The Problem with Digital, They Don’t Listen!

This is about penetration of digital media and its impact on advertising, which is what media companies survive on.

The other day a Google representative contacted me for our online advertising account and how they could optimise it. The attitude was rather patronising, which was okay with me, knowing it is Google, and all. "Now that you are advertising heavily in the print media and, sort of, why don’t you try online advertising, kinda, you know, usually we don’t contact clients directly (true!), but we are making an exception in your case." Get the drift? Seeing as to how Google was started and in a garage/bus/whatever, it’s understandable, I mean the attitude.

Then I see this discussion about how digital is the media of the future by Madhavan Narayanan where digital guru Mahesh Murthy has this to say, “The weightage given to older media is perhaps less about the demographics of the target audience than about the demographics and psychographics of the advertiser. The TG is online, no doubt. But the advertiser and media agency aren't. When Mr. CEO and Ms. Media Director only watch CNBC and Friends, it's unlikely they'll put big bucks behind a medium they don't use or understand.” Very true! Mr. CEO and comely Ms. Media Director have a reason to be watching "Friends". "Friends" is friendlier than the average call centre guy with the funny accent hawking digital media. More of this later in this post.

Actually I am a big fan of digital advertising media having been initiated into it very early in my career, but what I am not a big fan of is the kind of attitude fostered by digital media, you know, “usually we don’t do this,” and all. It defeats the very aim of showing how digital has far superior reach, and is far more effective.

So, since I want to give my digital advertising to Google, why don’t he come down for a meeting? “Meeting? We don’t meet, that’s not our style, we could send you a powerpoint and if you are interested you could call me.” Whoa! That’s the other extreme of what business interaction is all about (at least, what I know of it), you know, the one about “close to the customer” and “understanding the customer’s need.” The powerpoint arrives and, as expected, it's all abracadabra.

That’s the whole problem with digital media. They don’t want to reply to customers’ complaints, they don't listen, they don’t want to talk to the customer face to face and understand their needs, they prefer to sit in their “call centres” (some place in NOIDA) day and night and impose their superior-than-thou attitude on customers. If you have a problem with some digital biggie's interface you are directed to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page and asked to (dumb you!) fend for yourself, because we aren’t interested in your WTF, goddamn business, you hear?

And that’s what should change if television has to handover the baton to digital, as Mahesh Murthy rightly advocates.

Of Chastity Belts and Feign-able Virginity Kits

We have heard of chastity belts Arab men fastened on to their women when they went into the desert, we have also heard of abstinence, but the headline Los Angeles Times headlined “ Gadget to help women feign virginity angers many in Egypt” boggles, nay, flabbergasts!

“The kit allows a bride who is not a virgin to pretend that she is. A pouch inserted into the vagina on her wedding night ruptures and leaks a blood-like liquid designed to trick a new husband into believing that his wife is chaste. It's a wink of ingenuity to soothe a man's ego and keep the dowry intact.”

More at the above link. One never knows if one gets a fair bride who is also a virgin (which is a craze in the West Asian and Persian Gulf region), the fairness may be due to a fairness cream and the virginity due to a virginity kit. What next? Power dildo kits and automatic arousal contraptions?

"That Thing Called Love"

friend and fellow writer Tuhin Sinha (author of That Thing Called Love, which, I am told, has been translated into several Indian languages and has sold a record number of copies, into five figures, which, incidentally, can be stamped “best seller” by Indian standards) has written this piece about love going wrong in mylittlemagazine because of a minor issue blowing up on the face of a budding romance, like that thing always does. I quite like his understated style and elegance.

In the Neighbourhood of Nostalgia

This post is about nostalgia. Guess it’s good to look back when you are past fifty on my life, my times, how things were then and now. How time creeps up on you, unknowingly. For those of you who think you are going to be young for ever, fact is, you aren't. You lose hair, your body grows sluggish, you spend more and more time in your past rather than in the future. I know the time when I was a teenager and wanted so very much to be twenty, I couldn’t wait. Sometimes I think I made a lot of headway, or, call it progress, sometimes I think the exact opposite. Contrary to anything anyone anywhere might imagine – least of all my son Ronnie – I was born in a village in Kerala in an age where electric lights were rare there – we had storm lanterns for light, and the nights were pitch dark and ghostly - there was no gas to cook, my mother (bless her soul) cooked on the open fire, and there weren’t ruled notebooks to write and coloured nursery rhyme books to recite from. That's why I am dense about most familiar characters that my friends refer to in their conversations. (So, you know why I have that blank look, duh!) I learnt to write Malayalam on sand spread on the ground, sitting not on a desk but on a plank of wood spread on the very sand on which I wrote. Nursery rhymes weren’t “Jack and Jill” but the following Malayalam children’s rhyme:

“Koo, koo, koo, koo, theevandi,
kookipayum theevandi,
kalkari thinnum theevandi,
vellam mondum theevandi...”

