In the age where our most inner and intimate matters have been commoditized by corporations, it’s no surprise that sex is being used as a tool to sell products. Many critics of popular culture use the adage “sex sells” to justify the means. Well, though there may be some truth in it, it’s disgusting if a product that comes with an element of the proverbial “social responsibility” resorts to a juvenile representation of its target market for the sake the one thing all business needs – sell more.
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If the advertising guys at Deccan Chronicle think this is what young minds are – one heck of perverts ogling at hoardings of naked woman embossed in newspaper prints all over her body, metaphorically meaning to read the newspaper giving particular attention to detail, or whatever crap that was meant to mean – then there has just been a little mistake. Just that we youngsters have a little more sense than to get swayed by pictures of naked women to buy a newspaper.
What’s more intimidating is that their ad doesn’t even talk about the quality of news – the least you would expect of a newspaper – and whenever they remotely do, it’s again a skin-deep expose. Chennai Metblogs carried a post on similar lines with more pictures. Probably the in-house talent pool of Deccan Chronicle Marketing ran out of concrete ideas to increase youngsters’ readership and resorted to the only supposedly sure-to-work strategy – sex appeal.
An independent survey conducted by research firm MediaAnalyzer states that,
While almost half of men (48 percent) said they like sexual ads, few women did (8 percent). Most men (63 percent) said sexual ads have a high stopping power for them; fewer women thought so (28 percent).
If only 8 percent of women give a damn to such an ad, then was it all about increasing Male leadership? Am I hallucinating or does it really sound awkward? If you still think this would make Deccan Chronicle the-ultimate-choice-of-the-young-minds then take a bite at this MediaAnalyzer finding,
Men tend to focus on an ad’s sexual imagery (breasts, legs, skin, etc.), which draws their attention away from other elements of the ad (logo, product shot, headline). This may be why men’s brand recall was worse for the sexual ads than for the nonsexual ones.
So there goes the sex sells theory. Trying to fit an ad suited enough to market a lingerie brand into marketing a newspaper looks as awful as it sounds. They would do a lot of good to themselves, if the nice folks at Deccan Chronicle could stuff their ad-women with some clothes and talk more about how good their news reporting is, so we know exactly what they sell. We youngsters like to see naked truth in newspapers, not naked women.
Filed under: Thoughts | 21 Comments
This Day, That Year…
The year was 2002. The day was November 18. And I had just woken up into a warm Monday morning cooled by the humming Air Conditioners within the confines of my room at Hotel Poonja International in Mangalore. I lay motionless in the bed listening to my watch ticking the seconds off counting down to the biggest moment of my then life – the first day of work. Hours later, I would start nervously, clad in my new shirt, new trouser, new tie, new shoes and new socks, almost spill a drop of sambhar on my trouser, and take the elevator down to catch the bus to work. To Work! How awfully strange it sounded on that day to say I was going to ‘Work’!
It felt so much like a newborn baby, with nary an idea what to expect out of a career – except that, it should be ‘great’. The nervous pride of beginning a career in a dream company overshadowed the nostalgic memories that were being created in those very minutes. It was still like good ol’ college days, and the first few weeks of training meant I would continue to pour over notes and write exams and wait for results. The 90-member class room – where I always sat in the last row – seemed just another extension of the college-day classes.
And when one such session was in progress we were told not to call the instructors ‘sir’ like we were so used to calling the college professors, but to call them by name; it was the corporate culture, after all. “Welcome to the corporate world”, one of the instructors had told us with an ironic smirk on his face. Life was never going to be the same again.
Well, it never was. Five years later, today, there is just the sepia tinted pictures of those days etched in memory. I do continue to work for the same company where my career was born on this day and brought up this far; where I grew from an anxious kid into the stuff that adulthood is made of. Today, I know why it’s hard to write software, why they call customer the king, and why they taught stress management in college. I know age and energy are inversely proportional, and, needs and responsibilities increase with income. And I also know that choosing the seat next to the emergency exit gives you the maximum leg room in flights.
