Virtually Reality

One of the buzz terms in the 80's was "virtual reality", where a user interacted with computer simulated environments to experience the surreal, an experience so immaculately developed that it was infinitesimally close to reality. People could land on Mars and Mercury, scale Mt. Everest on the treadmill, save the world from aliens and even rescue beautiful princesses from tyrants and marry them! (Yes, I am talking about Prince of Persia). The .com boom in the 90's saw the emergence of Amazon and eBay that opened up virtual malls and window shopping was soon replaced by browsing on deals2buy.com or xpbargains.com. The last 5 years the web has seen yet another development that could have a much more seminal impact than any of the phenomenons discussed above - "virtual communities". MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut and the like, have changed the way people interact with each other, something that was not tampered with since the big bang theory (or the days of Adam and Eve, depending on your perspective).

Virtual Communities are slowly becoming the primary way people interact with each other, be it chat rooms in Yahoo, IMs in Google or scraps in Orkut . Members of these communities create Avatars (yet another Sanskrit word sneaking into the English lexicon after Yoga and Karma), which are essentially virtual clones of the users, and interact with other avatars. Blogs are in the process of replacing newspapers as the dominant source of information exchange, so much so that newspaper sites share the same technology as blogs and news reporters are increasingly indistinguishable from bloggers. Even job search and career changes are done through professional networks via LinkedIn or Doostang. Wikipedia has become the go-to site for information on anything, from Paris Hilton to the Hilton in Paris, replacing the big fat volumes that used to adorn our bookshelves.

So, what is news? What is opinion? How do we filter the facts from the subjective analyses? Who are our friends - the profiles and avatars that exist in Orkut and MySpace or the homosapiens that reside in realms of reality. What happened to god old fashioned meet-and-greet or phone-chats. In short, what is real? What is virtual? Have we tampered so much with 0's and 1's that all there exists is virtual reality?

Money for nothing and checks for free!

"Money for nothing and chicks for free" - crooned Mark Knopfler in 1985, to express his views on the music industry. With a single syllable change, it applies to the Indian Premier League (IPL), the newly conceived 20/20 cricket league set up in a franchise structure like the soccer leagues in Europe or the sports leagues in the US.

While the IPL might turn out to be the most defining development to happen to cricket since the Packer saga in 1978, and might take the salaries of players to be on par with those of soccer stars and NFL superstars, yet, when players like Manoj Tiwary, whom I saw in a recent game in Australia and wondered how he even got selected, and Ishant sharma, who despite being the star of the Australian tour was a virtual unknown a couple of months ago, fetched $675,000 and almost $1 MM respectively, the deal seems to have more holes than a sieve.

True that when business tycoons like Vijay Mallya, Ness Wadia, and Mukesh Ambani are rubbing wallets with Bollywoood stars like Preity Zinta and Shah Rukh Khan, there are bound to be excesses. After all, isn't this the marriage between the two biggest passions of a billion Indians - Cricket and Bollywood?.

Let's take a look behind all the glitter and analyze if there is gold.

First and foremost factor in the success of a venture is the product, in this case 20/20 cricket. There is no doubt that it is exciting and probably the best suited version to really bring people to the stadiums and have fun after a hard day's work. But beyond an exciting and serendipitously successful World Cup, there isn't a proof that the version is worth the millions of $$ in bets that are being placed - huge risk with uncertain return - an investment that would make me look like Ford betting on the Edsel.

Secondly, the HR, in this case cricketers, are an impressive lot - established players and upcoming ones with its share of have-beens; overall some of the best players in the World are on display.

Thirdly, the cost of hiring these cricketers - a mind boggling $633 MM - is where the logic behind all this looks as thin as soup in a college mess. Given that the people and the companies involved in the league are some of the biggest in the country and are proven winners this is definitely not a joke. One look at the salaries and more importantly the $$/hour, which is astronomical, it reveals the lack of common sense. E.g., M.S. Dhoni is expected to earn $1500/hour, which according to The Economic Times was higher than what Mukesh Ambani, ironically one of the team owners, earns. Then there are other operating costs that need to be taken into account like those of marketing, support staff, travel etc., that will ultimately make the figure fatter than the priest at my wedding.

