Tellydallying
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I think the tragedy with Indian television these days is that all we have is more of the same, over and over again. Pick any segment - entertainment, news, lifestyle and even faith - and all you get are variations of the same five themes. I don't intend to imply that the surfeit is killing the video star by a long shot. Far from it, the industry is booming, bottom lines, stock valuations and ad revenues are in the best shape they've been in for a long time, especially when you consider the maddening rate at which the sector has been expanding. Then, as Dire Straits once sang, "Why Worry?" Lack of involvement and predictability are two factors that kill any relationship and every viewer dreads having those two feature prominently in his/her relationship with the television set. Right now, there is just way too much of both on....
Broadbanned
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If you ever wanted to see a deployment of the classic smokescreen tactic, all you need to do is turn to our dear telecom industry for help. For a better idea of what I am talking about, try parsing the following statement by Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (AUSPI) and Reliance on the government's idea to enforce strict Quality of Service norms for broadband services in India:
"It is seen that compared to most of the countries in Asia and the West, where broadband usage is growing, our country still lags behind. As such, the focus right now should be on both supply side and demand side of the broadband market, that is, creating and deploying broadband-capable infrastructure in the country as well as stimulating the use of broadband in the country. We need to focus on creating the need and deployment of broadband in....
Wednesday, June 07, 2006The Other Life
10 Tweet On the surface, the Mahajan saga (including both junior and senior) seems to be yet another tale from the rich and the powerful crypt gone wrong, but there is a darker and often untold story in the happenings that won't find much mention in the numerous analyses being played out endlessly in the media these days. The untold story is not of the pressure (when has pressure not been there in any social set up?), peer or otherwise, but that gradually we are leaving ourselves very little space or acceptance for people who are not as good or successful as the cream that shows up on top. It is no longer acceptable to be just good enough; you have to be excellent these days. Failures or the ones who don't make the cut are ostracized and are left with nowhere to go. If you are not wildly successful these....
Wednesday, May 31, 2006Tubular Tragedies
1 Tweet One of the greater disappointments of 2006 has been the rate at which new seasons of my favourite sitcoms have gone down the drain. I do not know what hit Max Mutchnick after season 6 of Will & Grace, but the series has become completely unwatchable. Actually even season 6 was nothing short of a mini-tragedy. The jokes don't seem that funny anymore, almost everything is predictable and even Karen looks like an also ran. I have been watching season 7 on and off and every time I feel nothing about it. And you know all hope is lost for television, when even minor indulgences like Amy Peitz, who is delectable as Annie Spadaro in Caroline in the City, turns up with a double chin and longer hair that makes her look like any average brunette in the latest season on air these days. Tragedy truly has no limits.....
Monday , April 24, 2006Buy Google, Microsoft exec tells Gates
10 Tweet Well, the title is not quite accurate, but the easier and cheaper way to go about what Microsoft Corp's most audible voice on the internet, Robert Scoble, said is for the company to buy Google and save quite a few bucks and a whole lot of sweat in the process. Robert, in a recent blog post, says that the company requires a moonshot, one that would give "A guaranteed Terabyte of Internet-based storage space for EVERYTHING and for EVERYONE running Windows in the world". To understand what this is all about, a quick refresher course in the history of the company is required. Once it comprehensively won the Big Browser Battle I sometime in early 2002, by bashing Netscape to a pulp with its Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft took its eyes off the ball and allowed the horse, the barn and the entire farm to bolt by leaving....
Thursday , April 06, 2006Working Music
7 Tweet CNN Money has a brilliant cross between a slide show and feature story today called 'How I work' on a cross section of top executives and professionals. It is amazing to see how many of the top lot interviewed in it stay offline for most of the time. Some have not even sent a single e-mail in their lives. The numbers they talk are equally baffling, but one thing they have in common is a filtering mechanism. They have an innate knack to block out the insignificant and pull in only the ones from which value can be accrued. For someone like me, who is constantly wired up (via WiFi in office, broadband/VPN/email at home and GPRS while elsewhere), work more or less becomes the only life you have. So it becomes very important that I at least don't feel lousy doing what I do everyday. Still, the....
Friday , March 31, 2006That Asian Sound
2 Tweet You know that the Indian/Asian sound has truly arrived when the second half kick-off of an English Premiership match starts off to the tune of Mundeya De Dil Hilgaye mashed up to a fine bouncy blend by Kais. Transfusion of musical influences is hardly any kind of news, it has been going on from much before the early Rishikesh-powered Beatles albums to the recent efforts of the Asian Dub Foundation and the entire London-based Asian underground sound. The only tragedy in the whole scheme of things is that while genres like dance, fusion, electronica and hip hop have imbibed the Asian sound very well in the west, other genres like rock have not made much inroads, both in terms of influence and artists from the subcontinent, into the scene there. While a lot of it has to do with the fact that both the European and....
Thursday , February 16, 2006State of the fourth estate
10 Tweet The news machinery is a well-oiled beast - an assembly line of reporters, editors, producers and technicians that rolls along at a maddening pace. A trip down to the first floor of our office, where most of the show is run out of, sometimes resembles the Orc assembly line in Isengard. Though I would have to clarify that we look and smell considerably better and there are no plans of dominating the Earth, Middle or otherwise, and our motives are considerably nobler, though a lot of the readers would beg to differ. But the fact of the matter is that it is people who run the media circus. Normal people who are susceptible to emotions, day-to-day problems, people who get to spend very little time outside the sphere of normal operations, be it with their families or with loved ones. But none of this count as the news cycle....
Thursday , January 19, 2006What do you think?
10 Tweet On January 21st we would have completed a month of CNN-IBN's existence in the online sphere. While we have already been judged as being better than the competition by some quarters, the fact of the matter is that we still have quite a long way to go both in terms of features that we had planned to roll out and also in terms of improvements in quality. But the good news is that more of you are coming to the website every day and once you do find your way around, you tend to keep coming back. We are grateful to each and every one of you who keep visiting us every day. In fact we have actually been taken aback a bit by the quality of the comments and debates that follow the stories, keep them coming! For our tiny team, comprising both editorial and technical, it....
Tuesday , December 27, 2005We are in this together
9 Tweet A lot of people have asked if we need yet another news channel and if we do not resemble a lot of the competition, notably NDTV, even after our self-professed ideal of being zara hatke from the rest of the crowd. To find answers to those questions, we need to understand that great changes do not always come in a king-size package. Other than the monstrous ones, there are also those changes which start showing up only in the tiny nuances that chip away both at the task at hand and at your perception, bit-by-bit, to show up one day in its full glory. What we are aiming to do is the same. So, be patient and keep watching, it will be slow in coming, but it will eventually materialize. But is there really an unfulfilled opportunity in the news media today when every television news....
