~ Workshop of a chronic thinker ~
February 22, 2012 Leave a comment
Look what I found on the Santacruz station bridge! I also spotted a Homer Simpson pair and another one titled ‘Bumpy Thursday’ with a Mr.Bump character. This was what I picked up. It cost me all of Rs.20.
Grumpy Monday themed socks for Rs.20 at Santacruz station bridge
*Cross posted to Divadom.
February 21, 2012 1 Comment
What do Siddharth Mallya and Arindam Chaudhuri have in common? If Ayesha Takia met Rashmi Bansal, what might they talk about? Let’s add Dhaval Valia to the melee. Any clues?
This month, I take a look at the grittier, seamier side of social conversations – public shaming as a social media tactic. Here’s an excerpt:
While on one hand, the powers-that-be worry about how to manage this public spewing of individual opinion, the system holds its structural integrity on one premise – the fear of public shaming. All the major parties in the above case used public shaming as tactics. The question was simply who the public at large, decided to side with.
Individuals are starting to feel the power of the media. Public shaming has proven mighty effective when it comes to breakdowns with brands and companies. Tweeting about poor service and other complaints, gets much faster response than call center chasing & other complaint registrations. A corporate entity that fails to respond or responds carelessly, can expect the issue to flare up into something much bigger and harder to control.
The article is titled ‘Public Shaming As A Social Media Tactic‘ and is posted at Social Samosa.
Image via Stuart Miles on FreeDigitalPhotos
February 21, 2012 1 Comment
They say a woman learns to dress from her mother. Actually, mum’s style is very different from mine. She’s a good dresser but unlike me, she tends towards minimalism & sobriety in colour and accessories. Remember this Ideart project on leaves? Mum and I went on a weekend shopping spree this Saturday and here’s what she wore:
Some things to note:
Mum wears:
* Cross posted to Divadom.
February 21, 2012 2 Comments
Last week, Payal & I concluded a two-day workshop for Avignyata Inc., a social media agency. The Avignyata team included client servicing executives, designers and content creators for different social channels. The objective of our workshop was to understand the anatomy of a brand, give it a distinct voice, devise a content strategy and create engaging content across relevant channels.
The conversations that came out of it, took me back to my days as a business analyst. I spent most of my last year as a corporate employee, with a young, vibrant group of people with excellent ideas. My role there, was to focus those thoughts, tie them into coherent structures, develop them into actionables and devise tangible metrics to assess them.
So much of good marketing is about fresh, innovative ideas, no matter which aspect of the function you look at. I find young people are possessed in abundance with these. What some of them find missing is the tools to organize them and take them to fruitful conclusions. This of course, is something that I have and continue to develop with experience and a natural maturing in thought. When it comes to social media, the early adopters of the channels are easily the youngest, brightest sparks. But the ability to convert the knowledge of these channels into business strategy doesn’t always follow automatically.It requires an understanding of basic business realities, domain understanding, content creation skills and a working knowledge of the social media.
Since our combined repository of experience and skills covers these, Payal & I are conducting a series of workshops, lectures and other training services. A big thank you to Moksh Juneja, for getting us to work with the Avignyata team over the last week!
Pictures of the Avignyata workshop are posted to our Facebook Page.
February 20, 2012 Leave a comment
The flowers that the boy gave me, the day he proposed.
February 20, 2012 9 Comments
I spent yesterday at Barcamp Mumbai 8. This has been my first unconference in nearly 2 years. My last Barcamp was over 4years ago, overrun by techie discussions and only drew me because it had a teensy segment for bloggers. BlogCamp evolved as an offshoot of that.
Yesterday was a pleasant return. For one, the event that usually struggles on time, breezed through the multiple sessions, speakers and classrooms easily. There were 4 classrooms in the ultra-posh Mukesh Patel ….. The wiki was flowing with colourful post-its even at 10:15 a.m., which is when I got there. And most delightfully, the subjects spanned a diverse range of intellectual tools, hobbies & interests & scientific applications in fun real life ways. One had to be truly ruthless to pick sessions to attend since there were so many good ones, several happening simultaneously.
Off the top of my head, these are the ones I attended:
Interesting titbits from the day:
I entered Rehab’s session late, having misread the wiki schedule. It was interesting and fun, though occasionally highjacked by someone who claimed that genocide made him happy. Quick tip – if you’re demonstrating or talking without a powerpoint, avoid the big conference room. The larger crowd is harder to maintain & engage. Rehab did a great job though and showed off a mind technique that will help anyone from an artist to an executive stuck in a business dilemma.
Harrish is always entertaining and touching in equal parts. His first talk was about the film AMEN being denied a certificate by the censor board and he did a superb job of bringing out the inconsistencies in their policies. His second talk though, was the one that really had people talking. He was speaking of how gay people are treated in India, when partway through, he was interrupted by a very fervent member of the audience who insisted that,
“According to Hinduism, you can only have sex with your wife, inside a closed room. Only after marriage and only for procreation, not for fun.”
The uproar that followed had to be taken out into the corridor to make way for the next speaker. The episode illustrated one of the reasons that unconferences are a great way to seed ideas, bring out thoughts and get people talking, sometimes about controversial and difficult topics.
