cycling in limbo

3 brands on Facebook...

2010-11-04T14:46:00.004+05:30

I checked out all three brands mentioned here (click on the title to read the original ET article), on Facebook that is. I looked for numbers (no. of fans, 'likes', comments); content (stickiness that makes fans engage regularly), engagement (what were the fans saying), innovation (what was the brand doing differently), scalability of idea (could it move into other platforms and create a bigger bang) and of course social strategy. Have rated them A-E, A being very good and E being hopeless.

Ching's Secret: Numbers - A. (Sales have also gone up, as the brand manager claims - that's great.) Content - C. (The recipes are good, but they use 'happy Bday SRK!' & 'What's yr fav movie?' types as fillers - all the time). Engagement - D. (Formula 'I luv Chinese fud'.) Innovation - E. (Even the recipes are 100% cut-paste jobs from other recipe websites - I checked.) Scalability - B. (The recipes are a good idea, could go mobile to start with.) Strategy - C. (I like the way the product is upfronted, but it doesn't go beyond that.)

JustDial: Numbers - A. Content - D. (But content is not a priority here - it's Search & Trends). Engagement - D. ('Top 5 Movies of last week!' Brainless. Tons of spam.) Innovation - B. (The Wall is D, but the Search/Trends is A+.) Scalability - B. (The Search could go mobile easily.) Strategy - A. (Loved the way they've integrated Search and Trends. Smart.)

Barista Lavazza: Numbers - B. Content - C. (They're not going beyond product shots, but I liked the occasional contest, UNICEF promo, etc). Engagement - C. (Low on numbers, but the fans really like the brand, and think before they write.) Innovation - C. (Product shots are boring beyond a point. They could have integrated the Google maps thing here.) Scalability - C. (Not sure what they'll do a year later. Same same I guess) Strategy - C. (It's a menu basically, with some interventions.)

To sum up: In terms of smart usage of the medium, i'd rate JustDial 1, Barista 2, Ching's Secret 3.

Lolita and Arundhati Roy

2010-10-27T08:37:00.003+05:30

I haven't read God of Small Things. I'd almost bought it at an used book store 10 years back, was leafing through it - till I saw Nabokov's Lolita a few feet away. Two sentences and I was hooked; if you like prose stylists, it's a no contest. The wily old exile was head and shoulders above Roy. Lolita was also Rs 20 versus God's Rs 100, so...
I've read some of Roy's essays in Outlook, they're brilliant. Unlike most writers who retreat to a govt-sponsored apartment in Asiad Village, occasionally showing up at school talent contests to award prizes, here was someone willing to stick out her neck and call a spade a spade.
But that is where it stops, at the name calling. After the brilliant first few paras (Capitalism is bad, corporates are evil, ban all nuclear weapons, India is a police state, etc.), she suddenly stops. And goes back to the beginning.
And you scratch you head and wonder if there's more, perhaps.
No. The movie's over, grab an auto and go home.
So you ask well-informed friends, But is she offering a solution? A glimpse of a solution, even?
They reply, 'But it's not her job to offer solutions, she's an artist, she points out the flaws, the layers. Layers you would never read about in the mainstream, corporate-funded press'.
They have a point. If I talk about the execrable state of some Gurgaon roads, the chief minister can't turn around and say, 'But do you have a solution?'
Agreed. But then, if you look at less prominent writers in the less prominent press like Economic & Political Weekly (epw.in), they offer far more depth, analysis and understanding of historical perspectives. They're ruthless when it comes to pulling up the state, but do not take rigid, all-or-nothing stands, beginning to end.
They can't write half as well as Roy, but then if I want to read prose I'll go for Nabokov.
End of story.
What I find more interesting at this point is Roy's detractors. There are two types.
The first one, urbane and intelligent, is represented by Ramachandra Guha ('She's hysterical'). Roy takes care of them herself ('That's the point.')
The second is more pan Indian, more rooted, and is led by Nitin Gadkari ('Arrest her'); Roy ignores them. Partly because she doesn't write for them, partly there is no serious substance in their 'sedition' arguments. And the govt. won't arrest her in a hurry - someone called Obama is coming, remember? And how can you embrace globalisation and muzzle writers at the same time? You wouldn't be called a 'wise man' in international forums, and Manmohan knows it.
I fit into neither type, and I suspect there are more like me.
We don't think Roy has a moral core to her arguments. We don't think she understands or cares for the bigger picture, from the pov of a peasant in a Naxalite-infested village, or a dam-affected villager in Gujarat. We don't think the end justifies the means. We don't think most activists on the ground get along with her, because she hijacks agendas. And finally, we don't think she's saying anything original - we've heard everything before.
But we believe she has a right to say what she's saying, because India is far more democratic than we give it credit for. The new India welcomes dissent, unlike the old India ruled by the Gandhis. (The Gandhis still rule it, in a way, but you and I have a bigger say in affairs than at any point in the past.)
'India doesn't need an Arundhati Roy, she needs 1000s of them,' someone wrote. True. Maybe an intelligent dissenter will emerge, from them.
An intelligent dissenter at some point engages - if you close the door on engagement, you close the door on the solution.
That's it. End of story. Now we'll grab an auto and go home.
We'll read a bit of her next Outlook story, but we'd rather reserve our brains for Rajnikanth or Karvachauth jokes on Twitter.
P.S. If you liked Lolita, you should try Pale Fire. Heavy.

The (Only) Issue

2010-08-23T14:17:00.003+05:30

(Wrote this last night. Bit rushed, shows. Some sweeping generalisations, but stand by broader points made.)

First, azaadi is not an issue - nobody takes it seriously beyond a point. Everyone knows it'll never happen. It's just a metaphor for 'We don't like the army, which is killing civilians'.
Second, poverty isn't an issue - the J&K economy isn't doing too badly, the per capita GDP in J&K is higher than in UP. Haven't heard of starvation deaths in Kashmir.
The average Indian doesn't understand the issue. The causes are a deep-rooted bias and a lack of education, especially in North India (you'll hear the most belligerent voices here), which also has a culture of violence (think khap). What he brings to the table is a deep understanding of cricket and Bollywood, and hatred of Pakistan. As long as the Kashmir solution doesn't include giving it away to Pakistan, he's fine. Strangely, the under-20 guys I discuss Kashmir with seem to be more rational and have a better understanding of SE Asian geo-politics.
The US doesn't care about the issue, as long as Bin Laden or his pals don't show up (and India keeps doing well economically).
Pakistan doesn't care about the issue - they'reis in the ICU, economically. I needn't even get into the civil war, the assassinated politicians, etc. etc. I don't think they're interested either, they're on auto-pilot Kashmir-wise. Soundbytes from old rhetoric lessons.

There's just one issue.

Human rights abuses. By the security forces, and by the terrorists. There is no other issue that can’t be solved or ignored.
The army is incapable of handling civilian rebellion. Whether in Kashmir, or in the North East. They're not trained for it. And you can't blame the average jawan - one, he's not very educated and has some biases, and two, he didn't do a PR course while training.
It's the CRPF's job to handle civilians anyway. Armies fight wars.
The terrorist is worse than the army, because you don't know who he is. So far, besides killing 200 pandits and driving the rest out, they've also killed 600 Kashmiri politicians for participating in the elections, and killed or cut off ears/noses of countless 'collaborators'.
We should not repeal terror laws entirely, we’re not there yet. Instead, build in a zero-tolerance policy towards human rights abuses (in phases – can’t happen in one day), start proper training and encourage use of non-lethal weapons to control unarmed crowds (rubber bullets, sonic guns, etc.) A PR department too. And tons of civilian surveillance equipment.
Should the Indian army should bomb terrorist camps in POK, or at least start incursions into Pakistani territory? Easier said than done of course, because of their nuclear capability blah blah blah, and an almost mutinious army. But a clear message does need to go out.
One solution could be to do it together with the Americans and the Pakistanis (the non-ISI part:), a tri-lateral force. The current system doesn't work too well, so why not?
Talk to moderate voices, even extremists. I think Yasin Malik and Sajjad Lone are sensible guys. Keep up the support for Omar Abdullah, I'm convinced he's the right guy to lead Kashmir out of chaos. And the Kashmiris elected him, never mind Mehbooba Mufti's allegations (in fact some think she has a role in the recent unrest, since elections are around the corner).

At the end of the day India’s fundamentally a civilised country, never mind the occasional Modi who crawls out of the woodwork. We’re peace-loving, practical, inclusive. Which is why I think peace is possible, in the next 5 years.

Kash Shree's Adfest Speech

2010-07-02T23:16:00.007+05:30

Before I start I'd like to ask a few questions.

How many of you have are from Thailand? How many of you from India?
Singapore? Malaysia? Indonesia? Japan? Australia? Europe? China? Africa?

How many of you here have exchanged stories with each other?
How many of you have exchanged stories with people from other countries other than your own?
How many of you have been arrested?
How many of you have been beaten senseless in a street fight?
How many of you have worked in other industries other than advertising?
How many of you have been fired from your job?
How many of you have had a near death experience?
How many of you have fought in a war?
How many of you have cried so uncontrollably that you had to vomit?
How many of you were picked on in school?
How many of you picked on other people in school?
How many of you have been in a threesome.
It was worth asking?

Good. Then you've all got experiences to tap into. Places to write from.

A person who's just had their heart broken sees the world differently to someone who never has and will express themselves differently.
Just as a person who's been addicted to drugs sees the world differently to someone who hasn't.
Everything we experience feeds us. Because our personal experiences are usually truths of some sort. It's hard to fake that.

And the best work always seems to be based on some kind of truth. That's the stuff that resonates.

Our cultures provide us with many of our experiences that affect our personal ways of seeing things.

For instance, anyone who has lived in the UK will know that the English and the French aren't terribly fond of each other. It not something that consumes everyday thought but it's there in the national psyche, just waiting for someone to use it.

It resonates because someone has tapped into that cultural truth. I daresay this way of thinking could work somewhere else. Japan Korea? Greece Turkey? North and South India. But it is an interesting viewpoint.

A person who has grown up in Asia is going to see the world slightly differently from someone who grew up in America or England.

That doesn't mean we're all so different and will never understand each other. I don't subscribe to the view that only Asians know how to advertise to an Asian market. It's as short sighted as thinking that only Europeans know how to advertise to a European market.

I think people are more similar than they are different.
There's far more unifying us than separating us.
We all want to love. Be loved. We all eat. We all want security. And we all like to buy stuff. The contexts may change be people generally don't.

Here are a few Asian commericials that in their way address very Asian values and yet resonate with non Asians.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCSQk_3l4WQ

But like I was saying our cultures help shape our ways of seeing things.
And different ways of seeing things are a valuable resource in advertising. Where we all feel like we've seen everything before.

About ten years ago Sweden started to appear on the world advertising map. They had a strange way of looking at things, to say the least. And it showed in their work. The Diesel advertising coming out of Paradiset in Stockholm was hugely successful.
The Swedish agency's strangely kitsch and ironic point of view turned out to be really appealing to a cynical generation X.

Traktor, a group of Swedish directors responsible for producing much of the Diesel work became the most sought after directors in the world.`

Their work started to influence advertising in the US and the UK.

But what happens when you displace some of those Swedes and put them in a new environment would they still be different. Would they be understood.

Two of the Diesel creatives, Linus and Paul ventured to the US to try their hand at Fallon.

Here's a little of what they did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVJCJg-8co

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQXfy_XfGqs

It didn't look like anything else in the US. Which meant it stood out like the proverbial dogs balls. And in turn helped change advertising a little more over there.

Other creatives and agencies started trying to do more kitsch and ironic work. Remember the C-Net campaign Leagus in SanFrancisco and the Discovery.com campaign form Hal Riney. Both campaigns incidentally, directed by Traktor.

When Neil French first turned up in Singapore. He brought a unique voice to the place that changed the market there. When you mixed that up with Australians like Jim Aitchison the style started to evolve further.
The next generation helped bring Singapore it's own flavor. People Like Calvin Soh and Francis Wee took those European and Australian influences and brought their own sensibilities and experiences to them.

Thanks to all that influencing and cross-fertilization Singapore now has it's own definitive advertising style.

And advertising is always better when you try to mix things up.

Wieden and Kennedy did it in throughout the nineties.

They brought in non advertising people and made them work with ad people.
They brought in designers and architects and mixed them up with philosophers and just plain odd people.

Say what you like about their work in the nineties but you can't accuse it of being like anyone else. It was unique. It was honest. It was thoughtful and funny and ironic and provocative.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ_XSHpIbZE

They also brought athletes to work on the advertising. Non just on the agency side but on the client side too.

They realized that sport was a culture with its own truths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNCPRkTN8N0

If you've ever been into sport. I mean really into sport. You under stand that the scars and deformities you get are sources of pride they're badges of honor.
I used to do martial arts. And I was proud of the way my knuckles looked because they were indication of what style and what level I had reached and put into it.

Here are a couple of spots from an Ex-Wieden creative who understood sports culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOpHAli7lgM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95iInjzeiAY

He was a fan who could take his eyes of the TV during baseball season.

Of course the Swedes weren't the first group of invading foreigners to help diversify advertising voices. There were Australians going to the UK and the States a decade or so earlier.

Eugene Cheong and Tan Shen Guan had ventured over to the UK to try and add their voices to the mix.

What happens when you start to take someone out of Asia and get them to apply some of their thoughts and memories in Western market?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eI0lkyASyI&feature=PlayList&p=6B4986ECAB9A0901&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=68

Tarsem's quote. "You don't pay me for the film I shoot or the awards I've won. You pay me for every book I've read. My childhood. Every walk I've taken, every movie I've seen."

And what happens when some of those experiences start to over flow and permeate other cultures? You start to see some interesting imagery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOylInKVtBU

We are rapidly getting to the point where we feel like we've seen everything.
But of course we haven't.

I went to Singapore because while at O&M London I had heard about Eugene and Shen Guan.
Well, To be honest I had heard that they said it was really easy to sell work out there.

Of course they were lying. But still it got me to up and leave. That and being fired from my job in London.
So I brought my own set of experiences and ways of seeing to Singapore.

The more places I live the more different ways of seeing things I'm exposed to. Even if I misinterpret them, I'm still changed. And just perhaps more unique.

And the more unique I become the more valuable I become. Unless of course, I become more uniquely boring.

Another example in England when the sun comes out we all rush out and try and soak in as many rays as possible. Because we never know hen we're going to see it again. So imagine my surprise when I go out walking with my wife, who is from India. And she starts taking this really convoluted route to get to places.
She was raised in India. The sun's not such a big treat for her. In fact she tries to avoid it at all costs. I'd be saying "where you going the shop's are over here. And she'd be the most convoluted route to get there. Andy my old partner experienced the same thing when he moved to Singapore. He was astounded too. Well, you store that stuff away.

SHOW: NIKE SHADE RUNNER

So what happen when you get an Indian kid from Singapore, Send him over to England at the age of 7 months. Bring him up with west Indians. And then get him to live and work in four different continents.

Hopefully you get a different way of seeing things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpyhpisoWf4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXAleHsmgEg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOShg-ulzU8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BqtdTpy93U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV5jNPTPx6E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n51XmB5_rh4

So what am I getting at? Don't be closed. Go out and take your experiences elsewhere. Then come back changed and apply that new modified voice back here. Or some where else again.

