Author

Kanupriya

IDEA – for the people, by the people!

December 25, 2008

Well, personally I have always liked the advertisements of idea esp. the television commercials. Though the ideas shown in the commercials are not always practical or implementable one but then too those commercials leave a sweet smile on your face with a thought, “oh how wonderful it would have been if this idea was implementable”. For e.g., that school kids of village learning through phone or the village kid giving the road direction to a gentleman in a very fluent English. Yes, some of the commercials show those ideas which if possible to implement could have really changed lives. So, considering my liking for Idea ads, it was quite natural for me to click this very prominent online Idea ad and to my pleasant surprise … Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat

Fresh Look!

December 22, 2008

Well, changing my blog look was on my agenda since long but after losing my personal template code last week, now I a neither have the time nor the enthu to write another template code for myself. It’s hell lot of work and needs some dedicated time which I don’t have as of now! Even weekends are damn busy these days and hence I decided to go ahead with this standard extra column template. Though I have done bit of customizations in terms of images and columns but most of it is from the standard layout. I personally like 2 sidebar designs just like my wordpress blog and so went ahead with changing the old blogger template to this. It needs some more work but will do those customizations as and when I will get time, till then at least there is a fresh look on my blog 🙂

Remembering Murphy’s Law

December 18, 2008
Ah as if all the recent incidents were not enough that this had to happen! Can anything be worse than office laptop getting crashed as soon as you are back from an official tour and you are supposed to finish off whole lot of pending stuffs??? Yes, suddenly my laptop decided to take a rest and very conveniently it displayed the message “ hard disk error, attribute code : 05” and after this you do anything its just not re-booting. Well, looks like luck is favoring me toooooooo much for past few weeks :-(.
I rushed to my admin guy and he again very conveniently replied, “don’t worry since it’s a new one it’s still under warranty and they will replace the hard disc”. “REPLACE! But about my data?” Another frustrating reply, “we will try to retrieve D drive but C is gone”!!!!!
Now I really don’t know how to react? This was a new laptop with high-end configuration given to me only few weeks back and since I had recently migrated all my stuffs to this new laptop so I have not even kept any back-up of the files anywhere. Considering the brand and configuration I never expected this to happen so soon! How will I manage my work without any file??????? Apart from all my office data of past 2 years, my favorite songs and some snaps recently downloaded from my camera, it also had some of my very important personal stuffs like snaps of my paintings which are hard to get back as I have given away most of my paintings to my friends and acquaintances :-(….So, all of those are gone! This realization is too upsetting and disturbing. I am feeling damn irritated and hopelessly thinking of Mr. Murphy who one fine day said, “when things have to go wrong, they will”. Were they actually having me in mind while devising laws like – “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” or “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way”!!!
Update: Well got the news from admin guy who was working on recovering files…I lost all my C drive, parts of D drive and but obviously all my desktop files and I had this bad habit of storing all my recent files which I need for immediate reference on my desktop :-(. And no it was not some virus attack, it was manufacturer’s defect because of which it happened. And losing desktop files also mean losing the new template code which I had managed to write with my novice html skills…I got this great idea of not using some ready template and having a totally customized template for my blog as my current template does give some problem in mozilla and so I had taken the pain of coding down a new template on my own! And I am not a techie, so you can imagine the pain and effort which I would have taken to write a code on my own! I was waiting for one free weekend when I could manage time to implement that code and here we go…that code is gone! Now I can think of why the hell I didn’t store that template code file in my D drive but no right now I can only think of MURPHY’s LAW!!! Somehow this law seems to close to my heart now 🙁

Recession and Consumer Spending Behavior

December 12, 2008
A lot is discussed now-a-days about India being geared up for economic downturn and consumer spending not observing any major shift as compared to its earlier pattern. Well, to some extent it’s true and being a marketer myself I understand that one needs to be optimistic about the market and consumer purchasing power but when I think of myself as a consumer I do feel that my spending behavior has undergone some major changes in last 3-4 months. Call it the effect of this phrase “onset of downturn” or the effect of phrase “save cash for those bad times” I have definitely changed my behavior towards lots of purchase decision which were not thought through earlier by me or my husband. In fact some of these were never so called purchase decisions rather they used to be just one of those impromptu expenses. Read More at Marketing Chit-Chat…

Aren’t we obsessed with dieting?

December 9, 2008
Yesterday I chanced to dine with one of my associates along with her young daughter. While we were ordering the meal, this young girl was absolutely not willing to eat anything. When her mother insisted a lot, she ordered some sandwich and that too she left it half eaten saying she is done. I asked smilingly if she has already eaten her meals or she did not like the sandwich of that place. Her mother replied, “no yaar, she is again on diet”! “Diet!!! But why and what’s her age???”, she looked perfectly alright to me, in fact I found her to be slimmer than average teen age girls of her age. I think she was hardly 14-15 years old. The gal who was on her fancy mobile by now gave a glance to her mother and walked away and then that lady heaved an exasperated sigh saying her daughter and her friend circle is crazily obsessed with slim figure, size zero, dieting and what nots! Even if some of the gals are perfectly alright including her daughter but still they are perpetually on diet. Their success parameter is to get fitted into tops and t-shirts from kid’s section of apparel stores and if someday they can’t fit and if they have to end up buying clothes from the section meant for their age then it’s nothing less than a disaster! Those days get followed by weeks of dieting and survival on juices and soups. Her daughter hardly eats one meal a day as she is always afraid that she will put on weight!!!

