Talk to me in Web 2.0.

I am, you could almost say, a man of (few?) words. On my word of honour, boys and girls. Words are my preoccupation. Or, shall we say my occupational accomplices? Playing with words comes to me fairly easily. I revel in it. I am word-friendly. I wish I were Lord of the Words. But I find myself at a loss for words far too often to harbour any such delusions of grandeur. http://digbig.com/4xsfr. My love affair with words is probably why I so highly value Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen and even Seinfeld http://digbig.com/4xsfw & http://digbig.com/4xsfx. My antennae, though, are always out for the meaning of words, even subtle nuanaces. The context and the subtext of word usage http://digbig.com/4xsft intrigue and often amuse me. For me, "There's a blaze of light/In every word," as Leonard Cohen puts it so eloquently in his Hallelujah. http://digbig.com/4xsfn. Take, for instance, the way Gmail insists on calling every exchange of email between two people, maybe a bit coyly and self-consciously, "conversation". That's Web 2.0 talk, dude. Keeping in touch. That's what Web 2.0 and social networking are all about, after all. At least, that's the mantra of the Web 2.0 gurus. Having been in advrtising long enough, though, I am painfully aware that many of the so-called breakthroughs in theoretical thinking are only a new use of old words. Or, the same old words in a new context. http://digbig.com/4xsfs.

Purely archival. In anticipation of certain arrivals.

Now that the Mankars from New Jersey are coming to visit us – Aditi will arrive on Saturday, 7 June; Ashu the following Saturday; Avantika and Nandini, Saturday following that – I serendipitously found an old piece I had written about their Kunuchacha on 5 March 2005 in my now defunct Hindustan Times column, QuiteATake.com column. http://tinyurl.com/52cz7o. I thought I would put it here in anticipation of the girls’ arrival. Read on.


Kunal, Avantika's – or Tika's as the "spunky monkey" likes to call herself these days – and Aditi's uncle won the Filmfare Best Director Award for HumTum on Saturday, February 26, 2005. February 26 also happened to be Tika's twelfth birthday. Kunal proved second time lucky on that very day. HumTum was his second directorial venture, you see, after Muzse Shaadi Karogi. We were all rooting for him, of course. He was telling Ashu and Ujwal and his mother Yash just a couple of evenings before the awards night that there was simply no chance of his winning. Maybe, that was his way of mentally preparing for the unknown. Do your best and be ready for the worst.

From what I've seen of him, I've always found him to be a cool, no-nonsense sort of a guy. Ashu was telling me that despite shooting his movies at exotic locations abroad, he never overruns his budget. When he received the Scene of the Year Award, Sonali Bendre mistook him for Kunal Das Gupta. Maybe he looked more a denizen of Bhadra Lok to her than the Mumbai-born Punjab-da-puttar that he is, a Kohli.

This, I reckon, is a symptom of how low profile he is. (For instance, Saturday's Bombay Times covered all the leading contenders but somehow overlooked him.) I'm sure Kunal will go places and – what's even more important – handle success humbly and diplomatically like the cool dude that he is. He has a good sense of humour, which gives him a sense of proportion too. And, he isn't the least bit hypocritical unlike most of Bollywood. Here at movies.dcealumni.com you'll find a bit about Kunal's next project.


P.S.: Kunal’s new movie, Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic, is due for an early release, I understand. He has smartly put an article on Wikipedia already .http://tinyurl.com/4dcojs. I’m sure he will be using all the social networks as well.

WWW = World Wide Waste?

In the dustbin of history, one often stumbles upon all sorts of gems, well almost. In my cache of old stuff in the D: drive, saved in July 2005, I found this scintillating bit of wisdom from Bill Coleman, senior vice president, Salary.com gleaned from a survey of 10,000 US workers conducted in May and June 2005. “Our results show that workers on average are wasting a little more than twice what their employers expect", i.e., 2.09 hours spent online daily, checking e-mail and surfing Web sites, to be exact. The second biggest time waster, in the opinion of the volunteer respondents, was socializing with co-workers. This was before social networking became the next really, really big thing, mind you. [Social networking timeline: http://yasns.pbwiki.com/.] I wonder what the WWW figure stands at as of now. http://www.salary.com/careers/layoutscripts/crel_display.asp?tab=cre&cat=nocat&ser=Ser374&part=Par555.