Damn’d

Yep, The South Asian International Film, now in its 6th year opens on the 28th of October with the world premiere of Aladin, starring Amitabh Bachchan.

It boasts of an eceletic collection of films from directors in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and England.

While there are indie commercials and comedy capers like Fatso and Raat Gayi baat gayi from the Pritish Nandy stable, there are also shorts and documentaries covering a wide range of subjects including Kashmir, the innocence of children, social awakening in rural india and parental pressures in America.

See the entire line up here.

So if you love films and are in New York City from the 28th of October till the 3rd of November, drop in for a dekko.

For more details, go to www.saiff.org

Updates on : http://twitter.com/southasianfilms

Community at: http://www.facebook.com/southasianfilms

P.S: I am volunteer at SAIFF, helping them with their Digital Marketing campaingn, so please help spread the word

Sometime in late August, Sramana Mitra had posted a special offer for Venturewoods’ readers. The deal was that the first 10 users interested in reviewing her latest book would receive a free copy. Free stuff is always nice, but alas, I wasnt one of the lucky few on her list.

Which is why, it was a pleasant surprise when I received a copy of her book Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, a few weeks ago in the mail from her PR agent. Its volume 2 of her Enterpreneur Journeys series.

This review is long overdue and here it is.

Bootstrapping:WMR is a slim volume which primarily contains interviews with 13 enterpreneurs (almost all related to the internet industry) who started on their own, and how they bootstrapped their way to success, before reaching out to VC’s for venture capital.

My initial impression as I started reading this was, that this books seems pretty similar to what the guys at Road Trip Nation have been trying to do.

If you are a reader of Sramana’s blog, you will know that she is a great proponent of entrepreneurship and bootstrapping as a way to get your venture out of the door (rather than banging on VC’s doors)…Infact, in the beginning of this book, she also outlines that ‘mom-n-pop’ enterpreneurship is one of the ways to get the US economy back on track and even exhorts Barack Obama to do more than pay lip service to the SME sector.

However, WMR is pretty different from RTN even though both have stories about people who followed their ‘passion’.

While RTN talks to people across all sectors (and not necessarily entrepreneurs) who believed in their gut and carved their own road rather than doing the ‘doctor-lawyer-banker’ routine, Sramana walks a different line.

Her interviews are exclusively with enterpreneurs AND who bootstrapped their ventures. The interviews are pretty detailed and provide good insights into how various folks started their business (their initial struggles – the perseverance- and how one becomes an overnight success through 10 years of hardwork, etc etc)… I follow Om Malik and Rafat Ali’s blogs so it was very interesting to read their stories.

A very decent read overall, and I loved the last few lines in the book,

” We are nothing. We are insignificant. We are a single speck of dust in the continuum of time.
So why be afraid of failure ? “

So if you are budding enterpreneur, or even planning to become one, it will do you good to grab a copy.

What was slightly disappointing, or rather what i was expecting in the book was more of her original insights, but I guess the intention of the book was slightly different, and we anyway have her blog for that

Another small niggling point was the design of the book. All her 3 volume covers seem to have the ‘open palms’ pic, which is also the same as her blog mast head. Not sure if this was a branding strategy but the book cover design could definitely have been improved.

I know they say, one should not judge a book by its cover, but I am one of those folks to whom the cover of the book makes a difference. A couple of years ago, i had picked up ‘Shantaram‘ solely based on its cover design, and its one of the best books I have ever read

Was recently doing some research on ‘How to file an RTI application’.

I was vaguely aware of the RTI Act and how it had been enacted to bring about transparency and efficiency within our government machinery, etc etc..

Its been almost 5 years since the act has been in force so I thought it would be a breeze for me to file an application…online !!

But no, our great government, with all its great intentions has still not developed a system where you can file an application online.You gotta do it the old fashioned way…’write down the application on a piece of paper and send it off to the Post office along with a fee of Rs 10′.

Can you imagine how many people do NOT file an application because of the ‘physical hassle’…

How difficult is it to have a system which could allow you to file an application online ?

But wait, maybe its by design and in order to discourage ‘frivolous’ applications (It will be easier to file online so more ppl will file applications which means more work for our babus)… Who knows ?