“The fire-spitting-engine goes “koo, koo, koo, koo”
It races ahead, the fire-spitting-engine,
It swallows coal, the fire-spitting-engine,
It gulps water, the fire-spitting-engine...”

You, of course, know what “fire-spitting-engine” means. I write about it a lot on this blog everyday. After all, I spend four hours of my day in it, don’t I?

It wasn’t until the third standard when I was seven that I learnt my first English alphabet, of which I consider myself, well, a – kind of, sort of – expert now. My father was away in Bombay and only at the age of eight did I join him in this city that had electric lights, cooking gas, proper classrooms, and notebooks to write my unending oeuvres. I have been in Bombay – a city I hate and love – ever since.

All the above drivel, and stuff, is the sneakiest of sneak previews, of my autobiography, still in the churn....

The Staring Man in Red

A man in a shocking red shirt stares at me when am having my post-lunch banana. I don’t know why. I have never seen him. I look up from my banana and he is staring at me. I nibble at my banana and still he is staring at me. So I search the net and find this painting by Eddie Cunningham (used under "fair use" terms to give some publicity to this deserving artist and some hits on his website).

Does he know me? Does he have any, what to say, ulterior motives, as the cliché goes? Does he know I am a blogger? Or, wonder of wonders, have I become faymbous, vaymbous like some of my celebrated contemporaries from the blogging world?

William Safire Is No More

William Safire, of the Nixon Administration, not the “howling pack of conservative pundits: Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin” according to Maureen Dowd, is no more. I liked to read his rather simplistic style and threadbare analysis. Here’s a tribute she wrote to the multi-faceted etymologist, grammarian, and English-usage expert. Excerpt:

“The only time I ever saw a shred of doubt was after the famous dust-up when he wrote that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was “a congenital liar.”

"A congenital pot-stirrer, he acted delighted with Bill Clinton’s subsequent threat to punch him in the nose. But, as a famous expert on etymology, he must have known he had used the wrong word. Congenital usually connotes a condition existing at birth. Was that really what he intended?”

Salman Rushdie on “Slumdog Millionaire”

This is rather late, but what the heck, better late than not at all. Slumdog won a lot of appreciation for its provocative content, which were trumped up by a director who didn’t understand his subject and a screenplay writer who probably hadn’t even read the book on which it is based (what explains the glaring mismatch with the book's contents?). Actually it made millionaires and celebrities out of a few people, among them: Danny Boyle, the scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy, Frieda Pinto, etc. If jealousy could have compensated for the loss of my time and movie ticket cost, then I would be a jealous guy. No, I don't need such entertainment, even with a gun pointed at the back of my head. How do I classify such phenomena in rational terms: come out with something which shows the wretchedness of poverty, show a lot of violence, gore and injustice, shock your audience and critics and then disappear into the night with your millions.

This is what Salman Rushdie writes about Danny Boyle and “The Slumdog Millionaire” in The Guardian:

"In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."

Has post colonial attitude to former colonies and their inhabitants been tempered with respect for a people who are no longer serfs but are independent? Having worked with the British in the Persian Gulf I know it hasn’t. The same mindset prevails, whether it is in Newcastle or in New York.

Having seen the film I can vouch that Danny Boyle doesn’t know anything about India, hasn’t read the book, and hasn’t even bothered to have the film vetted by an Indian, least of all the book’s author. He even has the audacity to admit it. For an Indian director this would have been lethal, a case of being torn “limb from limb” as Rushdie mentions above.

My own review of this controversial, yet unbecoming film appears here.

How Climate Change Affects Civilisation; What Are the Effects of Global Warming? Will We Become Extinct?

Ah the October heat is almost upon me. The mind goes dithery, the body sweats a lot of fluids, a vague disorientation, the mouth dries, the fingers don’t move on the keyboard, mistakes are made and generally speaking, October heat is here.

