DIWALI – A FESTIVAL OF…

Diwali is the biggest festival in India, celebrated by millions across the nation with great pomp and fervour. It is a festival that is awaited every year with lot of excitement.

While the general feeling is that Diwali is a festival of lights, which it surely is, one needs to analyze this a bit deeper to really put down meaning on what Diwali means for different people. Basis my observations of Diwali over the years, I am attempting to broaden the scope and definition of Diwali. Diwali is a:

• Festival of glimmer and hope for all the candle-makers and diya makers who try to earn a large amount of their annual income through their sales in the few days prior to Diwali.
• Festival of coming back home and enjoying home food for all those students who are studying in another land away from their homes.
• Festival of a holiday abroad for the families who head out of the country every year on Diwali as this is the time when the parents and the kids, both have a long enough leave to enjoy a good holiday.
• Festival of opportunity for all the trading communities, consumer durable companies, gifting companies as a large part of their revenues get generated during the 15 days preceding Diwali.
• Festival of socializing for all the la-di-dah ladies who attend various high profile Diwali parties across their friends.
• Festival of Glee for all the Teen Patti and Poker enthusiasts who emerge from various locations with Gaddis in their pockets and the illusion and belief in their head that it will be their day today and they would make a big kill.
• Festival of new beginnings for all the business and trading houses who start their new books of accounts on the day of Diwali.
• Festival of Welcome as the doors of every house is open to welcome Goddess Lakshmi as well as the guests who come to greet and meet them.
• Festival of splurging as saving money as a concept goes out of the window for these few days as it is the time of indulging yourself in new clothes, new products, new mobiles or anything else that you can splurge on.
• Festival of bingeing and weight gain as every house is filled with sweets and chocolates and it definitely goes and sits in someone’s tummy.
• Festival of Desire as everyone who sees people better off (whether in terms of the car that they drive, the clothes that they wear, the parties that they attend, the gifts that they buy) desires to such a lifestyle.

Last but definitely not the least, Diwali is a Festival of Money. It is a festival where money changes hands every minute and every second, where money comes to a few and goes from a few, where money defines the feeling and the mood of the people, where money decides whether it is really a prosperous Diwali or not.     

On that note, wishing all you readers a very Happy and Prosperous Diwali and a great year ahead! 

STEVE JOBS - RIP

It is a very awkward feeling when you wake up to the news of the death of a person you admire. You want to tell yourself that this doesn’t seem to be true. You switch channels to confirm the veracity of the news. Today morning, something similar happened to me when I heard the news channels flashing the message ‘Steve Jobs dies’. I immediately tuned in to some of the international channels to see what people are saying across the world on such shocking news.

I discovered more about him than what I knew. Steve Jobs had 332 patents to his name so while we may know about only 10 - 12 of these, he had worked on a number of other ideas. Even the stair case design in the Apple headquarters was designed by Steve Jobs and he had a patent on that design. That was the genius that Steve Jobs was.

The first product of Steve Jobs that I experienced was the Ipod. This was years back but it made me marvel at the style and design of the product. It just changed the way we heard our music – no buttons, no CDs, cool earphones. I read about the man behind this product and discovered a lot about Steve Jobs. He had founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak. The Apple ads of 1984 clearly belong in the cult category. Steve was asked to leave the company that he had founded after a few years but that did not stop him in doing some amazing work with Pixar and no one could miss out on his caliber and hence Apple got him back to take charge.

With the launch of the iPhone, Steve Jobs changed the game and gave consumers an experience that they had not experienced before. No other company can claim to have a product for which people stay up through the night across the world to see the launch and then line up outside stores to be the first ones to get their hands on that product. When one thought that this is the best that is possible, Steve would surprise everyone by coming out with the next level of the iPhone and during his reign, Apple gave us iPhone 1, 2 , 3 and 4.

As if all of this was not enough, Steve Jobs amazed the world with the launch of iPad that made everyone sit and notice and a tablet revolution was born. Another product that caught my attention due to its sleek design and style and I also became one of the iPad owners.

Steve Jobs had said once ‘It is not the job of the consumer to know what he wants’ – a statement that would have been poo poohed by regular marketers but Steve was different and he proved his statement by giving products that consumers would never be able to ask for.

