Post a brilliant overdose of yesterday’s leftovers and todays right-unders from my dabba kindly walloped together into 1 sq ft of vertical space without mixing and overflowing into each other,  I came across a tweet that mentioned that women (and in some cases men) are updating their FB status with color(s) of their bra, underwear, or err… nothing. Bluddy guaranteed to make the staidest or weirdest of us sit up and take note I guess. I promptly went out to all my followers list and popped an eyeball at the status mesg update feed there. Wonder o Wonders, nearly all, all of ‘em had updated their statuses with colors.

Drool !!

And then the twitter dams opened up to tweets, catcalls, witticisms and all brouhaha! Check these out

@rameshsrivats Censored scene in Deewar Parveen:Mere paas gaadi hai, bungalow hai, tere paas kya hai. Neetu: Mere paas bra hai

@thecomicproject : Asian Paints could tie up with a bra maker & promote breast cancer awareness .. girls with a mischievous look saying “mera wala red”/colours

@bombaylives: Pantone Colors is next

@manuscrypts: tweets abouts ze bra crossing limits!!

@fartingpen: One needs to overcome brariers in life

I don’t think I have ever, ever been so excited to hear about bra-episodes, even during those amazing, acne-filled, teen years of mine. This probably has been the best bra-gging that the women of the world and the bra have done for themselves. They have broken down bra-rriers that existed, in the mind probably, and the twitter world as one, starts speaking words about cup, words that never, ever slip via the lips.

Bra-Zeal is in #umbra should roll

At the onset, let me offer you my heartiest congratulations on the Talk For India Campaign launched by you.

In this campaign, you exhort all Idea users to use phone between the hours of 8:36 PM and 9:36 PM to make voice calls. Also, you mention that all “kamai” (in Hindi) or in English “NET INCOME” from all voice calls originating from Idea Numbers within India will be contributed towards procuring safety gear for the police force.

A very laudable Idea indeed, I must say.

However, I would like clarifications on the following points :

1) What NET INCOME do you talk about? I would love to know what it actually translates to as a percentage per rupee.

2) I notice in your ad that you mention over 5 Crores of user base. While I laud this following and strength, and I wish success that ALL your customers call, I  would like to know whether your networks have been looked into sufficiently well enough, to ensure that that kind of traffic can be managed and handled well enough for you to achieve sufficiently good revenues to hand over to the police force.

3) You mention police force, but do not talk about what state. I of course would love you to go all out and say Police Force, State of Maharashtra.

4) I further wish that your T&C (Terms and Conditions Page) http://www.talkforindia.co.in/terms_condition.html were drafted a wee bit better, and didn’t contain the following points :

a) The process and time of disbursing the amount shall be solely at the discretion of Idea.

b) The time and manner of contribution will be decided solely by Idea.

The above, to my un-enlightened capabilities, is suggestive of nothing further being planned other than this extremely exciting campaign of yours.

And last but not the least, remember, dear Team Idea, that the 26/11 tragedy still rankles deep within our breasts as a smouldering particle. It’s not fully ashes for most of us. I and I may go so far as to say WE, would really hate it if this emotion of ours was used towards commercial gain in any manner.

I, a citizen of India, laud you for this initiative, and request you to please come out into the open and provide audited results of this campaign of yours, including calls made during that hour, NET INCOME (still don’t get this bit or amount) generated, and lastly, amount distributed, to Who, When and Where.

I beseech all citizens of India to visit and spread the word of the IDEA Talk for India Campaign here :

http://www.talkforindia.co.in/

and to also requese IDEA to come out in an extremely transparent manner as to the audited results of this campaign, as a way to thank all those who support Idea in this campaign.

Sanjeev Sarma

The poster people of Mumbai.

For them, the world is an eyeball. And every wall that can take their size of communication is an asset. Religion holds no bar for them, neither does locality or status of residents. This army works mainly through the night when they can do their deed unhindered, unnoticed and slips away at the first peep of dawn.

No area is too far away, no wall, however already cluttered is to be spared. They work for ridiculous rates, involving only labor and the cost of gum they prepare of wheat and other things that are discarded. The pastes they prepare for gluing their posters is stronger and more resilient than most brands that claim such awesome powers of bonding and adhesiveness.

The question is, can they, who do this to make money for people who look to advertise for extremely CHEAP rates, be called vandals?

I think not.

