what’s the easiest and most recommended way to get your passport work done in india?
get hold of a contact who is with the government, and senior enough to push your papers across….so you avoid any hassles. if you don’t have any such messiah, then god bless. i, for instance, got my original passport made in a week’s time, in 2001, when infosys mandated us software engineers to have a passport ready…just because my uncle was a top IT official in delhi….however, 8 years hence, when i wanted to get it edited, so that my baby’s passport could be made, it has already been 4 months, and i am trying to figure out what the government status messages mean..sample these, and let me know if you can relate to this morse code status highlighted in pink:

just a random post…got an emailer, clicked on the link, and visited the site which was advertising..and found some glaring spelling mistakes, which are such basic mistakes, that i am alarmed no one thinks of them, in a hurry to put up content on the site…i mean how can a project named paradise be spelled paradies?

isn’t this so cute??? i really wish i could restart my education, and develop a lateral thinking mind as expressive and brilliant as this little piece of genius suggests!

i’ve said this earlier, and am willing to shout out yet again. vodafone has done a brilliant job of unleashing its zoozoo on the indian audience, this IPL. some positives for me:
1. voda continues to evolve, in its quest for marketing moksha, displayed so brilliantly earlier through hutch campaigns, and after the yummy happy to help campaigns of ipl 2008, they’ve gone a step further through their stunning series of zoozoo ads..and to think that only 10 have been released so far, with 15 more to go by the time IPL 2009 ends..yummy
2. finally, marketers in india have realized the impact a good tournament or tv event can make, and voda chose to launch its campaign when it knew tv audience will peak, as it did in 2008. excellent strategy.
3. voda is supplementing the zoozoo craze well, through facebook…with 8000 fans already (i remember 5000 fans yesterday..) the social media is being used adequately well to sustain the interest…in fact i got to know of the species name thru facebook
4. there’s not much to do this summer in india…with the producers and multiplex slugging it out, with heat piling on to our collective agony, the regular tv shows getting on to the nerves as usual…..and in between comes the big hope yet again, as it did last year and blew away every other channel…its probably going to end up the same this year too…fortune has favored the brave…and in the midst of all this, vodafone has managed to release a campaign which actually brings in more smiles and better entertainment that the histrionics being played out on the field! commendable.

a snippet from Om Malik’s writings:
“Cablevision, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable and Internet service provider, has continued its tradition of being a cable industry innovator by introducing 100-megabits-per-second service in Long Island. The service, dubbed Optimum Online Ultra, utilizes DOCSIS 3.0 technology to deliver the ultra-broadband experience over cable’s wires and comes with ability to send data upstream at 15 Mbps. It starts at $99 a month, will be available starting May 11 and will be the fastest service from a cable provider anywhere in the U.S.’

SRK (Shah Rukh Khan) has been the brand ambassador for pepsi since eternity, right? and he hates coke as well, going by brand endorsement rules? well well…i was extremely surprised to see him endorse Sprite! As logic would go, it’s all in the name of getting some much needed moolah for kolkata knight riders…the korbo lodbo jeetbo re tribe…but is he going overboard with brand endorsements for KKR, when they just don’t have a team good enough to win more than a couple of matches in IPL? was the simple idea behind buying a team was to add a separate revenue stream through endorsements which otherwise would’nt have come to him? will we next see KKR folks, ganguly included, applying some Axe talcum powder on their bodies and going out to defeat delhi daredevils? (SRK sells us duniya ka sabse chota AC, right?). I think SRK is killing his brand appeal by trying to be everywhere. Getting desperate to make money, while the good times last. One of his mandates is to get red chillies as the producer in case he wants to be featured in any endorsement…whatever happened to the creative liberties of the marketing folks in the brand teams? sample the sprite ad here…

without fail, all ads of the orange soft-drink, Fanta, leave me perplexed. they managed to create some horrible ones with rani mukherji, and now with genelia as their brand icon, the execution and the ideation have only got worse. fanta ka signal loud, bunking is allowed?? what kind of ideation and copyrighting is this? who on earth is the marketing head who gives an approval for such bizarre ideas? if you haven’t seen the commercial yet, here it goes. watch it at your own risk…