et al, armed with chalk and national pride, and scribble Mera Bharat Mahan on every brick and stone in the world.

So funny, it's sad

It's quarter past 15 and I'm still in office. I'd like to believe it isn't a complaint; it's passion.
Sid has this beautiful theory about how people in offices should start hurrying up their work around 5, show some urgency and get set to leave office by 6. He's doing this culture-mapping project to study how different industries or companies have distinct work cultures. Sid should meet some people in my office.
The other day, the head of our branch, addressed us all and complimented a person who had stayed up at work for like 50 straight hours. Then we all clapped in honor of his commitment to work. Humbled and proud at the same time, like jehadis at a suicide bomber's farewell.What kind of an industry celebrates a loss-making, unrewarding waste of precious manhours?
Youtube has the answer.

Friends

Caught up with a friend from school, now a rescuer of drugpeddlers at the lawfirm ThreeLongNames&Partners in LA or some place like that. We had kind of fallen out 10 years ago, but years of intoxicants seem to have dulled all recollections of bitterness from our neurons. so it was a lot of fun to become schoolboys again - including the part we showed off how clever yet angsty we've grown.

Anyway, the talk drifted through happy alleys of remembrances, the usual anecdotes of lawbreaking, and of course, women. I remember hardly anything from those 3 drunken hours, except this one brilliant oneliner he recounted from one of his dates while he was studying in the states. I thought i'll share it with you, in the hope that you too can employ his witticism should the situation arise - for example, to impress your hot Colombian girlfriend when on date in some fancy Cambodian restaurant.

INT. FANCY CAMBODIAN RESTAURANT. EVENING.
Maitre'D: Sir, why don't you try our house-wine, the Khmer Rouge?

Friend: Not really. But I do want to try your house-weed...the PolPot is it?

The BS in Brainstorming

I stumbled upon a funny little store called Pardon My Hindi, which is basically a bunch of strange New Yorkers(including a Jew called Nikhil) selling tees and blogging about it.It's surely the only store in the galaxy where you can buy a tshirt with Kalyanji Anandji's* mugshot on it. How creative is that.

Shortly after, I was over at Guy's blog today and read Jeffrey Kalmikoff's interview. Now Kalmikoff is the geniu$ who started the whole Threadless 'design-your-own-tee' phenomenon on the net. As Jeffrey explains, "Threadless is based upon the idea of 'customer co-creation' or 'crowdsourcing'....designers upload a design, it's voted on from 0-5 by our community of users...each week two reprints go on sale...The designer of each winning tee receives $2000 in cash."

So the reason it has got popular is because every prospective 'customer' who clicks onto the site becomes a sort of 'producer' in the process - true crowdsourcing.

But the difference is, I didn't find any real concepts. No Kalyanji Anandjis. Just the usual mix of graffiti so ubiquitously popular. What the herd chooses, reflects on its own predictive homogeneity. The thing is, crowdsourcing also marks down creativity. Since the design is done by some Joe Blow - one of us - we're less inclined to pay that premium for a designer's originality. PMH, for instance, sells its wackiness for $22 and above, while Threadless tees start as low as $10.

And I was thinking, hmmm. Crowdsourcing sounds familiar....feels familiar. Ah, yes.
In advertising, we know it by another name.
It's called "Brainstorming".


Put 10 people together, stick a few post-its, share a few gags, until, ok it's a wrap, we're out of cookies, well done team.
It's what Jacob Botter calls the ghastliness of the brainstorming experience.

"It's the trojan horse of mediocrity...everyone goes home with a balloon after a brainstorm - that they all feel that their pointless lives have been made somehow better by this semi cathartic experience and by the lovely little warm up games that they all played."

Send him to a Team Compatibility Reengineering workshop, I say. What BS.

(Via Giles Rhys Jones.)

Hffgm pmmb? Pwuf hg swehgbb!

The spirit of Syd Barrett lives on.
But not in the rehab centers, not in the blogs of depressed teen poets, nowhere that you'd expect. No, i found it residing here instead.

Notice the drunk debauchery of words, the rambling lunacy of illumination, the absolute absence of meaning, not seen since the days of Fleas in Pamela

Smoke this, mister Barrett:

"The perceived quality of the extension appears to be another element with relevant influence. When evaluating extensions, the perceived quality of the brand tends to be examined; whereas by analysing the retroactive effects, the variable that is worked with is the perceived quality of the extension, given that in this case the quality of the brand has a more prominent role as a variable to be explained rather than as an explanatory variable."

