आज दो छोटे से आलू पकाये थे
प्याज़ टमाटर भी तल डाले थे
जले थे क्या?
हाँ सिगरेट से लाल हुए,
और किचन मेरा धुआं धुआं
सुलगे जैसे कश भरे किसी ने,
और बस मुँह लगा कर छोड़ दिए
नमक डाला था?
ज़रा ज़रा सा,
सफ़ेद संग-ऐ-मर मर सा हाँ
दिल गलने सा, जब वो उबलता हुआ
कुछ कुछ यादों में जैसे छुआ
भूल तो नहीं गया मसाले?
हाँ-हाँ… खों-खों खांसते तक,
जैसे धौंक रहा हो पागल सा
फिर… क्या कुछ बना या नहीं?
क्या पता… रोम रोम यूँ तन गया
थकान से ली उबासी भरी
और तुम्हारी याद में,
चादर के भीतर मन गया
जलाने ख़्वाबों में,
दो और आलू…
For starters, I must admit that I haven’t written in a very long time. It takes time to think, gather notes, collect supporting facts, quote incidents, and finally draw a story. That said, I wonder how it would be if one could tell what he’s been through and what he has experienced in life. One might need to think and build around these experiences to churn out a well-written piece, but, if one is writing about oneself, he only needs to dust off the crowded corners of his mind and select the memories that need sharing. With this in mind, I will now proceed to tell you one of my stories – a story that can be perceived as a success story by some and failure by many. It is, however, a story from the dog-eared pages of my life.
Let’s rewind to my grad school days when I used to be an average guy, just like I am today. My college used to be one of the better colleges there were, albeit it would qualify as rather expensive one in the city. There I was, a guy from a service class family, studying with my business class classmates.
Due to a relatively lower headcount than other branches, all the batches used to stick together. And yes, we used to have the same college fights with other branches like everyone else.
Coming to the point of this story, it was the sports week in our college and the atmosphere was nothing short of electric. To clarify, I’m not a sports person. In my childhood, the only reason I was ever successful in taking wickets during a cricket match was that I was such a weird and slow bowler, that the batsman would get frustrated! That said, I was a known ‘celebrity’ in my life’s bubble nonetheless, so I thought it worth to try something. In any case, getting tanned in the sun would mainly cost me some fair and lovelies, so what the heck!
Like I mentioned already, our batches were close and most of the people around knew that I was asthmatic as a result of which dust and breathlessness could be extremely perilous to me, if not fatal. Add to that the fact that I had chosen to run a races without shoes, on a rusty red soiled ground. Some of my friends and seniors were concerned and tried to dissuade me from pulling such stunts, however, I had made my mind. Moreover, I knew that I could never run fast enough to win against the seven other people competing with me in the race (if you were to see me in person, you’d know what I’m saying here).
The fact remains that I decided to run. As the whistle blew, I could feel the other runners sprinting ahead. There were some who zoomed past me in a flash, and I couldn’t even see their faces. There were hordes of people cheering us and the atmosphere continued to remain rather tense and pumping at the same time (imagine a toned down version of bhaag milkha bhaag). I ran like I had never run before until I was nearing the end, all the while watching the fastest guy a few inches away from the rope. Then the second, third, and so on. Accepting my fate and terming it sheer predictability, I was close to giving up when I happened to turn my head and got a surprise. To my disbelief, there were two guys still behind me. Two fit and lean guys, whose body frames boasted of more sports activities than mine. I was no longer the last runner, like I thought, few moments ago. Now, I was that guy who ran with all his might. I still had a red face and the most difficult time breathing, but I now knew that if you and I were to be chased by a bear in the woods, the chances are, you would get to say hello to the bear while I would say goodbye and run 😛
Why did I share this story? Well, the point here is that we may not be perfect and perhaps we aren’t even meant to be so, but our imperfections and the determination arising from them are what lead us to create new and better versions of ourselves. They help us progress and do something new and achieve something better over and over again. It never was and never will be a good idea to give up or to think that you’re not good enough. Like a wise friend once said to me, “Try try, but never cry”.
Keep on running!
PS: If you know me enough, you will realise after reading a few lines, that the story is mine, but the writing is different. Thanks to the editor, for making a ‘Gangs of Wasseypur’ sound like ‘The Gangs of New York’.
You can read more of her writings here: Riveting reflections
If you’re reading this, you probably already know about the ‘mishap’, the ‘debacle’ the ‘mistake’ and whatever the people are calling it. To summarize the event, Sachin Tendulkar a.k.a ‘The God of Cricket’ tweeted about the inconvenience caused to him while traveling by the British Airways as given below:
The fans (read bhakts) went crazy when the brand replied back saying this:
If you’re eager to catch the glimpse of the fan outrage and other tweets, try going here.
Now putting the Sachin hangover aside for a while, let us revisit the event, but from a brand’s perspective. A celebrity felt he was not treated well by the brand, brand replied with a template like response… some people just found it funny, tried to troll it while the fanatics actually dragged the issue to a next level showing their outrage and labeling it as disrespect to their God by asking his full name and address.
Where did the brand go wrong? Was getting the details of a customer for solving his query a wrong thing to do? Maybe not… but now see this tweet conversation from HTC
The tweet isn’t really from a genuine celeb, but the tweets were coming rather frequently. Here is the reply by Jason Mackenzie, President of HTC America.
The cases actually aren’t exactly the same, but the point here is… can a brand give personal attention when needed?
The bigger your brand scales, the more important it is for you to manage its interaction. The British Airways already fares well on the Airline Industry Social Rankings, but here they could not recognize the conversation. To give another reference, this is not the first time British Airways has been in bad light… here is another example of BA’s good presence on digital, but a really bad CRM service.
If handled in a better way, the conversation must’ve been recognized, escalated to the correct CRM level and hence the whole event could’ve got contained in a less worse of a shape that it later became.
Sachin’s handle is one of the top 10 most popular twitter clebs in India and hence it was a predictable thing, that the issue might trend, or at least inflate to a greater extent, such that it creates a problem for the brand.
The situation was later controlled with an apology by the British Airways
and thanks to the fans, the hashtag stopped trending after 12 hours. The case is a lesson, to why a strong CRM is necessary for any brand and I hope people take some positive insights, rather than cursing BA even more… Off you go British Airways, go fly to inside the books of the MBA courses!
Twitter recently came up with a slight feature tweak. The latest ‘Like’ feature actually replaces the favorites section. Mostly it looks just like a renaming exercise and just a heart instead of the star (favorite)
BTW a lot of people missed the point of having the Favorite option on twitter. When you favorite a tweet you can actually go on the ‘Favorite’ tab of your twitter profile/dashboard and check out all the things you have favorited. People have been using the ‘favorite’ feature like a bookmark or ‘watch later’ function like that of YouTube, in a way that if there is a really interesting tweet, an account I may want to follow or a link on their tweet I can just favorite it and refer later.
It may make it slightly easier for people to understand the feature and use it much more frequently while it maybe a little helpful to the marketers for presenting the data as well as achieve increased number of engagement, use it as for their campaigns etc.
The twitter blog quotes,”You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.” This is one of the major points I have my disagreement with.Now, one might not like to refer the thousand things he/she has liked, but may want to revisit their favorites! Twitter being a microblogging platform attracts tons and tons of new messages and hence a ‘favorite’ will be rather useful than encouraging people to ‘like’ and put them in their archive/view later tab…
For all we know, certainly twitter engagements might increase, or a ‘retweet’ can be seen being replaced by a ‘like’ on many occasions. It’s a change for sure, but it isn’t really solving anything.
Opinions? What do you think?
Oh dear door, oh dear door.
What do you hold behind?
Do you protect,
or do you help all of them to hide…
Do you sleep all the daylight
and wake all the nights?
Can you hear all those people,
and still avoid what’s in front of your sight…
Oh dear door, oh dear door,
Tell me if we can be friends,
or will you hold the silence for more, till this noisy world ends?
I was a pressure cooker, not an electric stove or a microwave. Just a normal cooker. So you assumed you could increase the pressure for better results? I stretched myself, stopped bathing regularly in the sink and talking to my fellow utensils.
I’ve blown my whistle. I’ve done it several times. But, you’re expecting good food for you and your guests by building some pressure within me. You don’t know, after some more whistles I may burst open! But I am sure you’ll be really worried about the dirt I’ll make when the blast happens.
