Heartcrossings

Great summary of the gotchas of digital PR and SEO. The one I like best is : Embrace the social, not the drive by. Some PR agencies have been able to fully embrace these shifts at their core, and not only become successfully involved with online communities but have been instrumental at facilitating PR’s role in the various online channels such as social networking, blogs and search. These agencies are best prepared to represent brands in a win-win situation over those firms that skim social media with drive by pitching and promotion tactics and without a full understanding of the medium. Easier said than done mainly because the medium is evolving so rapidly. The rules of the game change the minute you have it all defined. Often you are lucky to even have the same game. By when old media has finally has it figured out, the circus has usually left town. Nevertheless, this article is full of good advise.

For those of us who have been around for long enough to remember a time where information was not easy to either pull ( time consuming ) or have pushed( interruptive and intrusive ) , it is amazing to consider both methods of information deployment (even before the push mechanism has run its course or exhausted its full potentail) are now reaching obsolensce and the new deal is ambient technology which is described thusy : For some it's the status of their portfolio, or the health of an aging parent. Others want to know if their friends are online, the upcoming weather, the score of a game, if the fish are biting, or if there's heavy traffic on their drive home. These are examples of information that is neither worthy of interrupt (push), nor worthy of investing time (pull). This type of information should be glanceable, like a clock or barometer. We call this ambient information..

Found this presentation that analyzes the meaning of some of very popular Seamus Heaney poems. I can't decide if I love Personal Helicon any more than I did before now that I have its underlying meaning explained and have its provenance traced back to figures from Greek Mythology. In his article Why Read Poetry ? Kenneth Lyen gets its exactly right. He says : Poetry is a bit like music. Something draws you to it. You just enjoy it. No need to find out why it affects you. And no need to analyse it. The very act of analysis can either enhance your enjoyment or destroy it. For me, when I studied music academically, it ruined the pleasure of listening to it. The same with poetry. I don’t like to dissect my poems too much. I like to read them aloud in a relaxed state of mind, and allow their meaning to waft over me. He goes on to list excerpts from some of his favorite poetry and I find myself nodding in agreement. Apparently, the punditry call these easy to love and appreciate piece...

"I never worry about things I can't affect, and with fidelity . . . that is between Barack and me, and if somebody can come between us, we didn't have much to begin with." Michelle Obama, Ebony, March 2006 That definitely offers food for thought. The impulse to stray or to seek more fulfilling companionship outside of marriage comes from a variety of sources and the provocations are as diverse as humankind itself. However, as Michelle Obama says if there is something truly substantial between two people, an outsider will not be able to create a wedge between them. Her words were on my mind when I offered my two cents to a friend struggling to come to terms with her husband's infidelity : If you forgive this man and take him back, it may be going down a slippery slope specially because you have young daughters and you will be their female role model. While you may think you are doing what is in their best interest, not standing up for yourself and claiming collate...

Families can be complicated organisms from what I have seen from the vantage point of my own extended one. Both my parents have a number of siblings and more cousins than anyone can keep track of. The family trees are dense and highly branched. Yet all my life my immediate family has felt somewhat alone, cut off from the trunk like we were a felled log cast to the side. For the most part it has been okay because I prefer to do my own thing and don’t necessarily crave company. But it does get difficult at times – specially when J wants to know about her cousins, uncles and aunts and highlights how little I know about any of them - also how unacquainted they are with us. I realize I have not met some of these people in ten years or more and don’t even miss them that much. I’ve been that left-behind log for so long that I have grown quite used to it. Other forms of vegetation has grown around me in the form of friends, acquaintances, neighbors and co-workers. While I have been able to ad...

When you title an article India is over-hyped as an innovation hub you can count on some sharp division in the opinions of the commentators. Being that people tend to agree and disagree with that assessment with equal passion, I am a little surprised that the comments did not generate into naming calling and a whole scale slanging match. Bernard Lunn's article on the same subject is far more informative and balanced. He makes a great point about why the kind of innovation that is happening in India is not considered to be "innovation" in the manner of Google or eBay Today’s successful (meaning currently lucrative) innovation in India tends to be at the process and business level. These companies use technology extensively, they are technology driven and enabled, but the technology innovation is more incremental than disruptive and still uses lower cost labor as a core advantage. He goes on to say : Many people would not see these as innovation. They are not seen as clas...

