A historic day

Later this evening, people all over the United States will queue up to the i-phone, one of the most highly promoted and publicised launches this century. We have to wait for a few months before it hits our shows leagally, and even then we aren't sure who the service provider will be now that AT&T is no longer a part owner of our client Idea Cellular.

Later this evening, the media planning and buying fraternity in Mumbai will be gathered at the Emvies, an awards show we have developed serious doubts about. Still, the Idea ringtone innovation just might win, who knows! It surely deserves to.

And lastly today is the day when Lintas India has finally become a 100% Interpublic Group owned agency. Welcome to a whole new world. "Turn it on".

An ode to the rains, in Khar and Torda

Funny flies around gaily. She has grown into a pretty petite little crow, and by the end of this week I think she will be able to get her own food. Here is a picture of her settled on a leaf in one of the palms outside my bedroom window in Khar, the little black spot somewhere on the right, taken just before the rains hit Mumbai on Friday evening.

The TANUVAS vets came over to Goa this weekend to inspect all the AWO's at the behest of the AWBI, and were overawed by the weather. We however have learned to take the rains, the beauty and the destruction they bring with them in our stride. Things grow in the rains, and that's all we really want to care about.

Here are my weekend phone pictures of the Torda forest, here is the jungle outside my bedroom window purpling in the settling dusk.




This one is an early morning shot of the forest on the right of our shelter, the left is just as dense!










This is the view from my backyard, where you can just about sight the rust and blue of the surgery past Noella, the canna and the lime and mango trees.









This is a little calf we are looking after, he got hit by a truck on the NH17, and was brought in laterally recumbent, now he can stand and walk around and also run a little.





And here's leaving you with a final glimpse of Torda from my verandah, the hills beyond and yellow traces of the ancestral home below. Next time images of some of my darlings in Torda, walking on two and four legs.

Watching baby birds fly

In an earlier post I asked you to spot the crow's nest in one of my tree shots. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. The nest will soon be history as Funny has finally learned how to fly! Her parents, Specky and Fluffy, with us for the past year and a half, raised two nestlings to adulthood last summer, while their neighbours were less fortunate and ended up raising only one survivor - a cuckoo! Fortunately Funny is doing well, she took her first flight a couple of days ago, just a tentative hop from branch to branch. This morning she soared up to the top of the chinars and reappeared only after a few minutes. I hope she learns to fetch food for herself before the rains really hit us with full force.

Every attempt I make to capture her on film has been thwarted by Fluffy, who comes swooping down on me if he sights me pointing at her with anything metallic. So instead, I leave you with this darling film to mull over on the weekend. Enjoy!

Magic from Bindass and a new tarot

Yesterday a large team from UTV made a two hour presentation to us on their new channel offering for young people called Bindass. Great insights, great showmanship during the presentation led by Zarina Mehta at her effervescent best, and a real live magician who passed on an electric current through his fingers on to our guys, and played some really good card tricks. The icing on the cake was a leave behind. Not the usual channel mug at all. This one is a nondescript black one that magically turns white after you pour something hot into it, and the words and logo then leap out at you!

Here is the before and after. I am having lots of cuppas today!













While on the subject of magic, I'm wondering how my tarot card has changed so much. Have posted what it looks like now on the right above the links, it's a far cry from my tarot posted two months ago, but definitely more credible this time. Go check out yours too again, and enjoy the change.

Sound of Music

Consider this. The things we remember most vividly are usually those we didn't see, that used a non visual sense - like one's first kiss (tactile), a fine wine (taste), unusually bad or good smells, unforgettable songs and speeches.

A sound that first opened my mind to nature's limitless possibilities, a sound I will never ever forget, is the whale song. While studying at Brisbane, I had volunteered with injured dolphins at Sea World and then hand fed wild dolphins at Tangalooma before moving on to a whalewatching trip at Harvey Bay. The first sight of a breaching whale and her calf was memorable no doubt, but it was the hydrophone that really got to me. Web 2.0 hadn't arrived back in 1998, and I have long since lost whatever I captured on camera. Till I found something on YouTube today.

