A few weekends ago, along with a few photo buddies, I went to Sampige Road, Malleswaram. We’ve been trying to cover the market places recently and I must say it’s been an interesting experience so far.

It’s a busy place early morning when all the shopkeepers are getting ready for the day’s business.

On the main road are the flower shops. There are baskets and baskets of beautiful blossoms, some piled on top of one another. Behind them, is the vegetable market, which hadn’t fully opened when we reached. I spent quite sometime wandering around the area taking pictures of people and flowers.

After that, we wandered up the road to the Mallikarjun temple. It’s a small temple but had some interesting colourful statues inside. And quite a few early morning devotees paying their daily obeisance to the higher powers. There is a stairway at the back where an old man sitting on the top of the steps, made a gesture as if he was blessing me, until I realised I was mistaken. He was only asking for some money!

A huge gang of kids surrounded me and wanted to get their pictures clicked. They kept pushing each other out of the way to get into the frame. Then, smart alecs, they wanted to see the pictures immediately in my camera! The digital bug seems to have bitten them too. They were rather disappointed when I shook my head to indicate they couldn’t see the pictures.

Some more scenes from the marketplace…

Picture this. You’ve got yourself a huge advance on your book. You need to finish it. Quickly. The publishers are pounding on the door. With the money bags. What do you do? You scurry to your library, pick up some novels you really loved reading and randomly start copying (or getting inspired) bits here and there. Besides, you’re only 17! Unfortunately though for you, several others too have read the same book.

In this case, the author happens to be none other than Kavaya Vishwanathan who made waves after being the youngest author in decades to bag a hefty advance and get signed on for a two-book contract with Little, Brown and Co.

Kavvya defends herself: “While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn’t aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty’s words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities.”

I can’t quite understand how someone can lift passages (with small changes of course and as many as 40 according to some reports) and then say she did it unintentionally. But I like the way she’s used the word ‘internalize’ to defend what she did.

The lady is smart enough to get into Harvard, but obviously not smart enough to figure out that people would eventually find out.

Is her career as a writer over though? People might be forgiving because of her age. On the other hand, perhaps not.

But if she does go and write a second novel, she’ll probably have to face a lot of challenges.

Apparently, Mcafferty, whose novels she has been accused of borrowing from has now refused her apology.

Or at least in a long, long time. I had a similar reaction when I saw the Pepsi campaign a few months ago, where they had lips on women’s navels that were mouthing the Pepsi theme. It was positively horrific. Later, they realised it and changed some bits of it.

I have a similar reaction to the current Pepsi TV campaign. Just as I thought they couldn’t get any worse.

So what were they thinking (again!)?

That we’re fools who will believe that we’re watching Pepsi TV if we drink Pepsi in front of the television? There’s only that far you can con us (dear, but misguided people who thought up this totally meaningless commercial).

They’ve used 3 big stars for the ad – Shahrukh, Kareena and Priyanka – meaning they’ve spent a few crores on it already. What a waste of resources! I know some guy at their ad agency probably thought on this bizarre concept in one of his creative flashes but it left me cold.

I’m not really fond of Pepsi but I’m off it forever after this really bad commercial.

Here’s another interesting take on some of India’s worst ads.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes had a baby daughter. Okay, that’s not so surprising. It was expected after all. But what I can’t understand is their choice of name.

Celebrities seem to be intent on giving their kids the strangest names so that they have a tough time in school and while growing up. Or maybe they do it so their kids really stand out!

For example, Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple. Of all the names in the world, why would you choose a fruit? (According to a new report, Gwyneth has a friend called Plum and therein lies her penchant for fruit names.)

Julia Roberts has named her twins Hazel & Phinnaeus. Lord, do we even want to try pronouncing the second one?

David Bowie’s son? Easy! Zowie Bowie!!

Bob Geldof’s daughters with Paula Yates go by Peaches and Fifi Trixiebelle and Tiger Lily Heavenly Hirani. You almost begin to appreciate Apple now :)

Coming back to Tom Cruise who has named his daughter Suri. I just hope that she doesn’t come to India someday, because it’s going to sound like she’s got two surnames with no name!

During BarCamp, I talked to Arun Ram for a while. Along with his brother Arjun, he is working on an ‘innovative’ news aggregator called Taazza.com.

Taazza as you all know means fresh, but there is an extra ‘z’ here, so don’t leave that out or you might land up with something else altogether!

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So BarCamp is officially on here in Bangalore. I walked in at about 8.30 am and found a few people hard at work already. Quite a few people walked in around 9ish and I’d estimate around 50-60 people have arrived and I guess many more will be coming through different stages of the morning…

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I was pleasantly surprised when I tuned in yesterday to find one more radio channel. So finally, Bangalore gets one more radio channel, Radio Mirchi at 93.3 MHz.

IMHO, there are too few radio channels on air. Which is strange because it’s such an economical means of communication with a high penetration.

This report analysing the trend of radio in India says, “It is ironical that while India has the second highest penetration of C&S homes in the world, radio has suffered from shunted growth. This can be attributed to misdirected policies by government, which did not give enough prominence to radio as a rich medium for entertainment and also for community development. Recently though, government has liberalized radio broadcast and this has resulted in most media houses diversifying to offer radio services. ”

I am hoping that we will see more niche and specialised stations coming up. There has to be more variety than FM Rainbow or Radio City (and now Radio Mirchi). And it’s quite a pity that Worldspace doesn’t have mobile units. They play some of the best music.

Though that might not go down well with a majority of the population which listens to film songs on radio apparently.

Some statistics from Madison Media Research (also from above link):

1. Radio has a reach of 56% and there is a distinct skew towards males.
2. Radio Mirchi is the most popular station and is tuned by people in SEC A and B.
3. People listen to FM at home (70%), while driving (32%), at public places (9%) and at the office (7%).
4. Almost 51% of the people listen to FM for an average time of one hour and another 39% listen to FM for a longer period of 1-3 hours.
5. Sunday listenership is dramatically low with only 10% of the people tuning in to FM vs. weekdays where the number of tune-ins is as high as 94%.
6. Majority of the people listen to Hindi film songs (63%), followed by Hindi pop (40%), remixes (37%) and English pop (33%).

Ah, April showers! When the first few droplets fell on my balcony on Saturday evening, I thought it was my neighbours upstairs cleaning their balcony. When it started raining in earnest, I rushed out and put my hand out to catch the first few droplets. Rain still excites me for some reason. And it’s been so hot and humid over the last few days, that I could almost hear the parched earth asking for some water.

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