One replay that should not be played during the highlights!!

They say (who are 'They' anyway? the 'elite'? the 'chosen ones'? aliens from Betelguise's solar system?) it takes a dramatic occurrence to move mountains.. and it takes something equally dramatic to make me shed my extreme 'blog inertia' and get me to start writing on my blog again.. and this time, the event was something that cost 40 crores and took many years to make - a 3-hour torment of the mind called 'Action Replayy'.

Its films like this that make one wonder about the future of the human race, or whether there is any future at all. The film forces you to shut your brains down the moment the first scene plays, because any person in the audience still trying to think and make any sort of sense out of or connection between the series of scenes he is subjected to in the first five minutes will either

a) be totally lost

b) go insane and start talking to his pet chair

c) take a solemn vow to wear a lead and titanium helmet to the next Bollywood movie he watches so that he is shielded from 'WTF' waves emanating from the screen

One theory is that the first half had 80 editors for 80 minutes of the movie and each was locked in a separate dungeon fifty miles from anyone else so that no one could see the one minute of movie anyone else had edited. That would explain the disconnect between every single minute.

In time, the film changes from a series of disconnected shots to a Paris fashion show with a specially rendered 70's Mumbai as the ramp and a series of very lively and equally clueless homo sapiens's as the models. Its a whole series of hairdos and costumes and sometimes the actors get to open their mouths too, but without committing the crime of actually making any sense. There is no explanation as to why Miss Mala (Rai) suddenly falls in love with a person she knows is a total jackass just because he sports a new hairdo. The people from the past never seem to question how a new dude suddenly drops out of the sky and infiltrates an influential household. And how these rich people got rich while being so meek that a kindergarten girl could hold them at gunpoint with a candy bar. And why these influential people suddenly start listening to the dude from the sky and totally listen to him even though he dresses in nightwear and gives advice like a college guy on crack.

I could go on and on but I did not start this entry to rant about yet another mindless brainless misadventure that the audience is subjected to every Friday. Sure you get away to the movies to relax and take a break but it doesn't mean you shut your brain down and have immense nonsense drilled into it. Is this the kind of 'entertainment' that we are willing to accept today? The film had a budget of 40 crore.. And I do not know if this is exclusive of the humongous pay the main actors get. Someone actually spent so much and took years to make people wear rainbow costumes and parade against 3D rendered backdrops. Could this kind of money not be used for solving at least some of the teething problems facing the human population today? Oh don't get me wrong, i'm not about to start preaching or be a 'change agent'. That, by our standards today, is a crime. Change agents are arrogant jackasses. We are content listening to the prose given by the 'big people' on the screen and how they believe that that new car over there is the greatest invention ever on Earth, second only to a cure for AIDS. We cannot blame anyone for the 'entertainment culture' prevalent today, no way. It is we who accept 'entertainment' like this and actually encourage this culture. We have a powerhouse of thinking machinery and trillions of terabytes of knowledge and experience in our brains as a collective entity and we let it all go into creating a culture that turns out things like this every week. We could be thinking and creating a better world for ourselves, a more regulated and sophisticated environment. But no, that's too lofty and far-fetched and will never work. So what is happening today is the 'right' thing.

So what is the definition of 'right'? We cannot say, because there is nothing called right or wrong. The concept of right or wrong exists only in our minds and it is only our collective concurrence that defines 'right' and 'wrong'. And the few who do not accept this theory are labelled iconoclasts and filthy rebels. Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, they've all been there. (Yeah the 'big' guys.. I thought I'd get some big names in to create brand value) They went against collective psychology and were labelled as iconoclasts. By his powerful charisma and dedication and inimitable strategy, Gandhi changed the definition of what was 'right' at the time and popularized Ahimsa (non-violence - i.e. something you should not attempt to preach when a 300-pound boxing champ is chasing you with a baseball bat, but only when mean people from across the sea colonize your country). Not everyone has the power to change what we call 'right'. Our education system is today a factory for churning out millions of brain-dead zombies each year. Where are the confident, assertive and forward-thinking people the education system should be breeding? Non-existent. And this is, in our definition, somehow 'right'. The few who go against this - Marilyn Vos Savant, Chris Langan (look them up on youtube) are called 'arrogant rebels whose ideas just wont work and whose egos will tear their ideas apart'. Funny that these 'arrogant rebels' are in fact some of the most intelligent and forward-thinking people in the world today. But of course, any move that goes against the definition of 'right' we have created is a crime by our standards and if it continues, it is not too far off when such people will be labeled die-hard criminals. I just hope that doesn't happen and they don't get jailed :) they're nice guys and should be left alone until we can understand them :) And when the day finally dawns when people see the light in their ideas, they will be labeled heroes but of course they'll be too far away by then to hear us. An apology to Galileo four hundred years after he died won't be heard even by his bones - even those will have decomposed.

A child born into the world today is forced to live in a web of tangled ideas and confusion that humans have created for themselves. Any action to try and make sense of this web or try to stitch it into a meaningful pattern is called arrogant or criminal and cast aside, rudely I might add :) (tough luck for the sensitive people out there.. but hey maybe a dude from the sky can change your hairdo so that you become a hundred times more confident instantaneously. Yeah that 300-pound bully whose chasing you with a baseball bat - tell him you are changing your hairdo and see the fear in his eyes) Nobody trains children to question things, only to adapt to what is told to them as 'right'. And what is 'right' today seems to be a culture of brainless entertainment and one of feeding on the drama, tension and frustration projected by media and anybody with a broadcasting device looking to become popular instantaneously onto our television screens. We are slowly training our brains not to think and not to question but just to adapt to what is told to us as 'right'. And the more we train ourselves into submission, the more easy it is for an 'elite few' to get up on a stage and tell us what is 'right' and what we should be doing. We are slowly turning down our most valuable asset, our ability to think and question. And if we pick up the pace and do this fast enough, we may not need to wait until December 21 2012 for Doomsday. And the cause will not be a fictitious rock from outer space which apparently has been hurtling toward us for a hundred years but which surprisingly even the most powerful telescope is unable to detect. The cause will be the rock hurtling like crazy inside our minds and putting a lid on those parts that still think and question.

