If You Were A Brand

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

Married But Available Launch Photos

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/

Chick Lit and Guy Lit

I kind of have a thing about the term “Chick Lit“ or “Guy Lit” for that matter. There is of course a definition in wikipedia to define what this genre is all about. By the way, type in “Guy Lit” in wikipedia and you discover there is no such category. Is that called discrimination or what? More importantly there is a kind of a predetrmined pigeonhole into which we are putting the kind of stuff chicks write or read about. Stuff that guys read or write about. Don’t we all do a bit of everything? I know enough men who found the film Sex and the City good to watch. Enough men flip through Femina as women who buy Car and Driver. Read more

Shooting Star

There is something about the Olympics that I find very inspiring. The motto “Citius Altius Fortius” goads all of us to be faster, higher and stronger. The dream that has inspired humans to go past their humanness and achieve what makes each sportsperson believe that they too have a shot at inspiring the six billion. When Nadia Comenici hit the perfect ten in gymnastics at the Olympics many years back, the scoreboard read 0 because beyond 9 the scoreboards again went back to a zero. It was not thought to be humanly possible to score ten. Well she certainly proved that perfection was achievable after all. Nadia had like every medal winner proved that it was possible to go beyond what even four years back was celebrated as the ultimate feat a human being was capable of. But winning is not about being logical. Read more

Interview: Gautam Ghosh

 During my last visit to Hyderabad, I caught up with Gautam Ghosh (popularly called GG) - the blogger. His blog has been featured in Business Blogs: A practical Guide written by William Ives and Amanda Watlington. His blog on HR and OD at http://gauteg.blogspot.com has been listed as the fourth among the top 25 blogs in the world by HRworld.com. You get the drift.

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