Strategic Marketeers, here's to you.

Blogiarism

Sometimes, you walk aimlessly with the specific aim of reaching nowhere. So it is with this particular blog. Having hit a writer's block and rapidly losing the habit to post, let me try poaching and parroting what other bloggers are thinking today. Hopefully you (and I) will end up in some interesting places in a couple of links. First up I drifted into Hugh McLeod's, whose "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" have become one of those iconic things that you always like to boast about being the first to discover - but as soon as the world catches on, you sort of jump off the bandwagon.
Quite the opposite seems to have happened with gaping void, though. Some other cartoonists have been passing off mcleod's work as their own.
Three things amaze me about this blogiarism issue, that (a) why we get a moral kick out of pointing out someone's misdemeanour, (b) how it takes skill to even plagiarize with panache- or, nakal mein bhi akal chahiye, and (c)why the f*** am i trying to blog when the inspiration just isn't there.

Gone fishing

Thanks for dropping by, Tim.
This blog usually has a life of its own, or so I thought - well apparently not. The cacophony of work marches on leaving silent blogs in its wake. And memories of more wasteful days spent in sloth, joblessness and PacMan.


Picture courtesy the most awesome site in the geekiverse.

a single malted organism

around 74,000 years ago, a supervolcano in Mount Toba nearly wiped out all human life with a force equal to 3000 times the Mount Helens eruption, which is roughly equivalent to 3 working Saturdays in a row.
I've had 6 in the past 6 weeks.
allhuman life has been squeezed dry out of me.
now finally, the earth is cooling back to normalcy, with a slow drizzle of single malts. will keep you posted, if you're still surviving out there.

10 Superbowls, 1 question

I've been meaning to read Mohammad Younus's book for a while now. My wife informs me as to how smart his Grameen Bank was in choosing debtors: the loans were given to groups or collectives of peasants, rather than the individual villager himself. This simple strategy ensured there was a Group Pressure on each co-debtor not to default.

By sheer coincidence, Amit Verma points us to a similar scenario, raised in a letter to the editor of the Financial Times.
Here's the puzzle:
You have a piece of bread and you are full. In front of you, 10 guys are waiting for you to give it away. You can ask them all one common question, to find out who is the most hungry guy. What question should it be?.

Tyler Cowen throws up some answers on his blog, Marginal Revolution.

Sometimes it's hard to take a face seriously no matter how many times over he can sue you.

Vanuatu or Hong Kong?

Apparently I'm living in the Most Economically Free country in the world. Hong Kong (with 89% Freedom Score) comes out on top in this latest survey. India is ranked 104th. That's 15 places above the Irrationally Exuberant Republic of China, while Russia's lower than both. Only Brazil escapes the BRICbats by crawling into a mighty impressive 70th spot.

Somehow it doesn't make a cent's difference to me.
Because what I've always wanted, is to settle down on an island. Or in South America. Preferably both.
Now I know why.
Seems like the 10 most happiest places on earth are either islands, or countries in south america.
Colombia. Panama. El Salvador. Cuba. Costa Rica.
Places otherwise known only for tornadoes, poverty, military coups, bloody upheavals. Also places famous for fermented beverages, football and the finest inhalants.

Singapore, which was No. 2 in the Economic Freedom index, is at #131. USA? Ranked #150. Japan? #95. Life looks different when you alter the parameters slightly. The worrying thing is, I don't even know where Dominican Republic is on the map. Maybe I need to change my viewfinder.

Page zero

...and speaking of book covers, do you have any favorites that come to mind? I'm trying to put together a gallery of all the best book covers I'v seen, and any suggestions would be welcome. New York Times comes up with a yearly list, but frankly i'm not too kicked with their 2006 picks. i could think of 5 album covers this month that were better than that list. or are book cover designers dorkier than their bretheren in the music album business? Check this one out, regarded by my good friend The Dragon King to be the Best Album Cover of All Time.

What is art?

I was reading a book in the tube today, and somehow it attracted the attention of a woman sitting next to me. She said it was very creative, the way I had covered the book. Then I realized she was referring to the way I had wrapped my book in an old newspaper. Hmm, so what's the big deal, I wondered. We were all taught to cover books that way since childhood.
Then I reached office and some coworkers said the same, nice cover and all that. I realized what was normal - even instructed - behaviour for me, seemed very creative to most people in Hong Kong. One man's necessity is another's art.

