Pain ball

So I went for the latest craze in town – Paintball. Here is what happened in 8 easy sentences:

1. Got up at 07:00 AM.
2. Spent an hour travelling to the arena by road.
3. Spent 1 more hour waiting for our chance of the action.
4. Spent 1/2 an hour listening to the briefing – do’s and don'ts of paintball.
5. Entered the arena.
6. Got shot 5 times in 53 seconds.
7. Sat 2 more hours for everyone else to finish.
8. Travelled an hour back.

Now I got 5 bruises on Mr. T which proclaim my stupidity. I bet for my opponents I was just a sitting duck waiting to be shot at (target practice!). Or worst still, I looked like a grazing cow! But I consider myself to be a brave soldier. It takes more than guts (read sheer stupidity) to go head on into the line of fire of 5 Singaporean active military personnel poised to shoot anyone coming in there (It takes suicidal instincts :) !!).

All and all I figured I am not the paintball kind of a guy (I know that's what losers say ;) !). I am more of the bowling kind.

Live’s dilemma

Too much “Marketing” is going to my head :) !! Two posts on the same topic in a day does show that I am taking my courses seriously …

Read this article about how the most searched term on “Live.com” (formerly Microsoft MSN search) is actually the term “Google”. I can think of one reason why. Internet Explorer uses Live as its default search engine. And most people do not bother to change it (even though its quite easy to do so!). And then they go around searching for Google every day morning even to check their emails!!

This kinda reminded me of a very old Pepsi commercial in which a kid bought Coke cans so that he could buy Pepsi .. ultimate test of Brand loyalty?

Brand Loyalty

My Brand Management course has somehow made me more aware of the brands around me. In one statistic, it says that on an average every person sees close to 3000 advertisements everyday! And every advertiser yearns for is a loyal customer who would not only buy their products but would also recommend it to her friends!

That makes me an advertiser’s worst nightmare! I cant think of absolutely any brand that I am loyal to! I have changed brands in everything from shoes, clothes, microprocessors, speakers, MP3 players to Mobile phones. So much for brand loyalty!

Well the only brand that I might honestly recommend to anyone is CASIO. The kind of abuse that I met out to my G-shock, makes me wonder, am I evil? That watch has survived with me every where and anywhere I have ever been. White water rafting, kayaking, swimming (everyday!), shower (occasionally), holi, washing utensils and ahem … mud wrestling (haha, never, but I would wear it if I have to do that too :) !!).

Harley Davidson is the brand that most people are ready to tattoo on their body. This is an interesting statistic. If you think of a Harley owner (sorry for the stereotypes!), you always think of a guy in his late 50s, with flowing beard with a beer belly and ridding along his Harley wearing leather jackets and a huge tattoo on his arm. Well, you guessed it right, people who already have had tattoos are more likely to have one more. People like me, who never dreamt of having a tattoo wont ever wanna tattoo a CASIO on their arms even if we are loyal to them :) !! So this “most tattooed brand” metric kind of anyways skews the results in favour of a Harley.

And before I end, some more CASIO brand “goodness”. CASIO is apparently launching a new line of cell phones (G’zOne) which are resistant to even the kind of abuse that you would meet out to your enemy than your mobile. See the video to know what I mean :)

The Matrix

I just learnt that it has been a decade since “The Matrix” was released to us fellow minions, which means, it has been 10 years since my perception of reality changed. I am not much of a movie buff and my choice of movies generally is B-A-D. Especially in the recent past most of the movies that I saw left a very bad taste in my mouth. (I saw “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “Knowing” the first day they were released and was absolutely disappointed with them!).

Anyway, unlike what you think, The Matrix is not the movie that I have seen the most number of times in my life. That distinction is definitely held by “T2: Judgement Day”, which, if I mistake not, I have seen a quarter of a century times at the least! However, Matrix definitely takes full credits for having the most impact on my life :) !!

For those of you reading this blog if you have not seen Matrix yet

1. Get off your seat right now!
2. Go to your nearest video library and ask for “The Matrix”
3. Do not go to your office/college/school and cancel all appointments
4. Darken your room, keep your phone off its cradle, switch of the mobile, take a deep breath
5. Watch The Matrix
6. Amen

And then, those of you who saw “The Matrix Reloaded” and did not understand what the Architect was saying, here is the transcript and here is the speech:

Funny men

Read an interesting article about how funny men can literally laugh women to bed! Which probably translated in layman’s terms means – females like funny males. Ah ha, now that's interesting!

I bet there are levels of “funny” that attract different types of females (to bed). The funny level that I belong to kinda attracts only the females from a species called Anopheles.

If this was not  disheartening enough for me, I also chanced upon an article that bouts of sneezing are actually triggered by “sexy thoughts” (wonder what that means!). And I always blamed the mites in my room for all the sneezing and coughing I did. Huh, next time you see me sneezing, I hope you interpret it the way it is meant to be :) !!

And before you start questioning my intentions and “how” did I land up on these articles? Well, these are the top stories in the feed that I subscribe to for news from India.

Sesame Street

Have had a heavy dose of Sesame street and Elmo this last week thanks to a friend of mine introducing me to one of their videos lately! Haha, though I didn’t actually grow up seeing Elmo, I did spend a lot of my time in my summer vacations in school watching Sesame street. I thought I hated all those irritating characters from the series (now that I am grown up and all!), but still the sight of Oscar singing  “I love trash” is so endearing that I couldn’t help sharing it with all of you here! Give it a look …

“Oh, I love trash!
Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
Yes, I love trash”

And then came across this video of Norah Jones singing “Don’t know why” on Elmo’s World because the letter of the day “Y” didn’t come :) !!

