Month: April 2015

  • Currencies of hope

    In The Narratives of our lives, I had written about how, thanks to the advances of civilisation, many institutional narratives like religion, nation, culture etc have assumed increasing levels of importance in our lives, and how these (and our personal) narratives are probably our way of ensuring a sense of belonging. ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines‘, criticism on the concept of singularity notwithstanding, has convinced me on the cold, sanitised nature of evolution, so these days, I try to see what evolution’s play is, in these narratives.

    Thanks to a wine-induced pop philosophy conversation, I got thinking about theism and atheism. The epiphany (for me) was that they are just two sides of the same coin, and the currency was hope. Simply put, the foundation of the theist’s hope is God, and that of the atheist’s is the ability to determine his own future. ‘Our beliefs create the world we live in’, but across belief systems, hope is a critical ingredient for man’s survival. I realised that as long as we are the dominant species, hope has to hang around, or vice versa. By virtue of providing a common imaginary friend to a sufficiently high mass, religion not only addresses our need to belong, it also gives us hope. What each of us hope for is a very subjective thing, but collectively, it makes religion a really dominant narrative in many lives. When I thought about it, I recognised an even bigger force – money. (more…)

  • The Black Rabbit

    Am I the only one who finds it funny that Sunny has been replaced by a bunny in Indiranagar? Anyway, The Black Rabbit has been open for a while now, (map) and getting good reviews from all who had visited. That seemed a good enough carrot for us to ferry ourselves away from Koramangala’s ever growing dining options. They have valet parking, or you could just park on the lane parallel to 100 feet Road. They don’t take reservations during the weekend. Tables are easy to find around 7, but an hour later, you might have to wait.

    They have a pleasant outdoor sitting area, and after a little tour to take a look at the options inside, (a couple of floors) we figured we liked the outside just a little more. Thankfully there weren’t any smokers around either. There’s a fairly comprehensive liquor menu with a few house cocktails thrown in as well. We chose the Currylicious and the Cuba Libre. The first had gin, sweet & sour mix, and just the right amount of curry leaves to give it that extra zing. The latter was a refreshing mix of light rum, cola and lime juice.

    collage1 (more…)

  • Old bottles, new wine

    I recently contributed a column in Pitch on the role of mass media in building ecommerce brands. You can catch it here.

  • Backseat

     Aditya Kripalani 

    Judging by the date of publishing, this is probably the prequel to the school of writing (not genre, but language skills) that has one Mr.Tripathi as its patron saint now. The word skills are right up there – my favourite would have to be “help her bare the night” which, in the context of dance bars, was unintentionally very funny. There were enough bloopers around to indicate that the above was not clever wordplay.

    The plot itself is fairly predictable except for patches, and the pace makes it bearable. The characters are uni-dimensional, though on a few occasions, they get out of their skin and go roaming randomly. The language is Marathinglish, and it’s possible you might pick up a few non-English phrases by the time you finish the book. (more…)

  • Immaterialism

    I was in Kochi recently, and was quite happy to find Uber there! About four years ago, a similar experience led me to write about how malls create a kind of homogeneity across cities. This is probably an advanced version of that thought, because I felt as though these were baby steps towards living in the cloud. If the apps (services) I use become available across geographies, how long would it take before location became irrelevant?

    “Of course geography is relevant. I have a home in Bangalore, what do I do with that?” leads me to the real point of this post – ownership. TC had a fantastic (guest) post sometime back (by Tom Goodwin) titled “The Battle is for the Customer Interface“. Quoting from the first paragraph – Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. The post, of course, moves on to the business impact of this, but I felt that it is absolutely applicable in a personal context. (more…)