Mirror Of My Thoughts…

A  lengthy article … but makes quite an interesting read …

Have breakfast .. or be breakfast - by Dr. Y.L.R. Moorthi

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel’s parent) are breathing easy you can’t be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple’s Iphone and Google’s Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The “Mahabharat” (the great Indian epic battle) is about “what is tomorrow’s personal digital device”? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – “who is my competitor?”

 Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says “What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?” The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won’t compete on pure audio? “Elementary Watson”. So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as “digital.”

 In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question “who is my competitor for tomorrow?” The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared “internet is a fad!” and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today’s competitor. Today’s competitor is obvious. Tomorrow’s is not.

 In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton ’s law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC’s price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film’s competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour “tamasha” (entertainment) . Cricket season might push films out of the market.

 Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is “I don’t remember!” For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

 One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is “alarm clock.” The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called “alarms.” What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

 On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley ). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said “Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast”! That sums it up rather neatly.

  —Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore. 

Ms. Stella asked, “Are you posting it today as it is Saturday?”

Love,

Satyabrata.

They say parents are teachers in Home and teachers are parents in school. Both of them take major responsibility to teach children, founding the base at an earlier stage of life. Not parents, not teachers, not books or not the money, it is the experience that counts in life and teaches the hard core facts in life and hence goes the realization of my life. And then you start to believe the meanings of the terms “I”, “Me” and “Myself”. “Fuck everyone”, “Fuck the world” become your regular slogan. You start listening your every inner words and believing every small instincts and your experience becomes your best friend. Your past maintains a high shadow in your brain cells. You start thinking, “I had done that and that had happened, but in the other case I had done that but the other was happened.”   

Who gets spared from so called life? It doesn’t suck; it fucks, not hard, really very hard, from different angles. It may be career or health or finance or relation. It’s too hard to bear the pain. If you are still a virgin, it’s your high time.

There is a say, “No one dies virgin because life fucks all.” I edit it as “No one can complain when life rapes all.” It doesn’t fuck, it rapes.

Love,

Satyabrata.

Continuing the last to previous blog, when I intrepidly opine that nothing lasts forever and I myself became a victim of it when the doctor put too many restrictions strictly to be obeyed. So for next three years:

1. I’m not allowed to stay alone or travel alone.
2. I can’t watch television.
3. I should avoid computer as much as possible.
4. I should not read books.

What on earth am I supposed to do? I couldn’t help asking the question to the doctor.

“Complete rest to nerves and no stress”, was his answer.

“Then possibly you’ll have to carry me to mental hospital.” I yelled but in vein as once again I got senseless on the spot for consecutively second time.

Epilepsy pronounced as pilepsy with ‘E’ silent attacks without knocking the door. There is no age or gender bar for it. And the cause of the epilepsy is never known if you have never a head injury or car accident before. Please visit the following to know more.

http://www.livebeyondepilepsy.com/home

And I sit quiet. I think back. There was a time when I used to ask myself:

1. What was the last GOOD book that I read?
2. What was the last GOOD movie that I watched?
3. When was the last GOOD time that I had with my fiancée?

Now, I’m supposed to ask myself:

1. When was the last time when I had read a book?
2. When was the last time when I had watched a movie?
3. When can Epilepsy attack me again?
4. Did I take medicine in time or is it in my pocket or I’ve stopped the alarm in cell but not taken the medicine.

Life doesn’t feel hell when I think of epilepsy. I am not terrified either. But not doing any activity horrifies me more. Not giving stress to brain is a stress.

All of a sudden one afternoon changed my life and I became a patient. Till that I had no idea of FITS or EPILEPSY or TIA etc.

I pray God, it should not be hereditary.

“So what’s next? How’re you going to survive with the restrictions?” Ms. Stella asked.

“Nothing lasts forever”, I said.

Love,

Satyabrata.

Well, I can see the directors creating too much ‘Threads’ and connecting them in movies and thus ‘Wow’ effect in theatres. Well, I’ve not read anywhere this ‘Thread’ concept and I say it of my own. To define it, let me explain.

1. The actress wears a watch which is old. The director creates a thread there. Later it turns to an emotional scene in a dialogue, “It must belong to your mother, your mother might be very beautiful.” And hence the director attempts to show the “Love Feeling” in an indirect way.
2. The Pen thread – The professor shows it to the students on the first day. The thread is created there. It is again connected at the last scene when the hero is being gifted it.
3. The Scooter thread – In one scene the hero confesses near the heroine’s bed imagining her getting down from her scooter, getting rid of helmet in stead of dupatta. It gets connected at the last scene.
4. The Pencil thread – The thread is created when the hero answers to the Professor’s lecture and the professor replies to it at the end where the thread is connected.

And so on.

Personally I feel these too many threads make people emotional in the big screen. They watch a scene, get a feeling; something is stored in the virtual memory cell. It’s again connected in another scene and a ‘Wow’ effect is created.

So it seems that it’s the main responsibility of a director to create too many threads, keeping all of them in mind and to connect them in perfect place.