If you think of Bollywood's portrayal of women in India as a bellwether of societal attitudes towards them, then a couple of movies are worth considering. The first is Saas Bahu Aur Sensex and the other is Welcome to Sajjanpur . In the first movie, the gossipy, saas-bahu soap addicted kitty party ladies find their groove in the Indian stock market. Set against a backdrop of modern day India complete with call centers, housing colonies, baristas, cable networks and mall-rats, the women in the story go back and forth between the old world and new with a dexterity that is patently desi. There is no contradiction in clinging to out-moded and often discredited values of an antiquated past while rushing headlong to embrace what is new and hip. Shyam Benegal takes this inherently desi ability to live effortlessly in dichotomy, to a whole different level with Welcome to Sajjanpur. While this is not your typical Benegal fare, it is everything you have come to expect from someone of his cal...

A large crate of ripe pomegranates caught my eye at the grocery store last evening. On both sides of the crate, tucked into sleeves were a bunch of pamphlets illustrating how to peel and eat a pomegranate .It had a child taking us through the paces presumably to cue prospective adult customers that eating fresh pomegranate does not require a PhD. Since when had humans become so dumb that they needed a how-to on peeling fruit. I thought this was a skill we had learned a while back. Maybe evolution taking us backward instead of forward. We probably have marketing and ad agency whiz kids , who are determined to sell to us at the cost of undermining our intelligence, to thank for this. Even crows are better than us - they are able to operate vending machines, cross the road at the right traffic singal and enlist the help of pass cars to crack open nuts for them.

Read this article on the inevitability in storytelling and Italo Calvino. He says : We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images  stripped of the inner inevitability  that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings.   Love the idea of the hailstorm of images and words stripped of their inner inevitability to help me understand how it is that we live in a time when there is surfeit of both and yet very little meaning that can be derived of either. Coincidentally (and in a totally different context), read another article via Delanceyplace which posits that  explanations rob events of their emotional impact. studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help defang it. ... But just as explanations ameliorate the impact of  unpleasant  events, so too do they am...

Found these extraordinary images via Mefi of faces and bodies used as canvass with natural elements to embellish and decorate. Each picture rivals the best in art and fashion of the "civilized" world. So delicately twined to nature, it is hard to separate art from real life, man-made from the natural. There is possibly no better to represent what oneness with nature is all about. What's best is these human paintings are so unusual and unique that they would be tough to enhance digitally. While it is easy to inspired by these beautiful people and their exquisite art, it is impossible to recreate the effect in a world outsider theirs. Even little urban children with all their natural creativity still intact (a long shot given their proximity to popular culture) cannot come near close. Maybe there is no ornament quite as stunning as absolute innocence. So while the Omo Valley people and other like them who still live in and with nature will look magical, the rest of us wh...

If you are borderline hypochondriac then Fitbit will make sure you go the whole nine yards of obsessive compulsiveness about how your body is doing. At first the device sounds like a pedometer on steroids but considering you go to sleep with it and have it beam up data about your body, it is also an idea that can grow exponentially. Why stop at calorie counting and number of REMs per night, why not run a dialy set of diagnostic checks on everything else that's going on inside as well - after all you don't know you are supposed to worry about something that you don't know about. I say, bring it on and lets start keeping track of the every functioning organ in our bodies and then some. Let's baseline ourself as we would have been with our "factory settings" intact and be alerted when our stats being to go awry. What is a new idea these days without a spot of social media thrown in for good measure. To wit : You can login to the Fitbit website to see even more d...

It is generally known and accepted that everyone loves a good story specially when it told well but this article discusses the science behind our love for a good yarn . Here is how Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto defines a good story : But the best stories—those retold through generations and translated into other languages—do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call “narrative transport.” A lot of coming of age or otherwise autobiographical stories would be appealing and memorable for reasons the professor describes. Translated to my own little world, that may have something to do with J's vociferous rejection of stories with characters she either cannot relate to or with characters who do and say things she finds unacceptable. The "narrative transport" just doe...

While browsing in the public library, my mother saw this line in a book that she quoted to me on our drive home " If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together " - it is an African proverb. It is obviously a very profound thought and tells a lot about the power of communities - possibly the context in which it was referred to in the book that she had been reading. But for both of us it has a very deep and layered meaning. My mother has lived and grown in a far from perfect marriage for the sake of the greater good, believing always in the power of time to redeem, heal and transform the most difficult life situations. What she has done is not unique in her generation. Many women have done even more and their patience and fortitude have paid rich dividends in the end. They have all gone far and gone the distance together. I on the other hand, had no time to waste, for things to turn around, to try and make a bad marriage work out in the end. This is a ge...

