Roadside art!
Rajiv Gandhi road (OMR-Old Mahabalipuram road) is an ever bustling 8 lane road,constructed for meeting the ever increasing traffic congestion on the IT corridor.In 2006 the road was opened for public to use. There were lots of 'firsts' credited to this road. Instead of cutting trees, the usual procedure, around 150 trees were uprooted from the side and replanted on the centre of the road. This was the first 8 lane road in Chennai.


But one feature that created much excitement and appreciation among the public was the various art forms commissioned on either side of the road. Paintings on either side of a Highway was never seen before and was happening first time in India.
Now, Three years after the inauguration, I happened to see some changes that’s happening for this road.
The art (all oil paintings) on the left side (From Madhya Kailash) are made on temporary walls made of sheets. Most of the paintings are in bad state and may disappear in near future

Am not able to get this one, probably a sky scrapper?


Fish's mid portion missing!





One difference I noticed while comparing the paintings on both sides of the road was lots of animals/insects are featured on the left side!


Half of the painting missing, deforestation in painting also?


Contrary to this the various arts on the right side are made on concrete walls. There are 12 such art forms

1. Peacock, temple gopuram, Ganapathi and Lotuses, made of glass chip on Tidel park’s wall



2. Oil painting on the wall of M.G.R film city


3. Art( a family flying kites) made of metal pieces



4. Oil painting on the walls of Raja Muthiayah reserve lab



5. Modern art with wires and steel pieces


6. Oil painting of a tree, nicely incorporated into the building of Central Polytechnic College, Artist P.Selvakumar.


7. Sculpture in memory of Tsunami, artist- Sailesh



8. Painting on either side of Central institute of technology foundation stupa with Ashoka Chakra on the top


9. Sculptor(mother and child) by Asma Menon



10. Oil painting and glass chip



11. Modern art by steel pieces and painting on the walls of M.A Chidambaram college of nursing

Next time you drive on OMR have a look, its worth seeing!

Image of the week


Is it a Statutory warning?

Wimbledon again!

It's been a year now, 2008 June we (myself,my wife and two cousins of ours) were at Wimbledon. It was a bright Sunday afternoon,calm and quite with greenery all around.


Never make this mistake; if you travel by train, to go to All England Tennis court, get down at Southfields station not Wimbledon. We went all the way to Wimbledon and came back.


A huge banner showing legendary Bjorn Borg’s historic moments at Wimbledon, Roger Federer was supposed to surpass him


Nice gesture, The All England Club welcoming players from all countries, felt happy to see India there


The Championships of the future, much awaited retractable roof for the centre court is already up, all will miss the famous Wimbledon showers for sure


All for this!







It was a Sunday so no matches,we could only see the famous courts from outside




The Wimbledon shop


Tennis Museum


2009 Championships starting from today, lovers of the game will miss Rafa!

The power of 140
Some of the latest developments happening around the world prove the power of social networking sites. Whether its the news of how twitter helped in bringing the true picture in Iran, or how a central minister tweet his day to day activities. How one find the humour side of any events.
Tweeter also known as micro blogging (You can have only 140 characters per tweet) has become such a powerful tool for networking that US asked tweeter to delay scheduled maintenance so that without a break Iranians can tweet their protest over the presidential election. Read here

Latest is something called tweetpsych where they will analyse one's last 1000 tweets and gives a psychological profile of the person. This is my tweetpsych

Now some interesting Tweeple

ShashiTharoor : author, columnist, former UN Under-Secretary General, now Minister of State for External Affairs, Govt of India
Follow Shashi Tharoor
Tharoor's tweet is fun to read. His tweets include the various types of garlands he receive during his Constituency visit, how many mangoes he eat in a day, the number of forms one need to fill after becoming an MP (Member of Parliament). Through his tweets one a clear understand how demanding a minister’s life is.

Kiruba Shankar: CEO of Business Blogging, Social Media Enthusiast, Podcaster, Teacher, Columnist, Wikipedian,
Follow Kiruba He tweets about his various online activities on Knowledge foundation, Blogcamp etc. His recent issue with ClearTrip.com has become a case study on social networking .

