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life September 13, 2008

Posted by rizwan adil in humour, life, random.
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5 comments

few things about life i’ve found to be true : 

  • character building is important. 
  • money is not everything, but it is a very big thing. 
  • character, culture, ethics and values are important, but if you expect people to love you, like you, respect you for these, then its lame. 
  • credentials carry more weightage than the ‘person’. 
  • every secret keeper has a secret keeper. 
  • when you feel like shouting, you must. 
  • constipation is bad. 
  • moderate continuous efforts generate better results than a one time fiesta. 
  • the more you work harder, the luckier you get; not necessarily. 
  • you are in full control of your life- untrue, true only when taken in an empirical sense. 
  • philosohphy and psychology are modern man’s voodoo. 
  • you cant always be positive, sometimes be real, run !
  • theory very rarely is same as practice; not rarely- never. 
  • people stink, dont poke your nose everywhere and dont be disappointed.
  • everyone thinks everyone else is a fool. 
  • in his mind, he is never wrong.
  • the road to everyones good books often leads to the making of a loser. 
  • personality is a direct function of confidence is a direct function of knowledge.
  • if everything is good about somebody, he is faking it. 
  • know your flaws, dont accept them, never. 
  • people love being miserable, there is nothing you can do about it. 
  • when advised, follow. 
  • you are too insignificant to claim honour, dignity and self respect, let go off it. 
  • very soon you’ll die and your friends will forget you before they get their next toothbrush, stop gving a damn about self respect, ego and your fashion statement. 
  • be selfish, stay that way, smile at others. 
  • save the environment, not the cheerleaders. 

billboards, iphone and business sense. August 27, 2008

Posted by rizwan adil in advertising, business, technology.
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5 comments

billboards have always been able to catch my attention, this time i have a lot to say about the ‘Idea cellular’ billboard which proudly flaunts their new marketing tag line  “one school, all present” (or something like that). the underlying idea that is that Idea cellular is so cheap and has such a wide network that teachers will be able to teach number of students across the villages of india (through phones!!) thereby spreading literacy and developing the nation. sweet. very sweet indeed. BUT, what is this billboard doing in the middle of a city?, infact at every other corner in the city? Reliance communications made the same mistake (you cannot call it a mistake in the fullest sense) when they promoted their network as the common man’s network. they lost many of the customers in the cities to other networks. the mindset of the people metamorphosed in such a way that even those who were a bit affluent abhorred reliance.  idea is doing the same thing now. people from the cities do not want to associate themselves with those in the villages, not at least in india. even those who come from the villages do not want to associate themselves with the villages. funny, i know. (this is typically similar to the NRIs who come back to India and insist on mineral water forgetting totally the fact that a few decades ago they used to run around drinking water from borewells in short nickers, or even without.)

what i want to say is that the advertising should be consumer centric. the people in the villages would be able to connect to the idea cellular’s education campaign, not just in a small way, but in a big way. the ads strikes a perfect ten there. however, the city crowd has a different way of thinking.

if you take the KFC himayatnagar road, you are likely to find another billboard which shows the picture of an iphone labeled ’smart’ and then the picture of a maruti suzuki car labeled ’smarter’. now this is definitely crazy, my first instinct was may be they give you a free iphone when you buy the car or something like that, but no ! i have absolutely no idea why maruti suzuki is gone nuts. please come and have a look at the billboard for yourselves.

speaking about the iphone, all i want to say is that – it wont work. now, i know i am a total apple ‘loyalist’ and would love to see apple products everywhere, but logically thinking, we end up elsewhere.

1. the iphone costs a whooping 31,000.

2. there are two types of people who have this kind of money for phones.

a) people belonging to the age group 40 to 60. one thing we need to remember here is that india has this generation of people who have worked ‘their way up’. very few of this age group population would have inherited their fortunes. (FYI, india is still a developing nation and we didnt have proper roads in cities until a few years ago.) these people are definitely unlikely to shell out 30k on a phone.

b) the heirs of this 40 to 60 age group, this market sector would be in their teens or twenties and they’d love to have the iphone if only it had ‘forwarding messages’ and ‘video recording’ in it. there goes your youth market.

the iphone was designed keeping the needs of an average european or american businessman in mind, who, as per our research should be atleast a second generation rich. that will take another 20 years in india, until then people will still use phones which are good enough to talk and talk alone.

good night and yes, dont forget to excercise tomorrow morning, you look weird these days.

the punctured parachute July 2, 2008

Posted by rizwan adil in diary, humour, life.
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2 comments

its two am in the night and i am strolling through random blogs trying to kill time, i have a feeling i am suffering from internet addiction disorder; wikipedia has a lengthy description of it, have a look at it. i personally feel addiction to the internet is not a bad thing, the ‘kind’ of internet addiction is what matters here. 