So five years, it has been. Enough time for a newborn to go to school. And that’s how long it has been since my professional life was born. A stutter here and a stumble there, but it has kept moving nevertheless.
Filed under: All in a Day's Work, Life and Living, Thoughts | 8 Comments
Not many things keep me away from writing, except when I’m down with a prolonged sickness and start seeing the nine (or is it eight?) planets of the solar system rotating around my head every time I cough – which was pretty much all through the day. So over the past two weeks, whenever the planets were not eclipsing my view of the world, I spent time reading some good old classics.
This morning I took my usual seat holding a sweet smelling copy of Somerset Maugham’s Collected Short Stories and turned to page 193. And when I read the line – Madame Coralie powdered her nose and gave it, a commanding organ, a brief look in her pocket mirror – I noticed two strange men hovering around me. One was an old man who wore his pants above his belly, and the other was a young one with a flashy ponytail. The former sat next to me, while I continued reading as if he were non-existent.
When you start reading alphabets instead of sentences, you know you are actually being engulfed with an irresistible urge to slip into what Freud calls an elevated mental state for disguised fulfillment of our unconscious wish. To you and me it is simply called sleeping. So, watching the morning sky fade into a premature grayscale enveloped by water-laden clouds receding down the horizon, I slowly drifted into a peachy bed of sleep. And then I didn’t know anything that happened.
For example, I didn’t know that the bus was stuck at a signal where there was no signal, that sunlight cracked for a second between the clouds, or that the old man who wore his pants above his belly was playing a game of solitaire in his mobile phone.
I opened my eyes, as it was the most natural thing to do after you are ejected out of the comforts of slumber. I glared at the outside world, where my little slumber didn’t seem to have had any impact. The earth continued to rotate on its axis and men continued to walk on two feet. The sun was not visible, but it was there nevertheless.
The bus screeched to a halt just outside our office after going around the world in sixty minutes. “This is the office?” the old man who wore his pants above his belly asked me. I affirmed and nudged him with my eyes to get down, while I carefully closed the Somerset Maugham taking particular care that I remember the last page I read (because I don’t use bookmarks).
The old man who wore his pants above his belly beckoned his counterpart who smiled a wry smile and went behind him, wagging his ponytail. And I walked away playing a random line from the archives of my memory – The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
Filed under: Life and Living | 9 Comments
This is a tagged continuation of the The War Between Bonnie & Billy – Part 1, at JustOrdinary.
The clock ticked past midnight, as her painted fingers reached for some tissue and shred them into the tiniest bits. Bonnie sat upright on the bed, her face resting on her bent knees and half-closed eyes still strolling its way through the disturbed comforters, the moist pillows lying one on top of the other, and a lock of hair fluttering in front of her eyes in the noiseless wind from the ceiling fan.
They made love that day, as they did every day. He was as passionate and never hesitated to show his love for her. In their most intimate moment she had a strange urge to reach out to him. She stroked his back with her fingers and felt his breath. She tugged him close to her and felt the warmth of his manly presence. He pulled her closer and let her bury her face between his arms. And he kept telling her how much he loved her.
Then he got up and moved across the bed to reach out for his belt. He had spent a particularly long time in buying the belt with an extra-large buckle attached to a protruding metal flap for a rugged feel that would suit his oversized Cargo Pants well, and also inflict a good deal of pain when he would hit her. He grabbed the belt and slashed it across her back as she fell on the bed unconscious with one stroke. She didn’t know what happened next. Probably he hit her more, because now that she was awake she felt more pain. Or probably he just made more love.
She continued strolling her eyes around the bed until it halted the moment they fell upon him. He was fast asleep, his back towards her, resting his palm under his ears. She could feel the mild rise and fall of his back with every breath.
She wanted to reach out to him, this time to press her fingers on his back so hard that her full grown nails would pierce his back and blood would ooze out through the shape her fingers made on his back. And she would move the fingers across his back tearing his flesh, tracing a distinct outline like creating a modern art, like what she used to see in the Museum of Art and Painting in her childhood days. She would create a work of art; an artwork made of blood and skin – his blood and her skin; one she would claim as her masterpiece, a dedication to her love.
