Pictures!!!

Just to let everyone know, I have posted lots and lots of pictures online and you can find a link to them on the right-hand panel of this blog. I will be adding pictures about once a week, so keep checking there. I have chosen to keep them there as opposed to in my blog, as not everyone (including me) is blessed with overflowing bandwidth and it allows this blog to load quick. I am also in the process of putting older pics online from other places I have been, so there will not only be pictures of India. So far I have uploaded ones from Iceland, China, Arizona, Barcelona and India. I will create new albums for each set of pics so that you don't have to keep looking through old ones, and you can sort the albums by date to see which are the newer additions.

Delightful Delhi

I am a huge fan of roller-coasters. Almost nothing I like more than speeding along a twisting track. Boomerangs, loops, barrel rolls, it’s all good, and after a couple of months of seeing the billboards around Delhi advertising India’s premier amusement park, I knew I would not be able to resist the heroin-like temptation very long. Yesterday I cracked. Manuel and I got into our best theme park gear, sun blocked ourselves into oblivion, flagged down the nearest rickshaw to Central Secretariat where we hopped on the metro for the approximately 30 minute journey which was spent anxiously and excitedly looking out the window for any sign of a coaster track. We knew for a fact there would be coasters because the billboards that we had been seeing showed a man and a woman harnessed into a car, upside down in a mid scream/laugh as they sped along the track. Or at least that is what the billboard suggested.

I should have known better. I work in advertising. We are the same people that tell you how much better your life will be if you wear a certain brand of shoes, how much thinner you will be if you use a certain shampoo and how unbelievably popular you will be if you drink a certain cola. But that did not stop me from painting a picture in my head that had absolutely nothing to do with reality. Adventure Island is at the end of the red line metro and as we counted down the final stops, three, two, one, we were beginning to wonder if perhaps we had not taken the wrong line. Nobody at the metro stations knew which line it was and so I gave it my best guess. Just as we were resigning ourselves to the fact that we had taken the wrong line and would probably have to save our island themed adventure for another sunny day, there it was. We both spotted it at the same time and we were both speechless, an affliction that does not often affect me.

We stepped off the metro and were immediately confronted with the paparazzi like crowd of bicycle rickshaw drivers each trying to get us to choose their bicycle. We chose one and were soon closing the gap between us and our destination. 5 Minutes or so later, and there we were, at the entrance of the shopping mall cum amusement park. Yes, Adventure Island is little more than an amusi-mall. We got our tickets and armbands, popped over to McDonalds for yet another Shrek themed happy meal and toy, and walked to the bridge we would have to cross before being officially on the island. The area is divided into two sections, one of those being Adventure Island and the other being Metro Walk, where one can find such stores as the American Dollar Store, where everything is 99 rupees (Note to store… 99 rupees is actually 2 dollars) and Depot, a store that sells books, music, gifts and the most amazing of all, freedom. Obviously freedom does have a price and it must be a good one as there was none to be found anywhere in the store. I was tempted to go to the customer service desk and ask when they would be getting in a new stock and see if perhaps I could reserve some along with the new Harry Potter, but thought better of it. Nobody likes an ugly gora.

After going through security, where we were forced to throw away our bottle of water we wandered across the bridge and into adventure. Our first stop was a ride that swung back and forth while spinning around. The screams started the moment people sat in their hard plastic seats. And we quickly came to realize that the screams weren’t just for that ride, one of the three that could qualify as thrill-ish, but for all the rides. They screamed on the swing, they screamed on the miniature water boat ride, they screamed on the bumper cars. As Adventure Island is India’s premier amusement park, it became quite clear the people acted as though they thought they should, the way people do in movies or in the video games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. Screams and amusement parks are supposed to go together like handcuffs and sex… It’s just a natural match. The park is open from noon to 11pm and after 1 ½ hours, we were confronted with what to do next. Manuel wanted to see the magic show that was still 4 hours away but when we looked at the options for killing time, we decided it was best to leave the island and return to civilization.

And then one of the best days I have ever had in Delhi began to take shape.

Manuel wanted to go to Red Fort and so we took the metro back with the intention of getting of at Chandni Chowk station, a few minutes walk from the Red Fort. We had to change trains at Kashmere Gate and as we could see the fort off in the not so distant distance, we decided to walk. We left the station and began walking down Lothian Road, in a part of Old Delhi I had never seen, and not a tourist in sight, save us. Very soon we came upon a tiny mosque, Fakhur ul Masajid where our presence interrupted a class of young boys who wanted to be in the pictures. A minute or so later, Manuel’s entire day was made. He had seen monkeys once before from a rickshaw, but didn’t have his camera. This time, they were just all over the place, on the rooftops, in the trees and crossing the street by way of the power lines or TV cables. As we made our way further down the Lothian Road, everyone wanted to shake our hands, talk to us and be in the pictures. That happens quite often, but what was so unusual about this time, was that we were in such a non-touristy area, and nobody wanted money as they tend to do when in other areas, they just wanted to use what little English they knew and have their picture taken. W continued our walk, crossing New Delhi Railway Station and on to Chandni Chowk.

