• Burning Issues

    While checking out the classifieds, he wondered why anyone would apply for a job selling ‘Cease Fire’ to homes. Offices were fine, but would people buy fire extinguishers for home? He was startled out of his reverie by the loud sound of the transformer exploding outside, and the thick smoke coming from his burning adaptor.

    until next time, quickfire answers

  • The Grand

    It’d been quite a while since I’d visited The Grand, so on this trip home – Cochin, I’d decided to give it a try, especially since the food there has always gotten rave reviews, and it was about time I made my own judgment. It is located on MG Road, since 1963,  so its a landmark for most auto/taxi guys.

    We reserved a table for 8pm, and were told that they wouldn’t hold it beyond 8.10. Fair. The crowd actually started coming in after 8.30. The menu is exhaustive with separate sections for Indian, Kerala, Far East, Continental, Chinese and so on.

    We ordered a velvet chicken and corn soup (2/3) and a Talomein Soup. Pappadams on the house while you wait. 🙂  The former is a chinese preparation – chicken broth flavoured with dry sherry, and the latter is a combination of shredded chicken, carrot and celery garnished with spring onion. The (velvet chicken) soup was quite good, thicker than I expected, and quite sufficient in terms of quantity. For the main course, we decided to go all Kerala.. ‘when in kerala….’ , and so ordered a Malabar Kozhi cury, an Erachi Varattiyathu, a Meen pollichathu, and a Tharavu Mappaz. Thats four kinds of living beings – chicken, beef, fish and duck respectively.  🙂

    So, the Malabar Kozhi Curry is a spicy North kerala dish, which turned out to be only moderately spicy, that was a disappointment. The Erachi Varattiyathu is cooked beef,  with onions, but with enough flavours to keep it from being bland. Better. The Meen pollichathu (you have a choice of seer or pearlspot) is fish with (usually) a very spicy paste around it. Its actually the paste that gives this dish its character. However, this time it was just some sort of onion preparation and ended up very average. The saving grace was the Tharavu Mappaz (they have a ‘duck’ festival happening here) which was duck cooked in coconut milk. This one was yummy, and the ‘chatti’ (earthenware) that they brought it in did add to the effect, I think. We ordered appams to go along with all, and though I was tempted to have a Kerala porotta, the appams were tasty enough to discourage any steps in that direction.

    But more than the food, which was reasonably good, though not the spectacular I had hoped for, it was the service that disappointed. They took such a long time bringing the main course that I had to ask them if I should be back the next morning to collect the order. (Yeah, I seem to be a bad service magnet these days) But they were pretty good in a very mercurial way, refilling glasses on time, bringing appams alongwith the additional order (not earlier and letting them get cold) and so on.

    All of the above cost us Rs.1200, which was reasonable that 4 people were quite well fed. When in Cochin, its worth checking out for some authentic Kerala food.

  • Increased Mobility

    He was surprised to be told that he was showing off. Wasn’t it a regular custom to send an sms to announce a mobile number change? Of course, this time there was a twist to it. The message said, “My mobile number has changed from W910i to E71. No, you don’t need to save it”

    until next time, numeric only? 😉

  • Buzz Off

    Even after building an entire army of twitter tools, the mania still continues. Hopefully its only a matter of time before the tweeding happens 🙂 Meanwhile, this is a fairly good top 5 list. And since we have a new player in the social scene, a bit of attention has been diverted there too. So it wasn’t surprising to read about Moopz, a tool that tries to reduce the noise in Friendfeed. And its not the first of its kind, there are already other entities, and I’m sure more are in the pipeline.

    Now, as an (almost) twitaholic I’d always agree that any tool which helps reduce the noise would be a blessing. I haven’t used friendfeed as much, but from what I have seen, noise is an issue there too, though I have always wondered about the term ‘noise’ since we are free to choose those we wish to connect to. I think my views have not changed much since I wrote this. And since its difficult for me to categorise noise, I’ll only say that I am missing out on some conversations, and perhaps its more a question of subjective time management than anything else, and creating ‘algorithms’ that work for you.