New TVC on the block

2010-05-05T12:08:00.002+05:30

What do you think of this TV commercial? Most love it - a simple tale of a girl who refuses to get into an arranged marriage, but changes her mind when she sees her clever mom trying out Tanishq jewellery at a shop. (My cousin, a shippie, called me from his ship to ask if I'd done it:)
I'm in the minority of one (so far) who don't like it, and I'm happy to stick my neck out. I think it's regressive, very 1980s. The girls I respect and admire don't think arranged marriages with NRIs from San Jose define their lives. They don't think their mothers can get them to switch values by just dragging them into a jewellery store. They're not against arranged marriages, btw, but don't think marrying a guy they've never met is a cool thing to do.
The TVC should work well though, for obvious reasons.

Clothes

2010-04-25T12:42:00.002+05:30

WARNING: The following has a slightly preachy tone, don't take it too seriously.

I hate the words fashion and style.
The most with-it-sartorially guys I've seen are Indian villagers - next time you're on a train in Gujarat or Tamil Nadu, take a look outside and you'll know what I mean. I saw a couple of Gond tribal boys in a small railway station somewhere in AP, still remember them after decades: whiplash-thin, hair tied in a bun with wooden beads, tattoos on their faces, spotless white loincloth, quietly sitting on haunches, smoking cheroots in the shade of a tree, looking at the train. This is what defines the bleeding edge of style, in my life so far.
Here's what I think about the clothes we wear. This is not a guide, just what I think, though I suspect there's a preachy note.
If you need a guide, ask Ritu Beri or someone...:

Jeans look like uniform these days. Also, they make girls look like BPO staffers. But if you insist, only 501s or Uniqlo. Avoid the Levi's Damien Hirst stuff, too NRI.
99% of tees look crap, esp the ones with big logos. And stupid lines, and wannabe graphics ripped off from 80s underground magazines. Design your own t-shirts if you're 20-25, fashion brands don't understand you. I like (some) Playclan tees, but wear them not more than twice a month, or they'll lose their aura. Avoid Ed Hardy, too mall culture - I have an Ed Hardly, I wear it to nightclubs to make fun of those wearing originals.
Uniqlo are the only guys who've got it. Clothes you can wear anywhere... you can sleep in them and go to office next day.
Wear linen, lots of it, if you're 30 plus. Get yr linens stitched from Mohd. Usman Khadi Bhandar off Northern Avenue (it's a garage), that's where stylish MPs from Orissa go. Or D. Vaish, in CP. Givo linen trousers are nice, good value too, they're made/stitched in Manesar so cheap in Delhi.
Avoid Armani, too new money. Avoid all big luxury labels, too NRI. Wait for 5 years, they've just come in so the rush of new money to places like Emporio, etc.
Wear vivid colours occasionally, but don't let Allen Solly define what's vivid, they're too 90s. If you must, avoid the maroon button-down-collar shirt, only Prannoy Roy wears it. Girls, don't wear anything Barkha Dutt wears, too wannabe. Don't copy her haircut either, looks like it's from the Benaras ghats. Though if you're from Benaras, you know what taste is, you shouldn't be reading this.
Never wear pointed cowboy shoes, if you insist, don't come near me. Avoid Crocs - ugh. And Woodland-type sandals with 3/4 cargo pants, too advertising.
Formal shoes, handmade Oxfords from khan Market, nothing else. Wear leather slippers whenever possible, ideally handmade in Italy. Expensive - about 4k - but worth it. Try Balujas too, good range.
Don't wear heavy watches, they suggest you got married in Gurgaon recently. Wear a simple Timex - I prefer HMT though I don't have one. And why do you need a watch, your mobile has a clock.
Half-sleeved shirts, always a bush shirt (straight, triangular cut at bottom). Fab India is nice but good luck with the fading colours. Anokhi is very good, you'll find them at smaller malls (Futurebrand I think).
Full-sleeved, avoid Allen Solly like I said, you'll look like an Eureka Forbes regional manager. Louis Phillippe shirts are good, but I try and buy dress shirts from Nehru Place pavement shops, they're used Salvation Army stuff, but original Armani etc. at Rs 100 approximately.
Many of my biker friends in the US never buy new clothes, they buy from 'thrift stores', and they're way cooler than most 'mainstream' Americans their age. They're 'subculture' graphic artists, hackers, musicians, etc., and strangely, icons for advertising agencies selling middle-of-the-road fashion brands like Tommy Hilfiger, etc. :)
Suit, always charcoal black, lightweight. You should be able to board a DTC bus in it - must be extremely durable. The best tailors in Asia are in Shanghai gullies, very cheap.
White shirt, yellow tie. Don't overdo it though, you'll look like a German car salesman in Pragati Maidan.
Girls, wear cotton dresses with lots of flowers. Benetton is good. All women look beautiful in a garden, as Vivienne Westwood once said. I like Promod too, beautiful cuts, inexpensive. Nautical 50s look.
Avoid salwar kurtas, they look like nightwear. Unless it's expensive khadi.
Avoid Sabyasachi, all Marwari women from Calcutta wear Sabyasachi to look cool.
Men's underwear, Rupa. They're actually more comfortable in the Indian climate, than Jockey etc.
Socks, don't wear Reebok socks with formal shoes. Don't ask why.
Don't wear American university tshirts, unless you're from that university. It's like pasting a Turbo sticker on a Maruti 800.
Don't wear baseball caps, unless you're at a baseball game. I don't think we play baseball in India, especially indoors.
Don't wear aviator glasses, unless you're David Hasslehoff. Men shouldn't wear dark glasses, makes them look like wimps.
Ladies, those huge round glasses perched high on your forehead are dangerous. They could make you look silly or sexy. I find 95% silly. Your call.
Don't tie those red puja strings around your wrist, that's for temples, not offices. (I'm a hardcore Hindu, but keep religion a private affair.)
If you can carry off a dhoti/saree, go for it. Nothing can touch Indian traditional, it's way out there aesthetically. Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close. That's what Nirad Chowdhuri and Naipaul said too.
Finally, understand and accept your father or mother has better taste than you. They grew up in the 50s/60s and got the best of Indian and Western. Things started going downhill after that.
If your parents grew up in the 70s/80s, you don't need to read this, your parents do.

Suggestions on how to use LinkedIn

2009-12-17T17:21:00.001+05:30

By now, we know most social media experts have all of one Facebook page as work experience. Hence, ‘suggestions’. Anyway, here goes:

1. Choose your 'recommendations' carefully. In a best-case scenario, get recommended by recognised industry leaders and former colleagues - ideally a bit senior, if you know what I mean. Avoid co-workers, of course they’ll say nice things about you.
2. Resist the temptation to sound very, very impressive. Stick to tangibles, avoid the purple prose. Example: 'Responsibilities included strategic planning, product development & realization, forming and chairing management committees to manage projects...' Wow. Deep breath. Here’s what you should be writing (it’s real): ‘Best International Media Plan of the Year, Singapore Advertising Hall of Fame Awards 2008’. Killer, isn’t it?
3. Your name is your name, not john doe johnjohn1234@gmail.com Marketing Manager. Crass. It also means LinkedIn will categorize you incorrectly.
4. Use the update function. Avoid Facebook-type updates though, especially puns on golfers.
5. Don’t stop at a resume. Join, start conversations, especially at ‘Answers’. It pays to meet new people, exchange ideas. Show what you know, get feedback from those who know better.
6. Keep an eye on who’s been going through your profile. You’ll be able to figure ‘em out, at least 50% of the time.
7. Sack contacts when you need to. Especially the strangers you met in airports – don’t be a LinkedIn contact whore. Unless they’re really senior. Dump groups that are inactive, and exist just for the sake of existing – or you joined just to look good.
8. Don’t autolink LinkedIn and Twitter updates. You’ll look silly at some point. I did.
10. Don’t accept intro requests from recruitment agency personnel. Looks odd. I’ve sacked ‘em all.
11. Accept/send invites to people in your broad area of work. (Unless you meet really interesting people of course.) I ignore requests from hookers and drug dealers. Sorry, that’s Facebook.
12. Parts of Facebook can also be used as LinkedIn. Or even your blog - like now.
13. Make up your own 12 rules and let me know how it goes.

Zoozoo and (Indian) Social Media

2009-05-14T12:53:00.000+05:30

Zoozoos are the lovable Vodafone TVC characters everyone’s following. There are a series of 25-odd TVCs, “one for each day of the IPL cricket matches”.

It’s been a long time since I saw mass infatuation at this level. Kids talk about it, so do octogenarians.
Rajiv Rao – a great ad person and a greater human being – has done a truly magnificent job. This is the benchmark of good, effective advertising.

It speaks volumes of the excellent relationship between the client and the agency, too: I can’t see too many clients backing this idea, or agencies that have the single-mindedness to see it through.
But this note is about something else: how social media is being used.

There are two ways of looking at it.

One, it’s an unqualified success. I saw the Facebook Zoozoo group with 42,000 members a few days after the TVCs hit the air – and it’s 173,926 as I type. 174k fans, besotted fans, extending the shelf life of the TVCs. I’ve seen people post the Zoozoo TVCs on their page, I’ve seen spots on how the spots were made. You get the sense history’s being made, in the Indian social media space.

Two, not really. About 99% of the activity is solely posting the videos on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Interspersed with press releases like ‘Find out what the Deccan Chronicle has to say about Zoozoos’ (Twitter). Throw in some wallpapers, e-cards and emoticons, and you’re done. All boxes ticked. There’s absolutely no attempt to initiate a conversation, which is the heart of social media. It’s like a sell-out crowd at a nightclub – who don’t talk to each other.

I haven’t seen much activity on Orkut either, a platform that’s about four times bigger than Facebook in India. A Japanese client I met a few days back rolled his eyes when he heard the Orkut numbers and asked his marketing manager, ‘What are we doing about it?’ (‘We’ is probably the world’s largest, most aspirational consumer electronics brand; and the gent in question had worked for Uniqlo, the brand that won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes last year.)

The good news is I saw a quiz of sorts on the Vodafone website a few days back: ‘Which Zoozoo are you?’ I find them mildly irritating, but at least the agency is doing something, even if it’s borrowing an apps shell and plugging in a message.

But what else? Any Zoozoo games (‘Steal a Zoozoo’), widgets (‘Zoozoo music player’), collaborative activities (‘Create Zoozoo stories with your friends’, ‘Compose a Zoozoo tune with your family’)? Any cross-media connects (‘Do XYZ, we’ll send your child a Zoozoo doll’)? Not really.

The big Zoozoo idea is the cartoony characters – there is no story as such. (Try and replace the dolls with actors, in your mind – doesn’t work that well, not really.) So why aren’t these amazing, lovable characters spreading fun online, doing things they can’t do elsewhere?

The last question is my point really, social media or unsocial media.

So in conclusion, I’ll say great job. But this is no case study on how social media should be used.

But then again, the guys behind Zoozoo are far more talented than I am, and probably will leave a lot of egg on my face a few months from now. Go for it, guys.

P.S. Take a look at this spoof on Zoozoo - Looloo. Very close to my heart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8fWCWTaBeQ&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hotklix.com%2Fcontent%2Ffun%2Fhumour%2FLooloo-parody-of-Zoozoo-Vodafone-ads&feature=player_embedded

DNA Article - some crap about the digital thing

2009-02-01T09:36:00.004+05:30

ARCOPOL CHAUDHURI, Mumbai: The fast-approaching death of the 30-second spot is taking along some casualties -- more and more ad men, who for long were part of creative teams that made these commercials, are hopping aboard specialist digital agencies.

It's happening in India, where -- unlike global trends -- digital units of mainline ad agencies such as O&M, Leo Burnett and the likes, rarely manage to provide end-to-end solutions at the scale at which a digital agency does.

"There's so much more that can be done in the digital space," said Shubho Sengupta, national creative director, Interactive Avenues, who moved from O&M. "In mainline advertising, after a point, one begins to feel like an assembly-line product. After all, there's only so much you can do making TVCs or writing smart copies. Whereas (in a digital agency), thanks to changing technology and new innovations, the approach to each campaign changes."

Which is why India has seen a mushrooming of digital agencies over the last few years.
Think Webchutney, BC Web Wise, Interactive Avenues, Hungama, Ignitee (formerly Connecturf), Contests2win and Quasar Media, and you're thinking of banner ads, rich media ads, viral marketing, microsites, social media apps, in-video ads, online communities, search engine optimisation and more.

Balakrishnan S, creative director, Pinstorm, who spent 16 years in mainline agencies such as Mudra, Contract and Percept before making a shift, said: "The possibilities are immense. I learnt that advertising can be triggered through keywords!"

Like many others at Pinstorm, who came from non-digital agency backgrounds, Balakrishnan underwent a customised training programme to get familiarised with the medium.

"There is a common understanding amongst everyone in this industry that investing in digital is the way to go ahead," said Vikram Sivaramakrishnan, a former McCann Erickson hand, now VP and branch head (Delhi), Webchutney. "In future, marketers will use the online medium effectively, not because it helps target consumers better, or because it's measurable, but because most of the consuming classes are going to be there."

Hence, said Sengupta, the earlier the person gets into the medium the better, since there are fewer entry barriers at present. "It's the right time to switch. Digital agencies are hiring, because this is when you experiment. Two-three years from now, digital advertising would have arrived bigtime and one wouldn't like to be caught clueless about how to exploit the medium," he said.

Former Vyas Giannetti Creative CEO Atul Hegde, who heads Ignitee, agrees. His interest in digital was sparked off in 2007, when he visited US offices of Google and Yahoo as part of a study tour for CEOs.

"That was a real eye opener. I learnt that we are after all in a communications business, not a technology business. Skill sets can be taught. What one needs is the mindset to change, and an understanding of brands," he said.

What's also fuelling this shift to digital agencies is a visible movement in advertiser confidence. The current recessionary environment has made FMCG, banking services, travel and hospitality sectors reshuffle their advertising monies in favour of digital advertising.

"Greater diversity in the kind of spending would make it even more exciting," said Balakrishnan.

The interesting bit, say experts, is that there's no formula for a successful digital campaign.

We're yet to hear of a Piyush Pandey or Balki of digital advertising. Sengupta offers an explanation: "It's an even stronger team effort. Even a trainee in here feels he has a stake in what's happening in the agency."

the indian digital ad scene, from a grateful dead fan's perspective

2009-02-01T09:25:00.002+05:30

I'll be editing this every other day, whittling it down...