Creativity in ites barest form is nothing but optimizing constraints.
Here in Hong Kong, I guess one never needed old newspapers when you could buy so mnay different types of shiny wrapping paper.
In that sense, the more constraints you face, the more creative you are forced to get. Drawing a star is no problem, drawing one without lifting your pencil is.
And perhaps it applies to everything in life.
Every small businessman in India learns how to beat the system and work through its loopholes.
Football urchins in Brazil learn to dribble because they dont grow up passing long balls in their crowded bylanes.
In my industry, it's often the smallest client who demands the biggest ideas. More the constraints, greater the imperative to be creative.

Perhaps it's the reason why the greatest European art blazed amidst the suffocation of the dark ages. Why all the finest writers I've read grew up in repressed regimes of eastern europe or south america. Art needs a problem, a resistance, to counterpoint. Art, after all, is freedom from the regimen: its fire stoked the more you try to smother it.

Fridead

07:45 pm
Friday night. like crazed automons we walk out the offices, me and the rest of the whole world, pulled like the sun gravity's, thirsty for our own poisons. it feels like the whole universe is graduating tonight and the week has thrown a party for all of us.

i have this bar i go to all the time. i dont know its name, but i recognize its breath strong enough to feel my way through absolute darkness. they have a smoking licence now, so this place is packed again. smokers in hong kong share this invisible handshake. ever since they banned smoking, smokers seem to cling on to their dreadful habit more dearly, like exiles from the CCCP emigrated to paris. You love most what the world snatches away. They sit around chatting and laughing and bitching, swapping dreams and drudgery over satay and limeheaded Sol.

the lady who runs this place never forgets to look happy upon seeing me. CRM starts with just a smile - i remember flying Valuair from singapore once. Their inflight meals come in a box. once I finished my meal, i discovered a little sticker at the bottom. it had a smiley and a message that said: Done? Go ahead,order another one! A bit cheesy, but equally warm. Instantly and genuinely connected with the brand. wonder why other airlines don't think this way.

9:15 PMAnyway, back to the bar. The usual music.Crowded House, Tears for Fears, Lisa Loeb. custom designed for nostalgic drunks.
The place is packed to the rafters now.
The collective murmurs of fifty people becomes a voice of its own.
Perfect to get lost in, write, doodle, daydream.

It's amazing how difficult it is to work when there's one person chatting away next to you; but not when there are a hundred. as if, by their sheer numbers, they cease to exist.

Is that why Authorities fear an Artist more than a hundred anarchists? One artists's voice screams more powerfully than the din of a thousand petitioners. Imagine the impact Orwell would have had when 1984 was first published.

Vista Rap: Will da real Underdawg please stand up?

As a rule, i always root for the overdog; underdogs enjoy way too much support anyway. But it's getting getting harder and harder to know who the underdog really is. never can seem to tell the bad guy from the good, the right from wrong.
Should i pledge my support the loonies at DefectivebyDesign? Or has MS-bashing simply become fashionable? Is there something really wrong with Vista? And what exactly is DRM anyway? (enlighten me.)
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Update 1: This is weird. From the aforementioned DbyD site:
Ask Bono to stand with us for Digital Freedoms! Now, with your help, we are going to ask Bono to take a stand with us on DRM. Sign the petition NOW.

Huh?? I mean, now we have to sign up for a pre-petition just to get Bono to sign up on another petition on our behalf? How about asking Bob Geldof to sign on a pre-pre-petition asking you to sign on the pre-petition requesting Bono for signing on the petition?
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Update 2: Apparently, Apple's ripping us off too. Et tu, sir steve?

My three-&-a-halfth place

I take the tube to work everyday. A journey spanning 30 minutes, 2 outlying islands and about 40 pages. To borrow a Starbucks catchphrase, the tube is my 'third place'.
but within that third place, there is another.
My book.
Thanks to living so far away from office, the long commute has added an extra hour to my day. I wonder where that extra hour lay hidden when i lived much closer to work? I mean, did this extra hour just get created miraculously out of nowhere?
And is there really a word like 'halfth'? Sometime, english doesn't have enough words for the modern world.

Someone (i forget who) pointed me to a similar concept that immigration experts are grappling with: the 1.5 generation. Young immigrants who aren't strictly first generation because they didn’t choose to emigrate. But not second generation either – as they were born and spent part of their childhood in their country of origin.

