The Last Laugh: Book Review

I love short stories. They are always an easy read, written to accommodate interruptions of daily life and yet leave you fulfilled. Sometime ago, a friend of mine sent me ‘The Last Laugh’, a collection of stories penned by a debutante author Ramya Sethuraman. I quickly read it, cover to cover, over two train journeys to work.

Ramya‘s stories deftly illustrate the intricate human emotions of love, friendship, deceit, guilt and sometimes of its shortcomings. Her writing is simple yet eloquent. Her words evoke sensations, of smell, sight and flavor. Her characters are well established and her attention to detail is remarkable.

In ‘The day I became Krishnaa’, my personal favourite - An aspiring writer, Krishnaa, pens the story of the two women she adores the most. Her grandmother, Lakshmi a strong-willed, compelling woman steeped in her traditional way of life. And her mother, Nalini, a soft-spoken, bashful but intelligent daughter-in-law. In her quest of self discovery Krishnaa understands the tumultuous dynamics of caste system and the unspoken bond of love that links her mother to her grandmother.

Her title story, ‘The Last Laugh’ however, lacks the finesse observed in some others. For me the emotions felt contrived and the story failed to build up characters that are quintessential to the book. Having said that, I enjoyed Ramya’s portrayal of the fiery, passionate Raji in ‘Silambattam’, the delicate, faithful Radha in ‘Radha and I ‘and the apprehensive, chatterbox Radhika in ‘The prophecy’.

While most of the stories employ an exotic south Indian backdrop and bring to life ordinary plots, some stories reveal the author’s confusion in the landscape. For instance, in ‘Letting go of Anand Nivas’, the setting is ambiguous with its reference to Urdu ghazals and turbans that is predominantly popular in the north and the unfitting filter coffee which is radically south.

With its predictably happy and tear jerker endings, ‘The Last Laugh’ has all the awkwardness of a debutante author. And while the book may stop short of becoming one of your go to books, there are moments that make you believe that the striking story teller Ramya Sethuraman is someone to watch out for.

On the whole, this book makes for a quick read and I would give it a rating of 3.5/5

You can also visit Ramya’s blog http://whimsicalraconteur.blogspot.com/ and read about her upcoming projects and her other works of fiction. ‘The last Laugh’ is available on all the websites listed on Ramya’s blog.

Art Attack

Sprucing up my blog was always a big challenge for me. At coffee & conversation I can’t let the caffeine levels dip or the interesting conversation dry out.

I am constantly looking for alternatives to keep my blog bursting with energy and voila! I found another one of those small tools that’ll salvage it from monotony – Sketchacast! A fun way to animate a doodle and bring alive an idea or just add that little zing to your blog. So if you thought blogs were all about text, think again.

It’s simple and really cool to use. Just register, doodle and publish! There are very few tools to deal with, which makes in simpler. One could add audio as well while drawing and explaining something hence it conveys the message better than a long prose. A sketchcast can be embedded Youtube style on your blogs or the URL could be shared.

I attempted 2 such sketchcasts. I admit they look retarded and my creativity should not be judged based on these. The first one is ‘faces’, oh it was a struggle to keep the pen on the canvas.





The second one is a scoop of popcorn and a film reel which I intend to use for all the movie reviews.





There’s more to come soon. But in the meanwhile, you can review my doodling. I should try a yoga sketchcast that would depict the yoga asanas Well that’s for another rainy day.

Feed a mouthful

I am skeptical about writing product or service reviews even if I find it particularly interesting. Simply because reviews are viewed as paid-for promotions. I have been accused in the past for doing so (If only people knew how difficult it is to make money out of personal blogs). There is this one service that caught my attention www.freerice.com a program launched by www.poverty.com to battle hunger and starvation.

The rules look pretty simple, it’s a multiple choice of synonyms and the idea is to choose the closest fit. For every word you get right, 10 grains of rice is donated to the United Nations World Food Program.

The points are indicated by a bowl that collects rice. The words are challenging and it gets tougher as you advance. This is perfect for GRE and CAT aspirants and the best part is you don’t need to register.

You can also extend your support for the cause by plugging in one of their assortment of banners into your blogs and websites. I am hoping one of my more technically adept friends will help me do so.

My Coffee Shop Dreams

Incidentally the 2 restaurants I visited last weekend were all very new in the business both in terms of concept and experience. And both were conceived as passionate quests, to do something different.

Brewhaha

Such is the story of Brewhaha, a cozy little place (I’ll explain in length later for calling it the place) where you could drink gallons of coffee, play one of their 65 board games and not worry about a fat bill, a case with most restaurants in Bangalore (sigh!)