I was reading an interview with senior industry representatives, and what struck me was the coyness about the current scenario. Erm, no, we're not affected, not really, we're too small, tee hee hee, and besides, we're a measurable medium, blush blush.
I like this medium. I love it. I think it's the future, the way strangers connect, talk, argue, refine opinions, and so on. It's like making new friends at a pub in Bangalore, connecting with some, exchanging phone numbers.
But when I hear the word measurability, I think of servility. The mantra is 'Digital is measurable, so give us anything your agency has done, we'll adapt it and run it tonight. Please.'
To explore the subtext, bulk CPC (cost-per-click) and CPL (cost-per-lead) deals. We keep 2% of media spends. Or whatever. And someone fills up a form, hey, we get paid too. Whatever.
'Creative' in the measurability universe, would mean the above-mentioned adapts, or really silly 'viral' films with some caricature Bollywood star, or a grungy microsite with a catch-the-popcorn game which a trainee at any of my former agencies like Contract, JWT, Leo Burnett and Ogilvy ('offline' agencies, as they're strangely called) could knock off in 20 minutes flat. (You might ask what are the offline agencies digital wings doing, creativewise - my answer is they're by and large naive beyond belief, of onground digital realities.)
Now there's nothing wrong with measurability. It works for banks selling credit cards - I spend Rs 100 online, I get 10 leads, which mean Rs 10 per lead vs say, Rs 200 through the cold-call-from-callcentre-then-physical-follow-up route.
There's just two problems. One, you dig yourself into a hole - there's an invisible ceiling after which the model implodes. Consider a click-through rate of 0.2%, which I'm told is the average CTR in some sectors - that's two guys, out of a thousand. And it's falling.
Second is the bigger problem - it's a demanding mistress. The agencies best resources are put on the job of number crunching - staring at Excel sheets all day long, collating data from publishers, mining data from Comscore and Alexa, and so on. There's no time left to... think. Frequently, the brief to creative consists of a client's forwarded mail.
The creative input from experienced account management hands are gems like 'Blue works better' or 'Two frames, no more'.
I can't blame these guys. They're bright kids, some of them, but with a gun to their heads. In a number-crunching scenario, it's safer to define 'insight' as 'Schoolkids play online games, so let's do something at Zapak' (for example). Not 'Schoolkids have a rebellious streak, so let's create an activity around rebellious underwear.'
The gun is held by four people: the client, who is increasingly burdened with ROI expectations from all quarters (I've heard of a low-involvement FMCG who want to give away free samples online - fill out a form as long as Draupadi's sari, get a free sample); the publisher (say a rediff.com), who refuses to update his technology year after year; the Internet service provider, who prefers low speeds; and finally the agency heads, who are under tremendous ROI pressure from investors, so prefer playing safe.
Everyone pretends there's no pressure from the 45 million consumers online.
Frankly I don't think things will change too much, in the next few years. 0.2% will further slide to 0.1%, but then 45 million might increase to 65 million, so the final numbers might remain stable. Who knows?
What I'm pretty sure about is that creative hotshops will open up, led by cross-media collaborations. A lot of them might seem to be freelance projects - an offline art/copy team with reasonably good digital sensibilities collaborates with a filmmaker, hires a freelance flash guy and his tech cousin, and the project is put together by an online servicing guy with good strategic skills. The media buying could also be freelanced - to a traditional online agency!
What'll add a fillip to the process is a client who doesn't care about AORs (in digital, they don't, really) - it's an outsourced project, with a fixed fee. Hit and run.
These might be small projects, but big spending clients might try it out as an experiment. Or even the really small ones, I don't know. At some point, someone might click, and that'll open the floodgates.
Here's what I'm doing, to meet the curve. I don't know if it'll work, but it's fun.

I've shifted the goalposts, lately. I focus on clients who understand brands, or the importance of branding, at least. When a client talks too much about 'measurable objectives', 'CPC', 'my offline agency', I immediately switch off. Sorry wrong number. I'd probably do better work than the offline agency without blinking, anyway, going by the usual sorry creative quality.
I have no violent antipathy towards 'measurable' advertising, but I'm wasting my time if I'm thinking of how many fields a mailer should have. There are other guys for that, they're good. I do a little sketch for something once in a while, in the car on the way to office, iPod plugged in, and so far it's been ok.
I'm very involved in strategy, starting off with a clean slate. I'm very involved in projects that encourage a big brand experience that can go media neutral. I'm very involved in projects that encourage interesting ways of looking at social media. I'm very involved with clients who say, 'What's the creative idea? Media plan baad mein dikhao, main khud likh doonga yaar.' I'm very involved with projects that use new technologies - and am not embarrassed to say I don't understand it that well. (Partly because no one does, beyond a 'technician' level.) I'm very involved in projects that force me to collaborate with outside talent, say a 20-year-old pot-smoking musician who calls himself 'Dude'. I get very excited about non-'creative' ideas which come from another division - like a bro concern is doing, creating new online properties. They're rock stars. I'm excited about mobile strategies that go beyond WAP banners with forms. Finally, I get very involved and happy when someone says 'Hey, guess what, there's a simpler way...'
So that's what I've been trying to do for the last few months, after a year of sitting in at ridiculous meetings which end with 'Great presentation, we'll ask our offline agency to mail you the ads.'
The results have been good - eg., we've got a media neutral client we do everything for, including TVCs. (We're already on, this is an India first, if it means anything to you.) We've got FMCGs who want to work with us on the basis of a 3-4 slide creative strategy. We've got development sector clients we'll happily work for free, if the works interesting and we believe in it. We look forward to weird collaborations that don't make traditional sense (if you're a pot-smoking 20-year-old musician who's on MySpace, call me now.)
There's the odd hiccup at times - eg., a client called up the manager the other day, to complain about me 'pushing creative'. (I was proud.)
At some point, sooner than later, I'm going to stop pitching. You won't see me dead in any reception, drinking bad coffee, waiting for the other agency to finish. You like our work? Meet us at a pub, we'll do some sketches on a napkin, then we'll see. Don't do pubs? You're too famous? Well then, give us a presentation fee, we'll come.
If there's a buy-in from my agency, I'll immediately separate media and creative, at least on a small, experimental scale. Just doesn't work - they tried it for 10 years, see what happened. A media buyer writing a creative brief is as ridiculous as it gets. It's like Piyush Pandey writing a media plan.
I would hire account management guys who love digital, from offline agencies, design agencies, MICA, music studios, bars, red light districts, but NEVER from a publisher (a rediff.com or a Google). The last partner I need is a 'sale-oo'. They just don't understand communication. I don't go to industry meets because of sale-oos in badly-cut suits claiming to be 'web evangelists', whatever that means. Everyone's a senior vice president at kalkaji.com, a WPP company... drop in sometime, we have air-conditioning!
(On a separate note, the national creative directors I've met are really embarrassing - all they do is upload moronic YouTube videos on Facebook, after writing 'Yo dude, just chillin' on various middle-aged women friends' Walls... I have to demote myself this year.)
I would take tech very, very seriously. The tech guy should be the highest-paid in the entire ecosystem, and the coolest too. An articulate visionary. A Deadhead. Don't smoke up? Stay with WPP, enjoy the free lunches. (Must admit we have a great Tech guy, my 2009 resolution is to handcuff myself to this dude.)
Search has potential, especially SEO, but spare me. I don't want to touch Search with a bargepole till brands take it seriously. Let video ads come, then we'll see. Main hoon na.
As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince claimed, 'I've seen the future, and it works.'

'Friend Request': Here’s how social networks could (possibly) make us happier people

2008-09-02T15:01:00.003+05:30

A recent study conducted by sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard and political scientist James Fowler of the University of California has thrown up some strange findings.
Very strange, in fact. One finding is if you’re putting on weight, your friend will too, over time. Even if she is a thousand miles away. What’s stranger is her friend will too – it spreads like a viral. One reason, the study says, is if your friend is fat, you’ll think that particular degree of obesity is normal, and thus unconsciously overeat.
Heavy stuff. And I’m not particularly interested in reading the 370-page report (published in the New England Journal of Medicine), as I have a few extra kilos tucked away here, there and there.
What’s more interesting for me is a sub-finding by Messrs Christakis and Fowler: Happiness – or depression – also travels in social networks.
Now that’s interesting. Does that mean a Facebook friend in say, Hong Kong who’s just fallen in love and goes mush mush mush at the drop of a hat (or click of a mouse) can also make me flirt with the nearest stranger in Delhi?
That’s an extreme (considering I’ve been married for a while), but I’m willing to agree with the general direction of their study. If a majority of my friends’ ‘status updates’ are positive, I do get a sense that things aren’t as bad as they seem.
Let’s shift the focus a bit. Let’s revisit the way we gather friends, on social networks.
The first thing you do after creating a (say) Facebook account is send out ‘friend requests’ to people you know well. Next, requests to people you know indirectly – good friends of good friends, for example. The final stage is when you start making friends with total or near-total strangers.
That’s when things get very interesting. Over time, you’ll find making interesting friends with shared and sometimes new interests.
Sure there will be some crashing bores you’ll be happy to keep at mouse length, the kind who send annoying YouTube forwards of Bollywood dance sequences.
But over time, you’ll find yourself clicking on pictures of interesting treks, concerts, food – you might even leave a comment or two. Someone else might comment on your comment, and you might comment right back. Happily.
What’s happening there is the birth of a network, your network – it’s like a solar system, with you in the centre. The only difference is the planetary bodies – your ‘friends’ – are more dynamic, and keep changing their positions faster. (Imagine Pluto switching places with Neptune next year.)
Of course, in the world of online social networks, the word "friend" is a lot less meaningful; it includes your most casual of virtual acquaintances. Until you have a chance to build a certain level of trust with them, respect and affection, your interaction with your online friends will often be the digital equivalent of nodding at each other as you pass in the hall.
But we’re not interested in the depth of the relationship, it’s the happiness possibilities of a new relationship. And besides, don’t relationships change over time? Doesn’t the casual become close over time and shared experiences?
I’ve noticed an increasing number of interesting ‘happy’ conversations I have on Facebook are with people I’ve never met, perhaps never will. We discuss literature, art, movies, treks, science and fish (baggage from Calcutta).
In the process, I get the feeling I’m entering a richer, more meaningful domain – albeit virtual. I’m not 100% sure if this feeling makes me a happier person, but I certainly look forward to these exchanges – I prefer them to many ‘real’ interactions.
You might want to try this thing out, making friends online. Hopefully, being a little happier in the process. There are unwritten rules of safety/privacy, of course – don’t give out private information, stick to open forums, and don’t be in a tearing hurry to increase your friend’s list. (I usually ‘talk’ with a stranger for at least 3 months before accepting or extending an invite.)
Here’s where to start:
• You will be surprised at just how many of your friends aren't in your address book – import them from your email account, it takes a minute.
• Find friends from work and college – enter your work and education history in your profile, browse through the ‘people you may know’ section that appears.
• Visit special interest groups... especially niche interests.
• Use a friend to find a friend. Ask someone to ‘introduce’ you – there is such a feature.
• Start a group or join an existing one, and get active. Post on the wall. Comment on forum posts and people's notes.
• Always write a personal note, when you’re asking someone to be your ‘friend’: mention your common interest, and how it would be nice to keep in touch.
Happy networking!

How Much is How Much?

2008-07-09T07:51:00.003+05:30

I was waiting for an autorickshaw last evening, at a place you don’t normally get autos. I’d just gotten off a colleague’s car. The option was a short but irritating trudge back home through thick carbon monoxide.

An auto appeared almost instantly and I jumped in. As is the standard practice (meters don’t work in Delhi), I asked ‘How much to E-Block?’
‘Whatever you like…’ the man smiled.

‘Tell me, what’s the problem?’ I insisted nervously.

‘Ok, Rs 15.’

Which was lower than the usual (non-meter) rate so I said ‘I’ll give you Rs 20, let’s go.’ I was also feeling a little happy about avoiding the walk, getting back home in time to play with my daughter.

As the auto groaned its way through the traffic the driver grinned, ‘I’m coming from Pahargunj, you’re the first fare I managed.’ (Pahargunj is some distance away, not too much, but lots for an auto on its last legs.)

‘Happens, sometimes… you’ll make it up tomorrow,’ I told him distantly, dismissing it as a weak attempt to get an extra fiver off me.

Which is when I thought of giving him Rs 500.

Ok. Deep breath. It gets a little tricky here, I'm writing as I'm thinking.

I’d been thinking of the value of money lately. How much was I worth? Who decided? How much did I need? What did I need, in the first place? Did Rs X have the same value for me as say, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan? Not in a transactional way (1 kg potato costs Rs Y for both Ash and me, barring variables of geography or scale like buying a truckload at a district centre and getting a better price… but I don’t think Ash or I would do that in a hurry) – but in real value? Would Rs X have the same real value for me 5 years later? For example, would I buy a rare book or a silk curtain or just milk for the dog?

One question led to another, and as expected, the trail led to the door of long-dead Greek philosophers. In their absence, here’s a working answer which I have the right to change the second I finish writing this article.

Money is work. Work is experience. Or rather, the quality of experience. So, money is the quality of experience you undergo to earn it.

This is of course highly subjective and highly debatable.

Subjective because experience is intrinsically unique – you and I might do the same work with the same quality of finish, but our experiences might be radically different because we’re different people with different DNAs and different acquired knowledge and (I like throwing in this banal phrase occasionally) different levels of spirituality.

Debatable because a human rights activist might (rightly) accuse me of ignoring the less privileged. (‘You’re elitist! What about street children? What quality of experience are you talking about? Do they have a choice?’) A debate I intend to wriggle out of effortlessly by stating this is for working professionals with the moral and intellectual ability to identify choices and the occasional willingness to act on them. (Er… street children are working professionals too, but it’s 3am and I’m off to make some more coffee.)

So, to get back to the point, how much is my apartment worth? Let’s see. I’m paying EMIs, lots of EMIs, and will be paying them over the next 20 years. Each EMI is about 1/6th of my current monthly salary. Now I can state with absolute certainty that I spend at least 1/6th of a working day doing absolutely nothing. Just trancing out into alphaville. Staring at the dirt under my nails, that sort of thing. There’s no quality of experience simply because I’m not thinking. So if the experience is zero, then the money I earn doing it is also zero. Thus, the real worth of my apartment is also zero. And I wouldn’t be too upset if a tsunami hit it this evening, provided there was no loss of life.

Questions like ‘But you’re really happy and working and productive the other 5/6th of the time? At least 1/6th? What if your apartment is financed by that experience?’ might be asked by those brainwashed in the philosophy of one Rene Descartes. To them, my answer is ‘I decide, therefore I am.’ We’re treading very subjective ground here. Besides, Descartes’s cause-and-effect theories are possibly out of date.

It boils down to this: X quality of old experience should be worth X quality of new experience if not more, never mind the price tag. If you had a great time for an hour and earned Rs 5000 as a result, then think carefully before you slam down that Rs 5000 for a pair of sunglasses. Will it give you the same returns, in terms of quality of experience, for at least an hour? Sounds ridiculous? Now what if the sunglasses were worth Rs 50 and look great, does that change the axis? In my book, no. I would still go by quality of experience including time spent, not the cost. So if the glasses were worth Rs 10000 and promised at least an hour of the original joy, I’d go for it. But then I don’t like sunglasses. I don’t like most ‘things’, most labels, so perhaps it makes it easier for me. Less angst.

That’s my working philosophy for the day. It might not work for you. It might not always work for me either. But it’s a different path I’m willing to walk on, at least part of the way. It forces me to question the real value of my experiences, of my life. And that’s fun.

I didn’t give the autowallah Rs 500, finally. I realised giving him Rs 20 instead of the Rs 15 he asked for, meant a certain quality of experience for him, a certain joy.

In fact my joy of getting home earlier and playing with my daughter = his joy of getting an unexpected tip after a fruitless journey. Small, but very meaningful.
What guarantee did I have these joyous experiences would suddenly be enhanced, with a forced-on price tag? I don’t like Descartes, I told you…

New Advertising Briefing Format, courtesy Delhi Police

2008-05-08T16:13:00.002+05:30

There are occasional discussions about briefing formats. A thought just struck me now:

A brief is essentially a friendly interrogation of the brand and the circumstances it’s in, with the objective of figuring out a way forward.

Now, forget advertising, put yourself in the shoes of a Delhi police beat cop.

It’s 3 in the morning, and you’ve just stopped a car with a couple inside. These are the questions you would ask:

‘Kya naam hai tera? Kya karte ho? Sach sach bata.’

‘Kahan se aa raho ho? Ghar kahan tera?’

‘Licence dikha.’

And finally, if things have gone well so far, you ask with a pointed gaze:

‘Yeh ladki kaun hai?’

Now let’s see this from an advertising context.

What the cop was asking is: What’s the brand/product and what does it do? What’s the history and what’s the specific marketing task at hand? Show me proof of what you’re claiming, why should the consumer believe you? What advertising has it done so far, are there any mandatories/guidelines?

