If You Were A Brand
November 15, 2008
I was recently invited by PepsiCo to join a dinner being hosted in view of the charismatic CEO Indra Nooyi’s visit to India. She was voted the most powerful woman in business in US for the third year in a row by Fortune Magazine. Irene Rosenfeld who heads Kraft was the second most powerful. Irene is a PepsiCo alumni as well. Moral of the story: Food and beverages make people powerful. So eat well, I told myself. Read more
Dasvidaniya
November 13, 2008
Do you make lists? A daily To-Do list? Maybe even an hourly list of things to be accomplished? Do you find these lists helpful or do you find them tyrannical? Lists bind me down. Worse still, I make lists and then forget where I have kept them. So making those lists doesn’t work for me. Yet there are scores of people who find lists a great help. They find it a source of joy when they keep ticking off the items one by one on that list. For someone like Amar Kaul (played by Vinay Pathak) in the film Dasvidaniya, (means goodbye in Russian) he lives for the to-do lists. That gives him a meaning in his life. He looks forward to the next to-do so that he can complete all those things marked in his list. For all his obsession with accomplishing tasks on his To-Do list, Amar Kaul is not successful in any sense of the term unlike his friend Rajiv Julka played by Rajat Kapoor. Read more
A Wednesday
October 31, 2008
Jan 1st 2008: Bomb blasts in Rampur
May 13th, 2008: Bomb blasts in Jaipur
July 25th 2008: Bomb blasts in Bangalore
July 26th 2008: Bomb blasts in Ahmedabad
Sep 13th 2008: Bomb blasts in Delhi
Sep 27th 2008: Bomb blasts in Delhi
Sep 29th 2008: Bomb blasts in Malegaon
October 30th 2008: Bomb blasts in Guwahati
Married But Available Launch Photos
October 30, 2008
To decide who would release the first copy of the book, we asked the audience to write their names on a piece of paper and drop it in a box. Karthika picked a name from the lot. that turned out to be Senthil Kumar who I share my alma mater with (just that he got way better grades than me always at XLRI - School of Business and Human Resources).
In the photo above : (Senthil Kumar releases the novel. Karthika - the editor looks on)
The launch of a book is the closest experience to childbirth. The editor will keep doing the checkups and fine tune the diet to ensure a healthy kiddo. But the date of the launch is always unpredictable. Once the book goes in for editing, the editor takes over your life.
No good deed is ever left unpunished. The editor then gets to experience the same sense of helplessness when she jands over the edited manuscript to the Production Unit who will then design the pages and the cover and get the book printed.
Then you do a launch event. So what IS supposed to happen during a launch event? It could be anything. The trick is to put up some kind of a circus that encourages the spectators to finally loosen their purse strings and buy the book. Hence a lot of authors (yours truly included) read excerpts from the book. That gives the audience a flavor of the story and the writing style. I had recorded some excerpts that I had recorded with the extremely talented Madhu Rajesh (who runs the blog of Fritolay India and is part of their HR team).
“Why don’t you read a dramatized version of some chapters?”, suggested Lushin Dubey - the ever so experienced stage actor.
That’s finally what we agreed to do. Lushin did a marvellous job of changing her voice and diction and pace to create her own version of characters. Was she good!!
These photos of the launch party are all courtesy R Rajesh who is a very innovative shutterbug. My mugshot in the backpage of the novel which are also being used on the novel’s announcement posters for bookshops, is courtesy Rajesh. Check out his photos at http://www.pbase.com/r_rajesh1801/
The Asian Age Book Review: Married But Available
October 24, 2008
The first review of the book is always awaited with much nervousness. Here is the first review of Married But Available as it appears in the Asian Age newspaper. I half expected Pramita Bose to do the review since she has covered stories on Mediocre But Arrogant and also did one of the early warning stories of the second :) My book’s review was by Pooja Sharma and here it is from the web edition of The Asian Age of 25 Oct 2008 Read more
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