Well, about the movie – I’ve been a fan of Aamir from my childhood and still he remains. His credit taken in the movie is “His Feeling”. When he is a college student, his walk, talks; everything seems like a student. When he is a patient is his previous one, his looks & talks seem like a mad one. He takes himself to that position and you feel that. That’s why, not me, everyone likes him. May be a farmer in ‘Lagaan’ or a terrorist in ‘Fanaa’.

No credit to Kareena, as usual.

Boman Irani – Will he be future Amitabh? I mean, he is so well in his all roles irrespective of the movie is a hit or flop.

Madhavan & Sharman – Okay, no issue.

Ms. Stella asked, “Didn’t you promise someone to watch this movie together?”

Love,

Satyabrata.

15^th Jan 2010

11:15 - I started to feel headache. There was dizziness.

12:00 – Folders in the desktop looked double. Letters in MS-word were blurred.

12:30 – Forehead was sweating in the AC cabin.

13:00 – I felt vomiting.

13:30 – I asked my manager for a leave and someone to drop me at my room. Just after the end word, I fell down and my mouth didn’t open. (What the hell!!)

14:00 – I was not knowing what was going on with me. They carried me to the nearest hospital. I was admitted immediately. They gave me electric shocks on my feet, but I didn’t respond.

14:30 – I was injected and I was able to hear sound around me; people moving around me, Friends calling me, but I was not able to speak or open my eyes. They were still giving me electric shock but I was not responding.

15:00 – I was shouting, I was yelling to remove the saline from me. In fact I didn’t realize that.

15:20 – I got back to normal. I opened my eyes, opened my mouth, showed tongue to Doctor, took my colleagues’ names, stretched my hands and legs.

16:00 – Saline was going on. I was normal behaving.

17:00 – Saline was still on. They took blood, urine for test and did also ECG test.

18:00 – Saline was flowing. I took some food.

19:00 – Saline was continuing. I was making fun with friends.

20:00 – I was discharged from the hospital with a clean certificate.

They said they had not seen such a case before.

My colleagues were afraid if I had lost my life.

The doctor, herself admitted that she too was scared.

The doctor herself said to my colleagues, “had you been five minutes late, you would have lost the guy.”

But no one could diagnose the fault.

I didn’t know what happened.

I got the reports today. They say everything is normal.

Still I don’t know what the hell happened to me yesterday?

Was it the effect of Solar Eclipse?  

Ms. Stella fell silent. She said, “Do you realize one of your friend was tapping your forehead with Shiv Panchakshari when you were yelling to remove the injection.”

Love,

Satyabrata.

Has been a very long time,

A blog under tag ‘Love’…

Mind stops, Hand stops,

What to say,

What to write.

Gone are the days…

We used to chat over phone

For hours and hours,

In college garden and in office lounge.

Five years in a relation,

Has never been a small time.

We’ve not noticed,

How time has flown.

Today we talk nothing except

Asking, “What else”…

Is it the effect of time?

Or is it the effect of aging?

Or have our thoughts gone lazy?

I wonder

Because Love has never been less between us.

Ms. Stella said, “If you wait another year to get married, you may ask others if it will be required.”

Love,

Satyabrata.

Last evening two of my colleagues who I know read my blogs regularly queried me about the New Year blog and resolutions.

Hmm, Well, the last year taught me a very good lesson when I quitted drinking. I started as a pleasure but soon I got addicted to it. I remember one of my well wisher warned me over a blog stating not to get addicted to it. But I did. I used it even thrice a week. Three months passed. And I felt bored of it. It didn’t amuse me. And I decided to quit and I quitted it. Absolutely.

So if you want to do something, just do it.

If you want not to continue something, just stop it.

Time and place and resolution are not required.

Well, few small actions that I decided to take up on the eve of a new decade.

To keep quiet, just sit and watch.

Keep quiet if you know, speak when you’re asked.

Ask it if you don’t know it.

Lesser you talk, safer you’re.

Ms. Stella suggested, “It should not be applicable to official presentations or product seminars. You’re safe on the rest.”

Love,

Satyabrata.   

Someone very close to me said to me over phone, “You do it passionately whatever you do, may it be your design application or read books or watched movies. You go mad there.”

I don’t object.

Rather I ask positively who on the earth is not mad.

I am mad.

James Cameron is mad.

Orhan Pamuk is mad.

Google launching its Nexus phone today is madness.

Everyone around me is mad for something or the other.

And moreover He is mad who has created all these mad.

“Who is the maddest of all?” – “God”, is my simple answer.

“Fuck you, fuck your thoughts. You’ve gone mad.” Ms. Stella was shouting from the hall.

Love,

Satyabrata.

Someone around me is waiting for the last date of the calendar (though he has a six digit balance in his account)..

Someone around me is seeking for his girl friend (though she has already ditched him)..

Someone around me is looking for a promotion (what will he do more being a manager)…

Someone around me has gone mad (he is rejecting every girls recommended by his parents)…

Someone around me is calling the lawyers and landlords to buy land and construct his own house (at an age of 26!!!)…

Someone around me has been visiting Tata Show room to buy a Nano car (a fresher perhaps)…

Someone around me has been putting his best effort to clear CAT in 2010 (after 6yrs of experience!!)…

Someone around me has been pinging me saying his trial for settlement in life (got passed 2 yrs back!!)