Reading this NYT article on the effect on rising oil prices on globalization made me wonder what adjustments Tom Friedman would make to his case for the flat world given this new development. While technology workers can continue to be impacted (negatively is a lot of cases) by the flattening, any line of work that requires the physical movement for goods from A to B might not. The article cites a report by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets : “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.” Perhaps things will come full circle for all those jobs that got offshored because oil was cheap enough to make it worthwhile to seek out far flung destinations that afforded lower manufacturing costs. But by when the jobs do return home, the workers who once did them would have been long gone and the skills t...

I only had to write about Shakespeare and the million typing monkeys before I ran into something by way of Mefi that goes on forever and reads like the ravings of a sociopathic lunatic but every once in a while there is a flash of good reason and commonsense. It's up to the reader to have the patience to dreg through the loggorhoea and find those. This is not the first time that someone's long personal ad which is more rant than bi o has gone viral on the web . Check the classified ads section on page 14 for an illuminating contrast between a man's and a female's perspective on what each seeks and does not find. Reading the two side by side reminded me of my favorite quote by Henry Wadworth Longfellow Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, 13 Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence. There is a common theme that con...

Having lived without a television in the house for over four years now, my tolerance for it is close to non-existent. There are all the usually cited reasons I don't like TV at home but reading this article on the convergence between Chinese and American economies gave me one that is very important that I had not really thought about. 24/7 news is a big part of television and I positively hate it. Now, I know why. Ted Koppel of Discovery Channel, says : My analogy [of 24/7 news] is it's rather like standing 2 feet away from a railroad track and watching the trains go by. And, boy, you're close and it's exciting and there's a lot of energy and you really feel as though you're on top of it, but you can't for the life of you see what's going on. And if you really want to know what's going on, you've got to step back 10 feet, 20 feet, 50 feet, sometimes half a mile, so that you can see the locomotive and the caboose and everything that is in between...

A couple of J's friends were over for the afternoon recently and I got a crash course in what's cool in the music scene for tweens. The older girl is a rising 4th grader and was my censor. When her younger sister asked for me to look a certain number by Fergie on YouTube, she would point out that it would be inappropriate for J. They would back and forth on the age appropriateness of a few other songs until one could be found. The other singer they wanted was Taylor Swift. Swift apparently is more kid-friendly than Fergie. Given the kind of music, I am guessing Swift is less of a mainstreet tween favorite than Fergie is. Needless to say, I had not been aware of the existence of either until these kids told me about them. J I am sure will be all caught up once she has her iPod and is in the mix of things swapping songs with her friends. It used to be mixed tapes in my day. Ten years ago, I lived as paying guest with a family in Kolkata. They had two kids - a seven year old girl ...

On the way back home after a very tiring Monday at work, I caught the tail end of an interview with poet Nikki Giovanni on NPR. She had just been asked to name her favorite poem and when she replied Ego Tripping , the interviewer requested her to read it. It was an exhilarating experience listening to her say : I am so hip even my errors are correct I sailed west to reach east and had to round off the earth as I went The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid across three continents I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal I cannot be comprehended except by my permission I mean...I...can fly like a bird in the sky... What a perfect end to a day when my last hour long meeting of the day had been about two alpha males trying to one up each other even as they took turns being condescending towards me. While I did hold my ground to the bitter end and they did back off, the whole process took a lot out of me. Until a few minutes before Giovanni c...

Any desi born and raised in India would know that anything that is worth stealing (or not) can and will be stolen in India unless you take steps to prevent such theft. Small wonder then that it would be a desi company that comes up with an idea to deter cell-phone theft . Who else but a desi to could concieve such a thing. While I can't imagine that the solution they propose is hacker-safe or fool-proof, some of the reader comments on the article are pretty amazing : yes, it’s a beta wiretapping system. The Indian government is trying to plant these phones throughout the United States, so that they can monitor your consumer behavior, then advertise you to no end. These damn sovereign wealth funds are trying to infiltrate our capital markets, our research Institutions, and the upper uschelons of government. Some days ago one of a friend was showing us her brand new flashdrive with some ungodly number of gigs on it. A neighbor had bought it for her on his trip to China. We all looked...