My session on ‘Social Content’ happened on the fly. It’s been years since I spoke completely extempore, as I did yesterday and it was a great experience. I was actually hoping to create interest for my upcoming series of blogging workshops, beginning with ‘Unboggle The Blog‘. But instead, I found myself naturally touching on several related but disjointed thoughts about this space. My 20 minute, stream-of-consciousness ramble imitated the way we consume and add to social content, on our Facebook Walls, our Twitter timelines and all out other channels of social media. I touched on the artificiality of traditional media, social media as an extension of normal, human behaviour, how trolls are mirror daily social miscreants experimenting in their own ways and that we’re all creators & consumers of social content. Here’s the talk:
I missed the #TWSS talk by Aditya Sengupta since the room was so packed that even the door couldn’t be opened. From what I hear, it was a tongue-in-geek demonstration of an algorithm used to generate and viral #TWSS (That’s what she said). But the geek in me found a corner in Anubha Bhat’s talk on diagnosing bipolar disorders using algorithms.
I’m not going to dwell on how great it was to catch up with old friends again, since that’s a given in any gathering. Yesterday was more than just friends catching up and people networking. It really was a meeting of minds, a true sharing of ideas. A big thank you to the Barcamp team for pulling off such a great day!
February 18, 2012 4 Comments
The thing to do with a really short hairdo is to wear lots of make-up OR big earrings.
It helps people realise that you’re a woman. (especially after this disaster)
Leaf earring on the left: Accessorize, InOrbit Mall, Malad
Butterfly earring on the right: Threads n’ Homes, Bandra West
* Cross posted to Divadom.
February 17, 2012 Leave a comment
Crisp, crunchy puri made of maida, not sooji.
Thick, clotted tamarind-date chutney, sweet and sour both at once.
Chilled, green, spicy mint water
A handful of mashed potatoes, boiled watana & white chana.
I could die happy.
* Also served at Plain Salted.
February 17, 2012 1 Comment
All of 2011 went by without my being able to be part of a single unconference. Which is why I’m really looking forward to this weekend. Sunday, 19th February 2012, will see the first BarCamp Mumbai of 2012.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of unconferences, these are completely democratic gatherings of minds, coming together to share and discuss their ideas on various things. BarCamp in its early days, was an open forum on technology, especially the IT & networking end of it. BlogCamp emerged as a specialized community from within the BarCamp framework. This space has seen much discussion and evolution through the course of various BlogCamps.
I’m going to be attending a BarCamp after nearly 4 years. The agenda has evolved considerably, to keep up with what’s hot and new in thinking minds. A quick look at the sessions list promises that the day will touch on restaurant reviewing, origami, online communities, yoga, urban commuting and graphology among other things. These will continue to be added on, as more participants sign up.
Here are the things you can do at BarCamp:
And just in case you missed the bold, underlined hint above, I’m going to be addressing a session on something close to my heart these days – Social Content. 
Here are the details:
BarCamp Mumbai February 2012
Date: Sunday, 19 February 2012
Time: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Place: Mukesh Patel School of Technology, Management and Engineering,
Along the Mithibai-NM college road, Vileparle West, Mumbai
Facebook: Confirm your attendance and invite others.
Wiki: Register your session and check out the agenda so far.
February 17, 2012 4 Comments
This is a book review for BlogAdda. The blurb of ‘7 Secrets of Shiva‘ by Devdutt Pattanaik says,
“Smeared with ash
Draped in animal hide
He sits atop the snow-capped mountain
Skull in hand
Withdrawn, with dogs for company
Destroying the world with his indifference
He is God who the Goddess shall awaken
His name is ShivaLocked in his stories, symbols and rituals are the secrets of our ancestors. This book attempts to unlock seven.“
This is not the first time I’ve read Dr.Pattanaik’s work. I immensely enjoyed ‘The Pregnant King‘ and ‘Jaya‘ enjoys a place of prominence on my windowsill book collection. I’ve also been following his articles and blogposts.
A lot of things draw me to Dr.Pattanaik’s writings. I have a dispassionate relationship with religion, customs and the concept of God & gods. I find it tiresome to labour through the reverence & perceptions that those of religious fervour, add to them. Most writing on religion reads like a priest’s preaching. I want to read about faith, belief & customs from an objective perspective and not from inside a “You must revere this or DIE!” mindset. All that I’ve read of Dr.Pattanaik’s writing so far, has matched that need. It has been refreshing to read his thoughts and even old stories, expressed without a fundamentalist ‘This is a God so we don’t question anything he/she does.’ attitude. I’m afraid 7 Secrets Of Shiva did not convey as much to me. It was as dry and preachy as the aforementioned religious treatises that I’ve taken much care to avoid.
Secondly, the other books I mentioned (Jaya & The Pregnant King) contained a fair degree of the author’s own analysis of beliefs. His articles often carry forward an idea from mythology and apply it to realities of our modern times. But 7 Secrets of Shiva seems to be no more than a collation of several floating stories about Shiva, with no sign of the author’s objective intellect showing.
There is a definite difference in tone from his earlier writing and this book. I used to think of Dr.Pattanaik as a keen, scientific observer of beliefs, myths and their relationship with human cultures.His earlier writing felt like a conversation between one intelligent, rational mind and another. But 7 Secrets of Shiva makes me feel like a stern-faced, elderly priest is frowning down on me while preaching from his dusty, religious texts.
Most notably, every Pattanaik work I’ve read so far has been beautifully illustrated by his own simple, distinctive sketches. I couldn’t find a single one in 7 Secrets of Shiva. Instead the book contains plenty of black and white photographs & paintings. The starkness of this is only compounded by a large font size, the kind you usually see in children’s books. Where is the quality I’ve come to expect from a Pattanaik book?
I get the feeling that I’m not the intended audience for this book. Perhaps it is a book for those completely unfamiliar with Hindu mythology and want a ready primer on the Shiva myth. Even so, I would rather recommend a simple Amar Chitra Katha over the dry, heavy tome that is 7 Secrets of Shiva. For the first time in my reading life, Dr.Devdutt Pattanaik disappoints.
Here are three other BlogAdda book reviews:
XX Factor
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What say you?