She moved across the bed, shuffling the pillows to the other side, bent lower over him and kissed him on his shoulder.
* For the next part of the story, I tag Amrita. Am, take over!
Filed under: Fiction | 7 Comments
We, The Bloggers
“We take your fun seriously”. The caption of BrewHaha was apt to describe the meeting of Bangalore Bloggers. Over forty bloggers from varied professional backgrounds, some with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (one of them actually queued at Blossoms even before the sun rose for the day) tucked under their arms and a jubilant smirk on their face, made themselves comfortable over bean bags, low-rise chairs, carpets and designer pillows that flanked across the floor at BrewHaHa on a bright Saturday afternoon.
 Bangalore Mirror covered the meet in its July 23 edition |
It was exciting to see a number of faces hitherto known only by the words in their blogs, including a number of fellow Desicritics. Some of them had suggestions for the Biz/Tech section (me being the section editor) on how we could cover more technological tit-bits and further enrich the section.
The enthusiasm was apparent and before any time lapsed we got into business with a quick round of introductions. Suddenly we began speaking another common language – the language of corporate India – where Mocha Frappes and Cappuccinos meant ‘Have a good afternoon’. The coffee cups began making their rounds as the bloggers – now christened Blogaloreans – went about our stuff.
Blogging is not just a phenomenon. From the days of daily rants, blogging has evolved into a major medium of communication and information exchange that is determined to harness its power to make a difference in whatever ways it can. A few of the bloggers shared their ideas of a Web NGO, Wings – an initiative to help differently enabled individuals take up adventure sports, and a number of other ideas most of which would be formally discussed in the upcoming BarCamp.
The primary aim of the meet was to nail down a list of topics to be discussed in the Bloggers Collective at the BarCamp at IIM-B campus, scheduled for the coming weekend (28th, 29th July). The following are some of the topics.
1. Technical tips for non-technical bloggers
2. What do you Blog about?
3. Social responsibility of a blogger
4. Copyrights and Censorship in blogging
5. IT Laws
6. Mainstream Media versus Blogging
7. Corporate Blogging
These topics are indicative and as is the spirit of BarCamps there would be more of it. I will be co-moderating a proposed debate on Mainstream Media versus Blogging.
This is also the first formal attempt to form a professional community of bloggers in Bangalore. Arun, one of the organizers of the BarCamp conveyed to us that they have formalized certain points with IIM-B for conducting the Bangalore BarCamp every four months in its campus.
This support from the academia and the enthusiasm of the bloggers is sure to take us a long way making this a socially responsible global phenomenon that would not hesitate to raise its voice through this powerful medium and make a difference whenever it matters. And BarCamps are important events to make it happen.
Filed under: All in a Day's Work, Thoughts | 10 Comments
Here’s a chance to catch up with all the faces you’ve known hitherto only through words. The Bangalore Bloggers meet is coming up on July 21st. Anybody interested in taking part or helping in organizing the meet, edit the exclusive wiki setup for the meet and add yourselves.
Date: July 21
Venue: BrewHaHa
Near Jyoti Nivas College,
Koramangala
This meet is a prelude to the Bangalore BarCamp 4 (or BCB4 as it is affectionately called) to be held on 28th and 29th of July at IIM Bangalore. Please visit the BarCamp Bangalore Page to register yourself for the meet. And also visit the Bloggers Collective of the BarCamp as well.
See you there!
Filed under: All in a Day's Work | 8 Comments
The God Delusion
Picked it up at Crossword last weekend. A couple of days back a colleague noticed the book in my hand and out of that intestine-wobbling curiosity that lies bundled inside every avid reader, he grabbed it and read the title. ‘Oh Man, how can you call it like this. This is ridiculous, this terming it a delusion’, he squabbled nervously and meekly handed the book back to me.
He had written off the book even before trying to know what is written in it. And this is precisely what Richard Dawkins calls as delusion in the book.
