Odds & Ends

A contrarian post in this Christmas traveling season. Sure, there is a buzz in going there and I've done a bit of that be it walking down the rim of a volcano in Indonesia, walking up the Champs Elysees in Paris, absorbing the silence of falling snow in the Swiss Alps, gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, watching wild horses run in meadows outside Seattle. Et cetera. They were all moving experiences. But I've seen so much more without going there. The last village in Indian Kashmir and the irony of the border, the windswept town at the southern tip of Chile before the freezing wastes of Antarctica, the European capitals with their cookie cutter layout of being built on either side of rivers with pretty bridges spanning them, the depths of the Grand Canyon, the remoteness of the Australian Outback, the samba in Brazil, the teeming wildlife in Africa, misty Machu Picchu... and dozens of other places I will never see in person. Video has changed everything. With their

How do you change a marketing culture? Marketing covers a wide gamut of activities from branding and communication to market research and new product and service development. This means that marketing departments are staffed by people with both quant skills and creative skills. Given corporate India's glorification of the engineer-MBA quant jocks, the analytical folks rule the roost. But here's the thing. The quant jocks can't usually create the magic needed for new products and ideas. That needs the creatives. Take Titan as an example. The quants may have worked the numbers but it required a different kind of thinking and sensibility to bet on watches and jewellery that were radically different from the status quo by way of design and aesthetics. Or take a Fabindia that took the humble cotton apparel and made it a premium fashion statement. I picked these two examples since I've met and spoken to the people who made the magic happen. In both cases, creating a culture t

Apathy? Fear? Don't care? We have a common enough problem in front of our apartment complex. A sewage drain has been clogged for several days and the civic authority in charge hasn't fixed it in spite of complaints and much follow up. A Twitter campaign would be a good way to exert some pressure, right? Some of us thought so too and posted a tweet, tagged the authority, and requested everyone in the apartment to retweet and amplify the post. More than 36 hours later, a paltry 10% of residents have participated. That's disappointing in a complex of over 200 apartment units. Not that the problem doesn't affect everyone. The smelly filth is gushing out and gathering in rivulets and pools along the road and in front of the gates. Cars and two wheelers squelch over it spreading it further. Pedestrians skirt the gooey muck and cover their nose. School children wait for their buses next to it. You can't pretend it doesn't exist. So what is keeping our educated and tech

One of the ways in which we Indians assert our identity these days is to extol our custom of eating with our hands.   Eating with hands is great. Whether eating a roti or biryani, drumstick sambar or dosa -- and definitely when eating from a leaf -- hands trump utensils. But calling those who prefer eating with a spoon and fork Macaulay's children with colonised minds? That's a bit of an overstatement. Many people genuinely prefer not to eat using their hands for whatever reason. The world is divided into three broad food zones -- the western world of eating with a fork and knife; the Indian, African and Middle Eastern world of eating with hands; and the east Asian and southeast Asian world of eating with chopsticks and spoons. But because of many decades of travel and cross-cultural pollination, food customs and habits have widely diffused across cultures. So framing the preference for eating with or without utensils in simplistic occident vs orient terms is misguided. The c

For my book on innovation I met a bunch of business leaders, among them Suresh Krishna who was then the head of the TVS group and boss of Sundram Fasteners. During our meeting, Krishna asked a question everyone should ask themselves at some point: What is your dharma? Why do you do what you do? It's a query common across cultures. The Japanese call it Ikigai, in psychology we know it as self-actualisation in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But I like the simplicity of the 'What's your dharma' poser, perhaps because of my cultural and civilisational roots. When I thought about it, I realised that a Sanskrit verse from the Upanishads, a part of which was on my school blazer's crest, pretty much described my dharma. Asato mā sadgamaya/ tamasomā jyotir gamaya. Whatever else I may be, I'm primarily a writer of non-fiction and an urge to shed light and speak the truth is at the heart of all my writing. It's not always easy. If you work for an employer or a client

There is this new phrase that has gained currency -- pet parents. As long as they were pet owners we could tell them to please get their dogs to shut up.   But dare we tell pet parents to do likewise? Tauba, that's so boorish, who scolds children? Still. Can the pet parents please try and coax/cajole/control their darlings from constantly barking. What's probably sweet music to the pet parents is an infernal nuisance to others.