What's age got to do with it?

In the afternoon today, I got a full primer on PlayStation from Neo(age 6)(who lectures me regularly on mobile and video games, thinks am way behind on the learning curve...) and then a lil later my father(age 65) wanted me to help him install skype!! My younger brother is quite a blogger and a web 2.0 expert!! Quite a digital savvy family balanced only by the combined tech-unsavviness of my mother and mil:-)

As the Internet turns 40, our one preoccupation that all technology products and services will only have the youth as early adopters, practitioners and evangelists will be put to test regularly...Just when I was mulling over these thoughts over a crazily busy fortnite, my planner buddy Meraj sent me this NYT link - Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens. Worth a read and some reflection...

Archiving some nuggets from the article..

1. Surprisingly(actually not so surprisingly, if you pause to reflect) many teens in the US(do we have data for India as well?) are not that heavy users of twitter. As one of them says - "I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life". Well am not teen by a wide margin but have similar thoughts about twitter...

2. Though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for just 14% of MySpace’s users and only 9% of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success is now proving to be largely a myth.

3. Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

If I look around at my digital habits and behaviour and many of my friends, the digital adoption curve doesn't always co-relate to our age in some simple linear fashion...On the other hand, India will be different because we are crazily young in age and outlook(as far as statistics go).

On another note, this reminds me of my interview with Javed Akhtar in Bombay when he brushed aside all this fanatical obsession of marketers with youth - "Aap logon ne youth ko hauaa bana rakha hai. Youth ko yeh chahiye, youth ko woh chahiye. Arrey saheb, youth ko toh khud he nahin pata ki usko kya chahiye:-)"

A trip to Chanderi

Few days back, I spent a day in the sleepy 'kasba' of Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh. A 'kasba' famous for it's 'Chanderi sarees'. It also has lot of Rajput and Mughal architecture. It's the birthplace of Sangeet Samrath - Baiju Bawra (1542-1613) a dhrupad singer. and the court musician of Raja Mansingh of Gwalher...It was nice ,this journey back in time...

My Son's Father : 5 Things I Re-Learnt From Neo

I was a bit apprehensive how my son, Neo would adjust to this city shift - Bombay to Delhi. He took less than 24 hours!! Children are that adaptive...I have tried to spend more time with him these last two months...It's amazing how you can learn/ unlearn/ re-learn tons of stuff from your kids. In their innocence and curiosity they often make profound comments and observations....Here's what I picked-up!

1. Look beneath/ look around. I remember it was one of the first few weeks in our Gurgaon house, he ran upto me to show something, Dragged me to the 'backyard' and asked me to look at 'the thing'. With my well trained planner eyes I kept searching for 'a thing' a 'big physical thing' while Neo wanted me to show how tall the grass had grown!!

He often stops me and shows me an unusual flower, the full moon, a bird on the wire, ants in the bathroom...

2. Play and learn. Like all kids, he has an insatiable appetite for play. Kids want to play in the morning, while eating, while studying, before going off to sleep...In play they learn. Playing UNO, snakes and ladder, cricket, ludo and Monopoly has made me wonder how we can inject more play at work. Increasingly a lot of work that we( at least I do) is conceptual and creative. Being too serious and working like a factory shift has diminishing returns beyond a point. It's the play value at work that adds that extra bit!

3.Do you know my friends?It's important for him that my wife and I remember all his friends names(often I fail miserably)- Bombay school friends, Bombay Ashiana building friends, Gurgaon school friends, the colony friends, the school bus friends...

What I feel is in all the lip service that a lot of marketing pays the DM mailer often reads - Dear loyal customer, the call centre guy often calls up from your mobile company to find if you are a post-paid or a pre-paid customer!!

If it's a relationship you care, remembering names is important. Period.

4. M and H.The other week-end I had taken Neo to the Qutab Minar(achcha tower hai he kept on saying), he suddenly points out to some similarity he found between the Hindi letter 'mm' and the English alphabet - 'H'. I wondered why this thought never came to me.

Is it because our analytical minds have been trained to spot the differences more than focus on similarities...Kids are good at recognising patterns. And it would help if we could learn to relax our grey cells and hunt for patterns in unlikely places.

5. Deliver-what-you-promise. It's very important for Neo that I walk the talk. If you have promised a bedtime-story, it must be told. Neo would wait upto an hour with sleep-filled eyes to hear a 'Ram-aur-Shyam' story from me.

Kids I have realised can teach us an awful lot...Next time before we brush them aside - Accha chup raho, abhi tum bache ho - maybe it would make more sense to lend them a ear!

P.S. The picture is that of a 'digital drawing' that he made on my laptop:-)

Truth Well Sold(?)

I had avoided 'Sach Ka Samna' by default till I was caught in the cross-fire of a water-cooler conversation at office and therefore decided to watch a few episodes. And I was hooked onto the show for the next 2 nights...

As NYT described it's original Fox US avatar -'Moment of Truth' - this is indeed a cash-prize competition that is neither a game of chance nor a test of knowledge. It’s a pseudo-psychological trial by ordeal in which the contestants trade candor for money.