Everyone has been busy for something, looking for something, seeking for something, craving for something, aspiring for something… Who has not been looking for anything is better known as lazy or back sitter or dull or lack of enthu.

And on the top, God laughs!!! He allows no one take rest in his/her life.

Love,

Satyabrata.

Only one thing I did good in this year is “I quitted drinking absolutely”. Nothing else precisely. In the short span of 3 months I had tastes of all brands and all flavors. If I am asked which one had been the favorite in that small time, perhaps the answer would bend to “Blender’s Pride”. Well, I put a stop here on this.

Then next thing in the year has been “Movies”. Like a mad, like an insane, whatever you may say, I would hear that. Because that will be true. In the name of the collection, at one time it was big for me to go through IMDB top 250. Then I kept on exploring and exploring, from movies to directors, from director’s profile to it actor profile, again that actor profile to another movie’s director profile. One thing led to another and I browsed nearly all generation movies from Gary Cooper to Tarantino and Client Eastwood. The journey, the experience can never be expressed in the words here. I learnt one thing:

The higher you fly, the more you know.

When it started slowly, I started to feel, “hey, I’ve seen him/her in that movie… Wait, let me se, what’s his/her name…. What are his/her other movies?? This movie is so good…. Who is the director dude??? What are his other movies???” These anxieties made me explore more and recognize some more characters in the Hollywood. Thanks to IMDB. The search engine is really good. It receives the English names and displays the French versions and otherwise. Too good. Thus I recognized David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg, Lukas Moodysson, Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne, David Fincher, Ridley Scott, Clint Eastwood, Woody Alen, Wolfgang Peterson, Mel Gibson, Alfred Hitchcock, Neil Jordan and many more. If you want me to describe on them, I can do that but it will be too long to type them here. In short, let me say Quentin Tarantino is an expert to show the dark sides of human feelings and Woody Alen is smart to portrait love-relation-affair kind of movies. Or do you want me talk on David Cronenberg? Erase his name from the screen, let me watch it and I shall recognize his work. They are slow yet so real. And in his each movie, sex is so definite and unusual you know like on the stairs, on the roadside.

179 Movies – Straight in a year!

Fantastic have been – ‘Curious Case of Benjamin’, ‘Avatar’ at the end of the year.

Too Good have been – ‘The Terminal’, ‘Saving Private Ryan’, ‘Gandhi’, ‘The Reader’, ‘21 Grams’, ‘Frida’, ‘Hamlet’ – 1996.

Good have been – ‘Love Actually’ (Both English & French Versions), ‘The Pianist’, ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, ‘Ben-Hur’, ‘A Few Good Men’, ‘The Bridge On The River Kwai’, ‘A History of Violence’, ‘25^th Hour’, ‘The Bicycle Thief’ & ‘Hamlet’ – 1948.

And I learnt remakes have started from Hollywood spreading to Bollywood later. ‘Lolita’ -1962 is better than ‘Lolita’ remade in 1997. But case of Hamlet has been different. The one made in 1948 was of 2hrs 37 mins. Later it was remade to 4hrs and it had been in more detail, clearer than the earlier. I was overwhelmed by the performance of Kenneth Branagh.

Movies based on the books have always been poorer. Let them be ‘Disgrace’ by J.M.Coetzee (Also screenplay writer) or ‘A Time to kill’ or ‘The Pelican Brief’ or ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ or ‘Spiderwick of Chronicles’ or ‘Harry Potter’.

Then I recognized the “Burn After Reading” and “Disgrace” old man Mr. John Malkovich and also didn’t feel a waste of time his directed “The Dancer Upstairs”.

I recognized the face, Ralph Fiennes, who did good job in movies like ‘Dead Ringers’, ‘Spider’, ‘End of an affair’.

I got familiar with ‘King Kong’ girl Naomi Watts, who opened her brassiere in ’21 Grams’ and ‘Mulholland Dr’ and did a good job in ‘Eastern Promises’.

Oh, Jeremy Irons!!! Was good in ‘Lolita’-96, but unfortunately the plot didn’t please me.

‘Enemy at the gates’ dude Jude Law failed to impress in ‘eXistenZ’, took a side role in ‘Road to Perdition’, shadowed by Tom Hanks.

Oh, the blog will not come to end, if I continue saying on Brendan Fraser (Do u remember ‘Mummy’?) or Mel Gibson (Do u remember ‘Apocalypto’ or ‘Brave Heart’) or Sean Penn (Magnificent job in ‘Milk’ and ‘21 grams’) or Judi Dench (Do u remember the old lady in Bond movies) or Thandie Newton (‘Mission Impossible’ girl and unveiling black nipples in her first movie ‘Flirting’) or Uma Thurman (‘Kill Bill’ lady) or Amanda Peet (lady of ‘2012’ and ‘Melinda and Melinda’ by Woody Alen) or Scarlett Johansson or Ben Stiller’s ‘Night in the Museum’ and ‘Escape 2 Africa’.

Hope to continue the journey and explore more in the next year in my 1000+ collection.

Love,

Satyabrata.