a lot of strange things have been happening lately to me and i am kinda ok with all of them. my root canal treatment failed and i have a swollen jaw, i have terrible cough for two weeks now, i tripped down the stairs and got a hairline fracture and from the time i gave up swimming, i have a feeling i am growing fatter,that apart, i am perfect. 

bill gates left microsoft last month to devote his time full time for charity. this man, despite what people have to tell about him has lived a remarkable life and continues to do so. bill gates was definitely not the pioneer in software industry, he was the pioneer when it came to making money through software, the man was responsible in a major way why you are reading this blog now and why i wrote it, it’s definitely not about the great software, there are better OSs and better computers around but they somehow never reached our homes. microsoft did. and that’s where gates the businessman comes in. gates was definitely not a stringent innovator, he was a businessman, a blunt businessman. he knew what to do where and was emotionally secure and cool almost always, very much unlike the monkey boy steve ballmer who is known to have vowed to ‘kill google’ and not let his children use an ipod. (yes, you can smile here ). 

this week had yet another news item as the blogosphere buzzed with verizon ceo commenting on steve jobs getting old and wanting him to die. even though he didn’t explicitly state it, the meaning was obvious. people might see it any way they like, but as far as i am concerned, this is some sort of honor, your competitors are so pissed off and jealous of you, they’ve given up all hopes of any competition and are wanting you to die. what can be cooler than that ? given the elegance, style and the awesomeness of the iphone, i am pretty sure that there is no one in the whole market who can even come half way of what apple did. and with the costs coming down, it wouldn’t be surprising if you end up seeing iphones with just about everyone in an year or two. 

two days from now and india will have it’s first sci-fi movie. i am normally a persons who abhors movies but i just had this feeling that i should be commenting about this movie. love story 2050 reminds you of star wars, minority report, xmen and so many others just by the look of its trailers . the point i would want to make here is that the target market which the makers of this movie might have speculated have already a lot of sci-fi in hollywood flicks and its unlikely that they’ll boo boo at it. also, you can’t expect the basic indian crowd to come out and enjoy sci-fi movies. for those who are going to see it, there’s nothing new in it, the others don’t quite bother about it. i am no astrologer but i have a feeling that all those projects which people take up just because they are ‘cool’ and have ‘worked before’ never quite work out. 

by the way, i saw schindler’s list yesterday and i think its an amazing movie.  we’re all so lucky we weren’t born at the time of the war. 

ps: the punctured parachute was blue in color. and contrary to what you might have imagined, it was discarded, no one ever used it.

experience, looks and ethics May 21, 2008

Posted by rizwan adil in business, life, technology.
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1 comment so far

on experience: 

some people are of the opinion that experience plays a major role in any task you take up. i disagree. unless the context here is as trivial as say, brushing your teeth or something like that, its not going to make much of a difference. In both business and life, we all faces new problems and if everything could be solved in the same way, then there’d be no fun left any more. every new challenge is a different from the other(that is exactly why its called a ‘challenge’) and all the experience here will not fetch you anything because this is the first time you are facing such a problem. if however you face the same problem twice, then the question here is about your capabilities i.e the problem persists to be a problem only if you left it unsolved in the first place. 

so you see, experience really doesn’t matter, instinct does. 

looks: 

to say that looks play a very important role is not quite agreeable, similarly to say that looks don’t have any importance at all is also insane. the same goes for persons as well as the stuff around you. we all like good looking things. as a businessmen, we need to know that it is very important for us to give the customer just that. you might have the best service or product quality around, but if the packaging is bad, people are not going to like it, one example here is that of windows and linux, the old linuxes despite being amazing on the functionality took a beating on the looks , people fell for windows which was infinitely better looking than any other oss then, except of course the macintosh. even now, microsoft is pretty much trying to sell vista on just one ground: looks. the only good thing about vista is that it looks better, it has got some visually enhanced apps, thats about it, people still seem to like it. giving another example, just think about it, would you have bought 7 up and sprite if they were in transparent bottles instead of the usual green ones? 

ethics: 

google has an amazing bit of advice in their ‘ten things’ corporate policy and it goes somewhat like this: you should not give up long term futuristic gains for immediate or short term gains. i totally agree. this is where ethics come in. like buffet once said: it takes twenty years to build a reputation and an instant to ruin it. logically thinking, the odds are that, you will stay for the most part of your life in one or two to three fields at max, and the kind of person you ‘actually are’ will eventually show up, you cant hide for long from people. keep in mind that you are not the only ’smart’ guy who walk this planet, there are thousands like you. people can never be fooled, not all of them, never. you have to be honest, else you will be exposed and cleared. or else, just look at it this way: say you had to trust a big assignment to someone, would you not study that person and make sure if he really fits in, after all its your hard earned money and market respect, you wouldn’t want to toss it off just like that.  the same applies to you as well, when people deal with you, unless and until there is an  ’umbilical cord’ of trust, no amount of legal agreements and memorandums are going to work.