The Red Fort was to our left and we decided to continue our adventure on the street by heading right, toward the spice market. We walked to the end of Chandni Chowk, taking time out here and there to explore the narrow alleyways and see parts of Delhi that most tourists never see. We had no map, no guide and chose our way based on what looked the most interesting… Not necessarily the busies or most beautiful, but where we felt compelled to walk. If all things seemed equal and we couldn’t decide, we took Beyonce’s advice and went to the left. We walked through winding little alleyways, discovering tiny temples and quite often having to turn back due to dead ends. People pointed us this way and that, making sure we didn’t miss the special parts of the area. At some point we came across a beautiful mosque we decided to explore. It was rather new, having been built in the 1900’s at Chandni Chowk and then it was moved to its current location (at least that is what I remember from the plaque, but I could be wrong, we saw a LOT yesterday) I was wearing shorts, which is not allowed inside a mosque. In the courtyard it is no problem, but not in the mosque itself. No problem there as a group of guys came to our rescue and provided me with a lyonghi (I think that is how its spelled) to cover my legs. Again, I was amazed by the kindness of people and just the desire to show us their world. At the touristy locations, everything has a price, even someone telling you what you already know, but here, they wanted nothing, except the conversation and picture.

Our walk took us through the spice market, which was mostly closed, so will be revisiting that area again, perhaps next weekend when everything is in full swing, to Lahori Gate, Naya Bazar, Sadar Bazar, Qutab Road, Chowk Singhara and Idgah Road where we came across a group of amazing children. Everyone it seems likes to have their picture taken and nobody more so than children. When you show them the picture on the screen of the camera, they go absolutely mad – they scream, they laugh, they make fun of each other and then they want to do it again. I could have spent the entire day with those children, just hearing them laughing and seeing how excited they were. At the end of Idgah Road we came across a rather large mosque dominating a number of lawns where cricket games were happening all over the place. Our presence caused a huge commotion, but after 2 ½ or so hours of that, we were pretty used to it. By this time, our feet were a bit sore and we were in need of some rest, but that would have to wait as we spotted a large temple at Pahar Ganj and could not let that area go unexplored. We decided not to go into the temple at that time as it meant taking off our shoes. Normally that is not a problem, and we had already done so several times that day to peek into the various mosques and temples we discovered, but we both knew that if our shoes came off again, they weren’t going back on.

We walked a bit around the back of the temple and through an alley full of women and children, all slinging babies all over the place and begging money. I still feel like a complete creep when I don’t give money, but it is that dilemma of wanting to help and not wanting to add to the problem by encouraging. I do give out a bit here and there, like to one little boy near Chandni Chowk that was doing circus like tricks for us. Yes, I know it is set up that way, but I would prefer that as opposed to someone who just tries to take things out of your hand as tends to happen quite often at Connaught Place, where we ended up after our walk and a short rickshaw ride, sitting on a roof terrace at QBA having a few cold beers and resting our tired feet.

I have discovered a few things about Manuel. One is that if he wants to do something or eat something, he will almost never come out and say it. He will ask if I want to do it. So he will ask if I want ice cream, but what he is really saying is that he wants ice cream. Another thing I have learned is that he is very predictable. We were sitting at QBA, across the park from KFC and I asked him what he wanted to do for dinner. I knew what his answer would be, but I decided to test my theory. I asked him about dinner at 15 past 7, knowing it was inevitable that he wound suggest KFC, but as a question. At 23 past 7, he asked me if I would like to have KFC for dinner, and before long, we were going to town on our 8 piece bucket of hot and crispy.

In a Nutshell

I have been working in customer service and marketing for over 20 years and have been a part of hundreds of briefings in a variety of roles; client, agency, vendor, stakeholder, subject matter expert, business owner, audience manager and scapegoat. The more I partake in these sessions, the more I am convinced there is only one brief that exists, and like a Christmas fruitcake, just gets repackaged and passed around. I have decided to remove the mystery surrounding marketing and advertising and publish that one brief here, in full, in one easy to understand sentence.

So, without any further ado, here is my brief, in a nutshell...

