Media & Entertainment

BlogCamp Chennai 2006: Update

BlogCamp, Media & Entertainment, Zeitgeist

The sole reason it has taken this long for me to post this update is that the BlogCamp in Chennai ate my weekend, and it took me the whole of the following week to recoup.

A lot has been said and written about people’s expectations and the varying levels to which they were met or not met.

Since I did not go to the BlogCamp with any expectations most of what I encountered or experienced had a certain impact on me. And I would want to remember only the positives. (There are enough negatives in rest of the world to satiate the part of me that feeds on them!)

The first and foremost was the free WiFi broadband connectivity courtesy Sify. A second for me in life — the first being Chennai airport, which had free WiFi by BSNL under a promotional scheme last year. [This was commented upon by Shailaja Neelkantan and this seems to have rubbed GreatBong the wrong way!]

Then was Amit Agarwal‘s eagerly awaited talk where India’s most celebrated professional blogger offered some insights into what everyone in the audience wished should be theirs, but somehow isn’t — a serious enough earning from their blogs!

I had a long and interesting chat with Nikhil Kuilkarni who is one bright 21 year-old. Reminded me of my teaching days. Talking of my teaching days — it was a pleasant surprise when Nidhi came up and told me she had attended some of my media management workshops in IP College (Delhi)!

A well-deserved word of appreciation for Kiruba and the team of volunteers from Chennai.
The hype-spike was chief sponsor Yahoo bringing Sunil Gavaskar to the event, and that’s where I found a lot of the unconference attitude coming unstuck. I was bemused by some of the questions put to Sunil Gavaskar:

  • What do you think is the future of podcasting?
  • What do you think is the future of blogging as a medium?
  • Would you like to do cricket coaching through blogging?
  • Would you like to do live ball-by-ball text commentary a la Prem Panicker?
  • Why are you only doing audio podcasts and not video-casts?
  • Which other sportsmen do you think are doing podcasts like you?

All of this to a person who said the following quite clearly…

  • Frankly, I don’t belong here
  • I belong to the transistor generation
  • I am a two-finger typist
  • I once went on typing for quite some time without looking up into the screen only to discover that nothing had actually been typed
  • I began looking at blogs only in the last some days

Perhaps the only sensible questions asked were:

  1. Is there a possibility of another autobiographical book coming from you after Sunny Days?
  2. While in a 2-commentator setup, you feed off the other guy (which Gavaskar himself had enlightened the audience about), would you like to try commenting while feeding off an audience?

There was also an interesting presentation by photographer Sharad Haksar who shared some of his work and how the blogging community mobilized support and helped him out when Coca Cola had filed a case against him.

And not to forget the company and hospitality of my friend and ex-colleague Jamshed Rajan who was quite popular with the Chennai community and seems to have worked well on his positioning as a humour writer through his blog — ouchmytoe.

And my take from the BlogCamp?

That’s in the next post. Please be back.

The Miracles of India

Media & Entertainment, Politics, Zeitgeist

Yessir! It’s happening once again!

If Ganesh idols were drinking milk then, it is sea water turning sweet in Mumbai now! (In between we had the ‘monkey man’ in India’s capital city!)

The ‘milk drinking’ is due to the phenomenon of ‘surface tension’ where the milk sticks in a very thin layer — practically invisible to the naked eye — to the edge of the spoon and travels from there to the lips of the idols, to the chin and all the way to the floor. If need be, please pick up a high-school physics book, and you would understand it very easily!

The sweetness of the sea water is being explained as post-monsoon dilution of salinity.

Even though I believe the scientific explanations completely, for me that is just one aspect of this issue.

The other aspect is — WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?

So what if the idols were drinking milk, huh?
So what if the sea water is less salty than usual, huh?
What does this do for you? Makes your life less miserable, huh?

Yet we have people (urban, educated and economically better-off) in this day and age falling for, and willing to swallow this crap (literally too**), in double-quick haste and not waiting/wanting to seek a logical/rational explanation for that.

And that’s the miracle for me, sadly!

Even as I close this post, I see news on India TV that the idols drinking milk scam is back, and I can very clearly see this time around it’s not about injecting the opium into the masses in an innovative way, but in a competitive way.

 

** Mahim creek, the site for this sweet water ‘miracle’, is otherwise better known as the point where passengers on Mumbai’s western train line generally get up from their sleep due to an overpowering foul sewage smell, while passing by!

Amritraj in Woodlands: Through the (rear) looking glass

Media & Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Sports

This Sunday morning my wife and I drove into Woodlands restaurant on Chennai’s Cathedral Road. Not the Woodlands by the side of Hotel Savera, but Woodlands — the drive-in restaurant. Incidentally Woodlands seems to be a very popular name for restaurants in Chennai!

Coming back to Woodlands drive-in, Chennai is unique in that right in the heart of the city you can drive in to this moderately wooded parking lot, order your food and have it either sitting in the comfort of your car or hanging around it (of course depending on the kind of car you have!). (Incidentally, Chennai also has perhaps the last of drive-in movie theatres in India — Prarthana.)

There is Chhote Miyan in Mumbai which is a busy parking lot by the day and a busier outdoor eatery by the night. But I don’t recall too many people sitting in their cars to eat.

There are tandoori stalls all over Delhi, where you would find people parked by the side of a a busy road to blare out loud music with their windows rolled down and eating some chicken on the side. Of course there is Pandara Road, where the parking lots are used as eateries.

Then there is the famous chaat stall on Shahajahan Road, where people prefer to sit in their cars ony to escape being trampled by the mob that gathers around the serving counters!

