Damn’d

One of the reasons, NYC is NYC because the good folks there continue to do crazy (cool) stuff like the Sidewalk Catwalk project.

Created by the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, the project features 32 mannequins dressed by local designers in weather proof material. Loved the the theme by Kenneth Cole (pictured above)

It does add some extra zing to the walk from 34th st to Times Square on 6th Avenue.

More pictures in the slideshow below:

Incase you cannot see the slideshow above, here is the Flickr link.

Not too many great movies going around these days…The Japanese wife is one of them which manages to stand apart from the pack.

Its the story of two pen-pals, one a bengali living in rural west bengal and the other living in Japan. Yes, as the title suggests, the girl lives in Japan.

What starts off as a friendship via regular letters takes a strange turn as Miyage offers herself to Snehamoy as his wife. Though they never meet during their lifetime, they are pretty devoted and behave as much like husband-wife as any other couple… Gives, long distance relationships a whole new meaning.

Detailed synopsis here.

The movie moves along almost poetically with a amazing background score and before you realise it, its the end. And it hits hard. Not something that you would expect.

Dont want to spoil the climax for you so go and watch it if you can. If you don’t understand Bengali, try and get a sub titled version as its interlaced with english and bengali (though you will really enjoy the nuances if you understand bengali, especially the bangladeshi accent).

One thing that did strike me at the end though is, we go through life waiting for something, and in the end when we finally get it, its almost always too little too late….Just goes to reinforce the fact that the journey is more important than the destination.

So whatever super urgent/important thing that you may seem to be doing, take some time out to watch this movie. Might help you see your life from a different perspective.

New York is an amazing city. By night, it gets even more interesting.

So instead of sitting all night in a bar on a friday night, we (Esther, Roma and I ) decided to do some ‘Night Photography’.

After dinner at Cowgirl (which had amazing pulled pork but horrible BBQ ribs) on Hudson st, we spent the next hour or so walking down Bleeker, 8 th Avenue, and ultimately finishing up at 6th and 14th.

Here are some of the pics below… and yes, I did take a picture of a man peeing into a telephone booth. Unbelievable, but i guess its a ‘new yorkish’ thing to do

Most gyms have ’tissue wipes’ for wiping the treadmill / elliptical trainer clean after you are done using them.

Most people don’t bother using them and usually walk off.

Today, the guy on the elliptical finished a few minutes before me and was pottering around as his wife was still on the treadmill. He had ofcourse not bothered to wipe it clean.

After I was done, I wiped up my elliptical and moved to the weights area. The guy had seen me doing it, and i was wondering what he would do next.

Surprise !! He got some wipes and wiped his machine. He obviously was not a regular ‘wiper’ because it was already a good ten minutes since he had finished so I assume he did it because he saw me doing it.

I guess most folks dont do the ‘right’ stuff because either they are too lazy about it or it just doesnt strike them…(another example which is very aptly explained in this awesome ad here.)

So if you want some things to change, lead by example

On a recent trip to the Surajkund mela, was wondering what to shoot when i realised that there was a whole riot of colours all around us.

Now while B&W photography is considered “classic, timeless, arty, etc etc”, i just love the amount of colour all around us, hence this attempt to capture the ‘colour’

Take a look at some more on Flickr here.

To see a slideshow, click the image below.

The Donkey and the Dog- Read and think-You may find one in your midst.

There was once a washer man who had a donkey and a dog. One night when the whole world was sleeping, a thief broke into the house, the washer man was fast asleep too but the donkey and the dog were awake. The dog decided not to bark since the master did not take good care of him and wanted to teach him a lesson.

The donkey got worried and said to the dog that if he doesn’t bark, the donkey will have to do something himself. The dog did not change his mind and the donkey started braying loudly.

Hearing the donkey bray, the thief ran away, the master woke up and started beating the donkey for braying in the middle of the night for no reason.
Moral of the story ” One must not engage in duties other than his own”

Now take a new look at the same story…

The washer man was a well educated man from a premier management institute. He had the fundas of looking at the bigger picture and thinking out of the box. He was convinced that there must be some reason for the donkey to bray in the night.. He walked outside a little and did some fact finding, applied a bottom up approach, figured out from the ground realities that there was a thief who broke in and the donkey only wanted to alert him about it. Looking at the donkey’s extra initiative and going beyond the call of the duty, he rewarded him with lot of hay and other perks and became his favorite pet.
The dog’s life didn’t change much, except that now the donkey was more motivated in doing the dog’s duties as well. In the annual appraisal the dog managed “ME” (Met Expectations) .

Soon the dog realized that the donkey is taking care of his duties and he can enjoy his life sleeping and lazing around.

The donkey was rated as ” star performer”. The donkey had to live up to his already high performance standards.

Soon he was over burdened with work and always under pressure and now is looking for a NEW JOB …

Source: Internet fwd via Neetu Mishra

The tagline says, ” You will never look at dinner the same way”.

And after watching the movie, I did indeed have a different perspective on the food we eat.

Its amazing the changes that have taken place in the food industry…and slightly scary too…The movie covers a wide range of issues, ranging from the need to buy locally grown organic food, the ‘factory model’ of farming and meat production, to the global impact which major food corporations have had on the environment…

Highly recommended for watching.

Here is the official website. And if you want to do more, click here.

I recently drove down from Gurgaon to Noida to meet a friend. The round trip took me almost 3 and a half hours and provided a fascinating melange that India has morphed into.

Right from cruising at 100 kmph on the NH 8 to waiting for 10 minutes in the ‘tag’ lane at the Gurgaon toll bridge, to battling errant drivers on Delhi’s inner ring road, and smoothly gliding past the tolls at the DND tolls, I had this constant question on my mind, “What’s the rush, people ?”

The answer was quite blatantly on display, pretty much every where.

India is on a roll. India is the next economic super power. Lifestyles are changing (and upwardly so). Women’s empowerment is on a high (as evidenced by higher divorce rates and nasty female drivers on the road – Earlier, it was only the ‘macho men’ who would cut you off ), etc etc

There seems to be an optimism in the air. The Great Recession has taken down America and Europe while India has  remained largely unaffected and is steadily growing and ‘developing’. Just the perfect place to be, don’t you think ?

We still have a long way to go. The roads are in a mess, the air quality in Gurgaon sucks, people are generally rude everywhere and everybody is intent on building their own sheltered cocoon – the rest of the world be damned.

While ruminating on the state of things with a friend, she was of the view that things wont improve unless the government improves things.

Take for example, the toll gate at the entrance of NH 8 in Gurgaon. Its horrible at any point of the day and during peak hours is a downright nightmare. While there are special ‘tagged’ lanes for folks with pre paid smart cards the lanes are usually jammed with ‘cash payers’ defeating the purpose of having a faster lane. While the govt could have put in place a system of checks and fines, ultimately, it is us, the people who dont respect the system and then later cry that it doesnt work.

Something needs to change. A change in the fundamental mindset which includes basic civic sense, respect for your fellow man and a sense of ownership in our country. Most of us are hardened ‘cynics’ and believe that its somebody else’s problem(usually the government) to fix it.

So how do we bring about that change to create an empowered India. The answer  to some extent may very well lie in this movie, ‘Stand and Deliver’.

Its about taking a small group and bringing about incremental change, one day at a time, and preferably with children.

The adults of our country are already in a mess. The only hope left is with our children, and if we dont teach them what is right from wrong, or more importantly, how to figure out what is the right thing to do…well i guess life will go on as usual.

As MG said, be the change you want to see in the world. Or atleast give it a try.

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