The biggest complaint I have against Event Management companies which organize music concerts in India is that they do not allow smoking or boozing at the concert venue.
I don’t foresee them relaxing these rules anytime in the near future as well .. But, what may come in handy to sneak in the butts and booze to the concerts are these interesting gizmos: a cell phone which doubles up as a cigarette pack and a sandal which can carry whiskey.
Hic Hic Hurray !
I came across this article, via Boing Boing, which talks about how content on news and other websites can be redesigned to help the readers get the story more quickly, remember more content and be more satisfied with the story experience.
I don’t intend to reproduce the article here or provide any snippets from there. You can read the entire article here.
But, there was this picture / research bit which interested me. It talks about the areas where men and women tend to focus when they are asked to comprehend information by looking at a picture. While the women settle on at the face, the men tend to focus on the face and the private anatomy as well. Ahem!
Probably, the advertisers can take a clue from here .. Our cricketers can be transformed into mobile billboards by pasting ads for say Lux, Fair and Lovely etc .. on their faces and other offerings for the men like Gillette, the liquor soda advertisements can be put around the areas where the men tend to focus more ?
The picture above may look like a reminder to most of the IT guys in Bangalore who travel to their office and back in a similar fashion in their Office busses or cabs or TT’s (Tempo Traveller’s). Most of them prefer to sleep on their way to the office and back, some spend the time with their iPods, books and some like me (for whatever little time I’ve been in an office transport) keep looking at everyone else around.
OK .. Now, on to some details which you probably missed noticing in the picture or which are not visible:
Do you notice the black leather seats?
The bus is equipped with wireless internet connection for those who wish to stay connected during the journey
Front row of seats are reserved for dogs. If the bus is running full, then the dogs are requested to move over to their owner’s laps
Provision to hang bicycles behind the bus
The busses run on bio diesel
Interesting eh? Now on to something even more mind boggling:
They run 132 trips every day to some 40 pickup and drop-off locations in more than a dozen cities, crisscrossing six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and logging some 4,400 miles.
They pick up workers as far away as Concord, 54 miles northeast of the company’s sprawling Mountain View headquarters are known, and Santa Cruz, 38 miles to the south. The system’s routes cover in excess of 230 miles of freeways, more than twice the extent of the region’s BART commuter train system, which has 104 miles of tracks.
So, which company are we talking about that runs these luxurious busses as fringe benefits for its employees?
Google!
On my way back from office to home today, I happened to listen to an interview with Venkat Vardhan, MD of DNA Networks on Radio Indigo.
During the interview Venkat mentioned that the 20,000 odd fans expected for the concert will also get to witness two new concepts at the show.
And, what does Iron Maiden want to take back as a souvenir from India?
A picture of the band with an elephant.
About 2 months ago, I had blogged about the TATA Sierra, a vehicle which in my opinion would have done considerably well had it been launched now and not when it actually was. The post turned out to be one of the most popular ones on my blog (atleast, that is what the Wordpress Stats tell me), which tempts me to post about my first crush, the one that I fell in love with when I was in school and the pursuit is still on, the fastest beauty on 2 wheels the Indian roads have ever seen, a sophisticated machine called the Yamaha (Rajdoot) RD 350.
When I was stepping out of school my father decided to buy me a 2 wheeler, and I could not muster the courage to tell him about the love of my life, though I tried giving him sufficient clues about it by constantly staring at the Army Canteen Price List which had the RD at the top of the list, and salivating over the hopes that my father would sense my love. He did not, and he bought me a Hero Puch instead.
I can sense an RD anywhere nearby just by the sound of it. I loved the sound of the RD so much that I wanted my Hero Puch to also sound like the RD. After a couple of experiments with the muffler and drilling a few holes in the silencer, I realised that immaterial of how hard I tried, there was no way I could make my domestic ass’s braying sound as melodious as I would want to.
By the time I started working and could afford a bike on my own, the RD was already out of the market. I was OK with the idea of buying an used one and I persistently chased 2 people who had very well maintained RD’s. One of them was the owner of Wildcraft, who clearly told me that he was not ready to part with his silver beauty at any cost and the other was my cousin who sold his red RD, without even informing me about it. He apparently spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure whether it was he who was enjoying riding the bike more or whether it was his bike that was enjoying taking him for a ride more before he arrived at the decision. Even today, I am as keen as I was then to buy an RD. It is just about spotting the right bike and a biker who is ready to part with his machine.
Matters of the heart apart, the RD, a 350 cc, 32 bhp, 2 cylinder machine was a marvel which could do a quarter mile in 14 seconds. When the bike was launched in India, the advertisements had a catchy line that said “For those who dare to live their dreams”. It is only much later that people realized what the actual meaning of the sentence was after they noticed their monthly fuel bills soaring up. The RD was a gas guzzler that would deliver anywhere between 6 - 24 KMs to a litre. The Rajdoot guys did some changes to the engine to improve its mileage, but not enough to save the bike from facing the axe.
Just like the TATA Sierra, I feel the RD would do much better if it were to be launched now. People are prepared to chase their dreams and the low mileage of the bike should not cause any economic nightmares.
Can’t Yamaha consider bringing this bike back to India again? In the 80’s Dharmendra probably could not do much to save the RD from being extinct, but if the RD were to be launched today, I don’t think it would need John Abraham’s assistance to sell.