The metaphorical or pantheistic God… is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.
And also quotes the ever-effervescent Douglas Adams, on how humans are being discouraged from questioning any form of religious dogmatism.
Here’s an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!
I’m still reading the book, and for all I can say – I’m enjoying it. As Jax noted in his review,
Irrespective of your religious belief, I think this is a great stimulating book that every person ought to read. I absolutely loved it.
Agree completely. If one thinks it blasphemy to open his mind to such objective and true thoughts as propounded in the book, then he’s exactly the person Dawkins is targeting – the one hallucinating with the God delusion.
Filed under: Books and Literature | 13 Comments
Short Story: The Tavern
Even as she lay cuddled with a coo in my arms, I knew Lizzy was already an individual in every sense of the word, and I would have to learn to let go of her someday, albeit painstakingly, although she was born of me. Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait for my Lizzy to grow up, so one day as a teenage girl she would scream at me that I’m being too old fashioned, and then years later we would talk head to head like how elderly women do.
I packed a bag with diapers, towels, two bottles – one with warm water and one with milk, dressed up Lizzie in what I considered her favorite white gown and drove downtown to grab some luxury clothing for her and a nice dinner together. ‘The Tavern’ was the latest happening place in town. And I was not to be disappointed. I felt Lizzie would love visiting that place when she was grownup, and promised her we would visit The Tavern every month.
I tried some clothes on her, and she looked too gorgeous for my own eyes to fathom. There was jubilance in her little smile and her wide open eyes rolled around the enormous structure of the mall. I walked around the mall so she would see everything her eyes fell upon and showed her the Tavern mascots in the ground floor welcoming the visitors. There was excitement all around, and Lizzie was enjoying herself. And neither of us knew we would be dead before dawn.
The last thing I remembered before losing conscious was a blasting noise, and a grip of heat that permeated my legs as the floor below cracked open pulling me down with it. I fastened my grip on Lizzie not wanting to let go of her on whatever it was that was about to befall us. Then there was a deafening rumble, followed by a blackout silence.
I opened my eyes not knowing how long had past. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, or felt any pain. There was darkness and dirt all around, and the place smelt a damp stench of faeces and urine. I couldn’t hear any voices, although I was hoping some rescuers would soon remove the debris over me and pull me onto a stretcher and place a smiling Lizzie near me. And suddenly that reminded me of Lizzie and I started rolling my eyes in panic trying to locate her amid the deathly chaos around me.
I tilted my face to look for her and a pain seared through my neck and back. I screamed. But the darkness swallowed my voice, and I desperately shook my head trying to look around for Lizzie. Barely two feet from me, I saw a baby smeared with blood and dirt and her face distorted beyond recognition. If at all anyone could recognize her, it was me.
I’ve cried many times before, but when I cried that moment, it was different. There were no tears, no sobs or sniffles, no nothing. There were sprinkles of water that escaped through the debris and fell on my damp face. Some of it diluted the blood on Lizzie’s face that looked as if she were bathing in a rain of blood.
I felt sleepy. I closed my eyes as a rapidly engulfing peace took over me and whatever was left of me began ebbing itself out. I felt I was standing on a long stretch of green pasture fondling Lizzie in my arms and showing her a group of white flamingos dancing under the bright sunlight. Lizzie, in her white gown, was laughing the way only she could. I tugged her close to me and kissed her, knowing nothing could ever try to separate us.
We continue to be together, though not exactly the way I thought it would all be. There’s peace here, and fun. And I don’t feel sad for what has happened. If anything, I’m only sad for what has not happened – a teenage girl screaming at her mom that she’s being too old fashioned.
Filed under: Fiction | 8 Comments
Eight-Thing Thingy…
This doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been held to the ground with a tri-tag. DG, Amrita and Tanay have all tagged me and I’m supposed to blow my own trumpet with eight random facts about myself and tag eight other unsuspecting victims in the process. So, here are my eight nothings.
