What Happened to US?

This is a project by Dan Perjovschi, a Romanian visual artist who mixes drawing, cartoons and graffiti. As his first solo exhibition in the US, he has covered a huge wall at the MoMA with graffiti and cartoons. It’s a humourous, poignant and scathing commentary on our times.

The best one to my mind was a dialogue between a figure saying “free speech” and another facing him saying “nice shoes”.

Iconography

Book from the Ground, an installation by Chinese-American Xu Bing is an on going compilation of icons used in modern society. As he says, icon traditionally meant objects of worship. Today, it’s come to mean company logos and instruction symbols. He’s doing a “Book from the Ground” which tells short stories using only icons. Extremely interesting – check it at his website xubing.com

What is the meaning of Jugad?

That was my four cents worth addition to a very interesting exhibit that’s been put up at the Museum of Modern Arts (or MoMA, as it’s commonly called). The exhibition titled “Automatic Update” reflects on the confluence of design art and technology. One of the installations called “33 questions per minute” put up by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invites all visitors to type out a question which it first flashes on an LCD display. Then a computer algorithm takes random words from different questions and combines them to form new questions which are perfect syntax but complete nonsense. I saw some like “How hot is the speed of pumpkin?” or a beautiful “Why is sex faster than dreams?”

As the write up to the installation said, the installation adds more dimensions to the age old question of how long will it take for a chimpanzee randomly hitting at a keyboard churn out Hamlet. Maybe because of my question now, hamlet will jugad his way through his foes in the Automatic Update version of Hamlet being written out the MoMA

! India Everywhere !

Edison, New Jersey is about 60 km from New York. Feels more like 60 km from Ahmedabad.

The Sound of Music

Last year all the casinos here changed from using coins to dollar bills on their slot machines. But they ensured that the recorded sound of coins keep playing on the machines. It seems people get enthused listening to that sound. A soundless game with dollar bills is an emasculated version of the real thrill – that of a constant promise of winning a pocketful of money. And coins jingling are the strongest signal of that thrill.

The Great Gamblers

Atlantic City in South New Jersey was the capital of the gambling world until the mob decided to move a large chunk their business to Las Vegas, then a desolate desert town in Nevada. But Atlantic City has made a come back of sorts. I am given to understand that there are about 15 casinos here today, drawing over 100,000 people on an average summer weekday.

Old, retired empty nesters jostle with young compulsive gamblers on slot machines, and on poker and blackjack tables. Ostensibly they are all there to have a good time – spend a day or two at some of the plush casinos, eat, drink and gamble some money. The casinos are only too happy. They offer fancy rooms at heavily discounted rates and put on great food. They also keep rates for their movies-on-demand on TV very high and don’t have swimming pools or any other typical five star luxuries. This essentially ensures that customers spend a large part of their time at the playing table.

The playing area itself is always lit up in neon and bright spotlights with a constant night time feel and comfortable temperature. It is the same 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It lulls one into a state of timelessness; sitting at a table you won’t know the difference between 1 pm and 1 am and 7 am. You are just focused on getting the right hand or hoping that your slot machine combination wins you a jackpot. And you keep playing one more game after one more game. The drinks keep coming, the bonhomie is infectious the sound of coins jingling in the slot machines keeps you feeling good about yourself and it’s very easy to forget that nobody ever wins against the house - Harrahs Entertainment, one of the largest casino operators in the US has seen its stock shoot up and is now being traded at an all time high.

The Wait is Almost Over

99 Dollars – that’s what you’ve got pay somebody to stand in a queue for your iPhone on the day of its launch. The marketing blitz has started. Ads (quite ordinary) are being bombarded; the stores have started the tease and there is anticipation in the air. The wait for the iPhone is almost over.

There are reports of young people trying to get jobs at Apple stores just so they can lay their hands on the iPhone before their friends. Stocks of Cingular-AT&T which has an exclusive deal to sell iPhone packages are up and analysts forecast a 4% subscriber churn in the first three months from other service providers to AT&T.

There is unanimity that Apple will simply not be able to meet demand for the iPhone, at least in the short term despite ramping up production to over 4 million sets in the first year. As is always the case, there are also naysayers who feel that Nokia, Motorola etc. will soon come up with new models which will be more competitive than the iPhone – especially since they know mobiles better than Apple.

Since I am in Atlantic City and the casinos’ spirit is all pervasive, here’s my bet - the iPhone will change the way mobiles are used. It will go through the usual hiccups before taking flight but eventually it will.

And it all starts on Friday, June 29 at 5 PM.

To Market, To Market

Spent day at a flea market. Like most other things here, a super-sized one. It’s amazing how many people drive over 100 miles to visit a flea market.

It was good old-fashioned commerce on a bright, sunny Saturday. There was negotiation, bargains to be had and deals to be made. On everything from trinkets to electronics to Playstation games.

