Apu’s World

Once upon a time, I used to write a travel blog, A long way ahead with good friend Art. Sigh. I no longer have the energy to maintain two blogs. Which means, this one is going to be a big khichdi.

Ever heard of Horsley Hills? No? A tiny hill station on the AP-Karnataka border - absolutely nothing to do. It was one of the best vacations I had and one of the most popular posts on my old blog! So, I am just re-posting it here…

When deciding on where to go, its always such a temptation for a culture-vulture to land up at places with much to see – temples, forts, ruins, palaces, all of which India has so much of. To top that, if you live in a state like Karnataka, which really has more than its fair share of history – Hampi, Badami, Aihole, Pattadakkal, Mangalore, Udupi, Dharmasthala, Moodbidri, Mysore, Belur, Halebid, Shravanabelagola, Bidri, Somnath – well, its sometimes difficult to just say no to pottering around, and instead choose a completely chilled out holiday that involves nothing more than lazing around, reading a book and maybe on occasional walk to digest all the food eaten.

After some trips had gone by in a haze of walking, seeing and absorbing much history, we finally decided that we needed one weekend where we traveled to do nothing. Ofcourse, we could have done this at home, but if you can do nothing in so much more peaceful and green surroundings, which one would you choose? Call it coincidence, but a friend mentioned this place called Horsley Hills, close to her native place, Madanapally. Now all us snooty city-dwellers had made much fun of Madanapally as a one-lane sort of town, but it has two distinctions – it boasts an old sanatorium from British times, and it is the birthplace of philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurthi.

Horsley Hills is about a 45 minutes drive from Madanapally, the nearest town, and about 3-4 hours away from Bangalore, although the drive on terrible pot-holed roads makes it seem longer. It’s interesting to note, that the stretch of road in Karnataka is terrible, while it improves immediately on reaching the Andhra Pradesh border, where Madanapally is located. Doesn’t say much for the Karnataka government, does it!

The road from Madanapally to Horsley Hills can loosely be called a hilly stretch, though in no way does it approach the steep hair pin bends of Tirupati for example. We reached there by afternoon, and settled in at the government owned cottages, which are pretty much the only accommodation you will find here. The cottages look picturesque from the outside, with their sloping red roofs, though the inside can only be described as adequate. For our purposes though (doing nothing, remember), they were good enough. If you need more luxury, the old governer’s bungalow has been converted into traveller’s accomodation, and for around Rs 1500-2000 a day, this is much more swanky, with refurbished tiles and decorated as well as larger rooms.

The property is situated on a gentle slope, with much greenery around, and the high altitude gives provides it with lovely cool weather. It is impossible to resist pulling the chairs outside, and settling down to a game of cards, and some food accompanying. Coming to food, the resort has an attached restaurent where fairly decent food is available, with the breakfast being particularly good. We however arranged for one of the shacks on the perimeter of the resort to cook and send in food, since the non-vegetarians in the group were not too keen on the restaurant’s food. Everything in Horsley Hills ofcourse moves slowly, including the arrival of your food. Calm is the dominant theme, for humans and animals alike!

Good walking routes are available, around the property – this is not however a trekker’s paradise. The entire place is so small that it can be covered in a ten minutes walk, so gentle ambling around and enjoying the cool mountain air, is about the most strenuous exercise possible. We discovered some beautiful nooks though, overlooking the valley, and these are cosy places for enjoying a peaceful moment. Early morning in Horsley Hills is a beautiful time in particular.

For those inclined to do something more, the resort does offer a swimming pool. Large spaces have also been left unbuilt, and these offer enough space to set up a game of cricket, football or just play frisbee. While Horsley hills is a sort of idyllic meadow in the daytime, night offers a totally different face. With very little artificial lighting around, in the glow of a few halogen lamps, the place looks like a recreation of the Blair Witch Project. Add to this rumours of a tiger from the surrounding forests on the prowl, and we were understandably a little nervous.