Some of his other famous quotes were:

• ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’
• "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
• “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

The greatness of Steve Jobs comes across even when even rivals talk great things about him. Bill Gates tweeted– ‘Steve Jobs was a brilliant person and it was an insanely great honour to work with him’. Google has a link on their home page for Steve Jobs that takes you directly to the website of Apple, whose home page is a dedication to Steve Jobs.

While the online world is abuzz with tributes to Steve Jobs, I really thought that these two statements sum up the mood of all:

• ‘Steve Jobs logged into the world in 1955 and logged out in 2011 but human kind will never be able to delete him’
• ‘Some great people are remembered for a decade. A person like Steve Jobs will be remembered for centuries to come’ –  Rajiv Makhni

Steve Jobs was a man who was far away from thousands of us, a man we had never met personally but had heard and read so much about him that we always felt that we knew him personally as he understood what all of us wanted, he knew what it was to come out with a product that would make lives cool for people across the world.

Once again, I would like to thank Steve Jobs on behalf of each and every one who has been touched by his genius and I hope that your soul rests in peace as you have done outstanding work in this world, which lot of people will look upto and get inspired. 

RIP Steve

PROVOCATION

Tigers are known to pounce on their prey in such a way that the prey does not have any chance of escaping their claws. It is pretty understandable for them to do that as it is their way of surviving and getting their food.

The problem starts when similar behavior starts getting displayed by human beings. In their case, the one pouncing is also a person and the one being pounced is also another person. Now when cannibals do something like this, it is perfectly justified as this hunt will give them their food but when non-cannibalistic people get into this act of pouncing, it is a little difficult to fathom.

So what is it that makes people behave in this manner? What is the trigger point to this? The simple answer to this is ‘Provocation’. When people get provoked, they tend to get aggressive and irritated and the only way for them to retaliate is by hitting back at the other person.

Provocation as a tool has been used by market researchers for years in getting ideas and making people reach a level where they have to think of new solutions or options. I have personally used provocation techniques in idea workshops for new product ideas and have got tremendous results.

I completely understand the positive aspect of provocation as illustrated in the paragraph above but in most positive cases, the provocative attack involves the person himself in some way or the other directly. Anything said or mentioned is impacting that person and for them to react in such situations is as expected in normal human behavior.

In recent times, I am witnessing a new form of provocation where people get provoked even with statements or things that have got nothing to do with them directly but yet they lash out or rather become quasi spokesperson for the person or issue that is being hit at.

I can cite a number of examples from the online world:

1. When Narayana Murthy criticized the quality of students at IIT, Chetan Bhagat got provoked and tweeted a few bad things about Infosys. In return, present and ex Infoscions got provoked and hit back.

       2. When a girl wrote an open letter to a Delhi boy on her own private blog site, a huge number of people(men and women) got offended and provoked and wrote a response to that letter, logged onto the girl’s site and gave harsh comments and left abuses. Once again, if you were to sit back and notice, you will see that it was one girl’s angst after having gone through some bad experiences (probably), which she wrote on her own blog site. But people who wrote back also commented about the South Indian community at large and extolled the virtues of North Indians, thereby showing how provocation works.

People who understand human behavior and how it reacts to provocation use it for their own benefit:

•  Sidin Vadukut, a writer for MINT and a popular author understands this concept of provocation nicely and he purposely tweets statements that will provoke people and elicit a response from them. Some recent tweets of his go like this ‘Sholay is a boring movie’, ‘Paneer is for losers’, etc., which he is tweeting purposely and he mentions also that controversies sell books so I might as well create some by tweeting such things.
• Shoaib Akhtar came up with few extremely controversial statements on Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid when he launched his book ‘Controversially Yours’. In his case, the provocation was so high that it bothered the entire country  and may have not got him sales of his books but got him enough buzz and publicity.

With the convergence of the digital world, where everyone is connected to each other and people are out with knives, any provocative statement is bound to get huge reactions from people and sometimes it is intended to be that ways and sometimes it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I hope this article does not provoke anyone of you because that is definitely not the intention.