Month: August 2011

  • Parenthesis

    Sometime back, I saw this relatively unknown Malayalam movie called ‘Calendar’, starring Zareena Wahab, playing mother to Navya Nair. Zareena’s character is widowed at 21 and she refuses to remarry since she wants to give all her attention to her child. The movie worked for me, despite it being built on the cliched “kid grows up, and gives more importance to her own life than her parent’s feelings”, thanks to a tight script and some neat casting.

    On the day I’m writing this, 3 works – one news item, one article, and one short story – appeared in my reading stream. The news was about a 107 year old woman left by her children, one of whom stays nearby, to fend for herself in a cowshed, the article centred around the topic of divorce and its impact on children, and the fiction work had to do more with marriage and infidelity, but with a neat twist in the end. Speaking of the end, I will link to them there, so you don’t escape this early. 😉

    I really didn’t need these prompts to write on the subject, since parenthood has been a source of constant debate recently, thanks to our parents aging and showing the first signs of serious aches and pains, even as we grow older and realise that the body also believes in keeping a low temperature of revenge for sins committed on it during the last three decades. 🙂

    Parenthood is one of those things that seriously lacks an undo feature, just like death, and is hence treated as a decision that merits serious thought. In general, the parents want the child to have a happy life and make choices on its behalf. Choices the child may not like/appreciate, but the parents believe to be the right one. They also make sacrifices for the child, in terms of time, money, and so on.

    But at least for debate’s sake, do you think these acts are always completely selfless? Isn’t brewing underneath it all a set of expectations? Sometimes parents see children as a way of fulfilling their own aspirations, sometimes they see them as support mechanisms in old age. Even if it’s none of these, or others you can think of, they at least get some pleasure out of seeing their child do well in life.

    But what blows me has always been that the parents get to make this considered choice of having a child and the child who is brought into the world and is the recipient of this and later choices, has zero say in the matter. It’s a serious product design flaw, and the only non-utopian remedy is for everyone concerned not to take each other for granted.

    As promised, the news, the article and the story.

    until next time, apparent traps

  • Yana Sizzlers

    The post title is going to get me a lot of traffic! If you’re among those who are hoping to see the “actress’” videos, really sorry. This is about a restaurant in Koramangala. Hot stuff, but of the food kind, though my tee was a hat tip to the actress. 😀 For those who are here for other drooling reasons, Yana Sizzlers is a chain based in Pune. Yana means ‘come again’ and you can stop sniggering! The Bangalore version is on 60 ft Road Koramangala, just after G K Vale – the same road as ‘Flambe‘, China Pearl, Vicky’s Tava Lounge, Oye Amritsar, The Esplanade etc. Parking for 4 wheelers may not be very easy, but there are a few side lanes around. (map)

    The restaurant has seating on two floors. The upper level seemed a little less crowded in terms of space and people, so we chose that. The seating is comfortable and they have puzzle tablemats that will help you while away time in case you are tongue tied.

    You can take a look at the menu on Zomato, though the Continental cuisine was completely missing in the menu we were given. We decided to start with the Scotch Broth. The guy who took the order seemed confused about it, and brought back another person who seemed to easily know more about the menu. We were told it would be creamy. It turned out thick but not creamy with barley, potato, pieces of mutton, and garnished with fried bread crumbs. Quite tasty if you add a dash of pepper to it.

    For the main course, I chose the Spicy Chicken Square and D opted for the Chicken Kebab Masala. You might want to try out the Barbeque sizzlers, which are a specialty of theirs. I somehow missed the ‘spicy’ in my dish and asked for the hot chilly sauce. The second guy (from earlier) then turned up to point it out and I shifted to the BBQ sauce. D chose the Garlic Pepper Sauce. The Spicy Chicken Square indeed lived up to its name, with prominent pepper flavour, and juicy boneless chicken. An excellent dish if you can be patient and wait for it to cool a bit. D’s kebabs turned out to be more like manchurian though. Not a bad dish, but just wasn’t what we expected. But it wasn’t very spicy, and D was sober, so she didn’t complain and therefore escaped unhurt. This is a good time to mention that the usual cabbage leaf base is missing. I’m not sure if that somehow contributes to the increased cooling time. However, despite that absence, there wasn’t much of burnt food thankfully.

