• What’s age got to do with it?

    Their eyes bore into each other’s. They both realised they could no longer hide their feelings for each other. But they hesitated, there was a huge age difference between them. Finally, the younger one let his emotions show. He made monkey faces. The 30 year old who reciprocated in kind, didn’t make a pretty picture.

    until next time, planet of the…..

  • Patna Roughcut

    Siddharth Chowdhury

    Patna Roughcut is a delightful little book, the kind of book you hate for being only 180 odd pages long. It revolves around the life of Patna’s own Ritwik Ray (i think there’s a lot of Siddharth Chowdhury in him), his life around Kadam Kuan, in patna,and Delhi University, the characters that influence his life- friends, mentors, and lovers.
    It is a tale of growing up, growing old and the loss of innocence. On many occasions, it reminded me of The Wonder Years. The interesting thing about the book is that its non linear, not just in terms of narrative, but also in terms of narrators, and though the protagonist remains Ritwik most of the time, you also get to read others’ perspectives.
    I think I connected with the book (also) because of its small town setting, middle class values, and ambitions that never go beyond a certain limit. It has a lot of “you know you were a kid in india in the 80’s ” moments that are very endearing.
    When you know that a wave of nostalgia tinged with melancholy is upon you, this is the book to pick up and laze through

  • A TVC viral ?

    Some of you might remember this ad of Bajaj for their 125 cc bike .

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gydm0ndfUQA

    It had 2 guys comparing their bikes at a traffic junction, and shows how the Bajaj bike scores on many parameters for a lesser price. Decent, but nothing spectacular.

    What caught my attention though was this Sun Direct ad that i caught on TV a couple of days back. After having seen some earlier ads of the service in a few inhouse channels, I was thankful that they had started acknowledging advertising as a profession. So this work, which did a cool take on the Bajaj ad, took me by surprise. Take a look.

    httpv://in.youtube.com/watch?v=NZAoP1C3Y-A

    As you’d have noticed, this time the roles have been reversed. I thought it was a good tactic – to piggy back on a much aired and (decently) identified ad and more specifically, its characters. After all, the intent was the same- compare the product with existing players in the market, and show its superior qualities.

    The good part is that these are just characters, and nameless ones at that, so I don’t think they can be copyrighted (correct me if I’m wrong) I’m wondering if other brands will have fun with these two, if so, we’ll have a good TVC viral; and different stories like Krack and Jack, only with multiple brands. I don’t think Bajaj will mind. After all, its a completely different category, and moreover, it adds to the recall for their brand. Maybe Sun can give Bajaj XCD 125 customers a free set top box?

    Zatak and Axe, though, are a completely different story altogether.

    until next time, ad value

  • Dead Ends

    Ever since I saw Via Darjeeling, I’ve had this thought. In every movie that I’ve seen, the hero has to be victorious at the end. The villain never wins.

    Of course, there are movies with tragic endings, where the hero dies in the end, but its always due to life circumstances than the villain in particular. Also, in Bollywood multi starrer movies of yore, whenever the number of heroines was lesser than the heroes, one hero was destined to die somewhere before the end. Sholay like scenarios, where its technically impossible for the hero and heroine to get hitched, are also included in this. There are also side heroes who end up martyrs. Add to this, the various instances of heroine/brother/mother/ human friend/ dog friend etc taking revenge on the villain  (the last one was specifically included for Teri Meherbaniyan) and you never see the villain win. Anti heroes always have a justification.

    We obviously don’t have a problem with unhappy endings. There are umpteen number of films that have become hits thanks to the hero’s tragic death in the end. So what makes films shy away from endings with a triumphant villain? Is it a self created rule to make sure that good always wins in good vs evil? Because people watch films as an escape from real life, and cannot digest real life on reel life? Why can’t we digest endings where a villain wins?

    So will you pay to watch a movie where the villain wins in the end, or will you stay away because you’d feel cheated with such an ending? How about books with this theme?

    until next time, know any exceptions?

    PS. Bollywood/Hollywood (like say, Arlington Road), I can’t handle subtitled stuff 😐

  • The Construct of Communities

    The initial version of Blogger enabled communities only through comments. And it did enable it quite well, as my other blog would validate. A lot of the people who comment there have been doing so for years now, and some of them are not bloggers. These days, I’ve been noticing a lot of people utilising the ‘follow‘ function that a recent version of Blogger had introduced. Of course, there were many entities that were providing this service, but the official Blogger add on is still a help. What pleased me much was the inbuilt feed mechanism, which would get people to use RSS more.

    Twitter of course, is built on a follower/following concept. But I’d say that Twitter/Facebook/Orkut/LinkedIn are not built around one entity as much as a blog is. The groups on these (except Twitter which still hasn’t got groups outside Japan) can be considered communities.

    I saw a list of fastest growing social networks a while back, with Twitter leading (in terms of growth), not surprisingly. But what i was surprised by was the appearance of Ning at #3 (despite the note that in the survey, it did not meet the minimum sample standards). My surprise had perhaps to do with the fact that, though i am a member of a couple of communities, i have not been active there. Both the communities I am part of are centred around shared interests.

    It made me wonder about the construct of communities that individuals would prefer to build in the future. Would it centre around blogs, would it centre around microblogging tools like twitter, which I know a lot of bloggers now prefer. Would it be a customised version of twitter, that’s made possible by tools like Shout’Em or Twingr (via Mashable)  or even something like the Prologue theme of WordPress. Would it be based on lifestreaming services (self hosted like sweetcron or otherwise like storytlr) where they can aggregate activities that they do all around the net. Or perhaps a tangential version of this like Friendfeed which also builds in the community feature. Will iGoogle become more social? Would at some point of time, individuality merge into communities, as discussions around topics become more important than introduction of the topic in a personal space? Or would both exist (as it does in the current form) side by side, depending on subjective likes/dislikes without any commonality in evolution?

    until next time, social circles into social web