50%+49% OFF..........

Things are going very cheap lately!
Very cheap indeed.
There's almost 75% (work out the title carefully) off on garments, up-to 50% off on fashion accessories, between 10% and 25% on eat-outs, about 10% on shoes (that's surprising though!) and so on so forth.
Many "are" actually buying too, to make the most of this great Cheapportunity.

Surprisingly, morality & conscience are being distributed absolutely free of cost, with a BOGO thrown in for good measure.

Still, not a single soul is even approaching the outlets.....

That can be because of two reasons: One, we already have enough of them, which seems a "bit" unlikely or Two, we consider them absolutely worthless to possess.

The second feeling is quite easily decipherable actually.
Classic "consumer behaviour", the suffixed, certified managers will tell you. There's hardly any "need" you see!
True, very true indeed!

Why should we ever need such worthless traits? Is it bankable or as the suits would have put it, "monetizable", with a Z? Of course not!
Do any of them make us look better? Oops, no again!
What about their "flaunt" or "snob value"? Fails miserably.
Having these might actually make you look like that bloody poor maid-servant whose family lives on our excesses.....
May I trade-in my conscience / morality to get something new in exchange, you know, like we do with our wives or husbands nowadays? No?
Come on...what the hell are you trying to sell buddy?

My F'cinsey friend gave me a better idea, to hand over this poor-performing "commodities" to an expert like F'kcenture....but that would require "substantial" investments on building "salience" around the offers he wisely admits. I remained poignantly silent.....

Why don't we all go and press the shoe-sellers for higher discounts?
Seems like we will soon require some thousands of pairs, to beat millions up, forcing them to walk into the "get-conscience-free" malls!
Frankly, I wouldn't mind a BOGO, to stock up on such foot-wear......even for future use

How Rom ana dig i....

I meant "How Romantic..." and no, I am not inebriated at all.
Today we live in a Digital world. Yesterday was Ana-Digi & the safely forgotten past was, shamefully, very Analog!

Have you ever noticed a small grid on back-covers of many pre-recorded music CDs?
There would normally be 2 alphabets in the 3 boxes formed by the grid. A and or D, in a few fixed permutations. The 1st letter denotes the "Source Master Format", the second - "Remaster Format" & the 3rd - Final format (as on the product inside).

So, AAD will mean the original recording in Analog, re-mastered to Analog & finally "converted" to Digital on the CD. Conversion is a key word in this post :)

Techies will be able to explain "why" conversion of an analog signal (from say an LP record or a cassette-tape) rids the original, of "quality & warmth". All I know for cetain is, IT DOES.

Therefore, every old recording that we hear on a CD or watch on a DVD, has undegone Ana to Digi conversion & lost significant quality!

The high-tech circuits that juggle content between Analog & Digital domains are generally called DACs or Digital Analog Converters. Though even my next door radio-repair shop can probably make DACs, it's only a very few (like Burr Brown or Faroudja) who can claim "mastery" over the process.

We, human beings being completely non-digital in construction, require every digital content to be converted back, to analog so that we can hear them, watch them or read them etc...
Almost everything has gone digital today - in the "mid-ware" sections, where machines communicate with machines.
Any human/ animal interface & the high-tech soup of 0 & 1 must be analog!

Then why the 1234 are we going digital with such gusto? Simple because digi eliminates requirement of human intervention, therefore its capable of getting various work done in fraction of a second, there's (apparently) no bureaucarcy, no possibility of human-error etc.

Simply said, we'd rather depend more on all things digital than human or analog.
After all, does your hand-wound lovely Rolex sync it's time with the world's most accurate atomic clock in France? No? Get a digital quartz that does you idiot!
You can actually buy a few thousands at the price of a Rolex!

I am told that with the gene pools completely exposed, pharmacology will soon go fully digital & most docs can remain behind painstakingly sterlised glass walls. A few digital probes will prick your whatever & feed the "data" to the digital chips. Voila! A molecule specifically built to annihilate your specific analog anatomical abnormailty will pop out of the other end (not your's, the digital paraphernalia's).
You may soon be able to digitally program vending machines, to pop the pill into your analog annals, whichever of them is the most suitable!

Anaz...I mean amazing!

What bugs me are simple, silly questions that naturally pop up on my untrained mind.
Many of them quite analogous!
Will it be possible to have digital "romance"?
Would we be digitised to make "perfect love"?
How will we ensure that there will be no loss of "quality or warmth" during such "conversions"?
Are we going to a seamless Digi-Ana processes while creating lives (babies)?
Will we need babies? Pets? Ecosystems? Brains? Muscles?

And finally, will Wall-e be the only digital creation with an analog heart?

Do you know anyone at Burr Brown or Faroudja?

I Think....Therefore....?

"I Think, Therefore I Am", said someone famous.
This oft quoted sentence has been used, rather ab-used by too many self proclaimed thinkers. No, I do not claim to be one among them. IF I was, today I'd not be typing away on my pc, for my own blog, with questionable level of following.
I'd then be in the leagues of Mr. Santosh Desai (Times of India, CITY CITY BANG BANG), churning out text for leading print media.

Incidentally, being a regular reader of his column, I find a great change in Mr. Desai's "stance". Lately. As a matter of fact, this change is visible across the board, not only in TOI, but on many publications. A close scrutiny of the deft transformations, if I may call them so, would reveal, in my opinion, the fact that media is somehow coming to terms with the real India and truth - to some extent!

That's a wonderful change, if continued. Equally abhorring IF a prequel to the polls & completely disgusting IF brought on by the imminent changes in alignments (of all non-user factors that influence most publications).

For example, lately I find one of the country's most read periodical shifting clearly away from their long-held right-wingish leanings! They have actually started singing paens for the other camp! Recently it carried an article where late Rajiv Gandhi has been compared to the likes of Mr. Barack Obama. Well done indeed! After all, the saffron has been cohabiting with green on our national marquee, since independence.....so, why not?

Going back to Mr. Desai's newfound affinity for "straight-talking", yesterday's column (10th Nov 2008) was a bigger revelation. Mr. Desai, a B-School certified product himself, has questioned the worth of such "certifications" in no uncertain words!

If you've been following MINT (the wonderful business daily from HT Media), you may have read how many B-Schools "Manage" their images & rankings, more often than not. It's not really a surprise then, to find that the "products" they have been certifying as AAA+, may be quite incapable of passing the real muster, in a real market!
But then, all "respectable" columns worth their TATA salts have skilfully refrained from focusing their merciless arc-lights on our pride-of-India institutions, like IIMs, IITs etc! For reasons obvious to many.

In Mr. Desai's article, his grandma (presumably 20 years back) asked him a very simple question, when Mr. Desai landed a very well paying job, with his "certificate" adding excellent value. The question was, in retort to his admittance of the salary amount he was about to draw: "What excatly are you expected to do, in return for such a large sum of money?".
By his own admission, the question was & still IS relevant.

Commodity managers like your's truly have been told at many a job interviews that the "stakeholders" would prefer someone "certified by reputed institutions" to head their businesses. Yes, irrespective of their lack real-world experience or unproven capabilities. They ARE the ones with "brains" you see! And one requires significantly more grey-matters, to THINK, about the company, it's future, the BIG picture etc. Those invaluable certificates "guarantee" a thinking mind, I am told!

Well, I second Mr. Desai's pertinent question. I would also like to ask what exactly were these "Quality OK" brains thinking about, while the junta was being led down the garden path?

Though I am not "qualified" to do so, may I turn the title of this article on its head and ask:
Is it then "I Do Not Think, Therefore You Are....?"