The ‘ladki’*? She’s the excess baggage, the multiple objectives of one single brief, not a happy situation. (eg., ‘We want to say we are No.2, we want to say we are better than No.3 and we want to say we are for NRIs living in Japan – all get equal importance’)

So, one either has very good reasons to defend it (‘Kya bakte ho, yeh meri biwi hai’) or jettison it quickly (‘Ladki? Kya ladki? Arrey yeh kahan se aayi?’)

And oh, I forgot – ‘Paisa nikal’. Something we should never forget to ask, as advertising professionals.

Cheers.

*Sincerely apologise for being politically incorrect, but that’s a Delhi cop.

The Bhajji Affair - A Tale of Two Indias

2008-04-29T10:00:00.006+05:30

There’s a deeper story in the Bhajji-Sreesanth affair. It’s a story of deep-rooted bias, of kowtowing to the system, and finally, of how power structures evolve in the ‘new India’.
At the onset, let me state Bhajji got what he deserved, I have no issues with that. Over and out.
Now let’s take a closer look at where Bhajji comes from. The only son in a family of five daughters, the head of the family being a petty trader/manufacturer of hand tools. Economically lower middle class at best. (Next time you see his mother’s living room, take a closer look – in spite of the new-found wealth, the former poverty shows.)
Now ask yourself why the guy practiced bowling at a single stump for three hours at a stretch, and then some more after turning on a neighbour’s scooter headlight, and the reason isn’t hard to spot. Survival.
I’m not trying to romanticise Bhajji. You’ve heard this story before. Perhaps it’s your story too.
Now let’s take a closer look at Sreesanth. His father is a retired LIC manager. His brother owns a music company. His sister is a reputed television actress.
Hardly a picture of deprivation. If Sree practiced for 3 hours bowling at a single stump, the thoughts of getting his sister married wasn’t top of mind, as I’m sure it was in Bhajji’s. (Politically incorrect, but that’s where the other India comes from.)
So we’re looking at two immensely talented individuals born on opposite sides of the street.
If Sree didn’t make it, he would’ve possibly joined his brother’s company. If Bhajji didn’t, perhaps he would have been another trader in small tools in a Jalandar mandi, struggling to repay his sisters’ marriage debts.
Fast forward to the present. What I’ll say will probably leave you violently shaking your head in disagreement, but that’s the way I see it.
Sree represents the inner circle of the establishment, to the manor born. He’s almost a page 3 darling, walking in the footsteps of Yuvi. There will always be an ‘old boy’ to protect his interests.
Bhajji was born fucked, in Springsteen’s mythical ‘Badlands’. He can barely speak English, forget social niceties. He’s been in the team for years, and is actually more senior that Sehwag – but will never be a part of the team thinktank. Even if he’s one of the most successful bowlers ever. Even if the page 3 types cheer as he walks the ramp for a fashion designer.
He’s not ‘us’. Period.
The analogy with an expensive school is startling. Poor kid slaps rich kid. Rich kid runs crying to class teacher. Class teacher takes him to the headmaster. Headmaster speaks to principal, who expels him: ‘This sort of behavior will not be tolerated in our school.’ What he really means: ‘How dare you, you son of a petty trader.’
There is, like in the present scenario, no attempt to engage both parties in a broader dialogue. No attempt to explore the core. No counselling. It’s medieval punishment, swift and severe.
Look around you, wherever your world is. It’s the same ‘Friends of Sreesanth’ who are in charge. Perhaps you’re one of them like I am, in a sense.
A nation led by wimps, by the ‘babalog’. Where any strain of rebellion, especially from ‘them’, is met by moral outrage. An intellectually timid mass of borrowed facades, with a flaccid penis at the core.
I just stepped out for a smoke (my office is non-smoking), to the lift area. I saw a hesitant young man step out of a lift, dressed in a cheap white shirt and scuffed trousers. He clutched a pink polythene bag close to his Rs 20 tie. I suppose the boy had come looking for a job, at one of the offices.
That guy is Bhajji. And ten years down the line, there’s an outside chance he’ll shout at a colleague, perhaps worse. And there’s a fair chance he’ll be sacked: ‘He crossed the line.’ Read: ‘He crossed our line.’

p.s. At the height of the clinton-lewinsky scandal, bill had an unlikely ally: 85% of the us black population. their point was, 'bill is one of us, he comes from the same background (single mother, poverty); and he's being victimised exactly the way we are by rich whites when we prosper'.

on kawara

2008-04-27T13:11:00.006+05:30

first time i saw on kawara's date paintings, i said out loudly, 'what the fuck?' and went away.
but it refused to go away, stayed in my mind for a long time.
in a nutshell, kawara is a living genius, one of the greatest artists alive. he's one of the rare beings who make you question all you know of art, his work turns all preconceived notions upside down.
how do you explain a telegram (by kawara) to friends which goes 'i am still alive. 2 july, 1961'? you either get it or you don't. to me, it's 'pure consciousness'...
i would have cut&pasted an interview with the man, but the man doesn't give interviews. neither has he ever been photographed... seeing his date paintings is like walking around in a cemetery. can't explain the heaviness, the consciousness, any further...
here's a review or two, of his work:

It's a date!

On Kawara has made over 2,000 of these paintings since the 1960s, each one completed on the day shown. And if he fails to finish by the stroke of midnight, he destroys it. Adrian Searle is intrigued.

How much time does On Kawara's exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, take? How much of your time will the show eat up, how long does it last? You can be out of the gallery in less than half an hour. One drawing; 37 paintings, each presenting nothing more than a date from 1966 to the near present; two groups of books, 10 volumes each in a pair of vitrines facing each other across an otherwise empty room; a series of tables displaying numerous old telegrams under glass. Finally, should you choose to leave by the back stairs, you will hear a man and a woman alternately reciting numbers.

That's it, that's the show. There is no punchline. Thank you and goodbye. It took 30 years to walk down that staircase as the voices counted from 375 to 405AD. They were reading from the books in the vitrines, which contain nothing more than columns of dates - One Million Years (past), working backwards from 1969, and One Million Years (future), counting forwards from 1980. Tempus fugit, I said to myself, ars longa, or something like it. Life is short but sometimes it seems to go on for a very long time.

Each of On Kawara's "date paintings" was completed on the date shown, the painting's sole image. Collectively they're called Todays, and the artist has made over 2,000 since the 1960s. Should he fail to finish a painting by the stroke of midnight, he destroys it. You imagine his failures to make the deadline - an unexpected visitor, the artist was struck down with sudden toothache, time ran out.

The paintings here were all made on Sundays. That is not the only day of the week the artist paints, but the qualification gave him the rubric for this selection.

Perhaps, as you read this, somewhere in the world On Kawara is making a date painting. If he is in the US, the date will begin with the name of the month, in English, followed by the day and year. If he is painting in Europe, the day will precede the month. The abbreviated name of the month will be recorded in the language of the country he happens to be in. If the country doesn't use Roman script - in Japan, say, or Russia - he will write the name of the month in Esperanto.

He invents rules for himself, self-imposed limits. There are four or five coats of the same brand of paint on each canvas. The paint goes round the edge of the stretcher. The lettering is hand-painted with calculated precision and anonymity. It is always in crisp, white lettering and occupies pretty much the same proportion of each canvas, though the canvases themselves are not always the same size, nor quite the same colour. Some days are greyer, some more brown or a shade darker or bluer than others. Every day has its individual timbre, though at first they seem alike. That's how the days go, as reticent as the way he paints them. January 30, 1966 had a blue, expansive feel. On Aug. 23, 1998, On Kawara made two small, identical paintings. It was a day for doing things twice. There are French Sundays in Fevrier, red days in March. The paintings are not so much self-effacing as unrelieving.

The days go by. For many years, On Kawara always placed a page from the day's newspaper in the plain cardboard box in which each painting is stored. For some reason, he no longer does this. Perhaps for him the day's events make us read too much into the painting (although, like the kidnapper's photo of the prisoner holding aloft the newspaper, it is proof that some sort of hope remains). Is there a painting dated Sept. 11, 2001? Did On Kawara get up that morning in New York, where he has lived for many years, take up a canvas and start brushing on the first layer before the day went wrong? Lately, On Kawara has lent date paintings to kindergartens and schools in Iceland, Australia and the Ivory Coast, where they hang in classrooms, bearing dates that fall within the lifespans of the children. He calls these small poetic interventions "pure consciousness".

On the day I write this, On Kawara will have been alive for 25,546 days. He is around 70 years old (the leap years trip me up) and counts the days. Does he also count the cigarettes, the dinners out, the aeroplane trips and laundry tickets? For a long time he made a map of his daily walks and cab rides. He made lists of the people he met. He sent telegrams to friends and colleagues around the world, telling them he was still alive, "I am still alive - On Kawara", and for some years he also sent out postcards from wherever he was, each rubber-stamped with a message detailing his temporary address and the time he got up. Then someone stole the rubber stamp, so he stopped.

Telegrams have largely disappeared too, thanks to the fax and email, so On Kawara sends far fewer than he used to. The "I am still alive" telegrams are valuable now. Here they are, addressed to famous curators, artists, dealers. There are variations: "I am not going to commit suicide don't worry", "I am not going to commit suicide worry", and "I am going to sleep forget it".

On Kawara's work is a matter of life and death, a question of survival. Never agreeing to interviews, shunning photographers, always absent from his private views, he too seems to exist as pure consciousness, recording his persistence.

He is like one of those peculiar, driven characters in a Paul Auster story, except On Kawara deserves a better fate than to be memorialised in Auster's overrated fiction. On Kawara creates his own memorial every day, in the eloquent silences of his works. He exists, and his art is the proof of it.

One day all this will stop. No more counting. There are no remembrances of time past in On Kawara's work - or is that, precisely, all there is? When he was a teenager in Tokyo, the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He stopped, by his own account, being a diligent student. His early works, from his late teens and early 20s, were images of prisons and cold, detailed drawings of amputees in sealed bathrooms. Legless, pregnant women, bits of bodies, smears and slugs crawling the tiles. These drawings are terrifying. Much of his early work he destroyed; these he left behind.

He travelled, learned Spanish and French, immersed himself in Sartre and Camus. He became, I suppose, what is called a conceptual artist, but his art is, in every sense, singular. You'll get it or you won't, be captivated or moved or not.

Perhaps you'll be bored and feel the show's a waste of time. Whose time? It will or will not get under your skin. Where will you be when you think of it later, and for how long will you turn it over in your head? What day was it? Can you prove that you were alive? When On Kawara wakes up, does he think one day more or one day less? We do not know. Nor do we know, at this moment, if On Kawara is still alive.

more dope on barkha (article by rochelle pinto / the hindu)

2008-04-27T12:52:00.006+05:30

Having women in responsible positions is no guarantee that sensitivity to questions of gender will also naturally fall into place.

There has been coverage enough of the particulars of the rape and murder of the British teenager Scarlette Keeling on Anjuna beach in Goa. This article therefore does not deal with the details of the case itself, but is a comment on the nature of media coverage; in particular an episode of a talk show. This episode was aired a month after the murder of Keeling. The high visibility of women journalists in responsible positions in public television has its own range of effects, and the symbolic value that women journalists with a presence have is undisputed. The particular handling of this episode shows, however, that there are no guarantees that gender politics will also fall into place like eggs in an egg holder, solely with the inclusion of women.

If we were therefore, only to deal with the anchor as a media product in herself, with her team of producers, and if we were, in hindsight, to stand in the shoes of a producer of this episode, what would be the tasks at hand? For one, the urgent need to assess the possibilities and problems of putting together a neat episode in a social terrain that is not very well known. Some things about Goa are known though — the sea, the beach, the round-the-year (cheaper in the monsoon) party. As an intelligent producer, why would you pass up this familiar hook on which to peg the story? As the episode began, with sea and surfers in the background, it was clear that this was going to be no ordinary grim talk show. Rape and murder notwithstanding, there was a visual frame to be filled, and this was Goa. In addition to the sea and sky there was a line up of suitable celebrities: A belligerent and hostile Minister, the bereaved mother, Fiona MacKeown, and celebrities of the likes of Bina Ramani.

Priorities

As a producer committed to keeping audiences glued to their seats, and loyal to your channel across the commercial breaks, the sordid question of rape and police-cover ups is not the most enticing of discussions. In fact, it is something of an old story. Further, this was an audience already titillated for at least a week, sated with pictures of the bruised body of the victim. This is where the sheer skill of an experienced journalist became evident. The first eight minutes of this episode were devoted to airing opinions about how the crime had altered the image of Goa. This allowed for the expression of local resentment at corruption and over the image of Goa that had been narrowed in the first place to a hippie haunt, and now a sleazy one at that. This feeling, currently intertwined with the sense of onslaught in Goa from SEZs, and government schemes for land appropriation, has its causes and often legitimate points of origin, but could not have been aired at a worse moment, sometimes in the worst metaphors possible. The “rape” of Goa, used unproblematically in some of the agitational literature in the State, was evoked here as well, as a parallel to the rape and murder of the Scarlette Keeling. While the oppositional stance of those heading some of the mass movements in Goa is only to be applauded, the absence of sensitivity to questions of gender could not have been more visible with this comparison. Or for that matter, in the comparison of Goa to a beautiful young girl who had pimples on her face that had to be removed. For those who were also morally outraged by the sexual practices of the tourists, this crime, and the person of Fiona MacKeown, began to be symbolic of what was wrong with Goa.

Changing storylines

Those who have survived the memory-erasing effect of news 24/7 will remember that the British media had met the story of the rape and murder with the most lurid tabloid coverage, and a vociferous attack on Fiona Mackeown, highlighting her tattoos and her alternative lifestyle as contributing reasons for her daughter’s murder. By the time of this episode, Indian newspapers had abandoned their own coverage, to reproduce the details of Fiona McKeown’s sexual past and very unmiddle-class present. Where the television episode scored on high drama and newsworthiness over the others was in actually having MacKeown there to face the anchor’s unrelenting charges in person.

One can only presume that this was the reasoning behind the fact that most of the questions posed by the anchor from the ninth minute of the episode were about the culpability of Fiona MacKeown. This was how the episode on the rape and murder of a tourist became a trial by television of Fiona the Bad Mother. The anchor apologised before informing MacKeown that she had to ask her questions about her sense of responsibility, about her multiple sexual partners, about her large family of children and the fact that she was a single mother. Why did she have to ask her those questions?

What we do know is that this public trial of motherhood opened doors for various declarations of moral superiority, including a celebration of the British press for drawing attention to bad parenting. Remarks such as “I definitely share in the grief of Fiona…but I would not have left my daughter with people whom I’ve known for two or three months”, was offered by the Minister, after he was explicitly invited by the anchor to express his judgement of Fiona’s parenting. What must have been particularly insightful to MacKeown was the anchor’s sensitive suggestion, “Fiona, when you look at the images of Scarlette smiling at you from the photographs, do you think to yourself, what a fool I was?” This must be a first in television history. When MacKeown began to reply, saying that perhaps she had been naïve, but she had felt assured that the family would take care of her daughter, the anchor interrupted to say “But you know, a fifteen-year-old in full blown relationships, a fifteen-year-old on drugs!...”

The term trial by media was never better applied, except that this time, it was not to those who actually perpetrated the crime — or rather, this channel’s notion of the criminal had shifted from the alleged rapist to a mother who had left her daughter with a friend and his two old aunts. Interestingly, it was members of the audience who mid-way through suggested to the anchor that the questions that should be asked were about the drug cartel and the cover-up of medical reports. The dominant approach to the crime, however, incriminated the mother and assumed that men will be men. It was up to women to stay out of trouble. No walks at night, no walks on the beach, no drinking in shacks. In contrast to this approach, the statements of a women’s organisation in Goa, Bailancho Saad, have countered the focus on parenting by emphasising the number of women who approach them, having been raped by brothers and fathers. None of this unfortunately has reached the mainstream press. Most critiques of the parenting obsession and of this television episode for that matter remain on personal blog sites, apart from the odd article such as Ajit Sahi’s in Tehelka.