I am a great believer in creating a market before creating a product and more importantly earning a few cents before betting millions. The IPL fails on both counts.

Hopefully the IPL will not suffer the same fate as that of the Indian stock market in April 1992, when blinded bullishness brought about the fall of many a millionaire, and Lalit Modi, the brain behind the IPL, will do better than Harshad Mehta.

Get Paid to get Interviewed - NotchUp!

I got an invitation from a friend of mine last week to join yet another exclusive, membership-by-invite-only, networking site called NotchUp. Having been an active member of LinkedIn, a successful and widely accepted business networking site, for the past 3 years I can vouch that it is very impressive when it comes to professional networking, job postings, referrals and forum discussions and I found it to be very useful when I was looking to change jobs last year. I have since gotten invites for similar sites like Doostang, Plaxo etc, but I am of the firm belief that when it comes to email addresses, credit cards, networking sites and girlfriends (or wives!), two is one too many to maintain!

NotchUp has a slightly unique selling point in that it is trying to replace pricey headhunters by actually paying people hundreds of dollars to interview. They are in a lot of ways the eBay of business networking, which seems to be the way entrepreneurs are going these days - adapt the successful eBay business model to various industries. Start-ups like Prosper are good examples of using an eBay-style P2P auction platform in financial credit services, rather successfully so far.

NotchUp is free to join, and you can even estimate how much you should ask for an interview with their calculator. For the type of professionals that they are targeting, I would actually say the price is about right. Since they seem to be different than the run of the mill networking site, I decided to sign up just to see how the model works.

From this article at NetworkWorld:

You say you wouldn’t interview with Company X if they paid you?

A startup called NotchUp is betting that’s a bluff.

Debuting this morning at Network World’s DEMO 08 in Palm Desert, Calif., NotchUp founders Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis tell me that 15,000 people a day are signing up for their new eBay-like employment service - based solely on word of mouth. The founders are convinced employers will pay hundreds of dollars directly to people they would like to interview — especially those not actively in the job market — because it will bring them better candidates faster.

So how does it work?

To get started, simply register, create a profile (which is similar to an online resume), and set an interview price. Your interview price is the price at which you’ll talk to prospective employers. Once you’ve created your profile, companies will search it and make you paid offers to interview if you have the skills and experience they’re looking for. Accept the offers you’re interested in, go to the interviews, and we’ll collect the money and transfer it to you.

Personally I feel, It’d be cool if this company merged with LinkedIn since this is complementary to what LinkedIn offers and it would definitely reduce the number of site memberships I have to maintain.

Hollywood's Dollies

The popular perception is that that Bollywood/Kollywood (I am just going to call it Indiewood to refer to our neck of the woods) is the only place where the same actor donned multiple roles, sometimes as flimsy as playing brothers (with and without mustache) or playing father and son (ala all Sarath Kumar movies). Though multiple roles in Hollywood may not be as regular as in Indiewood, Hollywood is definitely not immune to it.

Peter Sellers' 3 roles in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (one of my all-time favorite movies), Mike Myers' 4 in Austin Powers movies and Eddie Murphy's uncountable roles in Nutty Professor spring to mind immediately. I was curious to find out if Hollywood was more prone to "cloning" than what meets the eye and below is a complete list that resulted out of a little digging. If not anything, it is worth a nice bite of trivia or an ice-breaker for that SuperBowl party this weekend.

• Rolf Leslie - 27 parts in the life story of Queen Victoria, Sixty Years a Queen (1913).
• Lupino Lane - 24 parts in Only Me (1929).
• Joseph Henabery - 14 characters in the Birth of a Nation (1915).
• Robert Hirsch - 12 roles in No Questions on Saturday (1964).
• Michael Ripper - 9 parts in What a Crazy World (1963).
• Sir Alec Guinness - 8 roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
• Eddie Murphy - 8 characters in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000) and 7 characters in The Nutty Professor (1996).
• Jerry Lewis - 7 characters in The Family Jewels (1965).
• Peter Sellers - 6 roles in Let's Go Crazy (1951), 6 roles in Soft Beds, Hard Battles (1974) and 3 roles in Dr. Strangelove (1964) and more.
• Scott Mosier 5 roles in Clerks
• Vincent Perrera 5 roles in Clerks
• Mike Myers - 4 roles in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002).
• Terry Thomas - 3 parts in Arabella (1969).
• Red Skelton - 3 characters in Watch the Birdy (1930).
• Meg Ryan - 3 roles in "Joe Versus the Volcano" (1990)

