Friday, December 28, 2012
Being Digital
Friday, August 31, 2012
Mythos and Logos
Saturday, August 25, 2012
My Father's Son. My Son's Father.
Friday, August 17, 2012
The Big Bucks School of Advertising's Coming Big Test
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Et Tu Mr. Rajan?
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Proud To Be Indian
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Downshifting
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
The Lower Upper Class
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
The Calculus of Change
Monday, August 6, 2012
Boredom - The Creativity Engine?
Friday, August 3, 2012
The Second Education Revolution
Thursday, August 2, 2012
A Tin Ear and The Clown Prince
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Beyond the Brand: The Meme?
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Googlewhack
A googlewhack is a word or phrase which when googled results in the reporting back of just a single link.
Recently two googlewhacks got killed: coelcavnth sharpner and rarebitnutters.
What killed these two quite delightful googlewhacks is the fact that the Economist mentioned them in an article. Lo and behold, google these phrases today and multiple links are reported back. Mostly of articles talking about them.
To my mind this is a good example of the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty,a principle that came to us first from the annals of quantum physics.The principle simply stated is that an event can never be observed without changing the event itself.
At a personal level, the Heisenberg Principle came to my mind when an old friend opined about this blog as being my effort to impress an ex-girl friend - a continuing labor of love, so to speak, While my objective is simply my own education and edification. And hopefully the entertainment of all my friends.
Simple lesson to be derived out of all this is to fine-tune your communication to account for the Heisenberg Principle as an archer accounts for the wind.
PS: If anyone of you discover a new googlewhack please do let me now. I will endeavor to kill it by publicizing it on this blog.
Monday, July 30, 2012
The Great Gatsby Curve and the Dying of the American Dream
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
"Life is much shorter"
Friday, July 20, 2012
Leadership without leaders
Thursday, July 19, 2012
The Burning Platform
Monday, July 16, 2012
Can anyone succeed in a failing world?
The period from 900 to 200 BCE is called the Axial Age. This was the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jermiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mancius and Euripedes. It is in the Axial Age that humanity discovered it's deepest truths. Alas these truths then lead to the perversity that are the religions of the world. While the truth is that every individual is indestructible because he is the microcosm of everything that existed, does exist and will exist, most religious practice is about seeking salvation for the self. Truth is that seeking success for the self is pointless because the self is already the embodiment of supreme success. The Human Project is about the creation of a successful world. Those who connive, trample, ignore, corrupt and slight to achieve the delusion of success, succeed only in besmirching the mirror in which they will one day, worn out by their misdirected endeavours, seek their self. The simple truth is we are all in it together. When the devil takes the hindmost, it is all of us who are cast into hell.
You might think it would be very burdensome to be bothered about the success of everything and everyone around us. Au contraire. On those very rare moments that my being grasps the eternal truths, all worries about the rat race and the Joneses fall away and I soar as the magnitude of the Human Project comes into view. So much to do! So little to worry about!
Friday, June 8, 2012
The Renaissance Generation?
Being fifty plus has its joys.
I am now beyond feeling old. Like Bob Dylan I can kick back, marvel at my repose and sing.
“Ah I was so much older than, I am younger than that now” (from the song “My Back Pages”)
No change can befuddle me. I have crossed the technology and pace-of-life chasm many times overs and still earn a living telling people how to market to the young. Something about my generation’s rebelliousness in the 60’s and early seventies provided us with a reservoir of saviour faire.
An insouciance that celebrates both youth and wisdom while dismissing both as imposters.
“I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.”
- Extract from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot
Friday, May 18, 2012
The Rise of Slime
The vast ecosystem of our seas and oceans is being altered fundamentally by overfishing, industrial pollution and the waste of the human race run amuck.
While many a species of sea creatures head towards extinction one thrives - the jellyfish. The jellyfish species thrives because it feeds on the pollutants and waste we dump into the sea. Compounding this is the fact that jellyfish also feed on the eggs and the young of the predator species that feed on them. And so as the population of jellyfish multiplies the population of species that could have kept a check on it dwindles. Setting up a vicious cycle that ocean scientists have termed as 'the rise of slime'.
Think of jellyfish as the corrupt. Think of the pollutants and the waste as acute materialism. Think of the species that hunt jellyfish as the honest and the upright in society. And think of the attack of the jellyfish on the young of these species as the insidious corruption-fuelled attack on the values of our children and our young.
To use another metaphor, humanity's race to extinction is not just being fueled through the inexorable running down of the hardware - global warming et al- but an insidious attack on the software- the corruption of the human spirit.
Bad as the diagnosis is, the eternal optimist in me believes that the prognosis is not all doom and gloom. Because even slime wants to evolve. All of life arose from a primordial slime. Unfathomable are the ways of this universe- an endless cycle of destruction and creation.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
(reclamation)
Hard day's night waits/
For the last flight out/
Free beer fails/
To stir the soul/
(as it used to)/
Bemused I look around for/
Amusement/
(the soul's drug of easy resort)/
I spy! I spy!/
Sparrows! A troika no less!!/
In this anodyne plastic wasteland!!/
Could it be a fey designer's/
Half-wit touch?/
Or possibly/
(oh stirring thought!)/
Nature reclaiming,/
Inch by slow inch,/
Her own
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