Read a book “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan about how climate changed civilisation which is about the dramatic changes the environment made in entire civilisations with people progressing from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farmers and then to organised citizens living in city-states and then into kings and kingdoms. The book was an eye-opener in that it chronicled how the species originated in Africa (I had my doubts, but it has been set right by this book), moved to Europe and Central Asia, then to Siberia and through the Alaskan tip to North and South America. Yes the entire landmass then was one. There’s no justification in thinking that the Indians of America were a different species of people, they are actually originated from the same genes as ours. One breakaway faction came to the Indian peninsula and moved to Australasia through the Malaysian isthmus. (There still are hunter-gatherer people in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, now part of India, who live the way their ancestors did thousands of years ago.)

The first city-state was situated in modern Iraq and its name was Ur and from this we got our city names: Kanpur, Nagpur, Solapur, and even my native village name of Kidangannoor. Ur simply means in Tamil, native village. I don’t know in other languages. So we aren’t a racially disparate people as we once thought, at least, I thought, though external characteristics would make us think so. Scratch the surface of certain acquired customs and beliefs and we are still one. Pretty obvious, isn’t it?

Now an important observation here: if climate changed civilisations as we know it, will the present warming give rise to huge repercussions and lifestyle changes for our progeny, even threaten its existence? Yes it will. During the last Ice Age millions perished, even hundreds of species became extinct. If heating of the landmass and icecaps continue (the earth's temperature would rise by 6 degree C by end of the century, according to today’s newspaper), the melting ice would lead to inundation of most of the world as we know it. But civilisation will adapt and survive for many centuries more. Most of our major cities are built around the sea or rivers (Bombay, New York, Tokyo, London, etc.), due to proximity to ports and access to aquatic life. This would mean, with rising sea levels, we would be deprived of most of our modern cities and civilisation will continue with the progeny of farmers in remote hilly areas, who have learnt to adapt to climatic changes as the inhabitants of the Steppes and Tundras did during the Ice Age in northern Europe.

Not very happy thinking, especially for my friend Anthonybhai. He says, “Eat, drink and be merry, men, who is bothered about what will happen a hundred years from now. I, tho, don’t care.”

"Managing your online afterlife"

Time issue dated September 14, 2009 has an interesting article “Managing your online afterlife”. So what happens after one kicks the bucket, er, well, sort of? We think about these things, don’t we? Just as we look out of a train window and think how many people passed this arid landscape that's nothing but sand and dust and how many of them are dead. Same as I do when I pass the dry areas of the Deccan Plateau when I visit Kerala. Yes, our boundaries blur, we fantasize, we go into the netherworlds of the imagination.

The article delves into the issue of the hereafter, based on the experience of one Pam Weiss who logged on to Facebook to trace photographs of her dead daughter and found many, in fact, a whole lot that would identify with her life, recreate it for her, in the absence of the records she in her old-fashioned way hunted: diaries (now replaced by blogs), letter (now replaced by emails), photo albums (now replaced by online albums). Life changes, so does various aspects of it, sometimes unconsciously, I might add. So she got plenty of material she didn’t know existed, before, um, Facebook actually deleted her profile. I am not sure they do.

Acually Facebook has a policy of putting a person’s profile on “Memorial State” if the person has deceased, so that people know the person is no more. No one can post a status update but can post a comment if he/she is a confirmed friend. Facebook also will delete a profile if the person’s immediate kin approaches them with a death certificate and a copy of the person’s email to the said kin.

People spend a lot of time on their online networks (I do); it’s a trend that has caught up. So all we can do is catch the trend and stay with it. What does the future portend? A life lived purely on an online forum? A life full of Facebook comments and no real conversations? Prescient? Don't know.

Bloggers to the Fore. Product Launches, What Next?

So what’s up in the blogging community? Am a bit dense here because I haven’t attended any of their meet-ups or bothered to network, really. So the following comes as a bit of a surprise as it comes on the back of the revelation that India is among the top ten blogging nations of the world. This article on Campaignindia.in sheds a little bit of light about what has been happening behind the back of this blogger. Excerpt:

“For example, Marico’s chain of skin care services Kaya Skin Clinic targets beauty and fashion bloggers who try out their skincare packages and blog about them. In return, Kaya experts write guest posts on a monthly basis. Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) has used blogs to release the first look of its vehicles. Not just that, M&M ensured that along with the mainstream media, bloggers were also invited to the press conference of the Xylo’s launch. Some weeks back, producers of a recent Bollywood release Toss, upset at how mainstream media had “completely ignored” the film, reached out to bloggers who could review the film on their blogs.”

Wonder who will invite me to the launch of their premium brand. Wonder!