The remarkable thing is, everything in the contemporary world seems to be in halves, greys and blurs.
It has perhaps to do with the way we live today; always mobile, never at Point A nor B. Never totally sure if we've reached where we wanted to be.
The same restlessness that drives us to switch industries, search opportunities, ditch the daytime job to launch a startup. The same restlessness that drives companies to have brand re-evals every 6 months. The same restlessness that makes my clients worship and worry - obsessively in equal measure- about consumer research.
To be sure. To have some definition in a half-half world.

I tell them you can't fight Heisenberg. No matter how hard you try, you can't measure any one thing's location and direction at the same time, be it atoms, consumers, brand loyalty, personal relationships, whatever.

We carry Blackberries not because we want to keep moving, but to have the illusion we aren't moving at all.

They joke i need a fourth place. i take their advice and come back here to blog. have a good half-morning ahead, stranger. Time for brunch?

Powerdoodles - 3

Super-marketing

Two lazy observations while pushing a cart in the supermarket the other day:
Thought # 1.
Ladies, be warned. While you think it's your husband/boyfriend accompanying you with the trolley, the truth is far more sinister. Apparently, there's a gang of zombies hiding in every supermarket, who jump into your husband/boyfriend's body the moment he walks in through the door. You can identify them by their strange droopy gait and a vacant glossy look in their eyes. The giveaway? Tiny fangs emerge when in proximity to attractive unaccompanied female shopper.

Thought # 2.
Given that the average supermarket covers an area larger than Alaska, wouldn't it be nice if supermarket brands like Kellogs etc used GPRS or SatNav (or something web tooey like that) to guide you towards their shelf? i'm sure it can be done. You feed in your shopping list of brands into your GPRS enabled mobile phone, and bam! The moment you're in their vicinity inside the supermarket, you hear a beep on your phone. so no more mindless aimless clueless patienceless aisle hopping. no more zombies.

It sounds a bit farfetched, but have you heard about Mini's crazy new billboards? They greet you by your name whenever you drive past them. (via Frederick Samuels)

Frog Food for the Toady Tongued

5 things i learned today:

1. It's not a good time to be a Japanese cabinet minister.

2. It's not a good time to be Bono in concert.

3.It's not a good time to be an agency head on Madison Avenue. (via MTLB)

4. It's not a good time to be a believer.

5. It's always a good time to waste some, in which case drop in at Anand Ramachandran's, India's own answer to the Onion.

Deja views

if i had a dollar for every time someone started a sentence with "it's all about...", i'd be running my own emu farm by now. IT'S ALL ABOUT consumer empowerment.IT'S ALL ABOUT social networks. IT'S ALL ABOUT pull, not push. yada yada yada.
this morning, tony comes up with "it's all about relevance, not originality."
over at hinchcliffe's blog, it's all about 'IT'S ALL ABOUT...'. even the usually interesting dave armano bores us today with esoteric debates on tilting media scales and such like.
This whole web 2.0 schmaradigm is becoming like sex. if you're always talking about it, you aren't getting it.

there's no name for it

i've hit a bit of a bliter's wrock. blocker's wright. blogger's wrog. whatever.
i had thought i'll write about the 6 word story contest, but i got late. imagine compressing a concept into 6 words. my favorite entry was:

"Nice skin," he said, removing it.

creepy. i had submitted "Too late, hissed the seventh word.", and "The Last Thin man arrived at Fatville". Dark is the soul of brevity.
then i wanted to impress you with the dutch devilry of helmut smits, who is going around planting trees in front of billboards coz he's sick of advertising's omnipresent ugliness. (via guerilla innovation).
but then i thought why blog when you can bloglift? (blift?) i need to get out more.

Powerdoodles - 2

Had to try this. Sorry jerrster, thank you G.

One Show 2006 (though it could well be 2005)

I've settled into an armchair and begun going through the new One Show annual. The good news is that a lot of the ads are a bit samey and dated - new visual puns, or new puns on older ones. Which means it's easier for you and me to win next year.
The first in the 'Hey-someone-just-forwarded-me-this-joke-can-we-turn-it-into-an-ad?' category goes to this bronze winner for Durex extra large condoms in South Africa:
It sucks, because a) i didn't do it; b) no one over the age of seven should be doing it and c)too bloody cute to be funny. A joke turned into a bigger one, all win-wink nudge-nudge. It's the sort of ad that hangs around like a pair of low rise jeans: not sufficiently subtle to rise above the ordinary nor brash enough to descend into the obscenely funny category.