Ramesh gives a humour touch to various news, its fun to follow this guy
Follow Ramesh

Am busy tweeting so are others

Sathya's world!

We have one person in our office who comes out with useful and decorative things from so called useless (read used less) things. His name is Sathya and he is always busy doing something or other.

Here i feature some of the creations of Sathya
Its summer at its peak in Chennai, so to get some cool breeze, Sathya's Fan, Sathya's desk lamp


Table Titanic that will never sink!





Public Transport, Chennai's Volvo A/c buses are a big hit!



Public Telephone


Once we pitched for a DTH company,Sathya got inspired from this and made one dish out of Coconut shell!





Decorative item





Sathya with his creations


And his journey continues!!!

Brand power
Brands control most of our lives. We can not imagine a moment (forget about a day) without Brands. Right from toothpaste to brush to soaps to breakfast to travel to work, we have lots of Brands with us. Now let me share some theory, Brand equity is the sum total of its assets and liabilities. Some Brands’ equity is even larger than GDP of nations. Now the product, logo, even colours used, fonts all plays a vital role in deciding the Brand equity. Now see this, will it come under asset or liability?

A finale
There was one person in Kerala (he is still there) named UNNI. Remember the small cute two wheeler “SUNNY” that hit the road in 90s? Now this UNNI had one SUNNY. In order to customize his vehicle he did something, with great difficulty he changed the ‘S’ in SUNNY to ‘U’ in UNNI. Now there are two UNNIs, our hero and his two wheeler. One day UNNI gave his SUNNY (read UNNY) for servicing. The mechanic did a good job and he found out there is something wrong with the name. Now you can guess what he did, he changed (difficulty level remains the same) the ‘U’ and brought back the ‘S’.I leave it to the imagination of the reader the facial expression UNNI had while collecting the vehicle
Brands some times really touch our lives!

How to take care of customer

“Customer service” is a clichéd word nowadays, right from multi billion brands to corner tea shop, everybody use, misuse and abuse this word. Now when you are in a service industry” customer care” must be in the blood and sweat. And when the industry you are in is something like Aviation you better take care of your customer.
Find below is the mail one of the Managers had sent to his peer enlightening about the details of a customer expected to fly with them. For obvious reasons I have changed only the names of all the characters and message is exactly the same
From: Shankar, Manager

Dear David,

Mr R Natraj - Managing Director of the DXBT Inc along with his family have booked on Mumbai - Delhi flight X3528
.
His PRN IS 53CZDF4. Seats blocked for them are 3B, 4D, 4G, 4F

Now please provide them a car for them to be taken to the aircraft??(Here I think what he meant was to Airport) and provide them assistance. Please instruct the crew to pamper them” (excuse me????)

Mr Natraj is travelling for the first time and we need to get them to come back to again (am sure he is confused and determined to make others also)

Please meet and see that they are taken care off.

Regards,

Shankar

Now what do I say when customer care is of Paramount importance? I am sure you will also send an instruction like this

Lost images- The beginning!
I love traveling and the fun is more when I travel to remote villages and towns. The reason is there is always a ‘coming home’ feeling, the narrow and dusty roads, lots of greenery around, fresh air and innocent people. You never come across these images in any cities for sure.

Headless village God, name I don’t know

Ice cream vendor’s cycle, I saw a bunch of kids happily enjoying the ice sticks and my “hygiene conscious” mind did not allow me to try the ice sticks

A stitch in a time !


See an ad of a tailoring centre. We(myself and my wife) were definitely interested in quality stitching, ok with good designing and most inviting part was “xpress delivery, within 24/48 hrs” , which was a myth, to once again confirm that we had to wait for 10 days. In a way we realized this after 10 days. We stepped in after 10 days (after no response of repeated calling) and found the cloth piece in tact. I am sure most have gone through this phenomenon. I have not met anybody who have seen anyone who have received any dress on time from tailoring shop
Now what’s the use of quality stitching,good design and all if one can not deliver on time? We are on the look out for another “quality tailor”, any suggestions?