Two IIM dudes, Sreeram and Mansur, felt their fat jobs at MNCs were not good enough and decided to chase their coffee shop dreams, and Brewhaha was conceived. Now Brewhaha can look deceivingly similar to a coffee shop but it’s not, and Sreeram (who otherwise looks seemingly pleasant) nearly jumped at my throat for calling it a coffee shop. It’s a community driven entertainment lounge where one is likely to meet his own kind and have a lot of fun.

Making a business out of playing board games and sipping Calvin shake all day long sounds like fun to anyone, even to Sreeram and Mansur, and that’s why they are in it, but they know it’s hard work to keep the money flowing.

These guys say they take your fun seriously and they really live up to it. Hopping from table to table teaching board games, pretending to lose just to flatter your ego and ensuring you had a ball must be a really tough job.

Sreeram looks into the food menu and has given it a lot of thought (you’ll realise it when you read the menu a little carefully) to dish out some interesting food and coffee to go along. Mansur loves gaming and has done justice to his passion by bringing together an interesting assortment of games at Brewhaha.

Whether you’re with friends, colleagues or just by yourself, head to Brewhaha. I’ll guarantee you’ll have one hell of a time.

You could catch their hip hop workshop or online quiz, to find out about all that’s brewing at Brewhaha log on to: http://www.brewhaha.in/

PS: Sreeram you’re paying me for this :)

Ta'am Falafel

Now who would have ever thought you would get to taste Middle Eastern street food in Bangalore. Anil Elassery and his Ta’am Falafel have changed all that. After having lived in Israel for a long time, Anil thought it was about time people back home got to taste something new, something that shouts non-continental. So he brought with him the falafel in a pita. Egyptian by origin, but became the national food of Israel, and is now better known as Arabic fast food.

Falafel looks like a vada but is made of chickpea and herbs. It’s stuffed in pita bread along with pickled vegetables, hummus and tahini sauce and is served as sandwich or wrap.

The Indian street food is going to face some serious competition. Anil plans to take this falafel concept to the streets of India.

Check out http://www.taamrestaurants.com/ for more details on Arabic fast food.

The reviews of both Brewhaha and Ta’am falafel will be up on Discover Bangalore shortly and will give you more details on the food, menu and pricing of the place.

Having a coffee shop dream is one thing and starting one of your own and surviving is a completely different thing, and both are usually mutually exclusive. We all have our own coffee shop dreams, to start a cheerful little neighborhood place, we also know it’s all far too whimsical.

I personally felt both were very niche, new ideas that were striving to be different. They admit life’s not always been rosy for them; after all surviving in a jungle of wolves can get really nasty and you are alone.

Ask Guruji

India has now joined the bandwagon of International search engines after Google, MSN, Yahoo and ask.com, with its very own guruji.com. It’s the brain child of Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra and its too early to claim that they are India’s very own Larry Page and Sergey Brin but we sure can applaud their efforts.

Guruji differentiates itself from other global players by indexing only Indian content and by offering a local search product that delivers the phone numbers and addresses to users.

The founders say they have developed proprietary algorithms that are used to classify and identify Indian content. The web crawlers look for certain properties in the content to ascertain its Indianess.

Why guruji? India has been the spiritual guru/leader of the world, now it's seeking to become the guru of the IT space. I don’t think we are far behind. After all, we seem to be the hotspot for most foreign companies to set their shop.

A very interesting statistics report thrown up in a study conducted by IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India) said that 65 million people use search engines everyday and the size of the search engine advertising is $50 million and fast growing.

Guruji, as a part of their ing effort, has also added new features like guruji in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. This makes it more relevant to the Indian audience.

What is interesting to note is, unlike other search buttons this one reads ‘Search India’. In a way it truly helps you discover India, the content is very India specific and allows you to go right down to phone numbers with their city search engine section.

I like the guruji gyaan section it throws up interesting trivia about India which also allows you to understand this country better. They could use this as one of their marketing strategies since no other search engine has such a feature. Guruji’s Gyaan sounds almost sacred.

Here are some that I Liked

"Prem Nazir is the only actor in the world who has acted as the lead Hero in more than 600 films (primarily Malayalam)! In 1979, a record 39 films were released with the actor as the hero."

"The Mumbai city single handedly handles about 25% of the Domestic Airline and 38% of the international air passenger traffic in the country."

"The game of Kabaddi was introduced at the 9th Asian Games hosted by India at New Delhi in the year 1982."

"Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani better known as Dhirubhai Ambani,was born on December 28, 1932, at Chorwad, Gujarat. He began his entrepreneurial career by selling bhajias to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends."

"Karsanbhai Patel, the man behind the hugely successful 'Nirma brand, named the detergent powder Nirma after his daughter Nirupama "

I am sure like me there are many who didn’t know this.