I was sort of shocked. Not that I am not aware of craziness for hourglass figure and picture perfect look amongst youngsters but dieting at that age and for no good reason left me amazed! If you ask me, that gal really needed to put on some weight and here she was surviving on juices and soups. One quick flash back at what I was doing at her age and all I could think of was board exams and my braided look! In our times, in fact our mothers used to force us with all nutritious and home cooked food so that we can have good health and concentrate more on studies. Size Zero and hourglass figure were unheard kind of terms. Well, I know time has changed a lot but so much? It’s not that I am myself not conscious about my weight or dieting etc but then I don’t think I have ever been obsessed about the same. To me a healthy body is more important than a thin body, a fit figure is more important than a slim figure and it’s ok to sometimes have those few extra kgs for the sake of ice-cream or chocolates :-). After all I don’t need to walk the ramp tomorrow and I know that those can be shed if I put in some healthy effort like exercise and walk. Who doesn’t want to have a model like figure but starving oneself to achieve that or dieting in an unhealthy way is nothing less than madness. There are many ways to maintain that “oh so perfect body” but guess most of us esp. teenage girls are just not willing to put in those effort. And this gal is just another example of soooo many people around me who speak nothing but DIETING and WEIGHT LOSS! Aren’t we obsessed with these two terms now? Probably Fashion ka hai yeh Jalwa… 🙂

Yet Again??? Mumbai terrorized…

November 27, 2008

Well, it’s no less than a movie! Like some real-life Hollywood thriller or some Bollywood action flick. But very unfortunately this time it’s not fiction or reel, rather it is TRUE & REAL. And I always thought pirates coming down through sea by hijacking some ship or boat and then entering a city, running like crazy in the mid of main markets and streets with guns up in their hand and shoulder bag full of explosives, open gun firing, capturing the main buildings on gun point, hostages caught inside those buildings day and night, police fighting with goondas, firing, continuous rattling of AK 47, sudden blasts of granades, heavy smoke and fire in the air, good cops dying in such battles and masses losing their lives like that can happen only in either Johny Depp / Sunny Deol movies or in those pirates stories which we used to read as kids! The realization that it can happen in real life and somewhere so close to us in Mumbai and that its going on for more than 26 hours now is heart wrenching, terrifying and so shocking!!! It’s frightening to realize that these pics are not of any Bollywood set rather these are true stills of our very famous Taj hotel in Mumbai:


Thank god that my brother down there in Mumbai finally reached home safely last night and thank God that my mom who was going to my brother’s place in Mumbai boarded off that train today. What if she would have started one day before and reached CST last night??? Oh God, when such thoughts are so scary then how would those have felt who would have faced an open gun fire at CST? How are those feeling who are still trapped inside Oberoi for more than 26 hours now? And how must be the families of those feeling who lost their family members in this horrific attack? I can’t move myself away from television since last night, it is so depressing to see all this but then I’m just observing it on screen…out there are hundreds like us who are facing it in real life…I pray and can only pray for them!

Oh Award for my blog!!!

November 26, 2008

Thanks Sindhu for giving me this award…:-) In fact this is the 1st award for my this blogspot blog, so all the more special for me. And yeah getting a blog award just like that is definitely a very sweet and pleasant surprise. Now I need to follow these rules if I have to accept them!

Put the logo on your blog
Link the person who awarded it to you
Link the bloggers you are about to honor

Hmmm if I would have got this from someone else I would have definitely passed it on to Sindhu as her blog is really the coolest and my favorite one :-). And next in my list would have been Nautankey. But it’s through these two chains only that I got this award. So, let me pass this on to some of other blogs which I think are really cool:
So, here I pass on this award to:
Rhett: For those lovely and soulful poems!
Abhishek: For his cool blog where I hang out often
Chhavi: For those lovely pics and such a cool photoblog!
Clap Clap Clap for the new recipients. May I request all three of you to accept this award please?

SMS Marketing or Bombarding?

November 25, 2008
Yesterday I attended a session on “Mobile Marketing and its immense concealed potential in India”. While I agree to some of the points and as a marketer I am absolutely aware of the potential and different channels of mobile marketing in India but when it comes to execution I can’t help myself from heaving a frustrated sigh on this term known as “Mobile Marketing”. I will not go into deeper details of why and what, I will just cite few examples of my recent experiences with one of the most basic tools of Mobile Marketing which is SMS based promotions. Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat…