BRAND

Some more wise words from my unlikely inspiration, this time, on what “brand” means:

“The saying goes, "a brand is a promise." On a personal level, I've always felt that statement was incomplete. A promise is the lowest common denominator of a brand - it's what people expect. Think of your favorite brand, whether search engine or sneaker or coffee shop or free software, and you'll know what I mean - a brand is an expectation. If you experience anything less, you're disappointed.”

I distinctly remember the time one of the candidates in my group was asked to define a brand in an interview. According to him, a brand was a set of positive (or negative) associations that were made with an entity – a product, a service, or even a person. It consists if certain qualities, some things that come to mind when that entity's name is taken. He continued to define himself as a brand, in terms of qualities and abilities, and that of an institute as well, expressing some of the ideals that it stood for. I thought it was a brilliant answer. It was only when I read the above blog that I realised that there is much more to this now-ambiguous-sounding word. And this knowledge/realisation comes with experience. I wonder, in the new world that I going to in a couple of months, how much knowledge will be realised into experience?

Round and Round

Round and Round goes the Merry-Go Round,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.
Recognise the same swivelling chairs,
The same people hunched over their screens,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.
Recognise the “lame ducks”,
The same errors on trying to execute different files,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.

Um, Did I say merry?
I can't believe that I have been driven to write something like this!!

Sometimes..

Has it ever happened to you that at one point of time you feel very strongly about something, but then later you wonder why you even bothered to think about it in the first place? The following two issues mean so less to me now that I'm not even able to word them satisfactorily.

“I am because you are”
I was asked: What comes to your mind when you hear this statement?
My answer and thought stressed on the opinion that our character and personality are significantly affected by our environment – society, our family and elders. Maybe this is because I am largely a product of my environment. I owe everything that I am to the kind of city I come from, to my parents (who took all the right decisions for me at crucial times in my life) and all the values/opinions that I have inculcated from them.

“Lame Duck”
The best way to explain this is that when you are at the last rung of the ladder whatever everyone throws at you from above falls on you. By virtue of being junior in both age, experience and consequently knowledge I am the Chosen One to execute all the dud, sure-to-end-nowhere tasks. It's frustrating because I end up wasting time and energy, only to realise (or be told) later that I should stop working on it as it is heading nowhere. Worse, I lose motivation to work. Why do the task when I know that it is going to be a lame duck?

Big Bully

Who? Doordarshan

Why? Because they are use legislations and laws to make up for their inefficiency

What? Passed a legislation so that Nimbus (the company that runs Neo Sports Channel currently has rights to telecast all cricket matches in India till 2010) will be forced to share live telecast feed with Doordarshan for all the matches that it airs without encryption. This not only means loss of valuable revenue within India, but the lack of encryption also makes the telecast vulnerable to usage by other channels outside India.

Or take the presidents of IOA (Indian Olympic Federation) and the All-India Football Federation. The current presidents have been holding their posts for more than 15 years each. Yet, India is ranked 132 among 137 countries that play football. And we can count the number of medals India has won in Olymics in the past 15-odd years on our fingers. One wonders – do these officials ever feel accountable, if not to the country or their job, then atleast to themselves? All they have done during their tenure is to amass a disproportionate amount of wealth, and abuse their power. In my opinion, the recent Bill on reservation in educational institutions was also an effort to this end – abuse of power. The politician in question was probably thinking that this would be the sure shot way of coming back in the limelight. After all, how many of us even knew he existed before the Reservation furore?

I wholeheartedly agree with the Supreme Court judge who said “Everyone wants to loot this country. The only solution is to hang some corrupt persons from the lampost”. I would think that when it comes to politics, rather than people getting corrupted by the power in it, it is the corrupted who get attracted to the power.

Disillusionment.

What did i say..

"I've always likened mails with the people who sent them. They always come out exactly how a person talks somehow. But it is different with you. I guess it might be cause we've known each other better. The problem might arise somehow when one of us starts liking one part better over the other.
On second thoughts it might be that the mails don't inherently have a stamp of their writers but that personality is added by the reader. It acquires the quality the reader identifies with the sender, maybe the one quality he/she likes the most. In that case yours enthuses warmness in me. :) "

What did I say about the power of words?

Smell the flowers

It took an offhand invitation to a friend for a get-together (followed by a predictable refusal to join) for me to realise that I've been too involved in my life (and in myself) to stop and smell the flowers. There are so many other things that I should do to make my life complete. Being too busy to think about it is just an excuse. I spend my weekends being (and feeling) incredibly lazy, as if to make up for all the 'hard work' that I did all week. I want to spend those couple of days catching up with everyone I haven't kept in touch with, but at the same time I want to spend them at home. If I could just walk out of office right now, with the whole day at my disposal, this is what I would do:
1. Drop in at my Music teacher's house. She has moulded my singing to what it is today, and I haven't met her in ages.
2. Walk down those narrow roads that I grew up in, the roads I took to school, to my grandparents' place years ago and to all those classes.
3. Surprise that friend by landing up at her office, and we can spend lunch catching up with each other.
4. Sometimes, just being with somebody is enough; what you do together is inconsequential
5. Get hold of a good novel to read (and definitely finish reading it!)
6. Get myself a new phone, I've been trying to decide on the model for months
7. Sing my heart out, and do all the other things that are such an integral part of my life :)
8. Parks, lawns, or any open green area for that matter is hard to come by in this concrete jungle. If I ever come across such an area I would walk barefoot on the grass, lie down on the lawns and let nature's therapeutic effects wash over me.

Talk talk

I am a strong believer in the power of words. Words put beautifully can impress, can enliven the atmosphere and most importantly, they express an aspect of your personality. A stray word said in anger or frustration can hurt, and like an accident, the damage is already done, and nothing you do or say after that is going to undo the effect. The thought is depressing, and makes you realise just how powerful language can be. Words are like Clay. With a clump in your hand the shapes that you can make out of it are almost infinite. It is natural for any mind to visualize creating complicated figures out of that clump. After all, that will show your skill, right? Firstly, doing is not as easy as thinking. Secondly, time and experience with moulding Clay will tell you that the most beautiful creations are the ones that are simplest in design, because they are created with clarity of thought. Ergo, it's easy to complicate matters. Keeping it simple is difficult!

It is widely acknowledged that no words can express emotions felt very strongly-like love, anger, grief, happiness and separation. Then, all that is felt is the ache in the heart, the tear in the eye, or both. This makes me think that language is a more developed version of the primitive experiences (read:emotions). It is all very fine for it to sound good when read out, but do the words do justice to the intensity?
Then again, words are an experience by themselves :)

So blogging isn't an infatuation after all..