If we look at our enterprise-wide mission of continuing to quickly build progressive products and enthusiastically customize inexpensive infrastructures and services, maintaining the highest standards of cutting edge product offerings and increasing customer satisfaction by optimizing touchpoints while transforming our company into a virtual center of excellence, then it becomes pointedly clear that the most definitive and impacting priority and key point upon which we must hereafter focus almost entirely is the streamlining of the streams of until now unstreamlined and unstructured communication and optimizing the relevant and resonating bullet points within those streamlined streams so that the streams are strum in a sensationally structured fashion in a horizontal manner across all of our verticals of focus to deliver the otherwise confusifying messaging in a clear, concise, simplified, personalized and yet out-of-the-box manner with surgical precision to the target audience with whom we would otherwise like to engage in stimulating, one-on-one dialogue-like conversation that mirrors real-world, real-time discussions in the business place which will enable us to hold our customers' hand as we drag them through the journey we have mapped out for them to increase their curiosification with the end purpose of moving them from awareness to evaluation and facilitating a paradigm shift leading to cost-effective pre-selling, upselling, cross-selling, side-selling, in-selling and outselling our vast suite of revolutionary, empowering, performance-based, end-to-end, feature rich products we fully and completely endorse in a calendarized fashion preferably and most desireably in a manner in which the precision of the strum communications is irresistably intoxicating to the end recipient thereby igniting the drivers and dormant desires of said recipient to purchase and deploy our until now unpurchased and undeployed products for the optimization and performanatiousness of whatever it is they wish to perform, for which we are absolutely certain we have a laser-like and completeish blurry grasp upon as backed up by and gleaned from our colossal reasearchification efforts which we have continuously performed in a projectized manner on an ongoing basis to surface customer needs, pin-point pains and get a highly valuable, atomic level understanding and bird’s eye view of the core of what it is we are investigating thereby assuring us beyond any doubt that we might actually be making, developing or perhaps even thinking about what our unknown audience wants to know even if they do not yet know they wish to know, since we most positively and genuinely know our audience almost better than they know themselves and we are prepared to leverage those insightful insights in a fascinatingly geurilla-like fashion as we approach, educate and lavishly bombard our audience in a consistent, reliable yet synchronized manner via the proper channels through which they will receive the unsurpassed and ISO 9001 compliant level of service they would have received if we actually serviced them ourselves which will exponentially positively impact our revenues and increase their satisfaction quotient which can best be described as the level of euphoria and feeling of peer-group inclusion they experience upon timely delivery and successful deployment of our productified products combined with the clearly vague yet unparalleled value proposition we wish to offer them on a trial basis that will ensure they remain loyal, raving fans for a set and measurable period of time as defined, outlined and clarified by the metrics which we had created an outsourced team and fine-tuned for performance enhancement that will allow us to quantify the results of the lifetime worth of superior communication we plan to stream to ensure never-before-seen success once said communication is strum in a communicative like fashion using new and authentically innovative tactics and popular, powerful and proven media channels of which we know nothing about and are confident will allow us to cost-effectively explore, exploit and own certain media in the mind of our customer before our competition is clued in to our efforts effectively giving us a mission-critical window of opportunity which will definitely most likely assure a dramatic gain of market share and increased economically-sound value for current and future shareholders who, our research has clearly indicated might also be our customers at a consumer level and therefore members of our target audience allowing them to first hand experience our awe-inspiring, world-class marketing effortations which will ensure them that we are most likely heading in a certain direction while driving a vehicle that has momentum and provides movement within the space we wish to own or at least rent in the market and the mind of the customer, whose thoughts we are currently profiling for the future fulfillment of our database initiatives to generate the response driven responses we are certain to receive once the message has been streamlined in a manner which delivers the message in crystal clear fashion across a variety of media and non-media, generating demand, creating buzz and sustainable expectations around our brand attributes and imbedding within our communications and thereby instilling within our various segments, which have been segmented based on the segmentation models which we have incorporated for the purpose of optimal segmentification, the very philosophy of our brand values to create an environment in which the segmented segments are most likely certain they will not be able to survive without our products which directly translates back to the ROI and fed into our 360 degree balanced scorecard views detailing the mammoth bottom-line results which we are sure to achieve and surpass by immediately linking our top-down activities to our bottom-up initiatives in a coordinated manner which will not only guarantee cohesion, but will also become the backbone for our communications as we go back to basics, placing the customer virtually at the center of almost everything we do by including the various segments in focus groups, taste tests, pilot offers, extendable and scalable once-in-a-lifetime promotions we can refresh and renew on a quarterly basis, survey distribution and generic product communication development and refinement with the intent and goal of creating a positive perception shift and demand for our miracle products through word of mouth marketing which we will then use to launch and drive our very own “tell-a-friend” initiative which will allow us to communicate cross-segment, cross town, cross-culture and trans-global while at the same time enabling us to incorporate our own unique spin and align the viral activities to our brand philosophy which we hope to launch at some point in the future that will essentially force us to raise the bar and in preparation we are seriously considering implementing an improved “zero-tolerance” policy and approach to ineffective or unclear communication that does not contain imaginative messaging in line with our core values or a decisive and insightful call-to-action which, in our opinion is exactly what is wrong with the market at this moment in time, creating discontent and disillusion among our audience which is exactly the gap we hope to bridge by cutting through the clutter and becoming partners in success with our customers in a win-win situation.

