Day before, I was reading that it was the first anniversary of Ms.Bhutto’s horrible departure from this planet. One year? Already? Really?

Time sure flies fast; but especially when the hope of democracy of a nation is brutally murdered, I thought the tension, the worry, the pain and the anger will last longer. Maybe it still does in the hearts of Pakistanis. But I am strangely dissociated and appalled at my own nonchalance. Not nonchalance, but too quick a ‘coming-to-terms’ period.

Guess this is what politicians and media depend on: the public’s need and proclivity to forget. Not necessarily forgive, but forget. And be drowned in more sorrow, more killings, bombings, more things to worry about.

It is a happy merry-go-round, people. News is churned out, we consume and we throw it out of our brains. We consume information (tragedies and trivialities alike) like we consume chewing gum; mulled about a bit, but disposed off pretty soon, nonetheless. Sensationalism pays the news channels, and that’s exactly what they do more of.

We get what we ask for. The delivery and design of knowledge, opinion and entertainment to the taste of the mundane and the thoughtless. The curse of the modern civilization; where we seek to keep everyone happy. Or at the least, the majority happy.

Sigh. I am going to remember her for a little longer. At least, remember.

You may not know of him, you may not recognize him if he walked past you on the street; but you will definitely recognize his voice. His million-dollar, deep, rich, clutter-breaking voice. Known better as the Movie Premier Guy, Don LaFontaine has done trailer voiceovers for more than 4000 movies and innumerable adverts and movie beginnings. Watch this video to know more about this legend.

Came across the man with the golden voice when I was browsing standup videos on Youtube and saw a comedian (Pablo Francisco) do a spoof of this legendary voice-over artist.

So the next time you hear the familiar “In the city, one man, one mission…”, you know whose voice it is :)

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Nice, simple lyrics for a change. Enjoy.

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten…

‘Unwritten’ by Natasha Bedingfield. Read the rest of the song here.

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” — Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

J.K. Rowling’s terrific commencement address at Harvard is available as a video, MP3, or text. Thanks BoingBoing, for making me read it. We all love rags-to-riches stories, but this one talks potently about the power of desperation.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….

Link

Buzz marketing has been around for a while now, but I would like to point out one of the best examples I have seen in recent time.

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I usually don’t blog about food or my foodie outings, but this Saturday was an exception. A fricking mindblowing stomach gratifying monster of an exception.

Let me put things in perspective. A week of ok-ish food, and a very early and miniscule dinner on Friday evening left me with a craving for a good meal, desi-style on Saturday morning. (North-Indian, South-Indian, whatever-Indian. Doesn’t matter). And when two of my friends made a plan to go restaurant-hopping in Little India in search for a good meal, I was already smacking my lips and heading right to nearest taxi stand.

After a mistaken try at a shabby restaurant named Gokul (not worth going into details, let me jump to the more important parts here), we sauntered into this quiet south Indian place named Madras Woodlands. Not too much of a groundbreaking name, I’d say, but the food was oh-my-gawd awesome! All of us hungry souls straightaway went for the unlimited meals, and we were in session.

A tangy start with a vettha-kozhambu (spicy and hot sambar variety), with veggies, appalams (popadams) and steaming rice to boot, followed by the mullangi (radish) sambar cooked to the right tenderness; then came the fragrant rasam and more mounds of rice. The grand finale was when after a nice bowl of payasam I was just digging into my curd rice, and the waiter came and dropped mor-moloagais (chilli peppers soaked in buttermilk, dried and then fried). By god, that was a stroke of genius! and I’m totally sold on the restaurant.

After the humongous lunch, we all had to go back and rest for the afternoon. The food had gotten the better of us, and we all woke up and decided to meet for, wait for it, here it comes, a dinner meal :D

This time it was Gult food at Sankranti. The restaurant had opened only two weeks before, and since the four of us were in mood for experimentation, we repeated the sauntering and ordering of four unlimited meals. And this time, it was full steam, hot and spicy Andhra fare, no holds barred. Each one of us topped about seven courses: Masala rice, followed by Gongura, Allam, Podi (Gunpowder plus ghee), Pappu (dal), Charu (Andhra rasam), Perugannam (curd rice). After stacking empty plates and cups, we polished the meal off with a mango and left the poor waiter and manager in wide eyed bewilderment. (I’m lovin it!)

Even though none of us had the energy nor the inclination to even move after that meal, the experience was worth every morsel of rice that we demolished. To those who planned to have pizza / noodles / chinese indian / naan sabji on that day, can please go sit on their respective thumbs and watch us dig into another mound of rice. Or join in.

Next weekend, destination Mumbai Makaan and its steaming vadapavs. Yum!

p.s: Also caught a gult movie after the double meal ordeal (just for the heck of it), which was called Vivaha Bhojanam (Marriage Food) and hence the title of this post. Quite a befitting end to the day, I say!

[image source: www.sailusfood.com]

(7 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)

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What happens when you take an established dimension of looking at videos (featured, rated, comments, views) and then completely twist it on its head? What if enough videos and features now exist on all those many subjects that one can look at the unfolding of the events related to each and every subject, happening, or person in chronological order?

You get TimeTube.

Particularly interesting if you are reading about a person or event. It helps you chart the impact, pre and post reactions and what the whole world has to say about that particular experience, as time passes. Pretty darn interesting.

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Chanced upon a video of a talk by Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD. It was a talk about a program started by AMD called 50*15, where they aim to connect 50% of the world’s population to the internet by the year 2015.

It is a fantastic overarching theme to have as a vision, something that will set direction for the computing giant for the coming years, and more so because it involves other companies, even competitors in delivering a stretch goal that will benefit all of them, and the part of the world that is still hungry for information and enlightenment.

But what struck me most, was Hector’s relationship with his father and the way the old man egged his young son to perform better, in all aspects of life.

“For a civilization to progress, every generation has to perform better than the previous one.

A seemingly simple statement, but with great impact on young Hector’s mind. In his teenage years, the importance of this did not hit him, but when he set out on his way to a great career, his father reminded him of this one statement, coaching him that it’s not a job that he has set out to do, it’s a transformation, at an individual and societal level. Hector’s father again repeated the same mantra on the day of his marriage, reminding him that he had to be a better husband than his dad, and again, on the day Hector had his first child, reminding him that he had to be a better father too.

For a civilization to progress, every generation has to perform better than the previous one. In every aspect of humanity. In understanding, in treating fellow human beings, and in living as a whole.

Touche.

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I have posted some videos from TED before, and this one is another of those brilliant talks that could actually, change the world.

This one’s about how humans are leaving a footprint on the planet more devastating than ever before, and is spoken through the language of pictures, leaving a lasting impact on how urgent and awe-inspiring this situation is. And then begins the China revelation: pictures that show how unbelievably fast and incredibly sudden, the change is: in urban landscapes, in mass geno-shift, in the sheer scale of what is happening.

Edward Burtynsky won the TED prize for 2005, and left a lasting impression of me, even 3 years after the talk was delivered. And as they say, one has to see it to believe it, when it comes to China. Here you go.

Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, photographer Edward Burtynsky makes a wish: that his images — stunning landscapes that document humanity’s impact on the world — help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability. Burtynsky presents a riveting slideshow of his photographs, which show vividly how industrial development is altering the Earth’s natural landscape. From mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine, his images are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying.

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