The look and feel of this site is that of Google. Plain, clean and simple. The only difference is guruji is far more local, and you get a lot more Indian content. You can get phone numbers, addresses, road names and directions. In all, it also serves as your local directory.

Like Google they also have blogs and keep users and readers both updated on the latest on guruji.

I wouldn’t credit Anurag and Gaurav for being original, but more for being relevant. For someone traveling to India for the first time I think he would be better of asking Guruji and taking his advice than googling for information. Likewise, if I am looking for a restaurant in Bangalore, it would only make sense for me to ask Guruji rather than Google it.

It’s not a new Lingo it's BINGO!

ITC has launched Bingo with a Bang! Just when you thought the ready-to-eat snack market was saturated with a whole lot of players, ITC launches 16 new flavours and makes you think otherwise.

The 4 broad categories of Bingo (Potato Chips, Mad Angles, Live Wires and Tedhe Medhe) each of which comes in 4 variants is colourfully packed and is a direct competition to Lays and Kurkure.

I picked up 3 variants (yup I have some junking capacity!) Paneer Tikka, Mustard Sting and Bindas Masal Chaas. New and interesting were my first reactions. What stood out were the names which were typical to homemade snacks that are unique to different parts of the country. Paneer Tikka is the flavor of Punjab while Mustard Sting is so Kolkatta. (ITC is based out of Kolkotta and I am sure they wanted to pay tribute to the people of the state and what better way to do it than glorify Mustard oil!)

After watching all the amusing communication built around the brand, I have been eagerly waiting for the product to launch. Just like the commercials I think the product is also quirky and kind of grows on you. ITC’s marketing pockets run deep and they aim to be the market leader in 3 years in a market that is growing 30% annually!

To keep their consumers well informed of their choices they have launched not one but 5 30secs TVCs, all at one go. Sunder Raman talks about tangy lemon pickle and chips between Tamil-speaking lessons; Spoof of Tele Marketing ads dubbed in Hindi with the same contrived enthusiasm about a product – unveils Mad Angles; Two friends are confused about 5 liars and Live Wires; or a ho-hum lecture on what flamingos have and do not have. And a CBI inspector clarifies the difference between the criminal Zango and Bingo Potato wafers.

They have launched a full fledged multimedia campaign with a website called http://www.bingeonbingo.com/ and also looking at the use of mobile and other new media. They also plan to build the personality of each flavour in future.

Yup, I am going right ahead and trying all the variants. What attracted me to the product was the attractive chips rack, it was a remixed version of all the other POPs we have seen so far. It comes with a zing, stands out and provides ample space for branding.

I am all thumbs up for the brand name, the names of the variants, the quirkiness, the packaging. True it would take a while for people to digest the all new flavours, but I am sure the risk of launching a product in an already well established market would eventually pay off.

"Bingo - No confusion. Great combination."

Girly Games

Now let’s not get too imaginative. That’s Zapak’s new venture – zapakgirls.com an online gaming portal exclusively for women. Post their successful launch of zapak.com, this gaming portal’s database showed 10% of their users were women. In order to capture a larger chunk of gamers belonging to the fairer sex, they launched zapakgirls.com. Men have always been skeptical of women’s gaming skills and this site is like their echo. In their heads all women are terrible gamers just like they are bad drivers.

No denying, the number of male gamers on the cyber space out number the women, but no serious woman in her right mind would want to play Barbie!!!

When I indulge my sudden sporadic interest in gaming, I would much rather play mind-bending games and loose than help Easter bunny find his eggs. They claim ‘girls play smarter’ then why would any girl be on zapakgirls.com if that statement held any truth! Developing a gaming site entirely for women is as good as equating her talent to that of a nose picker and equating her IQ to that of an ant.

The portal’s main focus is games for girls, and hence the site has employed all the stereo typical (pink logo) and subliminal messaging (Astrology, girly forums etc.) to drive home their point.

Zapakgirls.com is looking at adopting 4 models of advertising - banner advertising, in-game advertising, advergaming and sponsorships. It will be interesting to see who would pay to advertise on this portal. We could probably spot damsels in distress / super woman / candy floss girl sporting pretty branded lingerie or waving their tangle free hair after using the newest serum in the market. And maybe when they pause in between their snowy adventures to catch their breath they could also discuss their boyfriends. How incredibly cute!

On the flip side maybe the website is intended for frivolous gamers who would much rather pelt paint pellets than wonder how to assemble an army and deploy resources and take the enemy by surprise, all this while grappling with various keys on the key board. If it’s a stress buster then I would much rather see cute teddies than gory mutilated dead bodies.

