Digging for Meaning

See these ads -> Bisleri500 Angry bride , Bisleri500 Casanova , Bisleri500 Superhero Tell me you didn't find them disturbing. If you did, stop drinking this irresponsible brand, and if it can be helped, bottled water altogether .   Story of the bottled water If not, let me shepherd out the outrage. What do you think is the brand trying to do through these ads? Its a classic advertising attack on your current behavior. Not all behavior change objectives are bad, but they always have a big responsibility - In your quest for increased usage/ preference, you don't want to bring harm to a culture or people. I believe Bisleri has been tremendously irresponsible in multiple ways. The behavior shift sought here is that from shared drinking to individualistic drinking. While traveling you would often see us Indians sharing a bottle, sharing food. Sharing is a big part of how Indians define themselves. However, sharing is perhaps a newer value that India tried to ...

Its Holi time. :) The best time (for some) to be in India. It is a global party to prepare ourselves of the terrible weather that will soon turn us into homebodies - scared of stepping out in the day time 45 degree dust bowls. One last day of being out and enjoying it - beat the heat with style. Social media, the zeitgeist barometer, though indicates a different Holi to me this year. On the one hand, there are people talking about the HoliCow party - stripping holi to its most basic ritual, and turning it into a modern dance banality. And on the other, there's concerned city folks who are advocating abstention from the whole thing - save water/ "Think of the poor" - droughts across India/ natural herbal colors as replacement for the more energetic color+water combination. (Should we blame this on ACs? I have a hypothesis - Holi will be played more vigorously in towns where there is low penetration of Air-Condition machines. There is a correlation between 'for...

How does the moon always manages to surprise me? Its always a shock to see something that beautiful and bright up above, without stilts or ropes. Right now its smiling to me on the western horizon - a thin crescent. Hiding & then unveiling from the silken black clouds. It holds the gaze and hides. and waits. and never does it let you know of its intentions. Gone for hours or minutes or seconds. Shining bright or pulling across its body, a thin cloud ever so slowly.

I am against hyper efficiencies sought in these days in everything. These hyper efficiencies are being sought without an understanding of the implications thereof. Take the case of energy systems. May it be the invention of the nuclear weapons, which has made extinction of human race a possibility in immediate future. Or see how this need for efficiency is fueling our irrational want for everything. There is a chasm of understanding between how things get made and how they get consumed. The hyper efficiencies are created by specialization of work. Vocations are getting more and more specialized. As such, human is getting distanced from the understanding of mechanisms of production of things that one consumes. This is harmful, because one then doesn’t understand the cost that natural resources, human life and flora and fauna is paying in producing something that may be totally superfluous. This drives irrational wants and creates a maddening consumerist race towards annihilation of wo...