Like in any good market, we fought with one vendor who tried to con us, got thrilled with another who gave us a five dollar trinket free and generally had a good time spending money. One of the definitions of commerce is a transaction where both the buyer and seller walk away feeling they got a good deal. By that definition, yesterday’s flea market was a roaring success.

Now we are off to experience yet another avatar of capitalism. The casinos of Atlantic City.

Yoga Camp USA

The Swami Ramdev juggernaut rolls on. He is conducting a two day camp in New York on June 30 and July 1. Registration fee - $100 and $200. Sponsored by Sahara One and Aastha Channel, both available on DirecTV. Tickets available at Patel Video and Shreeji Grocery!

65 Feels Like 60

That's what the weather report says about today. The first week I spent here saw cold weather and thunderstorms on two days – though the thunderstorms here lasts an hour and is really intense. Then, sunshine. Bright, warm, toasty sunshine.

It also became clear why weather reports here are such a big deal. Every publication, channel, radio station and portal carries it and everybody talks about it. As the newspapers here say, “65, feels like 60”. That left me with two things to get used to at one shot. Firstly, convert Fahrenheit into Celsius. And secondly, try to understand why 65 degrees should feel like 60. That’s supposedly because of the wind chill factor. Coming from sweltering Mumbai, it takes getting used to – bright sunshine and hot under the sun with a really chilly wind blowing. That’s obviously why people here worship the sun.

The Meeting Place

Doesn’t matter how many times I see Times Square, it continues to awe me. They say, if you stand in Times Square for 15 minutes, you’ll meet the entire world. Couldn’t be said better.

Celebrating movies at the Grand Central

The Grand Central Terminal, one of the main train stations in New York is striking not just in terms of how beautiful the building is, but how wonderfully preserved. The architecture itself is wonderful with a huge main concourse leading up to the ticket windows and a then again gigantic doors opening on the platforms.

Part of the concourse, I understand is usually let out for public exhibitions. The last few days has seen “City of Giants – Skylines of Fantasy”, an exhibition celebrating New York in movies. The exhibition coincides with a book on the same subject which has just been released. It features most of the memorable New York movie moments; from the old King Kong to Taxi Driver to Doing the Right Thing to You’ve got Mail. It has rare pictures of these movies being shot in various New York neighbourhoods, quotes from various writers and even a giant United Nations building background against which Cary Grant was shot for Hitchcock’s North by North West because the UN refused permission to shoot the movie in its premises. The exhibition memorably brings alive the romance that New York evokes in the rest of this country – indeed in the rest of the world. Joan Didion wonderfully articulates this in her introduction to the exhibition.

Now just think of the immense potential for a similar exhibition in Mumbai celebrating movies from Paying Guest to Gharonda to Satya – in the splendour of CST station. Ah! But first we must fight whether it is VT or CST.

Of art and tolerance

Posts over the last one week have been tardy; the start of a long vacation is always filled with hundreds of things to do. This post comes from New York where I’ve been vegetating for the last six days.

Saw a Broadway play, “Inherit the Wind” at the Lyceum Theatre. Set in early 20th century Southern America, the play revolves around the conflict between the evolutionists who accept Darwin’s evolution theory and the Creationists; religious groups who insist on interpreting the Bible literally that God created Man in his own image and the entire universe was created in seven days. It’s surprising how live this issue is even today in this country, and how polarizing. The play itself was a piece of outstanding scripting and great acting by Christopher Plummer (yes, he of The Sound of Music and The Insider fame).

I am given to understand that there are entire parts of this country where even today, the evolution theory that all of us descend from apes is still thought of as heresy and taught in schools with a lot of riders.

But what I found truly inspiring is that this play with a lot of what could be considered incendiary dialogues related to Christianity, played to packed houses in mid-town Manhattan. I can’t bring myself to believe that a similar play with “strongly worded” dialogues, taking digs at religion could play in Mumbai (or most other Indian cities) without resulting in protests, vandalism and broken theatres. And if things go to plan, maybe a bandh.

For all our smug superiority about being the largest democracy etc., we still have some things to learn from this oldest democracy about tolerance for a radically different (and for some people, vile) point of view.

A Million Voices

"A million penguins” is an interesting project in keeping with the current spirit of collaborative networks. Initiated by Penguin publishers, this is a project which seeks to get individual amateur writers (hopefully, they also read) to collaborate in the making of an online book – a wiki-based creative writing exercise as they called it. Anybody can pick up the story where the last writer has left off and write the next chapter or so before getting tired and going off to sleep, leaving the next chapter to another aspiring Booker prize winner. People could also come back and edit a portion as many have done.

Over 1500 people wrote more than 1000 pages novel. And if proof is needed of the amount of trash that poses as serious user-generated content, this is it. The experiment is interesting for two reasons:
It shows up the number of people who are keen on experimenting with form and structure of the novel. Never mind that they don’t have the talent to follow that keenness up.
It also proves the point yet again that creative writing is simply not a collaborative exercise.

