Month: January 2012

  • QuadMo

    QuadMo aims to provide an end-to-end mobile and online gift voucher solution for retailers, consumers and corporates. In conversation with co-founder Rohit Rawal.

    [scribd id=78157835 key=key-29s1wwhow240sug6s4wm mode=list]

  • Good cop, bad cop

    Identity in era of social media proliferation was something I brought up in last week’s post. Since then, my office has shifted, and I have to travel a little more to get to the new place. Instead of going below the elevated highway, I take a shorter route that gives me elevated views every 5 minutes thanks to ‘amateur’ humps. But the traffic is better. Traffic and violations – that’s the connection.

    A few months back, a video on the Facebook page of the Bangalore Traffic Police made headlines. The cops asked for help in finding the errant car driver. (I’m not sure if they did nab him) Since then, I’ve seen increased participation on the page, with users adding photos of traffic violations, ad campaigns on safety and questions being answered by the cops themselves, though that’s occasional. In many cases, numbers of vehicles are clearly visible and I’ve seen one in which the cops have noted a violation by a fellow officer, uploaded by a user. This, and the brouhaha over the London cops naming and shaming those involved in the UK riots last year made me think about individual identities beyond virtual social and in to real social.

    Though we are still at a stage where even a person’s social, let alone all online activities cannot be comprehensively tracked and measured, technology on that front is rapidly catching up. In the near future, real world tracking technologies will probably catch up too. We’re already seeing signs of the worlds colliding. It is then possible that the social identity of a person would include his real-life actions too and a ‘Klout’ would probably have a holistic ranking of an individual, one that includes traffic violations and philanthropy and so on. 🙂

    This is probably one area where brands will then have a head start, because naming and shaming them is something many of us already do via social platforms. I wonder if we will be more lenient towards them after we get a dose of identity warfare.

    until next time, coping with cops

  • Oh, you rockstar you!

    Season 1, Episode 3 of The Dewarists brought together Indian Ocean and Mohit Chauhan, in “Maaya” and took me back to 2001. Goa. When Silk Route’s Dooba Dooba was still a popular number and I was loaned the Kandisa tape by my hostel neighbour A. After several months, he stole it back from me. (because I wouldn’t return it voluntarily!)

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRhTmRPVrYQ

    As I watched the video on YouTube, I noticed the silver creeping into Mohit Chauhan’s sideburns. 🙂 I suddenly realised that it had been more than a decade since the yellow car slowly sunk into the water and it’s been 2 years since Asheem Chakravarty died. It made me wonder about succession plans for artists and their bands. Yes, some bands do keep evolving, their members change, but their peaks of popularity is restricted to a timeframe – a generation at best. In some cases, the music they created lives on even after them, though the members themselves may have moved on, within this life or beyond.

    But imagine, each member being able to pick out his own successor who is able to recreate the music as well as that extra something that made the band what it was. Imagine The Beatles now with 4 new members doing concerts with a new sound but retaining the DNA that made them great. Quite impossible no? It’ll never be the same.

    And that perhaps explains why they’re special. And it’s not just artists, it goes for people who excel across the spectrum. There is no succession plan they can make. They are unique, ‘single piece’. But then so are all of us, one of a kind. The difference is in scale. What they created left a mark on many more lives. They found something at a point in time that only they could have done, in such a way that anyone who experienced it was changed.

    We do many things on any given day, and many a time we are also rockstars in someone’s life, even for a brief period. Is that purpose enough for us or will we want further? Will we open ourselves to possibilities and grab the chance when it comes? Will we go beyond that and chase opportunities down? Maybe the way we answer this frames our life journey.

    Mann ka panchhi Tan ka pinjara 
    Bin maange ki jail

    until next time, rock sako to rock lo 😀

  • Weekly Top 5

    [scribd id=77640458 key=key-1kxc52n6zwm8hng6lplv mode=list]

  • The Curious Case of 221B: The Secret Notebooks

    Partha Basu

    Partha Basu takes Arthur Conan Doyle’s master detective Sherlock Holmes and shows him as well as many of the cases that Baker Street fans are familiar with, in a wholly different light.

    The primary narrator is Jit, who comes across the secret diaries of Dr.Watson, the original chronicler of Holmes’ adventures. One one hand, the diaries recount the stories that were never formally published, with ‘mid-words’ from one Emma Hudson, whose identity is also a little mystery, and which add multiple layers to the official adventures, and on the other, we have Jit’s story and that of his parents, and how they happened to be in possession of the diaries.

    Partha Basu seems to have done quite some decent research, though whether the tales he has chosen were the best possible for this exercise would always be debatable according to personal Holmes favourites. But the concept itself is very interesting and adds multiple perspectives to the iconic character of Holmes, and to a certain extent to Watson’s too. This is more so because Holmes has always been the one on whom the focus has been on, while Watson has been content playing the foil to the superb skills of Holmes’ mind. Here, they seem to share the stage almost equally in terms of focus with Watson even outwitting Holmes in one case.

    So ‘The Scandal in Bohemia’, ‘The Illustrious Client’, ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’, ‘The Speckled Band’, ‘The Three Students’, ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, ‘Abbey Grange’ are all taken apart and reset in terms of either characters or circumstances as events that happened either before or after the case was published are brought to light, Characters and their motives are suddenly shown differently, thereby revealing that all may not have ended well. The book also gives a hat tip to the unofficial Holmes work – written by one Seamus Hyde.

    I also like the expressed aim of the author – to get more people to read the original works of Sir Conan Doyle. Its not very easy for a Holmes fan to be told that the master detective may have been wrong more than once – either in the specific context, or for failing to grasp the larger picture, and that he may have had character flaws that were significantly worse than portrayed in the published works, but if you can live with that, this book is a very interesting read for Holmes fans. I quite liked the touch of Holmes (once) corresponding with Arthur Conan Doyle.