Friday, November 26, 2010

My poor little squished ego

Of all the delusions that I may have, the one I definitely do not carry is that of my singing capabilities. I am no Lata Mangeshkar or an Asha Bhonsle is but plain knowledge but definitely am not a female voice version of Anu Malik too. Now Why am I raking this all of a sudden?

My son has caught the seasonsal flu and is at home at the time when I leave to work. Its not called the age of 'terrible two's' without reason. So for past few days he runs up to me, clings and starts bawling saying I am not supposed to leave him and go to work. I then cajole him, make up stories of a bad boss who will be bad to mamma if I dont work and end up making lots of promises to take him to his fav jhoola park; malls etc and feeling wretched leave home.

Well today was no different except that sonny boy was half sleepy with droopy eyes. So I thought why not sing him a lullaby of sorts and then can make a clean exit while he has sweet dreams. With such good intentions I cradled him and for whatever reasons the only song I could think of at that time was "Khwaja Mere Khwaja". I had just about crooned two lines of it when he mumbled - 'Mamma padathey'. Of course, what a stupid song to sing to a baby. I decided on my personal fav "Thode badmash ho tum" from Sawaariya. Within minutes my sleepy boy says - Mamma Padathey. Mamma don't sing. Each letter a little more pronounced than I would have liked to hear.

Silence.

I slided him to the arms of my much amused mother and embarassedly muttering that it was getting late to office, I booted from there. Babycenter lies when it says kids love to hear their mom sing and they dont mind off-key notes. I exactly now realise what they mean when they say "my family is my best critic".

My boy is ill and possibly wanted some quiet. Bad choice of songs, maybe. Hmm I think I need to learn some good lullaby's soon.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Marriage and everything else...

He early on let her know who is the boss. He looked her right in the eye and clearly said, "You're the boss." -- Anonymous

And that I say, is the key to most happy married life. ;) But jokes apart marriage has a away of growing upon you. Its a wonder what good companionship can actually do. In the age where quarter-life-crisis is the norm, 5 years of being married (with a child in tow) can be considered close to eternity. And going by this standard, it qualifies me to get a little preachy too.

However am not going to abuse my reader's sensibilities by stating the mundane of not stepping over each other's toes or ask to whisper sweet nothings all the time. Heck, there are times when all you would want is whack your spouse for mulling over a lost wicket while your child is contemplating using the sofa cushion as his potty-seat.

Marriage is just like - say shopping. You itch to wear that new outfit at every given opportunity till the sheen wears off. Not saying you discard your spouse like a well-worn dress, rather with the passage of time it gives the same comfiness of wearing your snug-fit old jeans. Bad comparison but conveys the message.

Sure its all cream and dream when things are going your way but life is adept at throwing the seemingly impossible situations. Do not pretend that he has no flaws or delude yourself that giving in just to avoid squabbles will lead to marital bliss.
Children, in-laws, finances, career, friends, personal priorities etc are all factors that only compounds the issue. Being good at either tennis or badminton and mastering different serves can sure come handy. :p Actually there is no single solution for a happy marriage, especially in today's times when there is so much extra pressure from all corners.

A good friend of mine is contemplating an affair just to get back at his super busy wife who hardly has time for him. Another ex-colleague of my hubby divorced his wife on grounds of cordiality. She refused to return to his house after the delivery of her son and he promptly divorced her. Today he has remarried and has another child. An old schoolmate's husband ditched her for another since he could not handle the responsibilities of being a father! These are real people and not a figment of any imagination.

It is the age of instant gratification where even advertisements goad you to move on, even so it makes one wonder if relationships are so fickle afterall? Its funny actually when I narrate them to my mom and my grandmom who have been married for more than half a century put together.I agree it helps not to judge others and possibly they all had their own valid reasons but it sure is unnerving. A friend of mine who is single surmised the other day "Marriage is definitely not for the faint-hearted, you know". I laughed and brushed aside her worries but maybe it means something.

Having said all this the joy of knowing there is somebody who loves you for what you are, without any reservations and will stand by you whatever may come, makes life worth living all over again. Here's wishing you all the same kind of happiness.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Hello, again


Its been quite some time I visited this space but today I strangely feel compelled to write here. Like renewing an old friendship, I come to say a quiet 'Hello' to the blogging world. Like when we meet old friends and promise to keep in touch, I silently promise myself to write more often. There are so many things one wants to say but with a little passage of time conversation comes not very easily.

As I write this I hear my 2.7 year old son humming - 'Papa jag jayega' on a loop. It makes me laugh and want to write stories of him. I look out of my window and see bright lights of vehicles dotting the darkness of an early night painting a vivid digital picture for me. Life is indeed beautiful. It seems like the initial awkwardness and hesitation is already disappearing. With a self assurance to make regular appearances out here - Ciao

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Rules 4 Writers

Time-tested lessons for writers in English.

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
16. Don't use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. DO NOT use exclamation points and all caps to emphasize!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
34. The passive voice should never be used.
35. Do not put statements in the negative form.
36. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
37. A writer must not shift your point of view.
38. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
39. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
40. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
41. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
42. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
43. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
44. Always pick on the correct idiom.
45. The adverb always follows the verb.
46. Be careful to use the rite homonym.
47. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

"Have Breakfast ...Or....Be Breakfast"!

An interesting way of asking, - 'Who is your competition?'

[This is written by Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore]

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras.
Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther From truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future.

But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The war is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It Says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn Between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both.
It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC.
The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India?
Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good.
But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.

Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is Applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were Distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor.

On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex Owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India Are called 3 hour "tamasha"(entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake Them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker.

They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What Do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary!

The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the Animal called competition.

He said "Have breakfast ...or.... be breakfast"!
That sums it up rather neatly.

Before civilized society it was "Survival of fittest", then came civilized sense of the "right to survive for everyone".

Now it's like "what would not survive and who could be fittest" remains the question.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Zoozoo'z Talk Malayalam??

The Vodafone Zoozoo ads have long gone from our television but my son still seems to hold a fascination for the white rubber-bodied eggheads. He smiles and claps happily while they animatedly run about the screen. Feeding him gets easier while he watches the reruns of the 'Zuzu' (as he calls them) ad films from a DVD.

This ad called - "Wonders" was running while the supposedly gibberish zoozoo language suddenly seemed to make sense. Listen carefully to the ad on Zoozoo's on Roaming Services and it definetely sounds like the zoozoo's are mallus after all. One can hear distinctly - Parota, Puttum Kadalaem, Kappa-Meen (all kerala's popular dishes) :)) Hilarious indeed.