Posts from — August 2008

It took me quite a while to figure out how to use the T9, or dictionary function on the mobile. Being the purist, I could not bring myself to type those ridiculous abbreviations without vowels, distorted into forms where words are squeezed, stuffed and changed into unrecognisable grunts. ‘R u thr’ may make a lot of sense to the current generation but I prefer the ‘Are you there?’ message anytime. To the spelling challenged , it’s a godsend to camouflage a weak ability under something cool. So, I laboured through those three taps on the mobile to get at one letter. Sending an SMS or ‘Texting’ as the US calls it, was like typing out a Morse Code. I kept it short and simple all the time.

Realisation dawned in one of those long nights in a post-production studio. I found this young guy effortlessly sending off messages. I asked him how he managed with such ease and he provided the enlightenment that no user manual ever manages to capture. “Spell it out on the keyboard’ was the mantra. I told him that all kinds of junk appeared on the screen every time I typed the first two letters in. “That’s simply because there are a lot of two and three letter words” he told me. “Persist and you’ll see how easy it gets.” He was right. While I still don’t send out messages like obsessed teenagers, I maintain a fairly decent SMS conversation when I need to.

But ‘Twitter‘ is beyond me. I can’t, for the life of me, see what’s so great about random thoughts being sent into the atmosphere. Does it have to do with some primal need of expressing oneself? Or is it the thrill of having responses from a total stranger? Why would anyone be interested in what I had for lunch? Or that I was standing at the junction of Mount Road and Spencer’s and I wanted the whole world to know. Maybe I’ll follow one of these erudite articles and get a clue. Apparently, from the ‘twitters’, a pattern emerges. What twits! Doesn’t that come from actually having a conversation that makes sense? Or is that too much to ask of people who are on the phone all day?

When talented athletes reach the Olympic pinnacle of their lives in their 20s, it’s a good time to reflect on “What’s next?” The New York Times has a very perceptive article, where after training for years on end, the champions had to face the return to an ‘ordinary’ life. It can’t be much fun to drive to work, do the dishes or take the dog out for a walk after being feted in front of an audience of millions. It’s a giddy high that may never return. Michael Phelps is the toast of the world right now and he’s young enough(23) to be in contention when the London Olympics rolls around four years from now but after that, what? The endorsement deals will keep him in the public eye and every time a swimming hero is required, his name will figure and be spoken about in revered tones. But fame is fleeting and a tough taskmaster, ever ready to betray.

Remember Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail? He’s still the best known internet celebrity in India and he has launched several non-starters, from a voice mail to a blog service and now – Real Estate The geek has become a real estate tycoon. Interesting transition no doubt and enough to ignite the feeding frenzy of the media. But he always has the reference to Hotmail in every one of the articles. It’s a constant reminder that his greatest moment was 8 years ago.

Roger Federer, who was unbeatable not so long ago is now being beaten by much lower ranked players. He did not make the quarter-finals of the Olympics and the latest Tennis Icon is Rafael Nadal. On home turf, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid are the old warhorses biding their remaining time in cricket. Sachin Tendulkar is the only icon who has managed to keep his place intact over two cricketing generations but there are vicious articles every time his form touches a low or his back problems surface. Retirement from the arclights can’t be welcome. Gracefuls exits are among the hardest things to accomplish.

Registering at a site for the first time usually involves filling up a box that has distorted letters or numbers called captchas. Their primary function is to prevent bots from auto registering on the site. Humans can read these letters quite easily, but computers have a problem. Looks like there are still a few things we do better than machines. Every time I had to enter one of these things it seemed a futile exercise, almost an imposition.

But reading this yesterday brought about a change. Helping without even knowing it is rewarding, even liberating. As a result of people solving these captchas all over the net, over 17600 ancient books have been deciphered. It took a leap of imagination, to solve a security problem at the same time as rendering a service. Wikipedia is another instance of human endeavour creating a massive knowledge base. Beating the Encyclopedia Brittanica within a few years takes some doing. We’re now seeing the net help us fight aids, conquer cancer and decipher human proteins. Filling up a captcha or donating idle processing power is a small price to pay for saving the world.

If there is a proper road, but there’s also a shorter one through a hedge, you can be sure the Indian will take it. The cops try everything on the road to prevent unauthorised U-turns, from placing boulders in a row in the middle of a crowded road to ineffectual signs. But the next day, one or two of those boulders are either removed or displaced and every motorcycle rider helps himself through the gap. Scooters meant for two carry a whole family of five. It is remarkable that no one seems to believe it is wrong. Breaking lines, paying bribes, cocking a snook at authority – it’s all in a day’s work.