Sell it to me

What does it really take to sell a product? Yes it depends on the type of product. There is no way you could sell a luxury brand toothpaste or a cheap 'Rs 1-lakh Bentley for the common man'. In the former, people would not want to shell out 4 years of savings to buy 200 gm of a paste that will keep their teeth clean for 2 hours. In the latter case, the cheap price would seriously undermine the prestige that comes with owning a Bentley. It wouldn't be so exotic if your gardener drives around in it would it? No offense to any gardeners who may happen to be reading this blog. You guys rock. The 0.01% of the world's population that still owns a garden in today's world of apartment blocks and housing tenements depend on you.

Now would you really buy that shaving cream just because that popular film star held it up for a few seconds on television? He gets a million dollars of shareholder's money for holding up that cream. He doesn't give a damn whether the cream helps you shave your hair or grow it. He probably cant even pronounce Gillette. Then why is it that apparently a product will sell better if a celebrity endorses it? Personally I base my choices only on what my friends tell me and on experimenting with different brands at the supermarket. I have tried all brands of toothpaste and soap before now sticking to one. Same with coffee powder. Deodorant. Mobile networks. So for me, if 10 different celebrities endorse 10 different products, 9 of them are wrong. But the system works. Go figure. I have found that the only dependable ways of determining a product's reliability are word of mouth and experimenting. I bought the mobile i own now because a friend bought it and i liked the features. I had based my previous choice on a television ad which showed the best feature of the mobile. Unfortunately it turned out the mobile does not have any other features beside that. Corporate ethics and advertising don't really go hand in hand. They cant afford to.

So how do you sell a product? For me, the only way is to make the product affordable and true to its promise and then spread the message by word of mouth. You can advertise flashy features on prime time television and get Oscar nominees to endorse it but once people find out the product does not live up to its name they will stop buying from you. They will develop a mistrust for anything your company says after that. If you have a monopoly in the market, it will only take one tiny rival with a superior product to topple you off your high chair. Most people who have been cheated are just waiting for such a player to come up. Make your product good, reliable, affordable and make the advertising friendly and you have a solid base to sell your product. Once enough people buy it and start showing their friends, the product will sell itself. This is one of the most effective ways of selling a product and in fact the only way that I see working for me. I'm no sales guru or marketing whiz but the day I become one, I'll be sure to come back here and say 'I told you so' :)

Tweet Tweet! whos there?

Twitter is one of the things that never caught on for me. My friends and colleagues rave about it. Most of my old college mates send out enough tweets a month to fill up the stratosphere twice. For me, it is just another one of those "things that I'll learn someday as soon as I get the time". Oddly enough, much of that "time" of mine is taken by Youtube and Unreal Tournament so I usually don't have much left over for learning how to use this tiny marvel. And i never learned it because I just did not see why hundreds of people would like to know that i am stuck at the airport or that my doctor told me i had pneumonia. Most of my friends wouldn't care if a vampire from Dracula's garden drew a stake through my leg. The chance of them giving a damn about a honeybee biting me is about as remote as a penguin at the north pole.

Now before all you tweeters start pelting virtual stones at me (yes i think facebook will add that option soon, after all the virtual farmland and office space is taken up) let me be the first to state that twitter is one amazing piece of software. In a world where hundreds of new social networking sites are opening up everyday in every college dorm from Istanbul to Antarctica, twitter was the one that actually offered something very different and interesting. Ever heard of micro-finance, the concept that took the savings and loan industry by storm? This revolutionary technique is growing rapidly today and is an area of immense interest to many of the financial elite. Twitter took the social networking craze and applied the 'micro' factor to it. This is an oversimplification but it conveys the general idea. A lot of busy people who did not have time for blogs could now send out tweets. This is not to imply that those of us who do have time for blogs are colossal nerds and couch potatoes. We just sleep less at night :) Coming back, tweeting only takes seconds and you needn't spend hours thinking about what to write. No proofreading (unless your English skills are about as good as a blue whale's). Just speak your mind. This concept allowed millions of people to get online and get an identity. Twitter tapped a previously untapped market - people looking for an outlet but who didn't have time for blogs or podcasts. Instead of taking a lot of words from a few, it takes a few from a lot of people and now it has millions of users (hold on, is it billions now? After all, its been 10 minutes since i started writing this..)

It is interesting to note how a small idea can snowball into a worldwide revolution. Did all worldwide revolutions spring from small but obvious ideas? What about the steam engine, the single machine that was responsible for starting more than 2 centuries of industrial development? Or the transistor, that will be responsible for 2 or more centuries of an information age? What is the next small idea that will lead the world on another revolution? Will it come after the world ends on 21st Dec 2012 as most controversy theorists and self-proclaimed prophets would love to believe? Well we'll find out on 22nd of that month (at least those of us who wont go into caves by then). Until then, i guess its time for me to join the bandwagon. Its time to start learning how to tweet. I'll catch up with Earth soon.