Why write?

I have been writing since I was in early school. I thought of poems in a spur and sometimes wrote them down. I don’t think there was any poetic genius there, but the random words were much encouraged by dear family to whose amusement I would often recite them. I did that for a while, but then stopped probably when I grew up enough to realise that that wasn’t really poetry after all. After that I mostly stuck to prose – stories, articles, book reviews, editorials - apart from a bout of poetry in my mother tongue that struck in high school. But I have always been an impatient writer. I am in a hurry to put my thoughts down and find repeated readings of the same few hundred words drab and painful. I’ve never given much thought to either my own writings or writing in general. However, much focus on writing over the last one year, here at A and during the last two months over the consulting intern has made me ponder over how I write and now over why I must write. As painful as WAC was, I am now convinced it had some merit and I’ve decided I must write more often – and hopefully this blog will be more prolific – and this post is dedicated to why I think we must write.

Forces you to think deeper – Thoughts often sound better in one’s own head. Putting them down in a sentence somehow forces us to see the gaps that exist and think further to refine those thoughts. Writing our thoughts down, and reading them is subjecting them to our own scrutiny if not anybody else’s.

Lends structure – I am going to be chastised for consulting jargon here, but as much as the word is probably overused ‘synthesis’ is important. It’s important and useful to be able to crystallise what one wants to say in a few crisp sentences, in a manner that makes it easier for the audience to digest what one is saying. Writing forces us to structure our thoughts, put them into buckets and consequently makes them easier to read and comprehend for others.

Understand and accept – One reason to write is to communicate, and the previous point about being more structured helps one do that more effectively. But one needn’t always write to communicate. Sometimes we write just to express what’s going on in our minds. It can even clear the tangle of thoughts that has conjured in our minds and help us make sense. People often write down the pros and cons while making a tough choice. Writing lends clarity and helps one better understand and accept ones owns thoughts. 

These are some of the reasons why I think one must write -not just literary geniuses, and these may not be reasons that inspire literary geniuses -  but each one of us. 

The casualties of blurring lines

We could safely say that for a while now, society has challenged the traditional gender roles of the ‘Man’ venturing out of the house to earn the bread and better and the ‘Woman’ staying behind to cook, clean and look after the children. The extent, of course, varies and one would expect very different scenes in a thatched roof hut in a village in UP than in a swanky twentieth floor apartment at Cuffe Parade, but there is no doubt that the lines are blurring.

More and more women are pursuing ambitious careers. They are getting out of homes, getting themselves an education, getting jobs and matching steps with their male counterparts as they too get home the bread and butter. Well, more bread and better, but more is always good. And this is great, but there is something I think we must pause to think about. How many men do I see staying home, taking care of children or cooking daily meals?

Oh yes, that must sound like a preposterous question. Why would I ever expect that to happen? Rather, why should I expect something like that to happen?

I think we have two concerns to address. Firstly, the direction in which we are moving is a dangerous one. It leads to a future, where both husband and wife go out to work, the maid cleans the house, the cook prepares the dinner, and there is probably a hired help to teach the kid to cycle. This is a house, but not a home and would spells the end of ‘the family and home’ as we know it.

Secondly, in our bid to create equality we have developed a notion that certain tasks are inferior to others. Or, we could also say that the notion that certain tasks are inferior to others is what fuelled the need for a feminist movement in the first place, but what is certain is that we are giving out a message, that as a society, and I include both and men and women here, we seem to believe that the traditional male roles are better than the traditional female roles. If I were to ask the question – do you think the ‘male roles’ are more important than the ‘female roles’, the almost unanimous answer I’d expect to get is a very forceful ‘No’, but that is clearly not what we truly believe when the entire flux that is created due to this greater fluidity between gender roles is uni-directional. Women are vying for opportunities that were earlier restricted to men, but the reverse isn’t happening. Few men, if at all, would rue the fact that they can’t cook as well as the women around or wouldn’t know how to take care of their infant child.

I am not saying here, that men should stop working and stay home to take care of children, but we must recognise the fact that the roles men and women play may be different but are equally important, and we can’t do without either. True gender equality does not lie in women doing everything men can, it lies in men and women being respected equally for who they are.

QR codes - scanning their way into your minds

Brands cast advertisements on radio and TV because potential customers spend a significant amount of time here. They put up huge billboards on busy roads. They insert flyers in the morning newspaper. They even find their way into the morning newspaper. With all of these, the brand is trying to find its way to where it expects its potential customers to be, and then exploit that opportunity to create an impression in their minds, stay there and eventually find a place in their lives. With more and more people spending more and more of their time on electronic devices, it was obviously not long before brands figured that that was the new place to be. And so it’s no wonder that the new buzzword of the 21^st century has been ‘Digital Marketing’. Digital marketing has given brands a brand new canvass to splash on, and they have made the most of it. Or maybe a tad too much of it, if one were to look at it from the perspective of the end recipients, who are often annoyed with the deluge of promotional mails, texts, advertisements which keep them from the interesting video that want to watch on Youtube or ads which pop-up while they play Fruit Ninja on their smart phones. All in all, digital marketing has become a two edged sword and if you don’t do it right you run the risk of pushing customers away rather than pulling them closer.

So how do brands exploit the great potential that Digital marketing has to offer to find a place in their consumer’s lives but do so in a way that is not intrusive?

