Why are we so obsessed with looking young? From Oscar Wilde’s iconic story – ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ to the botox treatments and the nose jobs that our actresses routinely have, it has become fashionable to cheat on nature and interfere with the inevitable ageing process. And why we are so mortified with the lines that …
Twitter has been experimenting with several features on its home page, but the latest one does a good job of highlighting the Twitterati who are active across topics. This is certainly better than trying to get attention by highlighting just a few tweets on trending topics. It gives a good idea of the kind of …
A lot of people find absolute darkness terrifying – but it has been proven to be beneficial for deep sleep and better health. Waking up in the middle of a night in a remote location in Kerala, I found that I could not see my fingers in front of my eyes even though they were …
Can you imagine a McDonald burger being promoted as an antidote to a hangover? The advertising requirement was to get more people to walk in in the early morning and late hours. The communication solution showed a burger dropping into a glass leaving a trail of sesame seeds. The image is striking, not because it is inherently …
Conventional wisdom dictates that the world’s problems – safe drinking water, disease prevention and shelter can only be solved by governments and charities. Very few companies see them as market opportunities that need unconventional thinking. Consider this – 90% of the world’s investment in health benefits cover just 10% of the world’s population – mainly …
GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format), those animated, flashing monstrosities have been a bane since the early days of the web. They creep, crawl and make web pages dotted with them an exercise in tolerance if the content is worth staying with. Try reading a book with the margins full of flashing lights and jiggly worms – it’s precisely …
Even when the Ganga is a continent away, Indians who have immigrated to the US have managed to find an alternative – Jamaica Bay in Queens. Proving that while you can take an Indian out of India, the rituals and customs will emigrate as well. The park rangers in the US were mystified to find coconuts, bits …
Condoms sell very well during a recession, apparently. And so do guns and burglar alarms. When ruled by fear, our buying habits go back to our primal instincts – food, sex and shelter. But the same doesn’t hold true for the housing market, battered by 3 years of a dismal performance. In India, the rise …
It’s easy to notch up 10,000 hours of watching TV – which is why the whole world is very good at doing it. In his book,’The Outliers‘ Malcolm Gladwell makes the case for experience over talent. The premise is simple. Spend 10,000 hours of your life doing something worthwhile and you will get pretty good …
It’s the category with the highest number of awarded patent applications – mousetraps. From the time the US Patent Office opened it’s doors in 1838 upto 1996, over 4400 patents have been granted for new and innovative ways to capture the rat. It does not indicate the number of patents that have been rejected or …