And you really won’t realize that I am useless and maybe dead, not because I was inefficient, because the work pressure crossed its limits…
Social Media was developed to bring people closer and build dialogues. But slowly it’s becoming a profession, and an obligation. The intent of normal conversations is changing and everybody is looking to be an influencer. In this race, people are missing their natural dialogues, which eventually makes them boring/monotonous. Tell me, haven’t you seen tonnes of quotes appearing from one of your friend not once but multiple times a day? It sometimes in fact becomes amusing to see such people become a wannabe rather than an influencer.
The following points will help you bring a balance to your social media, but yet again remember, it’s all about conversations.
Don’t be a Preacher
You may be good at your profession but remember, people go to the preacher only once in a while; people do not spend time with someone who is not approachable, friendly and has a boring serious tone all the time. Bring colours to your posts, keep calm, and have a mix of tone in your talks.
Listen to the People who are relevant to you
Of all the Social Media channels, especially twitter is built to listen to the people you want, and the 140 character limit makes it easy to consume a greater collection of content. Do not hesitate to follow the people of your domain or people who think can post good content, use Twitter Lists to maintain your favourite experts/friends/personalities, retweet the posts you like and when feels like appreciating, express it.
Take a look back, at least once a while
At least once a week take time to analyse yourself online, look for what people are saying about you, what all have you posted. There are many benchmark and analytics solutions available such as KLOUT and TWENTYFEET. Use them to filter inactive and irrelevant people on your social media network and acknowledge the ones who are contributors to your knowledge.
Risk is always part of any business, hence it is always considered good to keep the numbers in mind before making decisions. PR and Advertising for a brand is essential part of Marketing mix and one of the very unpredictable part too. ROI in promotional practices is very uncertain, though lot of tools and techniques are brought in to get certain figures but most of these are assumptions. For e.g: The AC Nielsen-Kantar product uses the TAM peoplemeters to measure and predict the TV viewership in India. The survey involves approx. 9,000 peoplemeters in different areas of India that track the activities of these viewers with peoplemeters. But, for a country with a population of 1.2 Billion+, which might also be more than 1/6th of the world, is this a right sample? The research provider might have their own logic and facts to prove it, but practically it does not seem viable to predict behavior with one sample to One hundred and forty thousand people.
This becomes even more complex with assumptions such as one Newspaper may have four readers and thus pricing is dependent on these assumptions. It is just wonderful how still Big brands put their money in these damn expensive ads, some even without media planning. The question here is certainly not about the recall value of ads on television or newspapers, the question is ROI, because these ads might be so expensive that they can inflate your product’s price by worrisome numbers, especially because it is a tough decision when to advertise and how much to advertise.
Kyle Bagwell in his paper The Economic Analysis of Advertising (Department of Economics, Columbia University , New York, NY 10027, August 2005) mentions that, ” advertising of one firm may steal the business and thus diminish the profit of another. This business-stealing externality raises the possibility that advertising may be excessive. In multi-firm markets, it is thus unclear, a priori, whether advertising is inadequate, excessive or optimal.”
This is where we talk about the Digital Mediums. The decision making in traditional medium suffers because of extrapolated figures. The digital analytics provide you right figures and ppc (pay per click) option avoids your payment for visibility, visibility their can be considered free, while if somebody shows interest to the ads, and clicks on them, then only they cost you something. Not only this, you do not have to wait for another expensive research and plan to analyse the OOH space or Spots on TV/Radio etc. you can target your audience according to gender, age, interest and what not! And the surety is quite better than the traditional mediums. Nitin Prajanpe, CEO and MD, Hindustan Unilever on a media conclave in 2011 expressed his evolved thoughts about how big digital could potentially get, in India, He mentioned that in the US, TV was still a lot bigger, but in the UK, digital had become bigger than TV, in media spend. Could such a scenario occur in India as well, he wondered?
To be continued… keep posted
The very next day of writing Part-I of this article I got a few answers, some harsh, hard hitting answers, please read through and don’t feel that I am off-topic because I’ll be describing this with a small incident that happened with me.