1. I’m lazy to the core. But I tend to get hyperactive to hide the fact that I’m lazy.
2. I eat a lot. Especially junk food. A “Sweets at my desk” email that someone at my workplace sends out to the rest of the team always has a post-script “FCFS, before Kishore finishes it.” My 66 kilo weight or my stature is no indication of how much I eat. But oh, I eat a lot.
3. I have a bad brain. And an awkward memory. I can more-or-less-precisely remember what I was doing this day last year, the previous year. And with a little effort, the previous-previous-year too. But I forgot to pay my credit card bills, which was due yesterday. And I was supposed to have taken a conference call last night, and I should have sent a mail to the team this morning, and…
4. At my workplace, I use the word ‘Amazing’ so much, that people have begun to associate the word with me just as they associate the morning with a sun rise. Once, A, replied to some mail from E with a single word “Amazing”. E replied back to A, “Kishore, what are you doing at A’s desk?”. See what I mean? If that is not weird enough, then take this – I hardly ever use that word outside of my workplace. Amazing, right?
5. I can watch Cartoon Network all day long (except when there is a cricket match on TV).
6. I love Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes. My work cubicle is filled with Dilbert cartoon strips and I have a Vista Gadget on my work PC which shows a random C&B strip when clicked.
7. I love creeping people out. And this one might just do that – I was born with a full grown tooth!
8. Now that I’ve probably creeped you out, I’m back to being my lazy self and don’t know what to write for the eighth point.
Tag time now. I tag Jax, Mahen, Arunima, Neels, Shub, Vidya, Sanny, Prat.
Filed under: Life and Living | 8 Comments
The monsoon rain is dashing outside in this late night hour, as I sit beside a thick volume of The Shadow of the Wind turned to page 143 and gazing at the line I just finished reading.
Everything on that page spoke of another time: the strokes that depended on the ink-pot, the words scratched on the thick paper by the tip of the nib, the rugged feel of the paper.
Much like what the lines of fiction do to me – speak of another time and another space, forming such mental imageries as if you were being transported through time into that world – the world that fiction is made of. And every time I raise my head from the tinted pages of a book, I feel suddenly ejected from the hallucination of those imageries into the blinding pace of the real world.
Fiction tends to touch you, at times in strange ways. There are times when I’m surprised how much a character resembles me in his thoughts, as if I were actually him. Like Yambo (the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana) did.
It was one such monsoon morning, many years back. I was staring out at the lashing rain and the chill wind seeping in with a whooshing sound between the edges of the window, until I began rummaging the non-existent bookshelves in my then home, dusting worm-eaten editions of what appeared to be Tinkle, Gokulam, Champak, Chandamama and Misha torn beyond recognition. A quick trip down memory lane reading the words from the books which bore no interest for my then grownup mind, made me go through the erstwhile thought processes of my preceding years; the times when Suppandi and Shikari Shambu held my rapt attention, and the talking animals of Champakvan gave an unfailing smirk.
At the beginning of the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Yambo loses his episodic memory due to a stroke and can remember everything he has ever read, but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo goes to his childhood home, and searches through old newspapers, books, magazines and comic books to see if he can rediscover his lost past.
I noticed Gokulam’s cartoons of classroom satire that did to me then, what Dilbert cartoon does to me today. Perhaps that’s how I developed a liking for corporate satire, and the cartoon adorned walls of my work cubicle. Misha was my favorite, that I carried with me to school, reading during the long commutation. Not much has changed even now; from carrying a book with me to work to the hour-long commute, the patterns of childhood still stick on.
Somewhere between the lines of fiction lie the roots of what has become of you today. Yambo is unsuccessful in regaining past memories, though he relives the story of his generation from the books in his childhood home. But remembering is only a process and not the destination. As Umberto Eco deliciously puts it,
Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering.
Fiction has a liberating effect. I seek refuge in fiction, when reality becomes a bit difficult to handle. Like an umbrella lets you enjoy the monsoon, even as it shelters you all the while.
Filed under: Books and Literature, Thoughts | 6 Comments
All in a day\'s work! 