Enjoy the sounds. If you know the significance of the song of the humpback whale and the fact that she never repeats a tune the following year, you will love this even more. In this video, her song has been set to native American flute music.

Creative copycat

I attended an unusual business creativity workshop on Friday which featured Carnatic music. I intended to blog about it on the weekend, and then discovered this writeup from a fellow blogger that has done excellent justice to the learnings, pictures et al, so let me be lazy and just give you the link.

http://indiadrant.blogspot.com/2007/06/carnatic-music-business-creativity.html

Meanwhile, here are two images of the trees outside my fifth floor windows in Mumbai, wet with the first raindrops of the season.











Try and spot the crow's nest. And more pix from the Goa monsoon later.

A flower for Pixie

"Kishmish is back.

It's one of those Biblical moments. Kishmish is our dog and she came to us nine months ago, from a local shelter called Friendicoes. As is the case with most relationships, the reaction to her went from ecstatic cooing to slight smiles to 'will you STOP peeing on the carpet.' All except in the case of my daughter Aalia, who has, on several occasions, clearly stated that she loves Kishmish (Hindi for 'raisin' - her colouring) more than her parents.

Almost a week ago, she disappeared. And since then, we have all been stumbling into or walking awkwardly around the big hole in the house.

Everyone, especially our maid, had their own conspiracy theory - attacked by the big kids down the lane, kidnapped, silenced, experimented upon - dark alleys I did not want to dwell on.

This morning, she came back. Apparently, as I thought, she had been hanging around the neighbourhood and seems none the worse for 6 days on the mean streets.

I'm off to get a new collar."

I have borrowed this little story from a blog posted by a friend nearly two years ago. I understand about stumbling into and walking around a big hole in the house. But my little one is never coming back. So starting tomorrow, I will place a new flower into a vase in my room every week, in memory of her.

In my heart and in my soul I know that she hasn't really gone away.

Experimenting

This is my first attempt at uploading a video onto my blog. Hope it works out. This 45 second film was made by young Kajal Srinivasan five years ago, using only computer graphics. We ran it foc on several channels during World Animal Week. Kajal also created our website www.goaspca.org which is now badly in need of updation. If you know of any young web designer, Goa or Mumbai based, who would like to do so for love and not money, tell me!

Shiva and the star tortoises

I spent this morning at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park at Borivli. A batch of over 2000 star tortoises confiscated by the customs department are being looked after there waiting for transport back to Tamil Nadu. I had gone to help arrange for this and inspect their condition. The staff were cleaning and feeding them well, all little babies poor things. They were laid out in plastic trays, about fifteen to a tray and two rooms were filled with these trays while two boys sat chopping vegetables into tiny bits for them, and another two were cleaning them one by one.

I didn't take a picture of them, since that wouldn't be right. But here's one of Shiva the tiger, majestically wandering about in the safari enclosure. Some years ago, he was a drab bored circus tiger rescued from Kankavali with all over skin infection. Now he is more handsome than John Abraham.

Time

I've been going over the events of the past week as they unfolded in my life.

And I think that there are some situations for which the time can never be right.

Or then again, it can never be wrong.

For these things, time....just comes.

I wonder what the next week has in store. Will He come quietly unannounced, or blazing in with the sound of trumpets and flashes of neon?

Or will He just...not come?

A diabetes pandemic

Here is a link to an interesting post I read recently. It's scary but I think it's true.

http://shajikrishnan.blogspot.com/2006/04/south-asians-eat-less.html

About a boy

A few months after I returned to media in 2003, we had a conference for all employees at then-still-new Northpoint. I remember Sujaya had set up a series of value search workshops for various levels, and I was required to drop in on each session and say an intelligent thing or two ('intelligence inside' being the theme that I had come up with for our journey going forward, disillusioned as I was then with the state of affairs I saw it - all hype and no substance).