You actually took the driving test and waited for your license to arrive? Poor sap, you. All it takes is finding the right tout and placing a few currency notes in the right place. The license zips through the system and arrives in your palm like a Fedex courier. Otherwise, it would be permanently misplaced, hiding behind impenetrable mounds of files, never getting into the right hands and always missing one additional requirement. Indians believe in beating every single system imposed on them.

Income tax is paid by just 5% of the total population. That would lead to the belief that 95% of the country does not make more than Rs. 1,50,000 per year (about $4000). Yet, our cell phone connections increase by 10 million every month. I haven’t even checked the number of cars or two wheelers sold. The Government requires you to file a tax return if you have a telephone, a credit card, have traveled abroad on a holiday or live in a rented house over 1000 sq.ft. Still no luck. There are ways to beat this as well. Untraceable cash is still king used for buying everything from gold to political affiliations.

Which reminds me of the story of an Indian who found a loophole in the American Traffic system. Hauled up for a violation and fined $50 dollars, the Indian transferred $52. The money kept bouncing between the bank and the system because it could not be reconciled and the violation was never recorded on his license. I was also told that this was one of the main reasons Indians write robust software. They can think of several ways around a system, intentional or otherwise.They factor in the fact that people will look for shortcuts everywhere. From cracking the license to speeding up a task.

Sometimes, I want to return to a childhood state. Where every day is new, every experience is unique. I remember a quote from Reader’s Digest, “You stop being a child when you walk around a puddle instead of into it”. That’s one of the problems of growing into an adult. Predictability is comfortable, even desirable. I remember the walks I took around London when I first landed there. Every sight, every road is burned into memory. It was like all my senses were on fire because the stimuli were all new. Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the pubs in the evening light, the posters for ‘The Mousetrap’ Agatha Cristie’s play. I drank in everything I could and more. I found half-price tickets for the theater because the evening shows were all full – and too expensive anyway. I remember paying the equivalent of a meal for a sandwich. Taking the metro, where the tickets and turnstiles were all automated and running on software developed by TCS.

Anything completely new is inspirational. It provides fodder for the imagination because all the senses are on high alert. Settle in and and a set of predictable responses take over. That is probably why the internet is still interesting. Surf far away from the top 1000 websites and there are still oases of complete unpredictability. In terms of thought, design or subject. Niches that occupied someone’s imagination are on display for the whole world to see. Secretive people let strangers read their most private thoughts. Inspiration is never more than a click away.

From today’s SMS smile , to the symbol ‘&’, there are enough tidbits into the way punctuation marks evolved. Each generation leaves a little bit of itself to history. Flower power was definitely the sixties. The bell-bottomed pants, where the spread of the pant was only slightly less than a skirt, still springs up to mortify every time a film set in the 70s makes a splash. There’s actually a blog about the ampersand. If typography is specialised, here’s the superspeciality. Blogs allow micro fascination. Obsession with just one aspect of a subject carried to the extreme. Claim a small niche of the net as your own. I wondered how long the blog about the ampersand was going. – 4 months. A lot of posts in the first month which drops dramatically over the next three. It’s like describing a brick in the wall as opposed to a whole house.

This is the technique that Robert Pirsig advocates in the cult book ‘Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance‘ when a student hits a wall thinking of a subject. He gets her into a smaller and smaller frame of thought till she gets down to describing a brick in the wall of a house. She suddenly finds that the focus help her write. A torrent of words gushes forth. But one can get tired of the brick. The small picture should lead to the big picture.

There’s a whole article devoted to the humble comma. What would we do without a full stop? Or a question mark for that matter? Like directions on a page, punctuation tells you where to stop, pause, think or idle. Without them our thoughts would be the jumbled mess they are in our minds, leapfrogging over one another, half-formed and incomplete. It isn’t enough to get to the end. The full stop may look inconsequential, but see what happens when it isn’t there.

From Guy Kawasaki’s blog, imagining a bigger market is the way to build one. There was an experiment back in college that proved exactly the opposite. The task was to build a stack of blocks by placing one on top of the other. That was easy. The tough part was estimating how many blocks could be placed even before touching a single one. Everyone came up with a set of figures. The timid ones were happy with three. The overconfident ones went all the way to fifteen.