It is noteworthy that Kamal Hassan's perfect 10 in Dasavatharam or Sivaji Ganesan's near-perfect 9 in Navarathri, though not at the top of the list are definitely in the top 5.

Super - Size it!

Downgrades are not good. It is true for all things including bonuses, stock values and airline seats and the only ones that have made me happy, until last week at least, are tax cuts. But when I fit snugly into "medium" sized sweaters for the first time in my life (after I became large, that is) it was one those "Aha!" moments, that I could have captured and framed for eternity in my living room; more so, since I have achieved this by running 100 miles per month (5 miles/day) for the last 3 months and not by liposuction as I had originally intended to do so!

I have always felt that the clothing companies should do to apparel, what Starbucks has done to coffee cups. The official Starbucks sizing scheme mixes pretentious use of Italian, and lies. The correlation goes roughly like this:

• "Tall", which in the context of a drink seems synonymous with "large",
• "Grande", which of course is Italian for "big", and
• "Venti", which means "twenty," the number of ounces.

They all mean - "a large cup of coffee".

Small, medium and large, in the context of clothes, on the other hand, are synonymous with "undernourished for an adult", "on the verge of obesity" and "obese", respectively. Other superlative extrapolations on either side, paradoxically, are not so superlative and only make things worse. In other words, no size is good.

One of my most embarrassing moments while shopping has always been when the girl at the showroom asks "What size are you, Sir?" and I reply "I am Large". Now, that just doesn't sound right. Also, why should a CSR be privy to the facts only my wife and doc know - that I am lazy, have lived in Wisconsin, and have a BMI of over 30?

So, here are my suggestions for clothes sizes:

• "Zippy", which means active or energetic
  
• "Zappy", which also means active or energetic, and
  
• "Zesty"; well, they all mean the same.

Now that's what I call super-sizing, a pretentious mix of English, and lies. More importantly, it makes anyone associated with these adjectives feel like they are on top of the world! Thats more than a good reason to go on a shopping spree.

Rajnikanth - Entertainer of the year 2007

"I am back", ala Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II. It is finally nice to get back to blogging after a busy holiday season, travel, work, GMAT etc.

Came across this piece of news about Rajinikanth winning the NDTV Entertainer of the Year 2007 award from Dr. Manmohan Singh. Terrific speech in typical Rajni style, spiced up with questions from Shah Rukh Khan and Karan Johar. I loved his answer when cryptically asked "Is there anything Rajni kant do?"; he had the humor to respond with silence, which only he could have gotten away with it. Excellent viewing.

More importantly, it is the first time that a national level populist award (I am discounting National Awards since it is more to do with politics than anything else), usually the birthright of Bollywood, has been given to Kollywood. Nice trend indeed.

Catch Him If You Can

I was at training today learning about credit card fraud and the highlight of an otherwise dull day was a video speech by Frank Abagnale Jr., the master forger turned fraud-fighter on whom Steven Spielberg based his movie Catch Me If You Can, that he had delivered at Discover (the company I work for). I found a speech on You-Tube which is almost the same as the one I saw and I thought I will share it with you (looks like he is also a master forger of his speeches). It is long but it is very interesting and humorous, especially when he talks about some of his early experiences.

An interesting point of debate is whether he would have been as successful in today's hi-tech and secure financial world, with all the fraud prevention guardrails, as he was in the 50's and 60's. My initial verdict is No since his success could be attributed as much to the "trust-all" mentality of the public that prevailed at that time as his own creativity. But a counter-argument could also be , given the fact that Identity Theft and other fraud activities that are still very prevalent, he may have broken the technological barriers and remained successful, albeit for a shorter period.