1. Of course the show has rocked the parliament and the MPs have made high decibel noises and sung the familiar - hamari sanskriti, hamara samaj' song. I guess the film-maker and nominated MP Shyam babu(Benegal) made the more sensible comment -

“Sach ka Saamna is demeaning to human beings and obviously has high TRPs. It is like someone stripping publicly to get paid for it, spectating in these cases is involuntary, like pornography it is demeaning to your own sense of self-esteem. When an act is in private it is different but TV is a social medium watched by public at large and 90% of it is about family viewing.

However, government must have no serious role in this, we need to create a self-regulatory body of channels with equal number of people from the civil society, TV industry and the casting vote should rest with civil society,” he said.

2. I quite agree with the 'personal pornography' part of it. I mean in the 3 episodes that I watched, the cross-dresser(Bobby Darling), a middle class HW(who it appeared as if she came prepared to dump her husband on national TV) and a UTD(uncle trying to be dude) who owned up to being unfaithful to his wife and in the process lost all the moolah as well - seemingly normal people were hell-bent on stripping themselves on national TV and on 2/3 of the cases got zero money for all their 'reveal'!

3. The way the questions get tougher and 'nosier', no sane guy can ever reach the booty of 1 cr without losing his/her spouse, alienating most of his/her family...I would love to know the actual motivation of the studio participants or maybe I am just too old fashioned for these reality-shows...

4. Dressing up. All game shows are by definition mercenary, but producers go to great lengths to try to dress up contestants’ greed as altruism(that's the facade that the public loves).

A man wants the money to buy his wife the diamond engagement ring he could never afford. A young woman wants to help her ailing mother buy a home.

These shows also use loving-wives, aging parents and smiling-siblings as advisers or cheerleaders to add some human warmth and humor to a prosaic and dumb contest.

5. No matter how profound Rajeev Khandelwal tries to act(in his new hair-cut that makes him look more like Apurva Agnihotri) and bandies casually - Yeh hai 'Agni ka hawan kund', 'aapki agni pariksha' and other such lofty pronouncements...SKS is plain crass American programming at it’s best.

This made-for-TV-and-TRP show is junk, voyeuristic, highly manipulative and addictive. Like a cheap porn mag, it’s good for limited use but eventually ‘people like us’ would drop out or so I think:-)

Already after a diet of 2 episodes on TV and another 2 on youtube, I think I know what the fare will be...Evenings are too precious to be squandered on people’s dirty linen washed in the national bathroom!

The danger is not what SKS does to viewers. It's a late-night show and one has the freedom to not-watch-it; the real danger is the precedent that it sets for future programming. And while Mr. Benegal thinks that our TRP obsessed TV channels are capable of self-regulation, I seriously doubt their intentions!

Big Idea : Nano Ganesh

Had read about Nano Ganesh a couple of days back in ET. The relevance and the desire to share the story got amplified post a telecom client mtg!

It's a story about the leap-frogging India. The other India(read rural)that is also growing exponentially in technology adoption and aspiration but often doesn't feature prominently on the radar of big media!

It's a story of innovation amongst farmers in Anand’s Sojitra, a village cluster, about 30 km east of Ahmedabad. On a sleepy summer afternoon in Sojitra one Bhavesh Patel makes a game changing call from his Nokia E-75, but says nothing and hangs up. “Will it come?” asks one of the villagers. They were all eagerly waiting for water to flow into their fields from a reservoir 10 km away. Patel had just activated the pump set at the site by making the call.

The inventor of this mobile-phone enabled gadget however named it Ganesh first and them prefixed it with ‘Nano’ after Tata Motors decided to relocate its Nano factory to Sanand, near Ahmedabad.

Santosh Ostwal, the Pune-based founder of Ossian Agro Automation has developed the gadget that’s revolutionising irrigation in farms across Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Around 7,000 farmers are already using Nano Ganesh. Ostwal hopes his impending north India launch will take the number to one lakh in two years.

Ostwal is taking advantage of low mobile tariffs and handset prices. Among many of the USPs of the device are its price tag at $15 - 55 apiece, and ease of use.

The idea has its roots in Ostwal’s childhood when he spent time with his grandfather, a farmer who grew oranges. His village didn’t have a television set; even electricity was a luxury. The senior Ostwal had to walk deep into his orchard late at night, with a stick and a flickering oil lamp to water the trees. “He developed infections on his feet and had to lose one of his legs.

That set Ostwal thinking whether he could do something for farmers so that they wouldn’t have to walk into the fields to water the saplings or plants!

A good education helped him become an engineer and got him a job at Telco. He quit in the mid-eighties, and started working on his idea. 10 years later he had developed the 'Nano Ganesh'.

Ostwal’s simple application is already winning him accolades the world over. Nokia recognised his work at the All Innovators contest in Barcelona last year with a cash prize of $25,000 and promised to distribute his mobile application to consumers worldwide!!