charukesi August 18th, 2006
On FM, ad for Mahesh tutorials - the teachers here so friendly and helpful, blah blah blah. They take a lump of clay and make it into a pot.
On a signboard in Dharavi for Kumar classes, we don’t teach, we mould.
So what’s with all the pottery in teaching?
charukesi August 15th, 2006
happy independence day - as it draws to an end… and who can say it better than google?
Kids in my building this morning just after the flag hoisting, lustily singing ‘saare jahan se accha‘ [another mobile phone pic]
This, I think, is what kids look nice doing - and not this…
More images, memories from the day - Karan Johar on tv talking about how proud he is about how much India has given the world - and then hastily, to all of us. And RJs on different FM stations running contests about which year of independence this was. type a for 59th, b for 60th and c for whatever….
charukesi August 14th, 2006
I was searching earlier on the net for something and came across a site called smartbahu and of course, I had to click on it. This is what the site says - Smartbahu.com - India’s 1st portal for the complete woman.
What was that again - complete women = smart bahu (or is it the other way round?)
The home page contains links to articles such as Injazat data systems to build the most advanced TierIV data centre in the region and GM utilizes internet to introduce new vehicles.
What am I missing here?
charukesi August 14th, 2006
They’ve been seen on pregnant bellies and tattooed on foreheads. They’ve invaded bathroom stalls, cellular phones and doctors’ offices. They’ve sneaked their way into movies, TV shows, novels and even Broadway plays.
Not to mention doors of movie-hall restrooms. remember you saw it here first - even before the Baltimore Sun wrote about the new advertising age [register for free and read quickly before it vanishes - is worth the effort - if only to warn you as a consumer, about where you can next expect to find advertising]
I found this article through adverblog which gives this dire warning - Advertising is hijacking all the blank spaces. Eggs, body parts, air-sickness bags… no blank space will survive. The world has become a stage for product placement.
And here is something more to chew on - New Book Reports 37% of All Advertising Is Wasted
Hmm, I wonder why? Are they actually saying that advertisements pasted on air sickness bags and on the doors of the ladies’ at movie theatres are not working? Why do I not find that difficult to believe? And what happens to the other 33%? What is to say they are not wasted?
An in any case, I wonder what is successful advertising - I read through the paper and find that the authors are as confused as the marketers (and the advertising agencies) whose $1 billion ad spend they tracked. What is clear however, is that while on one hand, we see the increase of “unconventional” media planning, marketers elsewhere are returning to tried and tested places - like television.
Personally for me, product placements rarely work - I tend to notice the brand / ad (you never know when you will desperately need a topic for a blog post) and then firmly proceed to ignore it forever - except when I am writing blog posts about it. I am sometimes happily surprised by a nice media plan that shows me an ad when I least expect it, does it subtly and does it well. The one I remember was one of the earliest attempts I remember in Indian advertising - Zee TV was showing Sholay on some national holiday (sometime in the mid 1990s) - and in the scene Gabbar laughs his well, Gabbar laugh, and shoots high up in the air and suddenly a biscuit (yes a biscuit) pops up in front of the gun, breaks into two, and becomes Krack-Jack - and we all went, wft!
charukesi August 9th, 2006
Exactly a year ago, I had walked up a few hundred slippery steps in the rain, to Karla caves near Lonavala and come back to wonder - proud of what heritage? - fascinated by the wood and stone that have bravely withstood the onslaugth of the elements for centuries but recently given up the struggle against human indifference…
Shekhawati was a similar experience for me - remarkable frescoes and murals over a hundred and fity years old, now suddenly under threat from a whitewash, a bollywood poster, a renovation… Havelis that housed the prosperous Marwaris who gave back to the community much more than they took, now housing multiple small families in need of a space over their heads, to hang their clothes, to light the kitchen fire… Towns that point the tourists proudly to the Rani Sati temple built in honour of a woman who died in 1295 upon the funeral pyre of her husband, and attracts over 300,000 visitors every year but are clueless about the significance, even the location of the havelis that are the storehouses of an art form that originated in Italy in the 14th century…
More on when art is irrelevant on Itchy Feet….
And to assure you that all of Shekhawati is not about decay and ruin, and to give a better context to the glorious images I posted here recently, is a more detailed post on haveli hopping in Shekhawati
As always, comments welcome (although I have been lax about responding to them, I know - my bad)…
charukesi August 1st, 2006
Just in case, a teeny weeny case anyone was wondering where I have been, this is what I did last weekend…
And when I was not sitting by the window, cup of tea in hand, watching the sun go down over the plains in the distance, I went haveli hopping and saw these…
This was in the “gold room” of the Jhunjhunwala haveli in Mandwa in Shekhawati… Three kilos of gold in all those trimmings and borders - how much of it still remians is anyone’s guess…
And oh, I made friends too…
I got chastised for not waiting for girl with brand new bag and had to take another picture, featuring said bag as hero… all in all, worth the heat…
And I played hide and seek with this boy for over five minutes… rather, he played and I waited patiently, camera in hand…
This was a weekend at Surajgarh in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan. I will eventuall get around to writing about wonderful, heart-breaking Shekhawati and those brilliant frescos, some of them surviving, even thriving despite all that decay and negligence… Till then, for your reading pleasure…
***
I was actually in Delhi last week on work; I have never seen Delhi before, as in seen anything really. So I set off one morning, camera in hand to one of the most photogenic of them all - Qutub Minar… And it was such a dull rainy day, just perfect for washed-out colors on your photographs that I almost gave up hope. Till I decided to shoot in sepia…
The Qutub complex really does not need a sepia setting on the camera - it is sepia.. You walk around the place, marvelling at the how beautiful ruins can look (yes, I love ruins, so?), and evey corner you turn, you see the Minar suddenly, peeking out from behind an arch, emerging from the middle of squat building, rising from the top of trees… You walk through the pillars and see the sunlight streaming in through the sides, the way it has for centuries…
And the rain is the perfect time to sit there and just watch the world saunter - a pair of lovers cootchie-cooing, the parrots and mynahs seeming to echo their very coos, the fresh air on your cheeks, the camera happy tourists (look who’s talking and all that), the ruin-weary child - mom when can we go home? Everything is freshly washed and happy… No one is in a hurry.. no one is really doing anything…
***
And just a couple of weeks before that, I was here…
For a city (country?) that has no single natural thing to its credit, parts of Singapore are amazingly vibrant and beautiful.
Sigh, I already feel like I need another holiday…