Now for the bad news: some teams are giving me a serious inferiority complex. My favorite by a mile is this brilliant piece of thinking for Stella Artois, the premium beer brand that calls itself 'Reassuringly Expensive'. The brief was probably to do a promotion for Christmas season. So what did the team come up with?
While everybody else was busy lowering prices for promotions, Stella raised theirs. After all, its reassuringly expensive. And honest. If you love the beer, and are at the store to pick up some, you're not going to be turned off by an extra quid. And how happy can a client be when your idea is ballsy enough to drive prices up? I just love the cheek of it.

Gwen Yip, professional lunatic

"Graphics is what I'm weak at. I always suspect to be scratched by it's coldness."
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Most art directors i know used to be graffiti geeks, child prodigies or general allround misfits until one day they grew up and joined advertising.

This one went in the other direction.
Gwen escaped Leo Burnett and fled to London, clutching her sketchpad and a few loose nerve endings to become a fulltime struggling artist. And I'm pleased to note that the patient is showing no signs of improvement.

bad service = savvy business?

I was thinking about how google is trying to (gently) push, shove, force, gag firefox 2 down throats, and the realization that they dont mind giving some customers a bad deal, as long as the strategy works for them in the long run. And my mind went back to an amazing theory my wife came up with.
We were talking about Air Deccan, India's first low-cost airline, a clone of the Southwest operating model, low cost, no frills, no (business) class. Their strategy is based on one simple principle: shut the eff up and go back to your seat, sir.
So there’s nothing as frivolous as seat numbers, public announcement systems or flight schedules, and no guarantee you’ll reach the aircraft let alone your destination.

So my wife’s theory goes like this:

She suspects the reason they have so many unscheduled delays is to keep you hungry – and captive - at the boarding gate. So when you finally get onboard after a 2 hour delay, you’re willing to eat the airhostess if she cooperated. And when you’re hungry enough, you’ll pay for anything – 5 packets of lukewarm instant noodles, limpy leprotic fries, throw us anything and we’ll pay for it.
Which makes a lot of sen$e.
At least for Air Deccan anyway.
Any pathetically bored statistician out there willing to do a correlation study on Air Deccan’s inflight meal revenues vis-a-vis their flight delay schedules?

Deafening silence

I'm no poet, but the meaning of those words came to me when i spent the last 2 days trying unsuccessfully to log in to blogspot. the reason, according to my resident IT expert, is because i was on internet explorer 6.0. and google was not too happy with that; as they would really, really like you to switch over to firefox 2.0 asap. Pissed off or not, google's got its marketing game right. ah, it feels good to be ranting again.

PS: Picture courtesy Jerrster's highly offensive imagination. Now don't go clicking there if you're anyone over seven, or eating. No seriously, don't. I said don't. Too late.

It's 03:28 & i'm hungry

Fish, anyone?

"The crack cocaine of the thinking world"

Is how BBC describes the Edge Question for 2007.

After going through some of the answers to last year's question ("What's Your Dangerous Idea?"), i am willing to agree: cocaine has had some part to play with some of these ideas.

take for example, renowned cognitive scientist David Hoffman's submission to the "dangerous idea" question:

"A spoon is like a headache. Suppose I hand you a spoon. It is common to assume that the spoon I experience during this transfer is numerically identical to the spoon you experience. But this assumption is false. No one but me can experience my spoon, and no one but you can experience your spoon. But this is no problem. It is enough for me to assume that your spoon experience is relevantly similar to mine. For effective communication, no public spoon is necessary, just like no public headache is necessary. Is there a "real spoon," a mind-independent physical object that causes our spoon experiences and resembles our spoon experiences? This is not only unnecessary but unlikely. It is unlikely that the visual experiences of homo sapiens, shaped to permit survival in a particular range of niches, should miraculously also happen to resemble the true nature of a mind-independent realm. Selective pressures for survival do not, except by accident, lead to truth."

Enlightening, professori.

This year's question is 'What Are You Optimistic About?'

You there sir, snorting in the corner, what's your opinion?

the yogi berra paradox

shilpa shetty blah blah racism blah blah trp ratings jade shetty blah blah daniella lloyd shilpa shetty blah blah big brother blah blah trp ratings bitch blah blah shilpa shetty blah blah racism...
(disclaimer#1: i was momentarily tempted to blog about the fiasco, but i assumed the whole world will. what more could i add? disclaimer#2 : but what if everyone thought like that? then it wouldn't get blogged at all. what if an event was so big that no one write about it. russell davies calls it the Yogi Berra paradox. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.")

Powerdoodles - 1

3 random pictures, messed up by me. On powerpoint.