The tensions among the audience at the shoot however, were signs of the kinds of conflicts that are likely to emerge in ex-colonies where the most vital economic activity is tourism. Even if one discounts the self-righteous sanctimonious responses, a situation where cases of sexual assault, including those of paedophilia, go unpunished, where a thriving arms trade is alleged, and a drug trade is public, is likely to generate some amount of anti-outsider feeling. Combine this with the fact that the recent months have seen an upsurge of small and large mobilisations against all kinds of projects in the State involving fundamental environmental and livelihood issues, and some of the converging ire against “outsiders”, whether tourists or migrants, seems to have explicable if not justifiable roots. Little of this seemed to percolate to the anchor, who said reproachfully, “There seems to be an outsider-insider divide here.” The episode ended with a rap rendition of one of Remo’s songs. The only thing missing was a cartoon by Mario Miranda.
Surprising silence

We need not dwell too much on how Goa ought to be represented, for, there is no right answer to this. If everything that happens in the State is put through a uni-dimensional, pre-given filter of representative images, this is only in the nature of the game. We are, after all, by now, an audience bludgeoned by the codes of television news, far from the ominous innocence of monopoly Doordarshan coverage, where the poised Delhi newsreaders grimaced to distance themselves from the lies of the news on Kashmir. Having weathered the close, intimate close-ups of the bodies and faces of those on the wrong side of television cameras, one is left with a mild feeling of surprise. While there are critiques from viewers, there is no public sign of a discussion of the visual grammar of television among professional media people. This is no call for censorship or monitoring or the imposition of prescribed “guidelines”. Just an acknowledgement of being part of a media machine that responds only to the threat of a ban, or in fear of mob fury.

What seemed to be at work in the rapaciousness of visual images of Keeling’s body across channels and of the brutality, with which MacKeown was handled on the talk show, was the pretence of a populist concession to public concerns. This is what the anchor repeatedly said to exonerate herself as she aggressively counter-questioned MacKeown — “I’m sorry, this is difficult for you and difficult for us, but this is what is being said…” This is the strategy behind most opinion polls with structured questions. The option is to agree or not to agree. The option to say, “this is a loaded and rotten question” cannot exist. This performance of democracy and viewer participation gives faces and voices to the TRP rating. It is no longer just a number generated by marketing departments, but apparently an accumulation of the sms opinion polls and emails, running as a strip beneath the news. The fact is, when the anchor countered MacKeown’s defences by hissing details about her daughter’s sex life, she did it in our name. The TRP rating and the fixed opinion poll generate an unnamed average viewer, who is obeyed by the channel and who silences dissenting viewers. For, who are you to express your fringe extreme opinion? What’s more, this average viewer also has a strong streak of voyeurism, taking the bite out of pornography by bringing it into mainstream television.

Welcome the Average Viewer

Recently, a Minister had a run-in with a pilot after he (the minister) had held up a flight allegedly by arriving late. The channel, which claimed to have “broken” the news assailed the Minister repeatedly with long-winded criticism and hostile accusation, and spoke on behalf of “Those Whose Flights Are Delayed”. What makes flight delays shouting-friendly, while massacre and gang rape produce “neutrality”? Who needs government censorship anymore? In the space of a decade, the Average Viewer has emerged as the more effective censor. It is the AV who legitimises flight delay-activism and prudent silence over illegal imprisonment, as long as you occasionally throw her/ him repeated flashing images of suicide victims, wardrobe malfunctions and the public laceration of Fiona MacKeown.

indian cities

2008-02-01T13:44:00.000+05:30

Toshi Ao at a Facebook group:
Most modern Indian cities strive to rise above ethnicity. Tell anybody who lives in Bombay that he lives in a Maharashtrian city and (unless of course, you are speaking to Bal Thackeray) he will take immediate offence. We are cosmopolitan, he will say indigenously. Tell a Delhiwalla that his is a Punjabi city (which, in many ways, it is) and he will respond with much self-righteous nonsense about being the nation's capital, about the international composition of the city's elite etc. And tell a Bangalorean that he lives in a Kannadiga city and you'll get lots of techno-gaff about the internet revolution and about how Bangalore is even more cosmopolitan than Bombay. But, the only way to understand what Calcutta is about is to recognize that the city is essentially Bengali.
What's more, no Bengali minds you saying that. Rather, he is proud of the fact. Calcutta's strengths and weaknesses mirror those of the Bengali character. It has the drawbacks: the sudden passions, the cheerful chaos, the utter contempt for mere commerce, the fiery response to the smallest provocation. And it has the strengths (actually, I think of the drawbacks as strengths in their own way). Calcutta embodies the Bengali love of culture; the triumph of intellectualism over greed; the complete transparency of all emotions, the disdain with which hypocrisy and insincerity are treated; the warmth of genuine humanity; and the supremacy of emotion over all other aspects of human existence. That's why Calcutta is not for everyone.
You want your cities clean and green; stick to Delhi. You want your cities, rich and impersonal; go to Bombay. You want them high-tech and full of draught beer; Bangalore's your place. But if you want a city with a soul: come to Calcutta. When I look back on the years I've spent in Calcutta - and I come back so many times each year that I often feel I've never been away - I don't remember the things that people remember about cities. When I think of London, I think of the vast open spaces of Hyde Park. When I think of New York, I think of the frenzy of Times Square. When I think of Tokyo, I think of the bright lights of Shinjiku. And when I think of Paris, I think of the Champs Elysee. But when I think of Calcutta, I never think of any one place. I don't focus on the greenery of the maidan, the beauty of the Victoria Memorial, the bustle of Burra Bazar or the splendour of the new Howrah 'Bridge'. I think of people. Because, finally, a city is more than bricks and mortars, street lights and tarred roads. A city is the sum of its people. And who can ever forget - or replicate - the people of Calcutta? When I first came to live here, I was told that the city would grow on me. What nobody told me was that the city would change my life. It was in Calcutta that I learnt about true warmth; about simple human decency; about love and friendship; about emotions and caring; about truth and honesty. I learnt other things too. Coming from Bombay as I did, it was a revelation to live in a city where people judged each other on the things that really mattered; where they recognized that being rich did not make you a better
I learnt also that if life is about more than just money, it is about the things that other cities
ignore; about culture, about ideas, about art, and about passion. In Bombay, a man with a relatively low income will salt some of it away for the day when he gets a stock market tip. In Calcutta, a man with exactly the same income will not know the difference between a debenture and a dividend. But he will spend his money on the things that matter. Each morning, he will read at least two newspapers and develop sharply etched views on the state of the world. Each evening, there will be fresh (ideally, fresh-water or river) fish on his table.
His children will be encouraged to learn to dance or sing. His family will appreciate the power of poetry. And for him, religion and culture will be in inextricably bound together.
Ah religion! Tell outsiders about the importance of Puja in Calcutta and they'll scoff. Don't be silly, they'll say. Puja is a religious festival. And Bengal has voted for the CPM since 1977. How can godless Bengal be so hung up on a religions festival? I never know how to explain them that to a Bengali, religion consists of much more than shouting Jai Shri Ram or pulling down somebody's mosque
It has little to do with meaningless ritual or sinister political activity. The essence of Puja is that all the passions of Bengal converge: emotion, culture, the love of life, the warmth of being together, the joy of celebration, the pride in artistic __expression and yes, the cult of the goddess. It may be about religion. But is about much more than just worship. In which other part of India would small, not particularly well-off localities, vie with each other to produce the best pandals? Where else could puja pandals go beyond religion to draw inspiration from everything else? In the years I lived in Calcutta, the pandals featured Amitabh Bachchan, Princes Diana and even Saddam Hussain!
Where else would children cry with the sheer emotional power of Dashimi, upset that the Goddess had left their homes? Where else would the whole city gooseflesh when the dhakis first begin to beat their drums? Which other Indian festival - in any part of the country - is so much about food, about going from one roadside stall to another, following your nose as it trails the smells of cooking? To understand Puja, you must understand Calcutta. And to understand Calcutta, you must understand the Bengali. It's not easy. Certainly, you can't do it till you come and live here, till you let Calcutta suffuse your being, invade your bloodstream and steal your soul. But once you have, you'll love Calcutta forever. Wherever you go, a bit of Calcutta will go with you. I know, because it's happened to me. And every Puja, I am overcome by the magic of Bengal. It's a feeling that'll never go away.

My two bits:
I've been thinking about what Toshi's written for more than a decade, ever since I left Calcutta for Delhi, never succeeded in articulating my thoughts as brilliantly as he did.
I keep going back once a year or so, to drop in at the occasional marriage, meet my mother (she refuses to move out), be a silent witness at property disputes, and so on.
While the change (flyovers, IT districts) is interesting, I'm curious about what young Calcuttans are thinking, feeling and doing these days.
Do they still buy old books from College Street, books filled mostly with love and revolution? Do they take a bus to the other end of the city to talk about movies with a friend? Do they discuss Kafka over a shared omlette at the Coffee House? Do they fall in love with acned schoolgirls in pigtails and sing Tagore songs at the Victoria Memorial? Do they still take ridiculous Eng Lit courses at the university? Do they have drug problems? Do they occasionally join a maidan rally just for fun?
I’m not sure. Most of the young people I’ve met seem to be in a hurry to prove their ‘neutral cosmopolitanness’. They buy satin shirts from Provogue and hang out at Oxford, the airconditioned Park Street bookshop, and check out the latest Hollywood DVDs at Music World (?) down the road. They aspire to be seen at hookah bar/nightclubs (there’s a Facebook group, Sheesha) and dreamily talk about management courses in Ohio. And – though this might sound terribly racist – I hear of Bajorias doing well in Calcutta, not the Banerjees.
I’m being facetious, of course – and a weekend visit doesn’t give you the luxury of going beyond the surface. One needs to suspend time and float around… roll a joint or two, or three or four, which I don't anymore...
But I’m curious about what young Calcuttans think, about the above. (I'm gently knocking on the doors of middle age, but I was 21 once, on College St.) Feel free to dismiss my drift, challenge my assumptions, Calcutta-style. I know the essence of the city Toshi’s articulated will never change, I’m just curious about, things.

on tv last night: indian bloggers

2008-01-14T09:37:00.000+05:30

This is the transcript of a letter I sent Barkha Dutt, a TV journalist of some repute, after watching her programme on Indian bloggers last night:
Dear Barkha,
Two words that sums up my feelings after watching your programme on Indian bloggers: utter dismay.
While I didn’t have a stopwatch at hand, my guess is about 80% of your programme had sex as the central theme. Sex as titillation, not liberation.
This was of course a direct result of your questions to three participants, concerning their personal blogs.
The entire tone of your questions was ‘Wow! You said all this in the public domain, weren’t you worried?’
There were sage asides on the above from some participants, including a lady with an impeccable hairdo who claimed ‘Blogs are like graffiti, no one takes them seriously.’
A mild-mannered gentleman (I think he runs some kind of platform for bloggers in India, much too mild for his own and other bloggers’ good) tried to tell you there were many kinds of blogs, including corporate blogs, but you chose to bring in a commercial break almost on cue.
A few points I would have made, had I been on your programme (even with the commercial breaks):
1. It was clear you have a personal bias against blogs, perhaps from your Kargil experience when some bloggers spread alleged untruths – something you mentioned on the programme.
2. There are many kinds of blogs, personal and non-personal, sometimes they’re both.
3. There are news blogs which have a bigger reader base than established newssites. There are tech blogs which companies like Apple and Microsoft regularly quote. There are very successful corporate blogs where users/stakeholders interact with the company. And so on.
4. If the issue is privacy, then I would worry more about the mainstream media – I suspect the Govt. of India agrees, going by recent events.
5. The content of blogs are subject to the law of the land – and there is such a thing called an IP address.
6. While it’s true that it’s easy to start a canard, they don’t have a shelf life. Truth prevails, more sooner than later. Your experience would be a good example.
7. A blog is ultimately about enabling an unheard voice to be heard. To me, it seems to be a constitutional right.
Finally, Barkha, my respect for your journalistic prowess took a bit of a beating last night. I sincerely hope it recovers soon.
Best wishes,
Shubho Sengupta,
21speed.blogspot.com

'meritocracy': reservation reexamined

2008-01-02T17:02:00.000+05:30

I've been following Rohit Chopra's blog, antihistory.blogspot.com, for quite some time. His blog should be made recommemned reading at every Indian college. Here's why:

It has always surprised me why Indians (in both India and the US) are among the most virulent critics of pro-diversity, egalitarian, and affirmative action initatives in the American academy. I suspect it has something to do with the caste privilege of many of these Indians, which they refuse to see as privilege. That guilt and anxiety is possibly projected on to the American academic system. The egalitarian initiatives of the American academy also call into question the idea of 'meritocracy' held dear by many privileged Indians. It is a deeply cherished myth among these Indians that their achievements are a reflection of their ability to best others in a competitive environment where all participate on equal ground. This is based on a wilful ignorance of the massive inequalities of Indian life, and differential levels of opportunity and access among caste, religious, and economic groups.

No wonder, then, that the meritocrats advocate a radical neoliberal reform of the educational sector, seeking to reduce it to a marketplace of products and services. The Indian system of reservations, which is often cynically manipulated by politicians, is surely worthy of critique, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta and others have noted. But the claim of meritocracy which is marshalled by privileged Indians and the neoliberals is patently spurious, no more than a self-congratulatory article of faith.

A similar animosity is often found in Indian public discourse--- for instance, on blogs-- against scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, theoretical work and certain disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas like cultural studies, film studies, postcolonial theory, and postmodernism are singled out for censure. An informed critique of specific works in these areas, reflecting some level of serious engagement, would be worth reading. But the critique-- if it can even be called that-- usually consists of no more than some sneering remarks about the irrelevance of work in these fields, or that it does not conform to that most charming of criteria, 'common sense'.

In effect, such an invocation of common sense amounts to no more than a vapid populism. It is a more sophisticated populism compared to the crude populism that informs, say, the Shiv Sena's attack on Indian artists or Islamic fundamentalist threats against Taslima Nasrin. But it is a populism nevertheless, one that masquerades as erudition accompanied by the pretence of wit. A difference in degree, in this case, does not necessarily imply a difference in kind.

It may be worth examining in detail what deep-seated anxieties such work provokes. If the humanities, in the American academy or otherwise, are so irrelevant to the 'real' world, the weighty matters that 'real' intellects concern themselves with, why bother commenting on them? Why do they provoke such ire, such anger? What gives?

It is also worth noting that the same criteria of 'common sense' are stretched in peculiar ways when it comes to the realms of realpolitik, the hard matters of national security and interest, the obfuscations of development, and the quantification of aspects of human existence. Witness the sweeping generalizations and assumptions about human nature that increasingly inform thinking about society, culture, and art in the Indian media. All humans act in self-interest! Greed is good! The national interest is the interest of the majority! Marx was right about the Asiatic Mode of Production- India has always been a society in stasis! Human history progresses on a simple linear path with India scrambling to catch up with the West!

"just five minutes boss!" (the 90s and now)

2007-12-14T16:31:00.000+05:30

I started working in the 90s. Things have changed. For the better, and worse.
Top of the ‘worse’ list is the concept of time.

In the 90s, when someone said “Five minutes”, it meant 2-4 minutes. Even in “cholbe na” Calcutta.
In Y2K North India (I moved out of my hometown many years back),
when someone says, “It’ll be done in five minutes”, uncork the wine, put on the Kishore CD and light a cigar, mate.
It could mean 20 minutes, 2 hours, half a day or the next day. Depending on your karma.