While the Act is great in spirit, it needs to be accessible much more easily (i.e for starters, the ability to file an application online)

Any takers for building such a system ? More importantly, if a private entrepreneur were to attempt building something, would the government allow it to flourish or throw a wrench in the works ??

Guess the only way to find out is to try and build something like that

Here is a good place to find what has been happening wrt to the Act since 2005. Somebody call Vishal has been religiously updating the blog

And its not all bad too.. Here is a list of some of the success stories…

Saw this awesome sight while driving home…The Empire State Building in New York displaying the colours of the Indian flag atop its mast…awesome …

Happy Independence Day

P.S: The fuzzy pic ofcourse does not do justice to the actual vista…wish i had a better camera..

at Newport, jersey city.

Even though the real estate market is still in the dumps, atleast folks still have their sense of humour intact

But yeah , the guy who put up the ad needs a reality check !

Watching a collection of MJ’s videos on the flight, I realised that he didn’t die recently. Atleast not for me

For a long time, I used to be a huge fan. Discovered him when I was in Std IV in a boarding school near Darjeeling.

Like it happens all ‘only boys’ schools there were times when you got into fist fights. During one of those fights, the guy I had just clocked, instead of punching back called me a ‘blackie’. I was dark and he was a ‘ fair’ guy.

To an impressionable 8 yr old, it hurt more than any punch.

And it was MJ’s ‘Black or White’ which helped at that point of time.

However, more than the social message, it was his music that I really liked. You could just hum most of his songs…even though i couldnt understand most of the lyrics, i just loved hearing the songs…

Those were also the days when magnetic cassette tapes were still in use and hard to come by. And they were expensive too (alteast compared to a school kid’s pocket money )

I used rent them from some of  the rich scmucks at school during the weekends. Later when I got my own Walkman, rather than buy whole albums , I would get a bootlegger to write about 12 songs on a blank tape. They cost like 5 bucks a song and were a much better deal than buying a single album.

I guess you could call me a cheap ‘fan’ but it was tough spending half your month’s worth of pocket money on single tapes.

Oh, those were the days.

Gradually, high school turned into college and Michael turned from black to white.(and i guess also went bankrupt fighting the child molestation accusations). He also stopped producing the kind of music that I liked. The breaking point came for me when i bought ‘ Blood on the dance floor’ and didn’t like a single song

Life moved on and he sort of faded from memory. Till ofcourse a few days ago.

Today when, I think about it, it’s amazing the amount of sub conscious impact his music has had on me, unlike that of any other musician.

As somebody was saying the other day, ” oh he was only 50 and should have lived longer”.

I don’t disagree with, that. However, in his 50 yrs, he has lived life on his own terms and more importantly ‘done his thing’ , creating history in the process.

Which is what counts at the end of the day.

May he R.I.P

Saw this old iMac in the trash room left by somebody who has no more use for it .

Wonder how will it be disposed off ?
Wonder if apple has a formal policy for reclycing stuff ?
Wonder if the user could have disposed it off in a more environment friendly manner ?
Wonder if it will end up in a developing country ?
Wonder if will even be useful in it’s current format in a developing country?
Wonder if I am wondering too much and ‘Waste Management’ will dispose it off appropriately ?

What would you have done ?

DSCN0351

Originally uploaded by abhikprasad

Saw the fireworks on the Hudson river as part of the 4th of July celebrations. Took some pictures but I don’t think any picture or video can capture the experience of seeing it ‘live’…was Awesome with a capital A

Check out some more pics on my Flickr photostream by clicking on the pic above.

Spent 3 hours in a line outside the apple store from 7 in the morning to get the new iPhone

I know there are like 21 million of them out there so thought that these things would be easier to get… Apple apparently doesn’t think so.

It almost felt like they were doing me a favour by allowing me to buy it… The way the lines were organized by the almost condescending apple staff (orange concierges) to the herding in store almost made me feel like my first day at school the fact that I paid over $300 for it almost seems incidental

But they have built a fantastic product and I guess are very much aware…

And it really is cool and not really a phone…again like the price, thefunctionality for making calls is almost incidental

Trying to blog from the wordpress app on the iPhone…seems pretty simple at the moment. Hopefully the writing will be more regular