Nothing much happened ofcourse, and after two days of pleasant indulgence, we drove back to Bangalore intact. On the way back is a small village Angallu, which specializes in pottery, with pieces sold on the roadside at extremely reasonable prices.

Faint twinges of guilt nudged us, at the thought of the calories that had been piled on during the weekend of nothing. We assured ourselves that it was a well deserved reward for weeks of over work, and groaned at the thought of getting back into yet another work-week !

apu Travel Tales

I suppose none of you (in India) have escaped the recent series of Airtel ads - Vidya Balan and Madhavan as a couple in various situations? I quite like some of them, for the way they manage to integrate product features with a story. I caught something peculiar about one of them yesterday. Remember the ad where Vidya is on her way home and she asks Madhavan to organise things because guests are arriving? No? Well, you can watch it at the Airtel site here.

Somehow, I saw this ad in both Hindi and Tamizh yesterday. It’s interesting that in the Hindi ad, Vidya tells Madhavan, “Salad bana doge?” The unsaid pronoun of course is “tum”, the “you” used for equals/peers. But, in the Tamizh version, the unsaid pronoun used (across a few sentences), is “neenga”, the ”you” used for elders, in formal situations, to convey respect and of course the you normally prescribed for women to use with their husbands. Interesting, is it not? I thought of a couple of options.

One, Tamizh women indeed have a greater preference for addressing their husbands using the formal pronoun, as compared to North Indian women who have shifted to using the casual one. Two, marketers think that Tamizh women are likely to continue using the formal pronoun, whereas North Indian relationships have all become more egalitarian. Which of these two is correct? Or is it neither, and the advertising agency just thought of ‘North’ with hip South Delhi and ‘South’ as conservative and unchanging?

English of course doesn’t allow for these subtleties; a you is a you is a you. But how about other European languages? French for instance does have it’s “tu” and “vous.” In medieval France, did women address their husbands as “vous”? In India, I feel this may have originated because earlier, it was quite common for a man to be much older than his wife, and of course we are taught to speak to elders respectfully. Today, however, with the age gap narrowing down, I don’t think it will continue beyond another generation, though I do see parents who feel “so hurt” if their darling son is addressed without an “aap”. (Those who want to rush in and tell me that there is nothing wrong with addressing people respectfully, please save your breath; I have no issues with it, except that such respect is usually reserved for the male of the pair.)

p.s While the ad shows Vidya requesting her husband to help with a bunch of small chores at home, there is a mild hesitation in her smile and tone, as though she is aware of the “favor” she is asking. I thought that was actually done fairly realistically, but it does say something, doesn’t it!

apu Media-Movies-Ads

The 60th anniversary is apparently also celebrated as a “diamond anniversary”. If so, a happy Diamond Anniversary to the Carnival of Feminists!

The 60th edition of the Carnival is up at Unmana’s Words. It looks like one sooper-dooper carnival, with a whole lot of interesting pieces, plus a special focus on pieces relating to India. (Yayyy! I’ve been included as well). Have fun reading!

apu Women & Feminism

Amruta Patil’s literary debut, Kari, is an ambitious graphic novel, a coming of age story with an alternative trajectory. As in many coming of age stories, the heroine Kari is young, in love, confused and trying to come to terms with an apparently meaningless existence. Her journey is however, more complicated. The object of love here is another woman, Ruth, who appears in the novel’s panels as an ideal, fantasy-world princess, who has nonetheless, abandoned Kari.

A graphic novel is a mesh of the verbal and the visual, familiar to most of us from our childhood reading of comics. It is now being used to tell every kind of tale, and Amruta Patil uses it to draw a fine picture of life in Mumbai, at least in some parts of it. Kari’s tiny flat shared with two self absorbed roommates, and extended to their boyfriends, is a microcosm of claustrophobic Mumbai. A tryptich of panels shows a bookcase dividing a bedroom into two, providing a safe haven for a couple on one side. Later, on a night-time jaunt through the city, Kari and a friend see the outlined shapes of furtive lovers. Such details are what make Kari’s Mumbai instantly recognisable.