For those of you who do not remember the original song here it is ..

Friend with a ‘O’

Well, today I was backing up my phone book (once a year ritual, I know I should do it more often!) and I figured I have friends with names starting with every alphabet in the English language other than ‘O’. Haha, perks of having an international friend’s list is that you have friends with names starting even with X, Y and Z. Cool, so this means, I just need a friend with a name starting with an O in my phone book :) !!

(PS – I checked my calendar and figured that I indeed know a guy whose name starts with an ‘O’ – “Om” but the problem is, he is like 24 years younger to me, and is still too small to own a mobile phone!).

Encounter with a roach

So I went for my regular bathing ritual after a dip in the pool today and as I reached for my only saving grace in a public bath (my towel), I saw an angry looking cockroach with his two antennae staring at me intently. I am not generally afraid of cockroaches, and have been brave enough to kill a couple of dozen as a kid (Missed having a digital cam then .. else would have taken brave pictures of me with the dead cockroach hanging by his antenna in my hand!).

Anyway, when you are wet and have nothing to hold on to, and your only saving grace is under his control, things get a bit messy. I decided to fight it out and tried the oldest trick in the book .. “shooo” the cockroach with your hand. The only problem was, my hand was wet, and the cockroach decided to take flight at the same time, and lo behold his wings got stuck to my hand. Haha, now I had a fluttering cockroach on my hand and my towel in my other. Anyway, I had the presence of mind, and turned on the shower to get rid of the cockroach. Got my towel completely drenched in the process.

Since I had this amazing start of an eventful day, I thought I dedicate this post to the cockroach that I met in the morning. And for those of you who thought I killed a cockroach, don’t worry “No animals were harmed during the making of this blog (they were just splashed with water!)”. Wikipedia says that cockroaches can survive for 30 minutes under water. So I bet this one survived to scare someone else today!

Salon

So I spent more than an hour waiting for my turn to get my small hair cut further at the salon on campus. 1 hour wait time for what you ask? Well, I actually saw a south-east Asian girl turn blonde!!

This particular incident has kind of made me a sexist. I am now totally against having uni-sex salons. Men's salons should be different from those for women. Men should not be made to wait for women. The kind of stuff a gal can do to her hair, is mind boggling. Combined with gossiping about the latest reality show with the hair stylist, some girls can sit their for perpetuity.

Here is what actually happened: I had to get my routine hair-cut. I popped into the salon and saw an innocuous looking teenager sitting on the chair getting something done to her hair. Since it was only one person, I thought I wait it out. And there is where the ordeal started.

She first got a "hair wash". I thought that is something you do at home under the shower when you are taking a bath. But then, the hair stylist was combing her hair under water for what seemed like eternity. Then the kid wanted a "blow dry". Which consisted of using a scary looking contraption called a hair dryer which actually just blew air onto her hair!

Then all of a sudden the hair stylist wore surgical gloves and took out a paint brush! And then started applying some funny looking liquid on each and every strand of that teenager. I still cant believe what I saw! She actually applied that paint on *every* strand. After what seemed like ages (yeah I dozed off in the middle!) the hair stylist got a futuristic looking contraption from the wall and put it on her head. Finally, her attention turned towards this motionless body sitting on the other end of the room, yours truly, and motioned me to sit on the other chair while the gal sat inside that futuristic contraption. And within the time that they discussed the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” my monthly ritual was done. Just out off curiosity I hung around for a while to see what the contraption actually did, and lo-behold, the gal actually turned from black haired to blonde inside that thingy (well after her hair was washed again!). Cool isn’t it?

Why I am not an iPod fan?

Wow. I know I am gonna ruffle quite a few Apple fans by writing this particular blog post. So before I get started, let me post a disclaimer which says - "I am not a Microsoft fan boy, nor do I specifically hate Apple or any of its products (iPod/Mac/iPhone included)". "I also believe that Steve Jobs is truly an inspiring person, and though I don't sit late into the night to party, I have always followed his keynotes live in WWDC and Mac World live whatever time of the night it is!".

However ever other subject that I study (Strategy/Technology/Marketing/Branding) in MBA somehow touches on the fact that Apple is a great company and they are good at everything that they do. How iPod/iPhone was a revolution and how everything about Apple is so cool. And then the class discussion is generally led by the Apple fans who go gaga over the amazing Mac OSX and how everything "just works" right out of the box. And we always conclude that iPod was the most amazing thing that happened to mankind after the discovery of the wheel.

My opinion is that, most of the iPod users out there are just ignorant of the fact that there are other digital media players available in the market, and also we generally tend to buy things that our friends have already bought (and do not experiment with new stuff). This behaviour which I think is rightly described by Scott Adams as "Moist robots".

As for things working right out of the box, I never had issues with my laptops and desktops (PCs) and they all to worked out of the box. (Yeah, the desktops I assembled, but the processors and Mobo and RAM just worked out of the box you see :) !!).

The worst part out of all this is, if Apple does commit a blunder tomorrow, the analysts and people will start bashing it and then suddenly what Apple does would suddenly become "so wrong". I always feel that Yahoo! and Palm do not deserve all the bashing that is meted out to them today. Same is the case with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. We like to make ordinary people and companies Demigods and then all of a sudden one fine day we start hating them to the bone! And then we blame the media for all the pain and gore in this world when in reality it is we the consumers who really like things that are sensationalized :) !! So in the end my opinion is Apple is just another good company trying to maximise shareholder value and personifying it into this massive benevolent organization out to change all that is bad in this world is simply wrong!

Before I end this blog post, I thought I show you all this clever advertisement made for the Blackberry Storm which somehow never saw the light of the day. Nice one...