In the 90s, we used to start working at 9.30am.
Now? Drop in at any office at 9.30 and you’ll probably see the security guard watching TV in his chaddis. FTV.
He’s a smart guy, he knows no one in his/her senses will enter the office before 10.30.

In the 90s, we used to unpack our plastic tiffin boxes (packed with fish and rice) dutifully at 1pm,
finish eating by 1.30, then go off to sleep and wake up refreshed at 2 sharp.
These days, people say “Yo dude, just steppin’ out for lunch” at 2, and are back by 3.
After which it’s social networking till 4, then work till 5, then online games till 6, then work till 7, then office cricket till 8, then…
Next day the same characters show up at 11am and say “Hi there… lotsa work last night… missed my cousin’s mehndi ceremony”

Last evening a young B-School type (Andheria More, not Ahmedabad) stopped me and asked “Sir, what is time?”
“It’s a concept, very confusing concept, don’t bother,” I replied.

Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards

2007-12-04T23:34:00.000+05:30

“My Hindi is getting better than my English, ever since I became a MLA.”
That statement by Yashodhara Scindia, former royal and presently minister in the Madhya Pradesh govt., pretty much sums up the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in New Delhi recently.
The Awards were presented at a swish hotel in the heart of the city (minimum tariff, $500 a night); expensive wine flowed freely, the seriously rich wore well-cut suits (Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum looked particularly dapper) and the accents were distinctly East Coast (US, not India).
The four social entrepreneurs were slickly presented by Vikram Chandra of NDTV, and were joined by Ms Scindia, Sachin Pilot (MP), and the articulate CII (Confederation of Indian Industries) president for a panel discussion.
Everyone was articulate, that evening. The arguments in favour of working together (corporates, govt. and NGOs) towards a just and compassionate society were flawless.
“The poor can pay for good products, we corporates need to realize this fantastic opportunity”, the CII president said more than once.
The finalists spoke too, inspiring accounts of innovations at the grassroots. Solar power for the poor, a bank run by poor women, drinking water for slum dwellers, schools for children of migrant workers.
But by then, I had switched off. I just couldn’t reconcile the surroundings with the core issue. And I was asphyxiated with business models.
I didn’t stay for the corporate-sponsored dinner.
Looking back, perhaps my reaction was a bit unfair. Maybe I was a victim of the common stereotypes NGOs are accused of: Any NGO who goes to a five-star hotel has sold out, and so on.
But, for the moment, I’m not sure. Would the original social entrepreneur, MK Gandhi, accepted the email invitation to the Award, followed by cocktails and dinner? I don’t really know.

is social media overhyped?

2007-11-29T10:24:00.000+05:30

(Article from cnnmoney, by paul Monica)

You may have heard that social networking is the wave of the future.

News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace and privately held Facebook are attracting millions of users each month. Google (GOOG) is trying to cash in on the social networking craze by partnering with the likes of MySpace, Bebo and other top social media companies through its OpenSocial initative. And Microsoft (MSFT) spent $240 million last month to buy a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, a price that values Facebook at an eye-popping $15 billion.

But is there a bubble brewing in the social media market? One industry expert thinks so. I sat down to chat with Jim Nail, the chief strategy and marketing officer of Cymfony, an online advertising analytics firm that was acquired by media research company TNS Media Intelligence earlier this year.

Nail, a former analyst at Forrester Research, said he thinks that some advertisers are making the mistake of thinking that social media will be the answer to all their advertising needs, and that MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and others of their ilk will become the ABC, CBS and NBC of the 21st century.

“Marketers have finally given up the illusion that TV is the magic solution to everything,” Nail said. “The problem is marketers want to look for the next magic solution and social media is not it.”

Nail argues that while consumers will probably continue to flock to social media sites, he’s not sure that any of them will really be able to generate large amounts of revenue from advertising. For one, he thinks that there are too many social networking sites out there chasing a finite stream of ad dollars.

“There are too many companies. So from that standpoint, there is a venture capital bubble in this area. There will have to be more consolidation,” he said.

Nail added that trying to handicap who the social networking leader will be several years from now is extremely difficult given how much change has taken place in the business in just the past two years. What’s more, fickle younger Web users have shown a tendency to flee one social network for the next once something cooler comes along.

“Where was Facebook a year ago? Where was MySpace two years ago?” Nail said. “This area is changing so fast that it makes it a harder market to call. People might just flock to the next big thing.” He pointed out that early “leaders” in social networking, such as Friendster, Tripod, Angelfire and Geocities, which Yahoo (YHOO) bought in 1999 for $3.6 billion, are no longer leaders.

This is not to say that MySpace and Facebook are doomed to fail. But the social media leaders of today may not necessarily be the sites where all the tweens, teens and young adults are hanging out tomorrow.

There’s also the issue of whether or not users of social networking sites will really tolerate advertising. People may have grown used to the idea of free entertainment being supported by advertising. But what about profile pages, messaging and other forms of social communication?

“Presumably people are going to these social networking sites because they want to get away from the clutter of advertising on every other medium,” he said.

Now before you accuse Nail (or me) of being a dot-com bear, he’s not predicting a spectacular crash for overall online ad spending. Like others I’ve spoken to recently, Nail believes that online ad spending should hold up well in 2008, even in the event of an economic slowdown or recession. And that’s mainly because Nail believes people will continue to seek out the Web for both leisure and business.

“The current trend is unequivocal, inexorable and irreversible,” he said.

Nail said another big difference between 2007 and 2000 is that big brand-name companies realize the value of online ad spending, and would be likely to spend more on Internet campaigns and pull back on TV, print and radio if the economy weakens further. Earlier this decade, online ad spending was supercharged by venture capital-funded startups that were blowing their IPO proceeds on banner ads.

“Now it’s the Cokes, P&Gs and GMs of the world. Real brands are fueling online ad spending,” he said. “In the late 1990s, there was this notion that Internet ad campaigns were more trouble than they were worth. That’s no longer the case.”

But that doesn’t mean that all online ad-supported companies will benefit. Nail sees search advertising, not social media, remaining the online ad of choice for many companies since it is easier to quantify the impact of a search ad on sales.

That’s why, when I asked Nail specifically about whether he thought Microsoft was getting a good deal with its Facebook investment, he just shook his head.

“Few companies are spending serious ad dollars yet on social media. I don’t think social networks will ever be a huge dollar figure of media spending budgets,” he said.

And there’s the Catch-22 for big social networking companies. A completely free model won’t be viable because users aren’t going to pay fees to manage their profile pages. But if users rebel against advertising, it may be difficult for the social networking companies, even the giants such as Facebook and MySpace, to justify their current frothy valuations.

my two bits on search marketing in india

2007-11-29T10:15:00.000+05:30

1. The form of communication that will do well is the form that coincides with human experience. People buy experiences, not products. In other words, it boils down to content.
2. Traditional forms of media that have done better than the other (eg., TV vs Radio) are those that have offered a more authentic experience. Can Search do better than TV? Only if it offers a more authentic experience.
3. Search sells leads, not experiences – that’s the fundamental problem. It works for small businesses, not big ones. The long tail of Search is built up of small businesses looking for low-worth leads, the big guys don’t need Search. And the big guys are where the big money is – they’re willing to spend for original thinking on their brands.
4. From a consumer perspective: Search works well in an ideal, flat world, not in one where socio-economic levels are so disparate. I can’t see it doing well in India, beyond a critical mass. TVs cheaper here, factoring in all costs.
5. There is no unique language of search – it borrows content from other mediums. Search will have a brighter future when original content is created for search, content that’s superior (more authentic) than what other delivery platforms can offer. So far there’s none. (Digital creatives are beginning to lead offline, with original brand thinking.)
6. Search marketing is a mercurial and unpredictable medium, which requires constant adjustment of strategy and tactics. Not only are the search engines' algorithms constantly being refined and the competitive environment constantly shifting, but the introduction of new targeting technologies requires that practitioners constantly upgrade their skill sets. This can be daunting for even the most forward-thinking organization. Also, Content will not be able to keep pace with the changes. We’ll need creative people who do only Search.
7. While there’s no doubt everything is going digital (including books!), Search will at best hang on to the coat-tails of other digital platforms, it can’t exist on its own. So, statements like “Search will be bigger than TV” are at best taken with a pinch of salt. Search wants to borrow from TV, for Chrissakes! And radio! And print!
8. Any dude with some attitude can start a search mktng co... where does it go beyond a processes approach? where's the talent, original thinking?

To sum up, Search has a great future in the long run, provided it finds a unique voice and creates unique content. Not the way it’s going, with the focus on short-term lead gen and microtargeting. The big spenders will see it as an add-on, not as a long-term lead gen (which TV does a better job of, I suspect).

"30kb limit pliss..."

2007-04-21T20:41:00.000+05:30

...that's been the uninvited guest who refuses to leave, in my first three weeks in internet advertising.
Technical restrictions.
The other chuha is media-driven creative.
In mainline/offline:) advertising, creative pretty much determined the media plan (unless you preferred letting them walk all over you), but here it's the other way around.
Budget, media plan, CPM, $#@%^& (that's the creative part), resize, tag and KABOOM! it's time to go live... you know the rest.

But if you take a beer out of the fridge, sit down somewhere and think about it (the situation, not the beer), there's a sexy blonde with a torch at the end of the tunnel:
1. Let's get real. There are restrictions everywhere, in some form of the other. And media is beginning to call the shots, even in mainstream advertising. At the most, as a creative person you're consulted by the suits about the best delivery vehicles. Usually, a 25-year-old chick from some big media buying house whispers some old mantras into the clients ear. If your're famous enough, you do a one-minute film and let the local creative teams do the 'hardworking' stuff. It differs for brands, but that's the way the big guys are going.
2. My first para was mostly about old-style internet advertising ("this works online, that doesn't"). That model will stay, but there are ample opportunities to break out of the box - if we have a good creative product. To do that, we creatives also need to work with the rediffs and yahoos and googles of the world. (Google probably won't listen, but no harm trying.)
3. Viral. Interactive. Video. Whatever you want to call it, we creatives need to get in there and start talking Desi. Some of us are already doing it, of course. But we need to do it at a Cannes Cyber Lion standard (hopefully I'll steal/execute an idea or two from an unsuspecting junior by deadline time next year...)
4. Technology - emerging technology that is - keeps changing faster than you can say Web2. Or 3G. What that means is, what raises eyebrows today will be possible tomorrow.
5. The last word. Youth. They're calling the shots, and as long as you're on their side, you're fine.

Was the beer good?

these are a few of my favourite things...

2006-12-07T15:27:00.000+05:30

My biking wishlist -
Cannondale F300 - I took this beginner's mountainbike to Lahaul-Spiti last year, home to some of the worst roads in the world. I rode it through bone-chilling streams underneath which lurked sharp rocks, and the killer frame just shrugged the water off like a dog, once through.
Thorn Expedition - A classic English bomb-proof touring bike. Goes anywhere, stiff upper lip in place. Popular in the Namibian outback and polite circles in Camden. The English looooove making bikes, and it shows. This range starts at 3000 pounds. This is why I started doing freelance.
Trek Fuel - The ultimate entry level trail bike. If you're planning to climb Everest on a bike, this should do the trick.
With the bike comes Ortilieb panniers (bags) from Germany, to keep stuff in. Protects old love letters from raging tropical torrents (in case you're weird enough to take them along) and your clothes too.
And a North Face climber's bivvy (mini tent, kind of).
And a Primus Himalaya Multifuel stove to cook Maggi noodles or coffee or biryani if you prefer.
And a Topeak Alien 2 multitool to fix everything. (Swiss knife for cycles.)
And... a Sierra Trade Wind to curl up in (Sleeping Bag of the Year, 2006).

which direction is your chuha pointing?

2006-12-07T12:01:00.000+05:30

So what have the Netizens of India that is Bharat been doing lately, with their collective mice?
Two big things I've been hearing about is www.orkut.com and www.gangofgirls.com, in the youth space.
I've been on orkut for a few weeks, and it's been quite an eye opener. The look is pretty basic, almost bad. The interactions are mostly the 'Wassup dude' variety. But what I suspect makes it a hit are the idiot-proof apps and the feeling you're in the middle of an intense gossip session ('adda', in bengali) with friends and strangers, across space and time. Years back we used to carry interesting books to college to impress classmates (Sorry Messrs. Kafka, Freud and Sartre); at Orkut one can pretend to be a member of interesting communities. Ok, your high school community / ad agency community too. I don't see it hanging around for too long, though - there's a very short-term feel about it. ('What do you say after you say Hello?') But then this is Google, baby, and it's Stage 1.
take gangofgirls.com... if you go by the numbers, it's a hit with 26,000 gangs of girls around the country. And a topic of discussion at every new media adda. A great start, HLL, good for you - everyone needs a platform, even mehendi-lovers. Thing is, HLL spent a bomb promoting it in offline media... if you take a look at the Comscore data, there's an upward swing in registrations everytime they pumped money into TV. But that's cool by me - as long as everyone's talking about it, who cares.
The travel portals are also in the news, with an older audience. But they mostly look the same, have the same business model... some have done a TVC or two, but there's been no real effort to build a brand where it counts, at the point the user meet the service, the website. Some feel there'll be a shakeout in a year or two. My two bits of advice: Visit www.indiamike.com.
www.naukri.com has been around for years, and doing very well with its hi-tech paper-pushing service. Volumes, baby, volumes. Not a kind of place where you'd look for a niche job, but employers looking for 75 BSc grads age 20-22 in Gurgaon know where to go. Somehow I think the investors have a cushy exit plan they're working hard towards ('We are the biggest!')

running shoes

2006-12-06T22:39:00.000+05:30

Why can't I find one, just one sports store in India that knows its running shoes?
Why don't an underwhelming majority of the bright young salesmen at a Nike/Adidas/Reebok store know the difference between a crosstrainer and running shoe?
Why do they give me strange looks when I complain about the lack of toe wiggle or mention my high arches?
Why can't a store that sells Rs 9000 hi-performance shoes invest in a treadmill?
The answer's not hard to find. Go to a Buzz or TC and check out the footwear.
The dudes don't run in their expensive running shoes, they listen to Jim Morisson in it.
And the salesmen know.

manali - leh 2002

2006-12-06T08:17:00.000+05:30

I'd put this up in a lonely corner of Lonely Planet and gotten it published in a (rather glossy) travel magazine, but maybe this is where it really belongs. Reading this four years later, I find traces of grandstanding but am happy to put it up, warts and all. I hope you get on a bike and hit the road, any road, soon. It's easy, and it's beautiful.

8 July: DEPARTURE, DELHI
The Himachal Pradesh Tourist Corporation bus people insist I need a ticket for the cycle. When informed I’ve taken my bike on trains and planes and never had to pay, they hem and haw but refuse to back off. When I insist ‘Please put that down on paper,’ they smile insanely. Suddenly the manager pops out from a cubicle and tells me it’s ok. The bus is packed with honeymooners and their parents en route Manali.

9 July: ARRIVAL, MANALI
Manali’s a wannabe West Delhi, with its Softy parlours, hardware shops spilling onto the road, and F1 auto rickshaws. Quickly huff and puff up to Vashist, a village about 4 km away, where a friend of a friend runs an ancient hotel. It’s an incredibly charming, two-storied wooden structure coming apart at the seams which creaks every time I shift in bed. The friend of the friend is an artist and a Tarkovsky fan – posters for the latter’s films, to be shown the hotel, are plastered all over Vashist. The man has also converted a room into an art gallery, with a TV in one corner for the films, but the only time someone showed an interest in the gallery was during the World Cup.