If the book’s realism is in its visuals, what makes it work at an emotional level is the lyrical quality of the prose accompanying the panels. Describing her first meeting with Ruth, Kari says, “Whatever love laws have to be broken, the first few seconds suffice. After that, everything is a matter of time and incident”. When Ruth leaves, “the airport was a ford and she crossed over”. Occasionally this does descend into sentimentality, as when Ruth walks her “into the secret lives of ginger, cardamom, basil and anise”. Kari’s visiting parents and an older friend Angel, stand out as bastions as gravity, although of different kinds. Interestingly, the conflict with the parents’ more conventional morality is presented without a hard edge to it. Attraction and transgression are themes running through the book, with plenty of irony and self-deprecating humour greasing the wheels. That balances out the occasional page with maudlin tendencies.

The visuals are not highly dramatic or compelling in themselves; but this is one book where they flow seamlessly with the narrative. In that sense, they move the story ahead without drawing attention to themselves. The only parts where the visuals stand out are when Kari is presenting advertising storyboards for a product ridiculously named ‘Fairytale Hair’. Aptly enough, these have a glossy-pink, unreal feel to them, their colour and style a contrast with the black & white of the rest of the book. In a sense, they seem to symbolise Kari’s dual life, as she slugs it out in agency meetings and commuter trains like the rest of the working population, but her ‘real’ life flows underneath, an exploration of lost souls, the city sewers and those about to cross from this world into the other one beyond.

Kari is a daring novel in that it takes on big themes - Love, Transgressive Love, Urban Alienation, Death. It succeeds not because it brings to the table any fundamentally new ideas about the nature of these. Rather it does very well an exploration of these through one finely etched character, and in doing so, takes the reader through some very keen observations on people, love and life in a modern Indian city.

Details: Publisher: Harper Collins; Price: Rs. 295

apu The Literary life

The Open Coffee Club, Bangalore describes itself as a “an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC’s and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level”. While I am no entrepreneur yet, I do hope to start up something in the next few months. So, when I heard from my friend, Rashmi about this Club meeting every forthnight to chew the fat, listen to experts speak and yadda-yadda-yadda, I decided to attend a session.

Today, they had Rashmi delivering a talk on “Viral Marketing for Start-ups”. Rashmi is the founder of Altius Consulting, a marketing consultancy that caters to starts-ups and SMEs. How hot a topic viral marketing is could be seen from the size of the audience - entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs kept walking in, until the small restaurant we were meeting in, was almost full.

A very interactive session, at times, it seemed as though the volley of questions from the audience would take over the talk itself! But, we did manage to come away with some pretty useful ideas, especially for those who haven’t really explored this kind of marketing before.

Some of the key takeouts for me were:

• Viral marketing is fundamentally different from mainstream marketing, in one aspect - it is non-intrusive and comes from someone you know and trust.
• Hearing about products and services from people you know, has always been around - what we call ‘Word of mouth’. Technology has however made it easier for marketers to create and monitor this word of mouth.
• Viral marketing is not a substitute for product differentiation; a me-too product, a yet-another-social-networking-portal cannot just bank on buzz. Creating this differentiation is therefore the start-up’s first task
• You need to identify what is known as a “hive” in viral marketing parlance : a homogenous segment that is likely to be really interested in your product/service. This is in any case, true for all marketing efforts.
• All jargon aside, if you create a message that you want others to pass on, you have to make it easy for them to do it. If they can’t do it in one step, they are unlikely to do it.

Once Rashmi finished her talk, start-ups got some time to talk to her on specific problems applicable to each of them. These ranged from “Should I as a founder be the one doing the viral marketing?” to “How do I use it for a B2B industry?” to “How do I measure the ROI on various kinds of marketing efforts?”

Overall, a morning well spent. One thing which I came away with, and which would probably be useful to others in start-up mode was that Viral Marketing is not necessarily for all situations, nor is it useful just because of the (relatively) low cost. There has to be something to engage the user - if that is absent, don’t do it!

apu Entrepreneurship