The recent case of the wallproject (#wallproject on twitter) has had me raising eyebrows, not for anything other than the fact that these poster plasters are called vandals. Face it … they can’t afford hoardings, they can’t afford to buy or lease media. They way they see it, they’re just adding color to otherwise peeling, unmaintained facades that proliferate in Mumbai city.

For me, these posters are not the problem. Believe you me, there are areas in Mumbai, walls and facades, that would look really, really horrible without them.

But then, they chose to do it on the #wallproject.

So you, a busy tax payer have spent a day indulging in your painting skills, and demand compensation for this labor and all else going waste cuz someone slapped his poster on the space you painstakingly painted.  So what if its commercial in its own way? (I remember this amazing pict that said ‘absolut mumbai’ … isn’t that advtg too?)

Methinks the idea isn’t to punish this industry. The idea however, is to hold those to task that use up public property wantonly through this media, and pay nothing for it at all. The wall publicist, who is told “chaap do ye is shaher ke chappe chappe mein” is not to be blamed for his miniscule rate of Rs. 2 per poster sticking, but the production house is.

Grab ‘em, make ‘em pay Rs. 100 per poster per day even. And employ the poster pasters … the Govt would be doing a far, far better thing that it has ever done before.

For note, we can’t do without posters on some walls walls that our current municipalities and govts are too “poor” to notice or maintain.

And by a whopping mandate it has declared the 100+ year old Congress party as capabale enough to manage this great country for the next 5 years. It has done so without ambiguity, and has left no room for shakiness at the centre in the form of volatile driven-by-need coaltions or by power hungry time serving politicians.

The country has also voted succinctly and clearly against the left and has left them stumbling and incapable, even in their own bastions of Kerala and West Bengal. Not to be left behind, the bourses, when they opened on Monday, lauded this decision by two successive upper circuit breakers as the index spiralled up to glory, leaving no one in doubt about their decision to vote.

For me however, this brings in a huge diaspora of mixed emotions. The happy ones have been listed above, as I shared people sentiments of a stable govt, and market sentiments of faith leading to rises in indices. The ones that really irk me as of now are:

1) I see that we are heading back towards a regime where ruling party reins are handed down in the family, irrespective of capability or qualifications. Takes me back to eras where maharajah’s were elected at birth.

2) I see a weak opposition now, a much needed facet of any democracy that prides itself on being driven by mandate. An opposition that risks the danger of standing leaderless, and probably missionless too.

I have also spent the past 3 days skimming over regions, people who won, margins they won by and so on, and I have these points that hit my face when I look at an inch below the surface of this victory.

1) That the Congress has won on a purely minority vote aggregation. Sounds ridiculous ? Check out their strong bastions as of now : Kerala, TN, Andhra, where Xtian conversion activities are gathering force daily, and plague the very fibre of a really ancient culture. Check out UP and other bastions, where the Muslims have voted en masse for the Congress.

How can I really call a party that has focused on pure divisive strategies to polarize communities and win, secular? Just because they keep their minority forces satisfied and leave the rest of the country to its own devices?

2) Hindu (the majority) votes have been divided and dispersed by regional parties, star power, etc, to the point of being absolutely miniscule and unaccountable.

The bastions that remain with the BJP today in the form of states are ones that firmly protect culture by keeping away minority appeasement policies and by keeping conversions at bay. Staunchly, firmly Hindu with no move or trend to garner those “minority votes” through appeasement. (Many may of course choose to view this as “communal.”) But this is the stark reality that stands out today.

That Varun Gandhi would win, I had no doubt of. That he would win by such a whopping margin surprises me, given especially that he made “communal” speeches.

While I welcome this Govt and the immediate sense of stability it brin’gs to the country, I am worried about the long run. Especially given the ruling party’s leanings towards minority appeasement in various forms. And by its approach to define leadership of both the party and country in terms of Family.

I think its time I joined the BJP. If of course, it changes its fence sitting stand and decides to go and proudly label itself a Hindu party without being communal.

I for one would love to live in an India thats HINDU. A country where all religions from time immemorial have been tolerated and encouraged in terms of practice (not in terms of rsions, mind you). A country where I can go to a temple with my head held high, and not be labeled “communal.” A country whose culture I protect by not permitting conversions or allowing appeasements that lead to nothing but polarization.

Sanjeev

I can’t resist blogging competition. Gives me another excuse to spout a ton of Gibberish in this, my own space.