My father took me to the city railways ticket booking counter, we had the need of a ticket for traveling and my father didn’t believe in paying to the agents. He told me to wake up at 4.30 am the other morning and of course I didn’t intend to. I woke up at 5.30 when my father had already left at 5.00 am for the counter (The booking counter opens at 8.00 am while tatkal (urgent) bookings open at 10.00 am. The concept of wasting such time for railway tickets was sort of weird but after all I couldn’t debate with my father. I somehow reach at 7 am and holy God! My poor father was still 4th or 5th in the queue. Later I found out 3 to 4 of them were these ‘agents’ or rather I call them ‘mafia’ from now on.
When the time came for tatkal bookings, just 5-10 minutes before that some 3-4 well built figures appeared and they started to stand right in-front of my father. Startled and confused he said that he was ahead along with another gentleman who came early. The other agents (who were present from the morning) said they were in line from night 1 am but went to have food, and on my father’s protest they laughed and said if he wanted a ticket he should come at 11.00 pm in the night. My father lost his temper and broke the line to come to his true place, on which these muscle men started pushing and abusing him, when I protested he they said ‘make your father understand the way it works, or we would see you, we have every possible way to show you right place for your guts’. As usual the police constable was just watching and silent and on this hustle bustle just came to my father and told him to shut-up and stand wherever they said.
My friends, it is very unfortunate but situational that I felt like beating the hell out of people who tried to push and abuse my father who is in his late 50s and is highly regarded for his clean image and good behaviour in his work. He is a Class I Gazetted Officer and if he can go through this, anyone else can too.
Till the next two days, I had the feeling of ripping apart these so called ‘railway agents’ who are actually goons and mafias, whereas my father made me calm down with his ultra-spiritual talks. No, I do not think violence is the right way, I do not think we should become just animals but who will teach the lesson to these mafias? The Law had been just another onlooker with that constable standing mum. But we didn’t approach to file a police complaint, or any other legal action too, wasn’t that our part to do?
Violence and Non-Violence are very controversial topics and nobody can declare it as wrong or right. Where shedding blood and living with hatred is a curse for humanity on the other side not fighting with the suppressors will be cowardice. It is for you to understand and to make decision when to hold hand of humanity and kindness and when to answer someone with a punch. We’re Social but yes, very animalistic inside, we truly are, we ca but learn, how to not initiate the violence, how not to humiliate someone and make him commit a crime.
We Indians are conservatives, civil and religious and although we have had the creators of greatest and most comprehensive ‘the art of mating’ type of books, we don’t like to discuss sex, dating, live-in relationships or even a close-to topic like ‘undergarments’. But what we like to talk about is Films, Cinema, Songs movie Stars or Politics, no wonder when I wished Shahid luck for his upcoming release my poor twitter profile got a new follower and 3-4 re-tweets within an hour while #ShahidKapoor had approx. 500 tweets this week!
The recent TweetRoll of #ReplaceMovieNameWithChaddi just mixed both of these philosophies to create a different humour this week. As the hashtag simply conveys, you just need to convert a Movie’s name with ‘Chaddi’(underwear) fitting somewhere in it.
Some of the sample tweets and Facebook posts are really worth a glance like Ravindra Jadeja’s mock account tweeting:
The results were amazing and interesting with crazy Movie names all over twitter and few splatters of it on Facebook too. The hashtag #ReplaceMovieNameWithChaddi received 3330 tweets till Friday midnight and might even continue to reaching more milestones. For now this hashtag has broken some comparative milestone already. The most expected to rock hashtags like #Sachin the ace cricketer while if seen in the last 2-3 days this tag beats #NaMo tag for the hottest politician name by a few points, and #inflation by approx. 50% this week. Coming to cinema, by the last 24 hrs. it gives #Bollywood a neck to neck fight while trails down with few hundred hash tag counts from #SRK Shahrukh Khan’s popular tag.
The campaign source although unknown but seems to be first started more than a month ago with mere 60-70 posts and has taken a toll to make it into the news primarily in the last 2-4 days of this week that is yet to end. All izz well that makes you laugh and share it with others freely, if you feel pretty much inspired already, what’s your #Chaddi Movie?
A Thought Blog - By Prateek Devta 