Any questions?

Airport 78/79

I have finally recovered from the whirlwind of last weekend. It was a fluttery of sightseeing, cocktails and flight planning. Since Manuel is here, I have been playing the tacky tourist. You know what I mean, the long shorts, sneakers, sunscreen dripping into the eyes, 35mm slung over the shoulder and digital camera in the hand, taking pictures of all the wrong things and offending the locals. I find a certain freedom in being the ignorant gora. If one is going to stand out, then one should do it with as much panache as possible.

Visiting temples in India during the summer is a unique experience. It is not possible to wear or take shoes into the temple and for some unknown reason which I am sure has a lot to do with logic, they seem to store the shoes about a kilometer from the temple itself. They lay down thin carpet like things over the hot coals of a walkway and the trek to the temple begins. People running from shade spot to shade spot and doing the hot potato dance in between. Little kids seem to be oblivious to the pavement, but my delicate feet sizzled like bacon. First stop was the Lotus Temple, which is one of my favorite refuges in the middle of the city. No matter what is happening outside or how hot it may be, the Lotus Temple is always quiet and cool. From there it was off to Akshradam Temple complex. It is a new temple, about 5 years old, but built in the old style so it feels as though you have stepped back through time in a sort of Disney meets Ganesh kind of way. It is a photographers dream, but no cameras are allowed.

After a few hours of sightseeing, it was time for cocktails and dinner with Stephen and Pierre. First up was gin martinis at their place, followed by dinner at Ivy and post dinner cocktails on their roof terrace. But not before Pierre dragged us to what is supposedly the new hip and happening spot in Delhi, Tabusalar in Saket. Of course, thanks to all of his planning, we spent our entire time there on the wrong side of the velvet rope. Pierre kept reassuring us how great it was, which made our inability to get in all the more frustrating. After about 20 minutes of waiting in the sauna like heat, we left and that is how we ended up on their roof terrace with Pierre force-feeding everyone more gin martinis.

Saturday found all of us nursing our hangovers in order to be fresh and perky for dinner at Ploof with the fabulous Danielle, who had freshly returned from Holland, looking as radiant and beautiful as ever… It was at Ploof when I came across yet another missing element from my childhood. Out of the 5 of us, there were only 2 of us that had not had a duck as a pet. A duck. What does one do with a duck? Well, apparently Stpehen’s used to follow him around, going into panic attacks if Stephen wandered off. Manuel had a duck. Danielle had a duck. Pierre and I were the obvious outsiders. I wasn’t sure weather I should be jealous or relieved. But then, Pierre dropped his bombshell… It is always odd when you discover someone’s hidden fetish. And Pierre’s is a doozy of one.

It seems he collects timetables from airlines. But not recent ones, mind you. The one I saw was from AerLingus for 78/79, which suddenly explained why Pierre often and quite suddenly drops a sentence like ”Do you know, if I had flown PanAm from Dublin to Nairobi in July of 1978, I would have had to connect in Cairo and then change planes 3 more times?” As if that weren't reason enough to call the men in white with their special little jackets, he then complains about how miserable his life would have been if he would have taken that flight and how his luggage probably would have gotten lost and don’t even get him started on the supposed issues he would have had at immigration due to the fact the airline would not have told him to arrange his visa in advance and the crazy taxi driver that would have fetched him from the airport. And that is how he talks when sober… Wait until gin martini number 6. Perhaps a pet duck isn’t so odd in comparison.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, she is free at last. My life, however has come to an end. Yes, she may have emerged smiling and looking like, well, 300 million dollars, but my life now has no meaning. As the president, founder and sole member of the Indian chapter of the “Free Paris Society”, I suddenly find myself feeling empty. My grief and feeling of uncertainty echoing in the cavernous emptiness of my previously full life. So here I sit in Café Coffee Day in Gurgaon (yes, Gurgaon, see how low I have sunk?) pondering what my next mission will be. The reverend mother says that when God closes a door, he opens a window somewhere. At least that’s what Maria would have us believe, but look as I may, all I see are closed windows and badly painted walls.