Then the actual building started. The ones who said ‘three’ were able to stack seven and sometimes nine blocks before it tumbled whereas the ones who said fifteen maxed out at five and six. The lesson we were supposed to take away from the exercise was – be realistic about what you can achieve. Stay within your limits and you will achieve more than you intended. Throughout our life, we’re told to be careful, be reasonable and be objective. Standing apart is frowned upon. It’s a good thing that the world has mavericks.

The twist in the latest bubblegum romance is that boy-knows-girl-but-does-not-know-he-loves-her-and-vice-versa. If that sounds complicated, it isn’t. Watching it, I realised the only thing different was me. Incidentally, why are they called bubblegum romances and not, let’s say, toffee romances? Another one of life’s intractable mysteries. Like the Mills & Boon assembly line of romantic fiction no one ever admits to reading but library shelves tell us otherwise. I’ve known stern headmistresses pretending ignorance when caught red-handed with the evidence. Fantasy never dies, even when reality intrudes.

These films are the closest to a sure-fire hit formula. Take a young fresh-faced couple. Build the parents’ characters in line with the permissiveness of the times. Two decades ago, Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla eloped in ‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak’ when their families did not accept their declarations of love. That film ended in tragedy. Today, we have Imran sobbing on his mother’s shoulder when he realises Genelia is engaged to someone else in ‘Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na’. Signs of the times? Definitely. The parents are all laid-back, accepting and cool. It’s the kids who are confused about love. A complete change from the time when the kids knew what they wanted and it was the parents who were dumb.

The singer Prince reinvented himself as a logo. It didn’t wash. He was derisively called ‘The artist formerly known as prince’ or TAFKAP for short – not exactly a promotion from his earlier identity. Nike\’s swoosh is still the defining logo standard for the world and it was designed by a student. I looked up to see what she had done recently but apart from the news article where Phil Knight gave her a diamond swoosh ring in appreciation and Nike shares, there isn’t much about her 37 years later. Would be interesting to see what she has done professionally.

Another trend I notice of late is companies taking up the last two seconds of their commercials to sign off with the company brand. Hindustan Lever has changed to Unilever. From the leaf to the multiple-element ‘U’ Does it really make any difference to the consumer as to which company the brand belongs to? When the brand and the company identity are interwoven, like in Virgin and Apple, it does but otherwise I don’t think it matters at all.

Designing a distinctive logo is tough enough today. All the simple shapes are taken. Squares, rectangles, circles and triangles and ovals, the shapes familiar to us are all registered . The + sign belongs to math, Red Cross, Johnson& Johnson and medicine in general. Designers play with colours and graphic elements within these shapes but these logos are invariably complex and less memorable. To get some sense of the difficulty, try registering your name at any of the popular mail services. The quick identities are all gone. It’s easy knowing who was net savvy very early on, because they are the only ones with first names at Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

The same problem extends to registering domains. Having a phrase rather than a short name leads to unintended side effects. A Yahoo! was fine to begin with but Squidoo? What does a company like Squidoo do? And who comes up with these names? They all need logos, so I wonder what the briefs are. Would be hilarious sitting in one of them and keeping a straight face when the company sounds as if it is passing gas.

Technorati Profile‘

Ever since Shawn Fanning launched Napster, the music business has found its dominance threatened. Torrent sites are the biggest distributors of free music and CD sales have slowed to a trickle. Major labels have shot themselves in the foot by introducing restrictions like blocking the ability to copy music from the CD or play it across various devices angering music fans further. Then, Apple became the biggest retailer of legal digital music.

The internet has displaced established businesses who have reacted with dismay, threats and strong arm tactics to protect their copyrighted content. The RIAA’s (Recording Industry of America) biggest weapon is to sue everyone it can – possibly opening up a new revenue stream, but even that is now coming under scrutiny because they have sued grandmothers and people who had no clue as to what a torrent was.

Over the last few days, Hasbro has sued Scabulous, for copying Scrabble. When Scrabulous became a huge hit on Facebook , Hasbro decided to act because it was getting no revenues whatsoever from the game. The latest twist? Scrabulous has been removed from Facebook and morphed into Wordscraper. The official online version of Scrabble, however, has no takers.

Expect to get disintermediated by the net. Or figure out another way to drive value – like Prince did. But the music label still lost out on the deal, even as the artist laughed all the way to the bank.