Some interesting things around us

The way English is spoken change from state to state, but will the spelling also change?
I found this sign behind a bus on the way to Thirupathi, what they meant was ‘ Ghat eligible’




This one is in a Studio at Guruvayur, near to famous temple, it’s a famous Malayalam film lyric, message is simple, ‘leave your footwear outside and come in’



This sign of a ‘Sun outage’ appeared in my TV, this phenomenon is very rare it seems



Coalition politics, Vehicle of a party leader

Invitation from an ad agency
How to invite for a get-together? What big deal? You must be thinking, write the agenda of the g2g, venue, time and date, right?
That’s the normal way and people in advertising are not normal guys so when they invite for g2g its something like this

All the characters featured are the employees and me there in French beard (without specs) behind the laptop

India Shining!!!

Remember 2004 election? when BJP coined the word 'India Shining' and campaigned? experts believed that this campaign was one of the main reason for their defeat because India was (if at all( shining only in Metros. Now thats about 2004

5 years after 'India Shining', 2009 Election time. I happened to go through CPI-M manifesto and this is what they say

30 million people are undernourished

More than half of India’s women are anaemic

40 per cent of children under three years are underweight

2,19,000 habitations have no access to clean drinking water

39 per cent of adult population is illiterate

77 per cent of the population spends less than Rs. 20 a day

The share of wages in the organised industrial sector is among the lowest in the world

India truly Shining!!!!!

High Tech election 2009

First phase of voting has started and this time election throughout India has become high tech.

First Tata Tea’s ‘Jaagore’ asked youngsters to come and vote. Followed was ‘Yes We can, we will ‘campaign, remember US election? Major national parties have TVC (TV Commercials) airing across the channels. Internet campaign is also in full swing. Banners like this is common in most of sites

Today I received a mail from twitter saying “ Vote for Sarath Babu" is now following you on Twitter! Now Sarath Babu, owner of food chain, Food king Pvt Ltd, an IIM graduate, son of a poor lady who used to sell ‘Idllis’ is contesting 2009 Lok Sabha elections.Now Twitter is a good medium where you meet lots of youngsters. Initial polling percentages shows that more number of people has voted compared to 2004 elections that too youngsters. It seems Going hi-tech has had an effect.

HERO Pen
After almost 15 years I saw a Hero pen! My colleague is using one. Last time I used a Hero pen was in my high school days. This pen was highly recommended for improving the hand writing. The pen used to come in three colours I think, Red, Green and Black.

Filling ink was real fun and a bit complicated also. But as a kid I used to enjoy this process. Having a Hero pen was matter of much pride in those days.


I googled and found that The Shanghai Hero Pen Company manufactures Hero pen. In Wikipedia it is mentioned as “This pen was popular in India during the 80s and 90s”.


True, Hero pen was really a Hero of all high school kids. Then came the Gel one and rest is history.

I have always considered me as a widely read person until I found out this!
Since Feb 2006, the year I quit a BPO and start hunting for some more meaningful job, I started keeping a note of books I read. I call this as power pages as information is powerful. This includes various interesting phrases from various books I read.



So according to this record, I read 26 books in the last three years, till Feb 2009 and that means
On an average 8.6 books per year
In a month 0.71 book, not even a book!!!
Now this figure is appalling. I am sure there are more books published in a day
One of my New Year resolutions is to read more books this year, so let me go and continue reading

Life in an Advertising agency, part-1
They say Advertising is the only industry where one can have fun with pants on. Now the level of fun depends on the client handled. In spite of deadlines and client screaming, ad agencies can be fun place. What started as a de-brief session ended up like a collage of caricature featuring the entire members of the agency (thanks to economic recession, not many left in the agency). Everybody (including me) contributed. The topics varied from one’s obsession towards earrings of unimaginable shapes, scale and sizes, recent honeymoon trip made by a member, about low waist jean one wears, one person’s highly imaginative story of a snake that can swallow a donkey (he still believes and often tries to convince others that there is a snake like that). Now activities like these makes an ad agency a place where one can have real fun (yeah, pants are still on).