    The service is quite prompt, though some of them do seem a little out of sorts. The meal cost was just less than Rs.900. Our favorite remains Tangerine in Indiranagar, and Kobe is around on a parallel road in Koramangala, but this is worth a visit too.

    Yana Sizzlers, #145, 60ft. Road, 5th Block, Koramangala Ph: 25505538

  • Personal Brand

    ’10ways to unlock your personal brand’ would guarantee hits, but the problem is that I can’t bring myself to write it. That’s what the post is about.

    The title is because the post is related to me, and the raison d’être of the blog. To give you a quick update, I have been considering various employment options in the last couple of months – not just ‘the next job’, but even at a ‘consultancy vs job’ level. Given the options, I believe I’ll be able to put that to rest next week, at least for the medium term. Since the blog’s existence played its part in providing me these options, I thought it deserved a ‘take stock’ post.

    I had always intended this to be a resting space for my ideas and perspectives. But I have realised that the blog is at best, a strategy, and not an objective. The objective is to tell the world that I have perspectives on the areas I specialise in – brand and social. Notwithstanding my interest in these areas, it has been driven a lot by the same blogging discipline that has kept the personal blog alive for more than 8 years now.

    However, the autopilot discipline, in cahoots with my general nature, has kept me writing more for myself than an audience, which completely goes against the objective. It not only affects the content generated, but the brand/communication strategy as well. I have followed a ‘build and they will come if they are interested’ approach, something that I advise brands and publishers not to do in an era of abundance. Also, I rarely publicise posts beyond a single tweet/ LinkedIn status, and refrain from baiting. (brand or individual) In fact, I very reluctantly started sharing my own posts on GReader only a few weeks back. Bad strategy in the era of aggressive personal brands.

    This thought had been gnawing at me for a while, but hit me when the afaqs guest post happened, and the reactions started coming in. This is a good time to mention that left to myself, the article wouldn’t have happened. It took consistent ‘do it’ pushes from the ever kind and wise Vijay Sankaran for the article to see the light of day. It took just a little more time than the average post to be written, but the amount of people who sat up and took notice was many multiples more than anything this blog had seen. It has also led me to the question of identity and a single web location (unifying the blogs), but that’s for later.

    Considering that time is going to be my most valuable resource going forward, I will need to prioritise.  I experimented with tumblr and paper.li to see if i could produce more content in lesser time (to be used here) and leave ‘heavier’ writing for platforms with more reach. But I realised I would just be adding to the noise, and not being original at all. I like what I do here, and won’t stop. What I might have to do is skip a week once in a while so that I can also meet the objectives I had initially set for myself. Interestingly, the immediate trigger for this post was that while I was writing the original post for this week, i realised it could make a decent article elsewhere. 🙂

    In case you have reached here, I have a question. If you could change something about the posts here, what would it be? Shorter? Better scope for debate? More personal/topical examples? Let me know.

    until next time, happy I-Day 🙂

  • Thought Bubbles

    Compassion is a value I strive for, but that does not make it any less a strange thing. It doesn’t help that we are in an era where it has been simplified to a Like and an RT. But each time I mock that these days, I am forced to acknowledge that I have absolutely no right to get judgmental.

    In the case of personal relationships, where circumstances require me to show compassion, I have caught myself holding on to baggage, and playing judge on whether the people in question deserve to be the recipient of any compassion. I doubt whether it is supposed to work that way.

    With people I don’t know, I wonder if the miniscule I offer in terms of time, money, thought, energy will amount to any significant change in their lives. If it does not, how different is it from clicking a button and transmitting the message to an audience? Do they, after all, vary in intent?

    On both kinds of occasions, I have wondered why I am not able to go outside my bubble and do more. Perhaps I am afraid it will upset the careful balance I have created, afraid to tamper with the default detachment. One part of my mind cares, the other carefully weighs the pros and cons, shakes its head and moves on. I follow. Being unaware of the bubble is one thing, being aware of it and yet unable to do anything about it is quite another. Perhaps I have to first learn not to be judgmental about the self, but then I wonder if that’s what leads to apathy.

    until next time, kam passion 😐

  • UniApply

    When you have to sift through information about various colleges and courses, choose your career options and then apply, UniApply can be of help. In conversation with co- founder Ranjan Banerjee

    [scribd id=61843588 key=key-1eogp4m3mdxuj9ywz3uh mode=list]