Since there are not too many women obsessed with gaming Zapak did the obvious, added astrology and girl talk. Like every other girl I read my astrology daily and it only makes sense to have it on the site, that way they are assured of footfalls from non-gamers as well.

This definitely is a first of its kind venture and is a battle of wits. The site has hosted its beta version and is yet to get fully operational. Are they flattering or infuriating? Only women with time on their hands to kill can tell.

Girls Night Out

Don’t be surprised if you see women donned in dancing shoes and dressed to kill thronging ‘The Beach’ on a Wednesday night. For it’s ladies night out and the girls are all out to have fun. What was a revelation for me was that the Beach attracts even more number of men on Wednesdays; one needn’t take an Einsteinish guess to figure out why.

I was there last Wednesday with my girlfriends and boy we sure did have a blast – Bitching, girl talk and dancing.

The ambiance is that of Goa, very chilled out and laid back, and it helps set the mood for the evening. They often spice up the evening by having theme parties like retro, or bohemian. The liquor is on the house for all the ladies till 9.30pm even after which the crowd doesn’t cease drinking neither does it stop more people from flocking to the place.

The evening kick-starts with retro music and later transcends into hip-hop. Early on, one would find couples fresh out of dance classes doing their little jig on the floor. But later the rising crescendo and intoxicating concoctions gets the whole place moving and grooving.

Ladies ought to be prepared to listen to hilarious pick-up lines and to take home a couple of phone numbers for most men seem to readily hand out visiting cards.

I thought the ladies night was a sales kicking idea, besides partying on a Wednesday gave me the much needed break from the daily mundane of work. Come to think of it Wednesday is such a strategic choice for throwing a party. It’s the time of the week when everyone is suffering from the mid-week syndrome. To attend a ladies night out on Wednesday is a real spirit stirring (pun unintended) experience for both sexes.

So girls let your hair down and shake that booty a little harder for the tide is high and the music just couldn’t get better. And oh, don’t mind the boys. They just wanna watch.

Holiday Helpdesk

Confused about where to go this weekend? Would rather unwind in a tree house buried deep inside Bandhipur forest, or trek up the Himalayas? Visit www.indiaresortssurvey.com and plan your weekend getaways and holidays.

India Resorts Survey (IRS) is first of its kind venture in India for all travel lovers. Here you can find new resorts, weekend getaways and hotels in India, add new ones, rate them on various parameters, join the network of travel lovers, and plan your trips.

One can join IRS by becoming an IRS explorer and enjoy the privileges that come with it. As an explorer you could help someone make their travel plans and earn brownie points by writing about the places you visit. You can also share photographs and experiences (both good and bad) with fellow travelers. You could make your own travel plans based on the reviews and ratings put up by explorers.

IRS allows you to filter your search based on distances from your residing city, tariff rates, type of resort, state, etc. This allows you to zero in on what you're looking for to make your weekend fun and exciting and thus reduces the hassle of having to go through reams of unnecessary data.

Online travel planning is a brand new concept in India but its a well-established business in the west. Most people in the states chalk out their travel plans based on reviews on sites like tripadvisor and igougo. This not only ensures they get their money's worth but also guarantees a fun filled weekend something they have been looking forward to.

From budget hotels to premium luxury resorts there is a destination for all kinds of travelers at IRS all one has to do is pack his bag and hit the roads.

The next time you're basking in the backwaters of Kerala or lying on the sands of virgin beaches along the konkan coast counting stars you know who would want to know. And in any case your trip was a rude surprise you can still log on and write about it.

On a personal note I think the site is user friendly and the navigation is relatively clear. There are a few travel blogs which make an excellent read and are also furbished with a lot of details and funny anecdotes but then again it limits my choice to a very few popular tourists locales. At IRS I can write, read and access information about my preferred (not necessarily popular) holiday destination. The site filters helps me find what I want amongst zillion other things.

The services of this site are more often than not labeled to be another makemytrip.com, who are in the business of getting the best deals for travelers. IRS on the other hand provides a platform for you to connect with other travel lovers and share their experiences and thus helping you plan that perfect vacation.

cheers

Dhivya

Blog Trackking Device

Marketers can now find which brands Dominate the blogsphere. This trackking device analyses blogs over a specified time period and draws up a graph that indicates consumer prefernece.

This in my opinion can can be used to ascertain the most popular brands amongst the consumer. it will give marketers a sneak peak into the minds of the consumer.

With this tool it is difficult to find out whether the brand is talked about in positive or negative light, nevertheless it is still a strong indicator of top of the mind recall.

Here are a few results I found. The retail coffe war is going reall strong.

For what ever reason Westside beat shoppers Stop hands down when it comes to top of the mind recall.

Will the cola wars finally end? or has it just begun?

cheers

Dhivya