So when I was invited by @peppysophia to write about this Online Social Shopping Experience, I was quite excited. The reasons for this are two fold

1) The Social Shopping space excites me. It’s very close to me, especially since I dabble in a concept called sCRM (Social CRM) and love mining a huge amount of feeds to trend and track conversations around a brand and a product.

2) This is a darned contest And I’ve not won one so far, and Sophia Amma promised me that chances are darned bright and whatever I fell for this.

Now for the crux. The contest involves blogging about the ShopCorn “Social Shopping Site”.

I went through the presentation here, and was frankly, not a weee bit excited by what they had to throw at me. Not that the site or concept is tacky, but that I am too steeped in dreams and aspirations of things “social” to see any value in what they bonked at me in the presentation.

They spoke about various things to do online together, like Live Reviews, Browsing Deals, etc etc that didn’t really appeal to me. For me, most good shopping sites already do these things.

I couldn’t see the “social” bit in this entire blasted exercise.

The site is done well. But then, that in itself ain’t Social. Social means much much more than what this site offers.

For me, I would say that it would make darned good sense for a site like this to start off as a simple FB or Twitter app, and then scale up to a full site.

Concept? Good. Implementation? Damp Squib

Sanjeev Sarma

Read all about it here

Cheers

Sanjeev Sarma

http://recnut.com Our FREE Recruitment Management System is ready to go live tomorrow, Friday the 3rd of April 2009.

So what is recnut?

Recnut is a software aimed at recruiters. Its not a job site (not yet) and its not a submission zone for candidates to come and post their resumes (not yet, too). Its simply, shortly and sweetly put, a FREE recruitment management system.

Recnut makes operations more structured and organized for recruiters.

It allows them to manage and track all the requirements, candidates, resumes, clients they are working with, to provide for an “at-a-glance” understanding of where they stand, and what they have to do next.

Its meant for recruiters to avoid getting into maintaining cumbersome multi-format excel sheets, and aggregates operations into a single style of documenting and reporting, thereby bringing all on par, operationally.

We have miles to go before we really can call it the “best” system. But we’ll get there soon, and we’ll work with recruiters to help us develop this into an ASTOUNDING application over time

After winning the toss, and electing to shoot, they have scored a simultaneous FOUR and SIX off their very first hit against the Sri Lankan Team.

Their knowledge of cricket has left even UMPIRES in a tizzy, and wondering what hit them.

Those of us who follow cricket would do good to keep an eye on their sharp-shooting bowlers and on their CRACK batsmen.

Cuz CRACKED is what these Taliban buggers are!!!

Better than it could have in a Ludlum or a John LeCarre thriller.

The story was being read all these years, the characters and events were unfolding slowly, methodically, without apparent connections or relations to each other.

And once it happened, all  events / characters / thoughts / ideas fell into place with the rapidity of a digital jigsaw puzzle being solved in auto-mode, with pieces seen/remembered/thought of earlier sliding into their respective places and forming a complete picture.

The world, beyond all doubt, understood in the space of the last three days that Pakistan and Taliban are truly one, and that one is not different from the other.

These thoughts did cross the mind of many over so many years, through unexplainable sixth sense or predictability fundas. But there was always a link here or an event there, that was missing in the world terror map. These seemingly unrelated links and events erected a friend or foe maze, peppered with cleverly disguised, even hidden markers, a maze confounded by contradictions ranging across extremes, and of a face put forward that was not a face at all but a mask!

I personally saw inklings of this for the first time, when the Dictatorship, Army driven functioning, of Pakistan was replaced with a “civilian” one. This obviously happened “around” the time the favoured daughter of the Pakistani soil, Ms. Bhutto was assassinated.

It was then that I kind of understood that the true forces that puppeteered Pakistan were calling for a show of hands.

Mumbai 26/11 happened, a war like stance was assumed, belligerent Paki threats tried to draw a raring to go India to war, to mask this as a “this happened while we were away protecting our borders” thing, the Taliban publicly announced its support for the Paki army to fight any Jihad against Indian armed forces, and then, SWAT happened.

Times Now (a channel that I seem to have come to admire for lotsa reasons) made some pointed remarks yesterday in a newscast in the nite:

1. That a British media has gone ahead to say that Obama favoured a Pakistan – “Moderate” Taliban link to weed out “extremist” Taliban, this would apparently lead to a “compartmentalization” and easy “management of terror”
2. It was also drawn attention to the fact, that this “peace agreement” happened barely a day or two after Sentaor Richard Holbrooke met Pakistani “leaders”.
3. (Amazingly, its just around this time that) A UCLA professor has tracked Osama to a hideout, in the Kurram region of Pakistan, not more than a dozen Kms from the Pak Afghan border.

