Everyone thinks advertising film shoots are glamorous affairs but the truth is, all the glamour is within the frame. If you saw the contortions that light guys go through to keep the lights in the right place, the shouted instructions to the camera assistants on keeping people and objects out of the frame and the …
I noticed our neighbourhood postman stuffing mail into the apartment mailboxes yesterday. The khaki uniform that characterised him is history. The modern day postman wears crumpled clothes and until I saw his bag full of junk mail, I did not even make the connection. The tribe is now unrecognisable. People had a close relationship with …
Who do we find interesting? People like us. We may be lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants and um, advertising copywriters but we find lives gone wrong interesting. Unpalatable and horrifying perhaps, but interesting. It’s like looking through a window into complex lives and watching them unravel episode by episode at prime time. They are usually about …
Morbid obesity is now on the rise in India and acquiring proportions of an epidemic. Over 5% of India’s population is obese, an unwelcome side effect of our growing prosperity. This puts a lot of stress on the medical system as well, as morbidly obese individuals are certain to have diabetic, cardiac and orthopedic problems. …
Everyone has their favourite Steve Jobs story. For us in India, it was the first time we set our eyes on products that seemed to have been invented on another planet. Even back then, they obviously catered to a different aesthetic and helped to elevate our perception of what computing could be. PCs with Windows …
The sentiment against corruption has reached a feverish pitch in India. The middle class has taken to the streets and is raising the banner of revolt against a government and a bureaucracy that it perceives to be highly corrupt. In a sense, it is scary to see such anger. Right now, the movement is peaceful, …
There was a time when smart meant intelligent people. But it’s now being used to promote meaningless drivel. Everything is now smart – from phones to cars to cards to electricity grids to washing machines. Put in some obscure bit of machine logic into a system or a device and we suddenly have miraculous machines …
Politicians are the ultimate salesmen. They sell abstract concepts like freedom and values, even if they don’t subscribe to or practice them. They know how to break it down in ways that people with little education or intelligence will understand and relate to. They can take stock of a situation and come up with effective …
There’s a fundamental difference in the way the US sees opportunity and the way India sees it. In India, when there are scores of unemployed with few skills, they are drafted into a government program like NREGA, which promises a minimum wage for a large part of the year, doing menial labor. The single biggest …
His video at TED has been watched over 6 million times. His gentle, yet highly incisive analysis of how education systems need to evolve and handle the unique challenges that children face today has won converts from all across the world. His brand of wry humour portrays the frustrations that parents and students deal with on a …