In one of the juniormost groups, participants were required to briefly present to me their individual takeouts. One by one, they trotted up to the centre of the room, said their piece, took my feedback and so on. It was going rather well, till ...the boy. Tall, gangly, very young and extremely nervous, he froze on his words. Like a mute puppy he stared down at the floor then looked up at me and down again and kept this up for about three minutes while the whole room of thirty odd managers watched in silence. Finally, he blurted out that he just couldn't remember what he had prepared and asked to be excused. A mixture of sympathy and scorn circled the room, while the boy walked back to his seat dejected but not defeated.

Over the years, I have watched him grow. Physically he is now a strapping young man. Emotionally he is strong, confident and incredibly tenacious. Most of all he remains humble and cheerful especially under pressure. From number crunching beginnings, he has begun to appreciate the value of creative thinking and, along with his seniors, he has worked on some of our more innovative projects.

The most recent being the Bol Bindaas Bol campaign to promote asking for condoms unselfconsciously. His team created half hour programs for news channels which got the man on the street to speak up about his shyness on this issue. This won us two silver medals at the Goafest Media awards - for best use of tv, and for cause marketing.

Before a gathering of thousands of ad revellers, the boy and I walked up to the imposing stage set up on the silver sands of Goa to collect the award for cause marketing. As he proudly held it aloft and waved to the crowds, I stood by his side with a deep sense of gratitude. Once silent before an audience of 30, now smiling before an audience of 3000, the boy is now a man.

Can you tell who he is from this picture?

Trillion dollars vs lead poisoning

With the rupee having broken the 41 mark to the dollar, my exporter cousin is biting his nails while the rest of us rejoice at India becoming the 12th nation in the world to be a trillion dollar economy. Even as the Govt has lowered its estimate of annualised GDP growth down to 8.5%, there is a strong sense of 'future' everywhere - especially in the media and entertainment, telecom, money and travel spaces. We remain a country of contrasts, with more corruption and less discipline than we ought to have. Healthcare and education are still floundering even as copious money flows into infrastructure which shouldn't be a bad thing except for that fact that less than half of that actually makes its way into projects - the rest is quickly gobbled up by graft.

I am not a fan of the SEZ, and hope good sense prevails. Why is there this constant need to compare ourselves or try to copy China? State directed capitalism may work in the short run, but do we really want to poison off the next generation in doing so? 34% of Chinese children are reported to have higher than normal levels of lead in their blood. Lead is a cheap ingredient into most of the Chinese manufacturing units, its effluent resulting in alarmingly high levels of pollution. There are villages where all the kids have black and blue fingers, being slowly poisoned to death.

I met a British gentleman yesterday whose chose to come here to work rather than China, because he believed that we had more humanity. That was a nice thing to hear. Trillion dollars worth of money goes well with a billion minds that never say die, and a billion hearts that still seem to care. Mera Bharat Mahan!

Tarot says

I found this interesting widget on Meenakshi's blog. Her tarot card says she is the World. Here's mine. Go check out yours. While I wait for that unexpected help, water and guiding light....(didn't even know I was thirsty!) Though I think it's true I'm not the only dreamer, having just crossed paths with someone who sounds like he might dream along with me!

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

To everything there is a season...

..and a time for every purpose under heaven...
a time to plant, a time to reap...a time to rend, a time to sew.

I guess you all the know the full lyrics of this song.

This year we decided to plant a little, to take awards more seriously even though our big sister frowns upon this. So far we have won five: Two golds for branded entertainment - for Idea and ITC; two silvers for Bindaas Bol - best use of TV and cause marketing; and agency of the year at the Indy's.

Here is a picture:



Kunal and Himanka are missing from it, they weren't here when we clicked, but are here anyway. Seems like it's time to reap.

And then I hear about a friend gone astray - a kind soul who couldn't say no when he needed to, not to others and more important not even to himself. So for his organisation, it became a time to rend. But I hope that wherever he goes he will learn to sew up the tears in his moral fibre.

Media agencies didn't win enough media awards

I didn’t keep an actual tally – but it sure felt like the creative agencies – JWT, Contract, Rediff Y&R, etc walked away with most of the media awards. Among the media agencies, Mindshare got four and the rest of us – Madison, Lintas, Lodestar and Starcom got two each. I think Maxus and OMS got an award each.