These days you can't tune in to the news without hearing about the credit crisis and all manner of pump and faucet metaphors to describe the lack of liquidity in the markets. By the time this is over clueless folks like myself will have gotten educated despite ourselves - they are really dumbing this stuff down to the third grade level so none of us are left wondering about what's going on. The editor of Seed Magazine describes what is really responsible for all this - i.e. broken trust . He concludes his article thusly : PS. One way to think of the financial markets right now is that instead of being populated by rational agents, they're full of people with borderline personality disorder . Is it possible perhaps the financial markets had always been full of people with full-blown personality disorders who imagine themselves to be the Masters of the Universe in the manner of the fictional Sherman McCoy ? Maybe that is exactly why things are so royally messed up.

I always thought it was okay for someone to be a ghost-writer for the money as long as they also wrote for themselves - sometimes following one's passion however doggedly just does not pay the bills. Christine Larson reports in her NYT article that ghost writing is one of the best careers of 2008. She talks about the commonly held notion about its practitioners : Doing something people regard as art — writing — for cash, and in someone else’s voice, seems suspect in a world where we’re exhorted to pursue our passions and express our true selves. Larson, a ghost-writer herself also tells us what such a profession is good for : SOMETIMES, suspending your own ego isn’t such a bad thing: Compromise in the work world can bring compensation, too — beyond the kind that pays the bills. Ghostwriting has let me climb inside other people’s lives and forced me to respect choices I wouldn’t have made myself. I’ve learned to listen more carefully, and to never, ever assume that I know how peop...

The proliferation of open source software and widgets has made it very easy for the assorted non-IT folk to whip up their side of the desk applications after having struggled in vain to get time (money) and attention from their IT departments. It does not help that high-end COTS tools are so hellishly expensive that snagging a license from the corporate pool requires a business case, series of approvals and cutting through untold reams of red tape. It is not as if the average business user is chomping at the bit to indulge in a spot of geekery alongside their day job. More often than not, they are pushed to the edge of despair and desperation when they decide to take matters into their own hands.  Used to be that beating IT at the own game was easier said than done but increasingly that is not true. With RAD and Drag and Drop tools, the barrier to entry into the world of the programming geek has dropped sharply. It can be argued that the code a tool would produce would be vastly inferi...

Learned a new phrase today - disruptive innovation and how that would impact the classrooms of the future. Here is how the article describes it : A disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. Instead of sustaining the leading companies' place in the original market, it disrupts that trajectory by offering a product or service that actually is not as good as that which companies are already selling. Because it is not as good as the existing product or service, the customers in the original market cannot use it. Instead, the disruptive innovation extends its benefits to people who, for one reason or another, are unable to consume the original product -- so-called nonconsumers. Disruptive innovations tend to be simpler and more affordable than existing products. This feature allows them to take root in simple, undemanding applications within a new market or arena of competition. Little by little, disruptions predictably improve. At some point, disruptive innovations beco...

My site stats often lead to interesting reads around the web and even occasional inspiration for a post. Here is something I ran into recently : Desi Dating a Meat Market in which the author writes of her challenges in finding a desi man to date (maybe marry ?) With each guy I talked to, I felt that there was always another woman there that they would rather be taking to and spending time with. It's that whole mentality that there's always something better out there. It was hard getting a guys attention and getting them to remember me without being too aggressive. She is describing a scene at a Netip conference but it could very well be any other place where a bunch of single desis have congregated socially. The boys have come to expect nothing short of "super-model gorgeous" when it comes to a girls they will date. Whether these liaisons will lead to marriage is a whole different question - often a question they have little interest in to begin. I suspect quite ...

Two words come to mind watching Chris Mitchell's film Super 30 - sadhana and samudra manthan . He traces the lives of the students who come from impoverished, rural backgrounds in Bihar but dream of making it to IIT by way of the Ramanujan School of Mathematics and then Super 30 . There are many participants in the sadhana - the students from remote villages in Bihar who aspire to catapult past the limitations of their life's circumstances - birth in a backward caste family, poverty and lack of access to good education. They believe they have what it takes to make it to the most elite institutions of learning in India and are willing to work as hard as it takes for them to get there. Then there is Anand, the math teacher who as a youngster missed the opportunity to study in Cambridge because his family was too poor to be able to afford it and his messianic efforts to bring such opportunities to the thirty most deserving students whose backgrounds are similar to his own. To...