    And that train of thought makes me wonder whether it would be a good idea to have some sort of a shake up of current services, that helps us better organise our conversations. Something that filters the buzz  conversations we are interested in from the random ones. I realise that it is a flawed proposal to begin with since each service has its own die hard fans. I, for one would love for social networks like a Facebook to be integrated into these social media aggregators, including friendfeed, because there are still conversations I have only on Facebook, since there is already a group of people there, who I have connected with over time,  and who are interested in the same things I am. So how about services that combine all existing ones and then provide some additional value? Well, there already are aggregators (will talk about a few in a while), but I’m not sure if they add to the noise or reduce it. Friendfeed was an aggregator, and now we have aggregators that include Friendfeed as one of the services. Is that an improvement?  So, is it better to just stick on to a couple of services and derive maximum benefits from the conversations that happen there. Yes, I agree that not all conversations need to happen there, but what about the ‘cost-benefit’ between the number of services used and the ‘noise’ you have to wade through to reach the conversations?

    Meanwhile, I read another new entity that aggregates Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, and Tumblr. Its called Posty and seems to be interesting. (via The Inquisitr). And though I am yet to utilise it completely, this one – Swurl seems much more interesting, one because it includes Facebook, and two, because it also automatically became a follower on Twitter. Smart! Do check out the timeline feature, I could see what I was upto in 2003!! Wow. Yeah, i know my archive can tell me that, and there is no comment feature yet, but still Wow!! 🙂

    As the services increase, the conversations also do. But does the converse also have to be true?

    until next time, fed up?

  • Tata Shy?

    I saw an ad for Tata Sky yesterday for one of their in house channels – Active Darshan. That, coupled with the announcement of Aamir Khan being made brand ambassador for the brand would have made for a nice plain brand rant post, but try as i might, I have not been able to get hold of that particular ad.We will come back to that. Meanwhile, Aamir is not the first person to star in Tata Sky ads. Kirron Kher, Paresh Rawal, and even Hrtithik Roshan have appeared earlier. They have also used regional actors.

    This pits Aamir squarely against SRK, in addition to the competition in handset manufacturers (Nokia vs Samsung), watches (Tag Heuer vs Titan), car manufacturers (Hyundai vs Toyota) and even biscuits (Monaco vs Sunfeast). Dishum karo 🙂 Wonder when Reliance launches its DTH, Big B will be made the brand ambassador.

    Now, back to the ad, I wonder why brands still don’t make the efforts to share their ads online. There is no one single source where you can be at least 75% sure to catch the ad. Afaqs relies on ibanklive, which I am yet to explore thoroughly. I have also tried the new entrant – Buzzar.tv, and the usually dependable YouTube, where at least a consumer usually loads the TVC within a couple of days of launch, but with no luck.

    Why are brands so shy? Is it due to lack of knowledge or interest; or a deliberate policy of not sharing. Before you laugh off the last one, it ties in well with the lack of transparency i keep ranting about. I personally feel that ads are perhaps a very good Step 1 to encourage conversation about brands. The amount of facebook status messages I have seen of Sanjooo (of Max New York Insurance fame) and the kind of stories I have read (look at this one for example) means that there is an audience ready to even generate buzz. Of course, it may not always be positive. Is that what’s scaring away brands? But isn’t it better to experiment a little, learn the art and make some good use of it, before it gets relegated to a commodity status? The other point is that all this will happen with or without their assent anyway.

    I’d  go on and say Tata Sky shouldn’t stop with just their brand. They can actually build entire communities around serials. Maybe it can even be a tool to lure housewives on to the net. Imagine the amount of gossiping that could be done online, complete with links to trivia and news on serials. It can even be in hindi. Hell, there is already a family tree website (via Indianweb2) in India, so why not an entire social network in Hindi? And its not just housewives, lets assume I am a fan of Doctor Who on BBC Entertainment, there’s a big chance ( i am basing it on some personal experiences) that I am also a fan of Battlestar Galactica. When audiences get connected, they help each other explore new worlds. The channels are happy, because they get new audiences, and they wouldn’t mind doing some advertising here. So, isn’t it a win win model for both the consumer and business audiences? Oh, okay, laugh, but one day when you have a K Kliq that’s stronger than all the ‘I hate Balaji’ groups on Orkut, you’ll know that i was right. :p

    The other vertical social network I see that has great potential is an entity like agencyfaqs. It is practically begging for more conversation. I’m sure they understand that conversations cannot be simulated by just having a comments box, though they are much better than exchange4media. It would make a great hangout for planners, creative guys, art guys, brand managers, media owners etc to discuss brands, ads, strategy and so on. But i guess, when agencies and channels are trying to be better and bigger rats, i am doing too much of ‘wish karo’ 😉

    until next time, don’t be santhusht!!!