10 July: MANALI TO MARHI
After 20 minutes of cycling, I realize I have a problem. I can’t cycle. I can’t work the gears right, I’m straining too much, my spine’s twisted into a figure-of-eight.I stop many times, and finally decide to cycle s-l-o-w-l-y in the highest gear. And pretend everything’s perfect, just the way it was meant to be, and that there was no point in worrying about how long or how far. It works.The road winds up through a thick forest, and there are tiny stalls with warm clothing/boots for hire at regular intervals. This is for the honeymooners who’ll go up to the Rohtang Pass, I guess.I take over 10 hours to cycle 37.5 kms to Marhi, about 2/3rd up the Rohtang. I’ve climbed 4,166 metres, to an altitude of 10,866 ft. I decide to rest tomorrow.

11 July: MARHI
Marhi’s a rag tag collection of six or seven dhabas, an ugly temple and an uglier tyre repair shop. But it does boast a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains – some enterprising locals give paragliding lessons to tourists, at Rs 300 a pop (I think), nearby. On a clear day, you can almost see the Rohtang, actually a couple of electric poles near the pass. I eat, sleep, smoke, read the route description (downloaded from sentient-entity.com), flirt with the dhaba manageress, wander around a bit. In the early afternoon, Ian and Sam from Dundee Univ, Scotland show up with their tandem bicycle. They’re cycling up to Leh, too. Their bike is state-of-the-art, with a mini computer mounted on the handlebars. My assembled Indian clunker (Rajdoot frame, Hero front suspension, fake Shimano derailleurs, Radu tyres, Kalkaji front/back carriers and rims) with schoolbags at the sides stands out in sharp contrast. ‘You do the best with what you’ve got,’ Sam tells me grimly. True.

12 July: MARHI TO SISSU
The long and winding road, again. It doesn’t seem too difficult today, but I can barely manage a crawl. (Much later, I discover my average uphill speed is 4 km/hr.) The road’s rutted towards the top, and road workers from Jharkhand and Midnapore and their boat-shaped tar melters - are they simply called boilers? - litter the route. I cycle past a snow wall close to the Rohtang, my first sight of snow. Some locals are busy pasting titles of popular Bollywood hits into the snow ('PYAAR KIYA TO KYA HUA'), using coloured scotch tape – a novel, if bizarre, photo-op for tourists from the plains.
I arrive at the summit quietly, early afternoon. A few scraggly flags on a heap of stones mark the spot, a sight I’d see many times over the next few weeks. The valley below is ghostly quiet. A mittened-up government official and his family are on a picnic – a couple of bodyguards stand around desultorily. My trip really begins after the Rohtang – the road snakes down endlessly through the grotty green hills, and I discover a new way to work the brakes downhill: keep the rear brake pad pressed lightly to the rim, and hit both brakes hard near turnings. At Gramphoo, I fill my Bisleri bottles from a tea stall run by a Lahauli family. At Khoksar it’s lunch at a dusty dhaba, and an Australian trekker asks me the question I’ll be asked many times: ‘So where are you headed?’ I invent my standard answer on the spot: ‘As far as I can go.’It’s a gentle climb to Sissu along the raging Chandra river. I arrive at Sissu, a quaint little village straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, at 3pm. An ex-army man and his son measure me up for a long while, and finally let me stay at their guest house. I meet Ian and Sam inside. We chat with the son for an hour or two, and it turns out he works in Delhi. He’s home for the harvesting season – peas and potatoes – and watches the religious Aastha channel for entertainment since the TV doesn’t catch any other signal. The room is built around a giant wood-fired stove, and out host tells me the women of the house sit around it and gossip all winter. It looks like it was designed by Leonardo Da Vinci on serious drugs.

13 July: SISSU TO KEYLONG
Sissu to Keylong’s about 30k, mostly easy. Actually, it seems easy now, but I guess I must have panted and pawed my way through. The sentient-entity website has a cheery view of most climbs: ‘Easy climbing’ and ‘Bad road but easy climbing’ mostly, ‘Solid climbing’ just once or twice. It didn’t make any difference to me – 4 kms/hr it was, whenever the road went uphill. Tandi has a good, basic dhaba and I pack in the rajma and chawal. I’ll swear by rajma chawal for the rest of my life – if you’re looking for a buzz that lasts forever, this is it. I’m told Maggi noodles is the khana of choice for biking in the Himalayas, but I felt it had as much energy as a weak cup of tea. Keylong’s a few hours uphill from Tandi and is the only town on the route. It’s a typical fly-infested anonymous North Indian town dotted, with STD booths and dimly-lit grocery shops that sell everything from galvanized steel buckets to cheap woolens. I check into the first hotel I see, a not-very-clean double-bed and bathroom with hot water. At Rs 100 with free chai, it’s a steal.

14 JULY: KEYLONG TO PATSEO
The mountains are still green but patches of rock begin to dominate. The further you get away from Keylong, the more people seem to get polite and soft-spoken. I bike past a big hotel at Jispa around noon, the biggest I’ve seen so far, and wonder whether to stop. The glass and granite and an Opel Astra parked outside put me off. Finally I stop at the outskirts, at a Tibetan-run dhaba. The thukpa isn’t very interesting, a plastic bowl of steamy earthworms with bits and pieces of bone thrown in. Then on to Darcha, a base for treks to Zanskar, and then a 2000 ft climb to Patseo. Was beginning to get a little tired by the time I got to Patseo, about 50 k from Keylong. The good thing about biking in the mountains is that you’re mostly alone. It bugs you a little in the beginning, but push your bike through a bone-chilling stream on the Leh-Manali highway, barefoot, and you’ll realize you can only appreciate the joys of yelling ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!’ solo. (I wasn’t carrying flip-flops to save on weight/volume, bad decision.)Patseo is at the base of the notorious Baralacha La, the second big pass on the road to Leh. There’s a sort of army supply dump with a big Indian tricolour (three concentric circles of saffron, white and green) painted on the roof. ‘Looks like target practice for Pakistani planes,’ Sam quips later.I check in at the sole resthouse at Patseo, a dak bungalow with two rooms, no water and no electricity. The Scotsmen have got there before me, and we go looking for food after they finish lighting many candles in their room. There’s a temporary dhaba fashioned out of rocks and plastic sheets a stone’s throw away, and we spend an hour or two there, squatting on the grass floor as the owner-manager-cook rustles up the most delicious sabzi I’ve ever had. A slightly drunk and very garrulous local landowner with his band of merry men join us at some point. They’re bombing around in a rusty Maruti 800, just checking out the scene.

15 JULY: PATSEO TO SARCHU
It’s not every day you can wake up and tell yourself, “Ok, let’s see what we have today, hmm, a 16000ft pass.” I keep up with the boys till the big army camp a couple of miles past Patseo. The camp’s a drive-in, with the road going straight as an arrow through mess kitchens and dining halls and recreation rooms and barber shops and libraries on either side. After that, it’s a short climb to Zing Zing Bar, an army truck stop. The in-charge, a preoccupied-looking man from West Delhi offers me a cup of lukewarm tea. The mountains are no longer green: they’re loose earth and rocks and scree, capped with the bluest sky you’ve ever seen. The road turns bad, then worse, then @#%**%#. There’s a particular nasty stream I have to cross, and the sight of trucks swaying through the water in 1st gear (“Vrrrrrmmmmmm!”) sends a chill up your spine. There are big, sharp rocks just below the raging surface, and it takes a lot of careful negotiating to get through to the other side. I lose all sensation in my feet after I get across.The last 5k are bloody murder, and I decide to hitch a ride of sorts from a scraggly Israeli on an Enfield. I tie my cycle to his bike with a nylon cord, and he blasts off like Schumacher on steroids. This is the stupidest thing I’ve done in my entire life – the bike takes some corners at 30, 40, and till this day I have no clue why I didn’t go hurtling down the sheer drops. When the Israeli shudders to a stop at the summit, my elbows and knees are shaking. About 50 metres to the right is a small lake straight out of Never Never Land. It’s so perfectly beautiful it doesn’t look like a lake. It lies quietly like an emerald in the harsh, desolate surroundings, and I’m tempted to give up everything and spend the rest of my days chewing a blade of grass by its side.The ride down to Bharatpur, then Sarchu, isn’t too bad but bad enough. The road turns into a watery gully at some point, and a couple of bored road workers cooking lunch stare as I pirouette through, like Chaplin on roller skates in The Great Dictator. I chug into Bharatpur, a ragtag congregation of tents selling rajma chawal, flat Pepsi and Wills Flake cigarettes. After Bharatpur, it’s a long straight not very interesting ride to Sarchu, the halfway point at the HP-J&K border. I pass many fancy-looking tent camps, the hot shower / portable loo variety. These are mostly owned by $25-35 a day trekking companies, and I steer clear. Right at the edge of ‘town’, in fact technically on the other side of the border - Sarchu’s on the HP side - are 3 or 4 tent camps run by hillpeople of mixed origin. (My host tells me everyone’s ½ Ladakhi, ½ Garhwali.) I check into one of those, at Rs 35 a night. It’s actually Rs 40 a night, but I get a discount since I’ll be there for an extra day/night on account of my wet socks and fast-splintering bones. The dorm’s after my heart – a pile of carpets are thrown over bricks, you get a pretty thick blanket (I took two), some conversation with truckers from Gurdaspur, and that’s it. I cycled 65 k, actually 60. Can’t believe it.

16 JULY: SARCHU
Sarchu’s cold. I’m wearing a pair of long johns, a thick full-sleeved cotton vest, windcheater, track bottoms, woolen socks and a woolen cap. If it gets worse, there’s a full-sleeved sweater and woolen gloves. And a raincoat. And more cigarettes. Deciding what to carry took a lot of time. I’d taken the bike stuff (spare tube, puncture kit, wrench, pump, etc.) and camping stuff (one-man tent, sleeping bag) seriously and compromised a bit on clothes. For example, I wore one undie throughout and piled on or took off clothes depending on the weather.My aborted trip along the same route last year (the other way around actually, Leh-Manali) was an abject lesson in what not to carry. I was way overloaded with spare tyres (don’t need them for a two week trip), medicine (Gelusil on a biking trip? Hmmm), books (I can’t read while traveling anyway) and incomprehensible gee-gaws like mini wire cutters. Sam and Ian cycle past at around 7am. They’d put up at a Rs 100 a night tent-dorm a little distance back. I’m a little sad to see them go, considering I won’t see them before Leh. There’s no way I can catch up, as they’re planning to cycle right up to Pang, without stopping at Whisky Nullah, the place I’m planning to camp tomorrow night. The truckers fill up on diesel stolen from army bases in J&K, and trundle away. It’s interesting how brazenly the scheme operates. A army 4WD drives up to a dhaba, stern-looking jawans get out, negotiate, seal the deal, the dhaba manager’s boys unload jerrycans of petrol and diesel, the jawans gets a free meal and drive back to Leh. Everyone’s happy.I spend the rest of the day walking around, chatting with the dhaba helpers, taking (I find out later) bad pictures. The grizzled Lahauli-Ladakhi who runs the dhaba is an itinerant trader, and has sold mittens in Chandni Chowk and blankets in Chandigarh last year. He’s also got a catering van, currently stranded at the Baralacha La with missing tyres. Apparently the van broke down, the driver hitched a ride to Manali to look for a mechanic, and someone stole the tyres. Probably a bored trucker.The dhaba owner is also a true bodhisattva: a madman with piercing eyes wanders in from the mountains and asks for a free meal, he gets it no questions asked.The helpers at the dhaba are the owner’s son and daughter, both in their late teens, and two claimants to the latter’s hand. The suitors shuffle around nervously whenever the girl’s around, and bump into pots and pans. She enjoys the attention, and sings Hindi film songs of unrequited love while gelling up her hair in fantastic spikes. A man driving a group of surveyors from Bombay to Leh tells me he’ll be at the Whisky Nullah tomorrow; I get him to promise me shelter in the bus at night, if/when I get there.

15 JULY: SARCHU TO WHISKY NULLAH
I start rolling early. The road’s almost flat, and I bike for 35 k or so. Somewhere I pass the madman from last night, brooding by the roadside. I feel oddly uncomfortable, shift to higher gears and zoom off. The view’s nice: the road follows a river, crosses a bridge, then turns back to where it started, along the river. Maybe someday they’ll build a bridge earlier, in the name of progress.I start climbing the Gata Loops, 21 ‘loops’ up to the Nakeela pass. It’s a bit of a plod, but not difficult. A man in a Maruti Gypsy stops me a few km up, and takes a picture on his digital camera as his little girl looks on. The man’s a Raid de Himalaya organiser, and is on a recce. I’m a little curt with him: being forced off the cycle when climbing is irritating. Besides I think the name Raid de Himalaya is a little stupid. After the Gata Loops, it’s another frustrating 6-8 km to Nakeela Pass, slightly uphill. The terrain’s desert-like, with low shrubs and some snow a few metres up. See a couple of trucks lying around belly up in the valley below. Thankfully, from Nakeela, it’s down. As I fill up on water from a tiny stream, I see a couple of strange igloo-like structures below. I zoom down. They turn out to be semi-abandoned plastic shelters, probably for road workers. I yell hello, and a boy in his late teens staggers out. Namaste, I’m so-and-so, can I stay here? I don’t know. Who should I ask? The boss is at Brandy Nullah. Ok, I’ll wait here. Later the boy relents, and I’m invited to wait in his blue and white igloo. It’s filthy, about 10 X 10 ft, two beds, a kerosene-fired room heater in the middle. Posters of Bollywood starlets are pasted on the wall. It’s hot, fumes spiral up from the very loud heater, and I feel asphyxiated. I don’t have a choice – it’s bitterly cold outside.I’m tired, I’ve done about 50k and want to crash. The boy peeps out of a small window every time he hears a truck. His boss, he reveals, has gone to Pang to get some chicken from the army camp. Late in the evening, the boss stomps in. He’s another boy with down on his upper lip, and wears a ridiculous khaki uniform, a cross between a RSS shakha member and Boy George. I’m interrogated for a while, and when the boy realizes I won’t leave even if I’m asked to, grandly invites me to dinner. The boy, Chitar Mal Meena, is quite charming. He’s the first graduate from his village in Rajasthan, stuck at Whisky Nullah for the last 16 months. He wants a new life, wants to be a storekeeper with a private company, but has to complete a course in storekeeping to apply. And to do the course, he needs a recommendation letter saying he already works as a storekeeper. Can I help?
It’s so cold I can’t sleep. This is the highest altitude I’m sleeping at, about 15200 ft. I have an entire igloo to myself, but sadly the kerosene heater doesn’t work. I got over to the boys' igloo, and mercifully they let me stay. The kindness of strangers always amazes me…

16 JULY: WHISKY NULLAH TO PANG
The boys refuse to accept payment for the chicken when I leave the next morning. It’s government property, they tell me, don’t worry, have a safe trip. A motorcycle rally is on in full earnest (not sure if it’s part of the Raid), and I’m forced to stop and answer many questions all the way up to the Lachang La pass. “Where are you going?” “Which country?” “What cycle is this?” “Where did you buy the cycle?” “Does it have gears?” and so on. Even the slightest interruption ruins my rhythm – I have to start all over again. I must have lost an hour in total, thanks to the bikers. Lachang La isn’t very impressive, just your regular flags on stones and a yellow ‘You are at…’ sign. The ride down is spectacular. The road’s the worst I’ve encountered so far, mostly rubble and in some places, just dust. A sign tells me: This road may shift. A biggish stream follows the road for a while, and chunks of ice sit around looking bored on the other side. There’s the standard memorial to a young armyman and his truck which took a turn too fast, and went over. Chattar Singh Meena had told me about this particular one: A very drunk (and bored) captain had insisted on taking over the wheel from the truck driver, on the way to Whisky Nullah from Pang. Meena was very proud of the fact the driver obeyed the captain’s order, despite being aware of the consequences. Yes Sir! Let’s go over, Sir! The terrain gets even more awesome after a broken cement bridge, lightly washed by a stream. Crashed cathedrals and impossible drops stand out against a brilliantly blue sky, and there are times I feel I’m inside a sci-fi movie. Suddenly, a sign: ROAD CLOSED, with a shattered bridge squatting just behind. As I smoke a cigarette and wonder what to do next, a truck sways through the stream, clouds of smoke billowing from it. The stream’s the biggest I’ve crossed, but the rocks are thankfully big. A minute later, it’s Pang. Pang was where I copped out and licked my wounds for a while last year. It’s a neat and dirty looking collection of tents (some looked like army parachutes) with enchanting names like Potala Palace, Sun ‘n’ Sand, etc. I logged in at the first tent run by two Ladakhi sisters. The tent-house was also a bar of sorts for armymen from the nearby base, and sombre jawans kept shuffling in and out well into the night. I met some Israeli kids fresh out of the army biking it through Ladakh. They kept running over to tinker with their souped-up Enfield’s every second minute, and one asked me I got bored cycling all the time. An Israeli in his early 30s, who’d been silent all the time, shut him up. Later someone told me early 30s was one of the best snipers in the Israeli army.