Today, the Taliban is just less than 500 kms away from Amritsar, India. Officially. Not counting all the infiltrations they may have made into India under various garbs, guises and so on. What is really scary is that the euphoria among people to welcome a Taliban there is high, and dissent against various extreme Talibal Sharia Laws are few and far between. After all, the US has allowed that Sharia law is permitted as per Pak constitution and norms. How extreme, is up to the People of Pakistan to agree to or be forced into.

What does SWAT mean to us, to India?

1. I find it mighty strange to believe that the Pakistan Army, that just recently promised to launch a HUGE offensive if India declared war, caved into a few hundred or even thousand hooligans called the Taliban. So there is much, much more that the Indian army will need to address rather than just the Pak army, if war (God forbid) is declared.
2. That a war may not be necessarily an Indian offensive, it may be declared by a “high on Jihad with Taliban” Pak too.
3. That the US might not step in to curb such events, given as per reports on media that it actually “favours a Pak-Taliban Truce”.
4. That a major amount of threat exists within India too from the Taliban, who may have penetrated and infiltrated various areas, sections of the country. And that WE, THE PEOPLE, must be ready and on alert to attend to and quell such inside worries.
5. And last but not the least, Pak’s Nuclear Facilities can easily be taken over by these forces. Pak doesn’t seem to have either the will or the verve to prevent this.

And herein, within point 5, lies the TRUE threat for not only India, but the World too, and this WORLD includes countries and agencies who at the moment, are funding/siding with Pakistan and Taliban for their overall immediate/near future geo-political gains.

Sanjeev Sarma

Wherever there is ADsense, there seems to be ADvani, promoting/projecting himself as the next PM. Whatever site I go to has Advani’s picts, messages, domain name plastered on it.

Advani / the BJP are the actually the first in India to cash in on a burgeoning media called the internet. Hate ‘em, Love ‘em, you have to see them at least once before you block ‘em. Sites ranging from the tacky to the pure click-through have recorded Advani’s footprints. Sites related, non related, contextual or not, are seeing the results of what is probably the BIGGEST keyword purchase from India for quite a while. Why, even Paki sites promote Advani as PM.

And why not? I remember reading someplace that Rs. 230 Cr. have been earmarked for the Advani as PM ad campaign. Safely assuming that 10% of this is spent on online advtg, its is a WHOPPING Rs 23 Cr campaign. Or roughly, $5M USD spend. And obviously, adsense is going berserk in deciding where you’re coming from, before showing you ads earmarked locationally for you.

All links lead to lkadvani.in, a cleverly designed joomla implementation. The team that has designed this and the content team thats handling regular updation and interactivity seems to be doing a pretty good job. Also the site is doing pretty well in terms of eyeballs, posts and so on. What’s more, the site reveals a well networked presence into YouTube, FB and Orkut and of course Advani’s own Blog.

The flip side is that the orkut interface is cartoonish, and shows a frog and a beetle. Also, The BJP’s site falls FLAT in terms of design, content and interactivity when compared to Advani’s site.

It seems to everyone, that this is just an aping of Obama’s online campaign, where he managed to garner HUGE funds and support. Sadly, I find that the campaign managers here, have not really looked at various aspects that Obama’s team did.

India Elections 2009, Future PM of India, Advani, and even Advani for PM refuse to throw up the site in Google. And terms like Prime Ministerial Candidate return not the site, but a sub-domain, thats Advani’s Blog.

The bottomlime

Advani is 81, as of last November. Come this Nov, he’ll be 82. And while his enthusiasm energy and ambition are laudable, one ponders whether one would want a Prime Minister so far advanced in years. And more importantly, when a mandatory retirement age is fixed at 60 for Govt Services, HOW can our constituion ever uphold anyone beyond that age becoming even a MINISTER, leave alone a Prime Minister?

The AD spends are fine, probably, “the wider seen is the more subscribed to” funda that drives adverts might work out in Advani’s favour. But I don’t think his age will. Its time for him to actually rest and mentor youth in the BJP, and not to push himself to the forefront. Its time for him to draft plans, policies, strategies that only he can in terms of the capability that his experience has gotten him.

Ad-vaani or no, I say NO to Advani as PM. I say YES to a Jetley or a Sushma Swaraj.