Of course there are the McDonalds drive-through outlets, which technically speaking, are the thematic opposites of ‘drive-ins’.

So, this Sunday morning, when we drove in, we saw a familiar face — that of Vijay Amritraj (of course there was the rest of him too!). Once upon a time, Vijay Amritraj was the most looked-upto sportsman in India; of course after Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar!

It was indeed a delight to park our car close to him. However, we soon caught ourselves (and many others) gawking at Vijay’s entourage, which included his brother Ashok Amritraj. It was rude. So the conscientious me decided not to stare. Instead I turned my rear-view mirror at an angle, where I could see them without having to ostensibly turn my neck!

Vijay left in his Mercedes, while Ashok left in his Hyundai Sonnata. Ok, that’s an assumption of ownership, but had me wondering — who is the richer of the two brothers?

Of course Ashok struck it rich much later in life, when he and Jean Claude van Demme scripted a few successes in Hollywood. I heard him narrate his struggle story in 2004 at Frames, the annual media event organized by FICCI (read here).

In case you are still reading, we had our regular order of masala dosa followed by filter coffee!

The hottest case-study topic

Education, IIM, Media & Entertainment, Politics

Clay figure of Laloo - by yours truly

On February 24, 2006, he said:

Mere zunu ka natija zaroor niklega,
isee siaah samandar se noor niklega.

Hum bhi dariya hai, apnaa hunar hame maloom hai,
jis taraph bhi chal padenge, rastaa ban jayega.

Ek kadam hum badhe, ek kadam tum,
aao milkar naap de, phasle chand tak.

Hum na haare par wo jeete, aisa hai prayas,
musafir ho rail ka raja, hum sabki ye aas.

Mun me bhav seva ka, hotho par muskan,
Behtar seva wazib daam, rail ki hogi yeh pehchan.

Kaamgaaro ki lagan se, hai tarakki sabki,
hausla inka badhao, ki yeh kuchh aur baddhe.

Aam admi hee hamara devta hai,
vah jeetega toh hum bhi jeet payenge,
tabhi toh yeh tay karke baithey hain,
faisle ab usi ke hak mein jaayenge.

Maine dekhe hain saare khwab naye,
likh raha hoon main inqilab naye.

Yeh inaayat nahin, mera vishwas hai,
daurey mehengai mein rail sasti rahe,
apnaa inaam humko to mill jayega,
rail par aapki sarparasti rahe.

And last month, students at one of the most hallowed institutes of management education in the world, Harvard, were introduced to the working of the newly annointed miracle man of India Inc. — Union Minister for Railways, Lalu Prasad Yadav (who in 2002 mysteriously changed the spelling of his name from Laloo)!

The verses above were from his Railway Budget speech in Parliament.

Last week, Professor G Raghuraman of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, was delighting the media all over, with the disclosure of his management-academician’s equivalent of a muse. That’s all you would need to make a wonderfully punchy (but surprisingly short-lived) story — Lalu Prasad Yadav, media’s favourite politician-entertainer, being endorsed by arguably the best management institute in India.

The flavour of the month is IIMs making case-studies on objects of popular interest. If it was Krrish @ IIM Indore then, it is Lalu @ IIM Ahmedabad now. The pace and direction seem to suggest that Sachin Tendulkar, Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh bachchan are just waiting to be studied. And why not! Between them, they account for a few hundred crores of business.

On Lalu, the turn around in perception has been remarkable. For someone long identified with nepotism, corruption and mismanagement in his home state, Bihar — being seen as the messiah for one of the largest public sector organizations is nothing short of a miracle.

“I think he must have taken the present task as an opportunity to prove his abilities and improve his image,” mused the professor.

Either I have become too cynical, or this is the height of naivete…

Prince of Kurukshetra

Media & Entertainment

Move over Budhiya Singh, Prince of Kurukshetra is here.

If you are living outside of India, maybe it’s an event that will entirely pass you by. But if you have watched any of the Indian TV news channels this Sunday, the story of the 6-year old boy, Prince, who fell down into a 60-feet deep bore well couldn’t have escaped you, no matter what.

The sequence of events is like this: Friday evening, some children are playing, when one of them falls into the well. In other times this would have been a tragedy that we hear/read about, feel momentarily sorry for, and carry on with our lives. But here along with help, arrives a CCTV camera, which is lowered into the deep pit. And a miracle occurs — the child is alive!

While his well-wishers see a ray of hope — the media sees a story. If you are a student of journalism and are looking for a perfect example of a ‘public interest story’ — this is it!

It has everything that makes for a sensational story. A tale of survival, the challenge of rescue efforts — a parallel tunnel being dug; oxygen and food being released; doctors and ambulances on standby; people offering prayers for the boy in mosques, gurudwaras, temples; Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi sending their best-wishes for the boy; Chief Minister of Haryana Bhupinder Singh Hooda arriving just as the boy was about to be rescued. And not to forget the CCTV camera that was giving minute by minute images of the boy in distress. A day-long gripping drama, that generates spontaneous interest in viewers. And you won’t believe it — no advertisements!

And then the overwhelming moment when the boy finally resurfaces — the TV anchors go berserk with hyperbole:

“…dharti maa ki goud mein pachaas ghante bitaane ke baad, ab apni maa ki goud mein hai Prince…”

“…apne janamdin pe hua Prince ka punar janam…”

Now that congratulatory messages are pouring in and crackers are being burst far and wide, time for a pun intended closing line…

All’s well that ends well!