Nevertheless, it makes one heck of a story!

Russell Peters - Outsourced

Phenomenon from Pannaipuram and the Lost Violinist

My recent pseudo-single life has made me turn back to my favorite recourse in times of solitude - music. As I gouged through my huge collection for songs that I had less listened to in the past couple of years, I stumbled upon the theme song from Raja Paarvai, and it had that familiar effect that vintage Illayaraja always has on me - a feeling of high without a stimulant, banned ones at least. His compositions have this magical element that makes you forget everything but the dulcet tune and this one is no exception. In this era of techno thuds and the hodgepodge that is euphemistically referred to as remix, it was refreshing to listen to creative music at its zenith, albeit from 1981. It is sad that such originality, apart from an infrequently inspired Rahman, is too rare to find these days.

The piece is a gem as far as fusion goes, starting off as a carnatic duet comprising of violin and veena (ragam: pantuvaraali - Google can make even me look like a virtuoso) leading to a pulsating violin solo and then meandering into western classical (with drums) before culminating into a fusion crescendo that leaves you suddenly waking up from a trance. It has to be said that the ending crescendo is just as hair-raising as the beginning one in Poongathave from Nizhalgal. The format of the composition is very similar to the ones from How to name it?, particularly Mad Mod Mood Fugue. That being said, it is the violin, played by V.S. Narasimhan of the Madras String Quartet (who had played the instrument in How to Name It? as well), that elevates the piece to dizzying heights.

One of my greatest peeves with Illayaraja has been the recognition (or the lack thereof) that the performers in his orchestra have received. Musicians like VSN and Sivamani had played for him for years but it wasn't until Rahman changed this trend in the 90's that some, like Sivamani, got their deserved due.

Though I am well diversified when it comes to music (Rock to Rahman, Rap to Raaja, Bach to Burman - anything goes), if there was one music that I am allowed to carry with me to my grave it will have to be Illayaraja's compositions from the stone age - Raja Paarvai, Payanangal Mudivadhillai, Nizhalgal, Sindhu Bhairavi, Mouna Ragam, Johny and the likes.

P.S: Listen to this piece by VSN and the Madras String Quartet - absolutely transcendental!

Right to Click

Rock star Mick Jagger once signed his autograph with an expletive, aggrieved that one day the recipient might make a profit from auctioning it without paying him a royalty. Years later he concluded that it was only fair if others made money from his name; after all, he had made millions out of it himself.

Maybe cricket administrators need to think the same way.

The latest move by the Australian Cricket Board to demand a fee from news agencies to cover the games and publish photographs is a classic case of "if-you-make-money-because-of-me-I-need-a-share". While a commission based system might work for TV broadcasting rights, it will not do so for news media. An analogy would be the NYSE charging the Wall Street Journal for publishing stock quotes or market updates. Royalty in the media is most definitely a No.

While such mercenary ideas usually originate from the BCCI and its bean-counting coterie, the Aussies have proven that they are not far behind in this regard. Unfortunately, while every such move by the BCCI has been widely criticized by the cricket pundits, the current crisis in Australia has hardly evoked a response from the pen-wielding experts, especially since it concerns the media. Surprising yet understandable, since all things Aussie are usually revered in Cricket.

Marketing is the key to any event and sport is no exception. By alienating the media the game might be deprived of its primary vehicle to reach to the masses. Sport and media share a symbiotic relationship where one cannot survive without the other and the administrators must realize that they are already the recipient of free marketing through newspaper coverage and the media is paying them through increased ticket sales. Hence charging them for coverage is definitely double-dipping.

Also, if newspapers start paying for the sporting event that they are covering they might want to play a role in influencing its outcome too, much like in Irving Wallace's The Almighty. After all they will then have become investing stakeholders and might rightfully want games to end the way that their returns are maximized. This will be a clear throwback to the doldrums that the game found itself in with the match-fixing allegations in the late 90s.

Sports and its organizations need to make money but they might be better off doing so with better quality of games and increased market share rather than resort to such ludicrousness. On the lighter side, they could at least be creative and subtle about their motives, like Shaq, who once said - "I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi and wear Reebok"