But it was good fun. The sands were hot and the weather was hotter, but drinks flowed freely, and the under 30’s had a whale of a time. Akanksha and Hardik went parasailing, Sharad and Deepa went jetskiing, Venky and his gang of girls caught up with old friends from other agencies, and we all agreed that next year we should send in a larger contingent. With a hooter.

Goafest is a good idea. It goes beyond awards, and in doing so, sends out a subtle message. I hope it lives.

Divine discontent

When I was growing up at Ogilvy Benson and Mather in the eighties, the agency mantra coined by David Ogilvy himself was ‘divine discontent’.

The second half of the Goafest Advertising Conclave yesterday morning expressed a great deal of that. Rifts between business partners were exposed. Pent up pressures found unlikely outlets. Media agencies got pelted at by both creative agencies and media houses, and its leaders (us) came away rather bemused. Speaker after speaker expressed negativity and angst against the advertising industry, eventually concluding that it didn’t even act like an industry in the first place. Harish Bijoor, the suave and intelligent moderator, tried to draw up a way forward action plan nevertheless.

In other words, there was a lot of discontent, but much of it wasn’t divine, so I am a little worried. I hope that the ‘builders’ among us will prevail over the ‘scavengers’ and raiders’. What is needed is ‘discontinuous social value addition’ as succinctly described by Uday Kumar, CEO of Star News, and the ability to act as ‘change agents’ and not just commission agents, as Meenakshi Madhvani so aptly put it.

As Shanta Kumar of Saatchi and Saatchi said, some years ago holidays were about going home to grandma in native place. Now it means taking grandma away for a holiday. That’s the kind of paradigm shift we are all looking for, and whether it lies in re-integration of services or not, we sure have to find new ways to operate because we seem to be seriously pissing off our business partners in the media houses and the creative agencies.

Horseshit, and how to clean it up

It was a fairly lacklustre start to the Goafest Advertising Conclave. I got the impression that there were more journalists than senior media and advertising people in the room. If it weren't for Pratham Raj Sinha (CEO of the Anand Bazar Patrika Group) and his enlightening speech, we would all have come away thinking that the even the tip of the iceberg wasn't touched.

Taking the advertising industry from Rs 15000 crores to Rs 50000 crores may be no mean feat. But as Dr Sinha opined, our industry seems bent on playing a 'zero sum' game, with egos and factions taking precedence over a common agenda of progress and growth. Unless drastic steps are taken by its associations, and clear thought leadership emerges, we may not make it. I liked his analogy of the 17th century London city council fearing that they had such a problem of horses defecating in the streets, that within a short time the streets of London would be steeped in horse manure.

But how do we clean up the horseshit? Hopefully the panelists tomorrow will shed some light. In the meantime, I am going to bed pondering over the more encouraging words of Martin Sorell delivered by videotape - that Indian advertising has been growing at twice the rate of our GDP growth, and that we should not doubt our abilities so much. So true. Four hundred years later, the streets of London are still pretty clean, aren't they? Lesson : replace the horses, the horseshit will go.

Writing for the Goafest

I will be blogging for the Business Standard at the Goafest on the media side of the business. So watch out for my posts here and at businessstandard.com from 19th to 21st.

Meanwhile here is an article written for the festival concept which appeared in Financial Express last week.

Patriotism

Yesterday we did jury duty for the Goafest Media Awards. The Cannes rule of discarding patriotic votes was introduced - ie a juror cannot vote for work submitted by his unit or group company unit. So we had a good time all through the day while deciding on what was patriotic and what wasn't as we journeyed through over 100 entries. It was great fun. Ten media heads from competing agencies finding a common voice in praising or despairing of the country's best media work.

One of the entries featured the national anthem. CD stood up first, I quickly followed, and then the whole group. To me, it was the most impactful moment of the entire day. Ten vociferous jocular judges found three minutes to stand silently at attention in unison and respect for their national song. We didn't approve the entry, but no guesses for who won the patriotic vote at that moment.

I love being an Indian in India, I truly do.