17 JULY: PANG TO DEBRING CAMP
Short climb up to the Plains, after I’m asked more questions at the army checkpost. The Plains aren’t really plain, it’s a gentle incline all the way to Debring. I have the advantage of a tailwind most of the way. Last year I tried to cycle from Leh to Manali, and gave up somewhere on the Plains. I wasn’t acclimatizing well, I wasn’t carrying enough water and food, and the wind kept blasting at me from the wrong direction. I struggled for a few hours, and finally hitched a ride to Pang. I’ve taken a year to get over it, and here I am. I’ve realized what works for me is solid planning, and once I’m on the road, not worrying too much about my plans. Plus the conviction that whatever’s happening is happening exactly the way someone or something greater than me has planned it. The Plains are the world’s biggest bathtub, with mountains at the edges. There’s a bit of low shrub on either side of the (pretty good) road, but it’s difficult to imagine anything surviving here. I’m startled by birdsong quite a few times during the ride, but never get to see the birds, though. Like right through the trip, I take water and cigarette and sweets breaks every 30 minutes or so. Sam’s suggestion of lacing the water with a little cola (sugar, in other words) works very well, keeps me going. I’m carrying a lot of water, four 1-litre bottles, as there’s nothing at Debring. I’ve also got packs of glucose biscuits, couple of buns, Amul and 5 Star chocolate and Spredit cheese. I meet a Sikh trucker and his mates standing around a truck. They’re unloading… wonder of wonders, gaily dressed women. The trucker winks at me and offers a lift to Pang. Sat Sri Akal, not this time. The traffic’s not exactly C.P. on a Friday night. There’s the odd army convoy, always a bored officer and his sleepy family in the first jeep, followed by more bored jawans cradling submachine guns. I salute once or twice, very smartly, just to wake them up. Later, much later, it’s the Debring camp. This is a bunch of decrepit sheds with the roofs blown off. Going by the graffiti (of a very crude nature), road workers used to live here three of four years ago. I’d gone a few km ahead from Debring, actually, looking for a better place to camp. Debring gave me the jitters, it was spooky. But in the distance, just before the Tanglang La climb started, I saw the madman from Sarchu shuffling along. I turned back immediately.I pitch tent for the first time this trip. It’s a bit of a struggle, a pin’s missing, but I manage. It’s still light, and I crawl into the tent and smoke many cigarettes. It’s difficult to light a match, probably lack of oxygen. I put on everything I have, including the raincoat. I’m a little scared of the nomads, in spite of being told they’re harmless. A wild-looking one had asked me for water earlier in the day (he yelled at me from a distance, brandishing an empty bottle), and I had refused. I’m glad when the night falls from the sky. Dinner, then more cigarettes and beedis. The Spredit was a good idea, unfortunately I don’t have a spoon. I improvise with a biscuit. I wonder if the ghost of the Englishman killed in a bike crash last year (Raid de Himalaya, again) is around. I listen for odd noises, the crunching of footsteps drawing nearer. Nothing… I doze off.

18 JULY: DEBRING CAMP TO UPSHI
I wake up at about 3 or 4, and spend the rest of the night smoking. At first light, I go out and take a crap. I’ve become an expert at using toilet paper. Sprinkle a little water on it, wipe your ass, repeat twice, then wipe with dry toilet paper till satisfied. I fold up the tent, pack up and pedal away, leaving behind a full bottle of piss and a ripped apart raincoat. I’d pissed in an empty bottle at night (was too scared to go out) and threw it in a corner of the shed. The plastic raincoat tore when I took it off early in the morning, and I’d left the shreds lying around. I’d planned to do the needful, but forgot. When I realized the enormity of what I’d done, it was too late and I was too lazy to go back. Quite an uncool thing to do, though I’ve joked about the piss bottle finding its way into a nomad’s hut and being uncorked on full moon nights…The climb’s not too bad. I stop frequently for a bite and a swig, and meet quite a few motorbikers on the way to Leh. When a woman waves, I wave back, when it’s a man, I’m impassive.There’s some very light snow – it looks like thermocol beads floating down from the heavens, and leave wet marks on my windcheater. The Bihari road workers get on my nerves. Do you have a cigarette? Beedi? Food? Water? I’m a little guilty about not sharing, but I’m carrying minimum rations and would rather play safe. The boys are ok, but sometimes the overseers get cocky. Near the Tangang La, an overseer predicts I’ll meet the ‘uparwalla’ (one who lives above, God) soon. The sentient-entity website has an interesting take on the road workers: “In a country which offers a wide selection of crap ways of making a living, being a Himank roadbuilder must be up there: living for several months at up to 18,000 ft in a tarpaulin tent with no opportunity to wash, let alone a source of entertainment, breaking rocks by hand and breathing in molten tar fumes all day for 80 rupees a day. A fantastic lifestyle…”I finally make it to the Tangang La (17582 ft). The summit’s wet and dirty. I think of begging a cup of tea from an army tent nearby, finally decide my priority’s getting down to a lunch stop asap. The terrain changes as soon as I start descending. Patches of dirty snow litter the roadside (diesel fumes), and dangerous-looking peaks loom in the distance. As I take a breather near a patch of snow, an army jeep following the usual Captain and his in-laws pulls up. I get the feeling they’re really low on entertainment. If I look like a Pakistani spy, the thing to do is ask for ID, not my family tree. A few kms later a rock about the size of a golf ball thuds into the ground. I stop, look up and see several more on the way down in lazy arcs. I’d given the helmet a miss to save on space, and suddenly feel like a fool. Sombre, dark clouds nestle around the biggest peaks a few miles away, and I try not to look. Soon visibility is down to a metre or two: it’s a dust storm, and a fine spray of rain complicates things. I get off and push, almost hugging the mountainside. I come across the cause of the dust storm a few minutes later, a couple of bulldozers clearing the rubble from a landslide. I lift the bike across the mounds of dust and rock and carry on.An hour or two later I see a shepherd and his flock, which means there’s some shelter nearby just in case. Soon I’ve left the bulldozers and rubble behind, and am zipping down towards Upshi, my nightstop. It’s an almost 60 km downhill ride to Upshi, and I hardly pedal till Rumptse, an army camp. I try a thukpa of sorts at the canteen. Exhausted road workers in fur-lined gumboots sit sullenly in a corner, staring at an Indian man and an East European woman (so it seemed, from her accent) next to me. The couple are probably headed for Manali, on an Enfield. Should I stay back at Rumptse? I ponder that for a while, then decide to keep going while the going’s good. Fields of barley on either side of the road sway in the breeze, like China silk. It’s a sight for my sore eyes, and I wish the ride lasts forever. The road and the stream parallel to it runs through a gorge, with slivers of green and blue embedded in the red rocks alongside. I see the first Ladakhi huts on this trip, one- and two-storied structures with hay piled high on the roofs. A couple of kids chase me once or twice, and a determined-looking girl lunges for my bags, but I yell ‘Juley!’ (Hello) and pedal away. Upshi, finally. I’d stopped at the one-cow town last year, on my way up, and everything’s just the way I left it. The dhaba run by a man from Sialkot, the thukpa place across the street, the shaggy dogs who sleep all day and prowl around at night, the sheep farm across the river, the cramped grocery shop with dorm upstairs. I’m happy to meet the Ladakhi young man who runs the dorm/grocery shop, again – he’s in army camouflage, a radical departure from last year’s traditional Ladakhi garb.There’s a rumour of a Bollywood shoot nearby, and a Tata Sumo drives up to the dhaba. Three men and a woman file out, stretch their limbs, and stare and me and the bike. “From Sanjay Dutt’s unit,” my camouflaged friend whispers fiercely. That night I dream of Dutt and his heroines cavorting in the barley fields.

19 JULY: UPSHI TO LEH
I set off a little late. After Upshi it’s dry, hot, boring. I climb a little, and stop for a chai at a little village. I ask the boy manager for a discount and he gets very annoyed, asks me to leave. When I don’t, he takes a long time serving me.After Karo, I hit the last stretch of the Leh-Manali Highway. I cycle alongside the Indus, pass a few villages. The road starts getting choked with vehicles of every description as as I approach the Shey gompa. At Choglamsar, a crowded little town of phone booths and garages and taxi stands, I stop to call home. From Chog, it’s an annoying little climb, a few kms, into Leh. I’m supposed to feel excited, but I don’t. I take many water and cigarette breaks, in an attempt to delay the inevitable. The road’s the trip; period.

Lessons learnt:
1. Technology doesn’t work if you don't.
2. Have faith in something, even if it’s your lycra shorts.
3. Travel at your own pace. This is your trip.
4. Rice. Dal. Subzi. Chocolate. Water. That’s it.

rishra

2006-12-05T18:40:00.000+05:30

Unlike most Bongs, I don't have Calcutta in my veins. I probably have Rishra in them.
Heard of the place? I'm not surprised.
It's an industrial town about 30 kms from Calcutta, next to the river Hooghly, a muddy silvery monster which claimed a few Rishra lives a year those days, usually weekend drunks who misread the treacherous eddies.
My father worked in a textile mill, and we stayed in the officers' quarters, a remnant of colonial times.
An early memory are the servants who tightened my shoelaces twenty times a day, when they weren't firing up the huge cast-iron coal ovens. Or swiping the floor religiously with water and kerosene, till I could see my face in it from a metre away.
The 'uncles' wore starched white cottons, immaculately-polished black shoes and walked to the factory a mile away.
The 'aunties' wore terylene sarees with polka dots, read Eve's Weekly and walked around the sprawling compound in the evenings, commenting on the fruit trees.
(My mother rebelled, more from boredom than feminist issues; she taught Physics at a womens' college in Calcutta, and commuted to work everyday via a combination of rickshaws, buses and trains. Once every two months or so, she would get me a Tintin from the AH Wheeler stall at Howrah station. How she managed all this on Rs 500 a month, I have no clue.)
The Bangladesh war took place a few hundred kilometers away, and though it happened a bit before my time, I’ve been told the ‘liberator’ Gen JS Arora came over to the jute mill in a navy boat, to give a speech and eat samosas.
Mohun Bagan and Shyam Thapa rocked. I played football all the time, climbed guava trees, set fire to warehouses, explored abandoned jetties and heard a lot of Lunchtime Special on a big Murphy radio (occasionally I would open up the back and gaze at the diodes; my sister had the rights to a shiny red plastic Televista transistor, when she came over on weekends from her hostel in Calcutta.)
The Naxalites waged war against the enemies of the state outside, but were forbidden from entering the jute mill compound by uppercaste Bihari durwans wielding lengths of sugarcane, which they would occasionally chew. Sometimes we would hear about how someone’s uncle was shot in the head on his way back from the fish bazaar, but we’d sing a Carpenters’ tune (‘Top of the World’ was a clear favourite) and go back to football.
We watched TV once a week, and saw exotic fish floating around in the black-and-white TV, to the tune of sad sitar strains. Sometimes it was a ventriloquist, with a grinning doll called Robert, I think – the doll wore a suit and had a handkerchief wrapped around its neck. Later we would watch a lot of Uttam Kumar movies, but found him boring, except when he played a doctor and held Suchitra Sen in his arms.
We kids were mostly Bengalis, but we didn't sing Tagore and had never heard of Shantiniketan. My mother sang a bit of Rabindrasangeet, and I suspect she took singing lessons at some point – a pair of tables and a stringless tanpura stood in a corner for years, till I broke them in boredom. The harmonium survives to this day, it’s under a bed in my mother’s room in Calcutta.
We spoke a strange mix of cockney, bengali and bhojpuri. The cockney was courtesy a few ageing English bachelors who had decided to stay on, after 1947. They didn’t really go to work, threw great Christmas parties, shot monkeys with double-barreled guns and drank beer all day long. One of them thrust a glass of beer at me at a party when I was four; I drank up, and the roomful of uncles and aunties applauded.
The common glue amongst us kids was a hatred of Marwaris. Non-bengalis (‘Obangali’) we could somehow get along with, unlike our parents, but to be a Marwari in Bengal was to be the lowest of the low.
There were a lot of marwaris in school, though. They were the sons of local small traders, wore ‘roll gold’ HMT watches and endless snacked on phuchkas and churan. We took much delight in beating them up behind the school bus shed once in a while.
To this day, my racial bias remains – if you’re marwari, never played football and wear a fake gold watch, you’re in my crosshairs.
I had a very happy innings at school. I hadn’t the faintest clue what I was doing there, occasionally passed the term exams, and always managed to get through to the next class, thanks to a grace mark or two, here and there.
Besides march past and standing at ramrod attention at the school assembly, I didn’t enjoy any kind of sporting activity.
I was a loser at almost everything in school, consequently I always felt like a winner. I lived the glorious underachiever’s life much before the yuppie cartoon strips got to it.
I hung out with everyone: studious Bengalis, sullen adivasis, indifferent Chinese, football-playing Nagas and Mizos, guitar-playing Anglo-Indians, the Catholic Malayalee ‘brothers’, even the Marwaris we beat up.
I liked the Chinese the most, they gave me the impression they really didn’t care about anything, an influence that lives on in me, to this day.
I liked the Nagas and Mizos too. The rest of the school, including the principal, was scared of them: they were big and sullen, hung around in groups, didn’t talk to anyone, and broke the noses of those who rubbed them the wrong way, even some teachers.
I had a strong grasp of anthropology and philosophy, and frequently argued with the teachers on differences between Masai and Bantu motifs, or why Plato got it all wrong. The fact that these subjects weren’t in the syllabus didn’t deter me one bit.
My literary influences were an arcane mix of Readers’ Digest, African tales written by racist Scotsmen, Freud, Plato, and ABBA lyrics.
I think the biggest thing a fringe education gave me was the belief that you’ll always get a second, third and possibly fourth chance in things you really want to do.
Like perfecting banana kicks over the course of an entire summer, one year – at the end of which I could bend it better than Beckham, with both feet, in both directions.
Like pschoanalysing my father, whilst taking notes and snacking on puffed rice.
Like deciding to break the world record in long jumping – I made it till 18 feet with zero training and lots of my dad’s whisky; pretty close to the national record in my age group, I think.

(To be continued, maybe…)