I am always eager to learn a desi bro's perspective on anything that he may deign to have one on. While I am frequently disappointed for my troubles, every once in a while, someone will say something that is will make me stop and think . Case in point is this observation by SivaKumar Nadarajah over at Sasural : In my opinion, majority of Desi techies who work for companies in the US, could still only be classified as Poor Desis. You still haven’t reached the threshold to be called ‘Rich’, unless you own your company and make more than a half a million dollars a year. The savings you have is not sufficient for you to be called ‘Rich’ and is not enough to go back and live like a ‘king’. The moment you start your normal life in India, the reality will strike you. But here are some exceptions. These are the ones whom I classify as ‘Smart Desis’. There were few folks who came to the US hell bent on the decision of going back at any cost. They never bought a house in the US. Never bough...

Once each year, I have been signing up to be "mystery reader" in J's class. The teacher sends home a sign up sheet several and parents indicate several alternative dates that might work for them. After a few days, you get assigned your date and time. Performance anxiety usually strikes me the night before. I am wondering how I must conduct myself given my non-existent skills as a reader or story-teller so I can make a half-decent impression on the kids and not be a complete embarrassment to J. You have to remember these kids are used to having best-selling authors of children's literature come do readings at school every once in a while. The illustrators among them will show them how they create the art work that goes in their books. While I imagine every mystery reading parent does not measure up to these high professional standards, not everyone is as read-aloud challenged as I am. Yet, I love the company of kids and this is by far the easiest way for me to spend so...

My friend F is has gone from being indifferent about religion (all including her own) to becoming deeply involved in hers. The transformation happened within the last couple of years. While I am not sure under what circumstances this happened, but I am only too aware of the manifestations. We don't meet socially any more because any spare time she has, she prefers to spend deepening her religious immersion. We have not met in months but she expects me to drop everything when she is finally able to do lunch. But that is not what this is all about. I get a mail from her at around 9:15 a.m each morning that has a thought for the day borrowed from DailyOM , a short prayer and a verse from her holy book. figure she takes some trouble to kit this thing together each day so maybe I should read it and I do try. I am not offended to read a prayer or verse that is not from my religion but I almost view her daily religious onslaught as covert proselytism that is not a very pleasant thing to ...

I was watching a documentary titled Destination Bangalore a few days ago in which the filmmaker John Kerns profiles a diverse group of people in trying to understand the social and cultural impacts of outsourcing. "It features interviews with journalists, sociologists, students, entrepreneurs, political leaders, storeowners and artists in an effort to cast a wide net in search for answers". There is a general lack of cohesion and conclusiveness to his efforts be it by design or by accident. At any rate, as a viewer you don't come away knowing too many answers. That said, there were a few interesting perspectives to be gleaned. Historian and sociologist Ram Guha explains why an information technology driven economy is marginalizing older family members. Whereas an old farmer used to be well respected and valued in the community for a lifetime of experience in farming, the average IT workers have nothing to learn from parents and grandparents and so they are being increasi...

R (my ex) and I were very proud of the fact that unlike most couples, we never had an argument or raised our voices no matter what difference of opinion we had. Instead of screaming at each other, we would sit companionably together and talk through the issue at hand - and what a lot of talking that was ! By when we were done, the original problem would have blossomed into a rash of several others hitherto unknown ones making it fertile ground for many other such "meaningful conversations" as we would call these episodes. So, the discussions and deliberations would continue ad nauseum until I was ready to scream if only to make this insanity stop and solve at least one thing. Needless to say, the distance between us widened at a devastating pace but we never stopped talking about the issues at hand and God knows there was no lack of them. All that talking opened up vulnerabilities in both of us that we would have been prudent not to show each other so early into the marriage....

While the pundits are blaming novel and little understood financial instruments for the economy going to hell in a hand basket, Sudhir Venkatesh finds the oldest profession in the world benefiting from these hard times .This must be the silver lining to the proverbial cloud - there are several others too who are doing well too . For a more detailed consideration of the bright side of things , this article by Micheal Lewis makes for interesting reading. No matter how eager you are to be on the winning side , your chances are not too bright if you are the little guy.