One of the best innovations in the sphere of digital marketing, in the recent past has been the use of QR codes for greater customer engagement, and these abstract black and white square tiles, I think, have the potential to be the one of the biggest game changers in Digital marketing in the near future. QR codes, originally used to track parts in vehicle manufacturing have become very popular in consumer advertising. QR has allowed brands to enhance customer experience and in a non-invasive way. QR codes are being used in virtual super markets in Korea, where customers can simply scan the QR code for the products they want to buy and the shipment is delivered home. Starbucks is using QR codes to reduce customer waiting time. ^[1] Angry birds had an eye-catching ad, which was basically just a QR code that took you directly to the download page. ^[2]

QR codes have great potential and provide multiple avenues to engage with customers, be it attracting customers to the brand’s websites, promotional offers that have something on offer for every scan, or making the final step of actually buying the product easier. And they are biggest selling point is that they are non-invasive. They make the customers come to you rather than going the other way round, which has three major advantages – one, it makes it easy to identify interested customers and hence the market that the brand might want to target, second - saves on a lot of money spent on aimless advertisement, and third – is a great alternative to the intrusive e-mails, texts and pop-up ads.

To sum it up, I think QR codes can be the next big thing in Digital marketing. It’s just a scan away.

Books I like -1

I just finished reading this delightful book – A man without a country by Kurt Vonnegut. It is by far the most delightful book I’ve read in a long long time and like I often feel, it made me wish I’d met Vonnegut before. But God is kind and life is long, so I shall be able to make up for lost time. I guess.

The book is short, funny and easy to read. It’s like Vonnegut is talking to you and about nothing in particular. He’s somebody who likes to talk, just as he admits in the book and is refreshingly blunt. It won’t take more than an hour to read.

 These are some of my favourite quotes from the book.

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different”

“You think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our number system. Imagine doing long division in Roman numerals”

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

“Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

“A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.”

“Vietnam only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”

Sun, sand and no surf

I like travelling. I like the going to new places, meeting new people, pretending to understand cultures and all. Now that I've grown up enough, I also like it, because it's considered  a valid excuse to not do everything you don't want to do and not pick up all the calls you don't want to pick up. So anyway, I recently went on this trip to Rajasthan, and apart from finding excuses to avoid work and not pick up calls, I clicked a couple of pictures which I quite like. Well, I also had a lot of local food, quite a lot of which was vegetarian and still good, but that later.

This one, at some lake in Jaisalmer is my personal favourite. The tranquility of the water shaken by the sudden flight of the birds was beautiful. 

You can see the impending sunset in the golden hues reflecting on the sand. 

Now what kind of a photographer, even amateur, would I be if I didn't get a camel silhouettes against the setting sun pic? 

If I had enough people reading my blog, I would announce a prize for guessing if this was sun was bidding adieu or saying hello. 

There were so many peacocks! All roaming around without a care in the world. One even made the driver bring the car to a halt with a jolt as it decided to come out of a bush without notice

and cross the road. This was all in a village which inhabits people of the Bishnoi community, bishnoi standing for 29, for the 29 commandments they follow religiously. One of the 29 is that they don't hurt plants and animals, which is mainly why these beautiful animals can move around so freely here. The world definitely has a lesson to take from this seemingly community, whose villages got roads only a decade back and who still live in mud houses.

And a blog about Rajasthan, wouldn't be complete without a fort now, would it? 

Musings of a tired mind

First there was the pressure to succeed - to clear JEE, to get into another good college, to get a job and so on. Then there was the pressure to be independent. You must not depend on anybody for anything. You're always alone in the end. There came the pressure to be confident and composed at all times and the pressure to know what you want. How can you be confused? And sometimes I can almost feel the pressure to be happy. And if you can't deal with any of these then it's simple, there's just the pressure to wear your masks well. 

My take-aways from Farhan Live

Okay, I have to agree, this is not what people typically take away from concerts, so please, bear with me. 

1.       I hate concerts. There, I said it. I know it’s an absolutely blasphemous thing to say, especially considering I am a 22 year old college student. But I truly hate concerts. I hate the crowd, I hate having sweaty people all around me. I hate the blaring speakers which cause your ears to stop functioning for the next 4 hours. I hate waiting in the neverending queue to get in, and then standing on the 0.5 sq feet of space one gets for two hours till the concert actually begins. And since the music, which is supposed to make it all worth it and probably even does to some, somehow gets drowned below all of those annoying things  and when I recall the 3-4 concerts I’ve attended all I remember is the crowd, the humidity and my aching legs, I think it’s time I accept I hate concerts.

2.       Apologies are not redundant. I have often felt that once the act is done, you can’t take it back and so no matter how profuse or genuine the apology is, it’s useless. But that’s not how we humans work. Even though the words don’t actually make a tangible difference, they make us feel better. The consideration of the other person somehow ameliorates the irritation. So whether it is Farhan Akhtar apologizing for starting the show late or the girl standing behind you who just elbowed you saying she was sorry, they are necessary and they make a difference. 

Happiness is ephemeral and meant to be so. This realization is mostly due to the lines of this beautiful song - Chaahat ke do pal bhi mil paaye duniya mein yeh bhi kam hai kya. The idea of what exactly is happiness has always eluded me. I have never been able to decide how exactly you decide whether you’re happy but at some level always believed it had to be something lasting, with some quality of permanence attached to it. And hearing those lines, with this cool breeze blowing into my face for the fraction of a minute, it dawned on me that I had got it all wrong. Because for those thirty seconds, I was happy, in spite of the crowd around, the humidity, and the pain in my legs and I remember that moment. So it’s not as ephemeral as it seems after all. And this one's probably a tad too profound to be based on one line and a whiff of breeze, but such things just come to you, don't they?