This is not new, but the second point in particular is important. Comment is today cheap; anybody can write a post or a comment. But quality / origin of that idea is a huge suspect.

As quality of novels go, the online space would be better off without it. At the end of it all, “a million penguins” is interesting for its ambitious scope and for helping make the point that many good voices can occasionally be a symphony but, untalented and untrained, it’s more likely to be a cacophony.

Of Briefs and Propositions

As I was reading about different kinds of briefs and “briefing formats”, it struck me how the notion of a good brief (and indeed, “briefing”) is changing.

Years back, we used to focus on the proposition as the core of all briefs. I believe today, the proposition is just one more small part of the brand’s offering. As product parity becomes a norm, the more important part of the brief are the values our brand stands for. That could be a far greater differentiator. Not that this is new in itself. What is new, I think is the relative importance of What I (i.e. the brand) Do vs. Who I Am.

The What I Do for you way of approaching most brand issues seems naïve in today’s complex environment. Beyond a point, a soap isn’t going to do anything dramatically different from what it did 20 years back; nor is a detergent or a bank or a biscuit. Behavioural and cultural insights can be mined to an extent but there’s a limit on how far they can take us. Laddering product benefits can make the output even more farcical – as someone once said when you want to sell a shoe, just sell the shoe and don’t sing the national anthem while you are at it.

In such times a bigger opportunity for a brand could well be, to adopt values and a personality that resonates with its consumers. Nuanced correctly, these values could make a person look at a brand much more positively. Today, as our society (at least parts of it) moves from scarcity to plenty, people will move towards buying brands that stand for what they as individuals stand for. That’s the Who I Am part of the brand.

Obviously some categories are closer to this station than others; but more will reach here eventually. Deciding Who I Am is not as simple as it sounds. The old answer that used to be the last part of the “brief” – my brand stands for honesty, warmth and contemporariness won’t cut ice. People will make their decisions about your brand as much for who you are, as for who you are not. People bond with real values and a real personality, not some cardboard cut-outs. This in turn will call for some serious introspection on the part of marketers and agencies; and horror of horrors, having to make some decisions and tough calls. We can no longer be traditional yet contemporary, or go-getting yet warm. We need to take a stand and hope that stand is in consonance with the stand of the people we want as consumers.

This part of the briefing process used to be considered “soft” and tucked away at the bottom (I suspect, because it is so nebulous and hard to pin down.) I reckon it’s time we learn to get comfortable with this.

Cheeni Kum, Flavour Zyada

Saw Cheeni Kum over the weekend and liked it very much.

After a long time, I saw a film with a sparkling and witty script. It just goes to show that the premise of the film is just the starting point. How it’s taken forward and the sensibilities it showcases is more important and Cheeni Kum scores well above average.

The key characters essayed by Amitabh and Tabu are mature and even the bits which could have easily become soppy, like their courtship, are handled with élan. Their repartees are on the spot and their relationship is handled with a great sense dexterity and light-heartedness.

There have been a lot of discussions in media about a ten year old girl being called “sexy”, and the wrong signals it sends out. I personally have some sympathy for that point of view; but at the same time I’ll stop short of making a huge moral issue out of it. Though it’s no excuse, there s far worse that is happening in our media and society and we’ll be better off focusing our efforts towards those issues.

Coming back to the movie, unlike a lot of films recently, which hold their own until the last 20 minutes before falling apart, Cheeni Kum manages to pace itself right to the end. Even the part at the end where Amitabh breaks down and his conversation with Tabu is very sensitively handled.

Following best traditions, the music by Ilayaraja adds flavour and ambience to the film without seeming to be interludes. The actors are at their best, which means given their caliber, outstanding. Just as I was beginning to forget how good he is (after hamming his way through well-marketed disasters like Black), Amitabh proves again that he has the firepower. But this movie reminds us yet again that it requires a strong script and a skilled director to get that best out of him. Sanjay Leela Bhansali will have to try harder.

Giving Chance a chance

Narayana Murthy’s speech at NYU which was excerpted in today’s Economic Times set me thinking on how receptive we are to learnings from chance events.

Most of us have grown in a learning / professional environment which is primarily western in orientation; these reinforce the importance of the outcome to the exclusion to everything else along the way. Being focused on the task at hand is of primary importance.

A corollary of being goal oriented is that we are so obsessed with the end product, that we miss out on any interesting sidelights we come across. We learn to ignore the process and interesting side paths.

One of the key requirements to being receptive to chance occurrences is the openness to flirt with the unknown. The courage to explore people, lands and events that are unpredictable; knowing they may end up leading nowhere.

It also calls for getting comfortable with doodling. Typically, blank spaces frighten us and we seek to immediately fill it up with something. Left blank, there is chance that more interesting ideas and thoughts accidentally occupy that space. These ideas may not always lead to Penicillin but, hey, you never know.