Women’s day

March 8, 2013 • General, People, society • by
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There is a common trait to all the ‘day’s being celebrated. Be it Valentine’s day, mother’s day, father’s day and even our birthdays. Yes, they are all your greeting card company holidays doctored to inject additional dose of spending into our already terribly commercial lives. There is something else too. Which is also the reason why these days stick. Besides the hype there is guilt. That’s what these ‘day’s cash in on.

We celebrate something or someone we ignore or maybe even mistreat the rest of the year. We try to compensate on these ‘day’s. One could argue it is not the case with everyone, we can still celebrate something without any kind of abuse, bias, chauvinism or discrimination. But would you?

If everyday is a celebration of life, would a birthday be any different. If you are madly in love and try to enjoy every possible moment you can with your partner would valentine’s day be any special? If you had cake everyday would you still look forward to eating it?

So in essence we celebrate something that is rare and on days like these something we have ignored. Women themselves would be amused by existence of such a day if they didn’t feel persecuted and don’t have to bear the brunt (today and) rest of the year. At least today they are made to feel special. Is this a sorry of some kind for what they are put through all their lives?

If I treat every one; women, parents, friends, grandparents and even myself the best I can every single day these days don’t seem any important how much ever hype there might be. I know. I have experienced it for my birthday, mother’s day and a couple of other days including this one. Unfortunately father’s day not so much. But I am working on it.

Also there is that other argument that there is no Men’s day.

So I am not going to wish any one a happy womens day today.

WWW of TLAs

February 10, 2013 • General, People, society, Technology • by
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It all began with an innocent LOL.  Soon we were all going IMO on forums. OMG was just getting mainstream. All I could say was WTF!

Whenever I went to chat on yahoo forums, it was ASL first. When discussing personal details with friends I had to SOS from time to time. BAK was the appropriate follow up for AFK but I never used it.

I used to alternate between RPG or FPS on my PS2. When it was on my computer I ensured I had the best ATI card for amazing FPS from my VGA monitor. You can imagine my enthusiasm as I had just graduated from DOS and gaming over LAN was FTW! All I wanted to do pwn people in WoW.

At work I had to PFA the PPT and present my POV’s in a Q&A session with the CEO. All the RFI/RFP’s came with an NDA. It all had to be done by EOD and only in SOP. Even in a small startup everyone wanted to be a CXO. Soon I began WFH via VPN.

The Social Network AKA Facebook became a big thing in IRL. Everyone started sharing TMI and calling each other BFF’s. BTW TIL on twitter that TLA is Three Letter Acronym. FML!

Once TLA’s were something respectable. They were broadcast networks like BBC/CBS,  Firms like IBM/AMD, degress like MBA or PHD,  organizations like CIA/FBI, computer terms like CPU/RAM, currency like USD/INR or some legal terms like IOU or DUI. Now they are all over the place. Anything and everything is abbreviated.

PDA is no longer Personal Digital Assistant but Public Display of Affection. Teens and people in early 20′s now only type with stuff like gr8, L8r etc.

Last night I was asked to RSVP to a 4letter themed party and asked to BYOB ASAP. I heard the host himself was AWOL. ROFL!

TTYL. XOXO

txtspeak in real life

Notes from a meeting with @psam

October 4, 2012 • People, Work • by
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09/09
Meeting w/ Sameer 

  • Attach to a B2B client who can channel you business and give cut
  • Take money on a periodic basis instead of lumpsum.
  • Have contracts and proper signing
  • Paperwork and documentation for everything you do
  • B2C by cold calling and approaching or mailing 1/2:100 to 5:100 conversion
  • Tie up with app/site developers and SEO
  • Parallel kind of work….
  • Work as per customer data provided
  • Work for similar companies but not rivals like schools, coachign centres
  • Pricing: work backwards from what you want to earn and what they are going to pay
  • Approcah consultants and see how much would they demand for a smiliar kind of job
  • Reusuable material but not let client know
  • Take considerable time to understand company
  • 25% extra time and keep good cut on pricing. dependency issue tend to arise
  • Take care of cost and charge extra

reproduced verbatim (including the typos) from a note in my evernote dt 16 Sep 2009

-@vemana

ps: This was when I was just about getting into doing social media marketing

Of Network Signals and Common people

October 1, 2012 • Technology • by
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I have been a loyal airtel customer for more than 7 and half years now. All my family uses Airtel and most of my friends do too. We live in an age where Network signal is one of the important details in our daily lives. I dunno if any network in India can truly claim great coverage but I know for sure every network’s consumer complaints of poor signal. I have poor signal of Airtel in my flat on the third floor on a building just off one of the most popular roads in Hyderabad. The signal is perfect everywhere else! Such is life. And no! I dont want to change carriers I am not sure if I will be happy with any other. Yes I am very brand loyal that way. Even though Airtel is more expensive, not perfect and has its own quirks, I decide to stick by it for as long as I can.

I am so committed that I have decided to move to postpaid in view of my rising recharge amounts thanks to 3G and business calls. (Calling is not my preferred way of communication you see, neither is text) For so long prepaid sufficed but I am sure to give postpaid a shot to cut down on expenses and worry owing to expiry of 3G/sms plans.  So I call the customer service 121 to enquire about it. Believe my shock when I find out that the number, which I am quite proud of for being an original airtel number (98490) and havent changed for ever, isnt in my name! A small bit of panic sets in. How could this happen? I remember the day I got this number and very well remember the place too. I had gone on number hunt with my friend and decided to get this and submitted my own documents.

Today I was at the Airtel Relationship centre to convert to postpaid and I found out that my number was in the name of some Botta Satyanarayana. Sigh! No shock, no shouting. I just asked the person at the counter if I can still get it converted to postpaid and change to my name. She said it could be done, since I have the SIM and all. My phone was once stolen (back in 2006) and they had replaced the SIM back then with me submitting my ID proof. No flags were raised then. But the number is still registered in someone else’s name!

There is only one way this could happen. The store keeper never submitted my original documents. Either they were lost or rejected. Nobody ever bothered to follow up. They submitted whatever will be accepted and are at hand. What else do you expect? That’s how we roll. No accountability, no far sightedness. Nothing is really important. Abhi chalega na? Kuch hua to jab ka jab dekhlenge. I could have been an anti social element. He could sell my details to anybody. Both might happen in somebody else’s case as we speak. But we dont care.

Reset [updated]

February 13, 2012 • announcements • by
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updated:

It is a re-reset. I wont say anything else to hopefully not jinx it. Vemana.in is Vemana Central.  Updated links below

It was chaotic. A blog here, a blog there; trying to be everywhere. There is enough foot print on the social networks which cant be consolidated and have to exist under the network’s own banners. A few like tumblr would let me redirect. Twitter, facebook, (newly) pinterest, last.fm and so on prefer to hold on to my data and not let me export into web friendly fashion. I was also to blame for my own chaos, for each topic I wrote on had been spun off in its own brand. No one really read it and all it provoked was unnecessary confusion in my head.

It is time to now add some clarity in purpose, simplicity in design and efficiency in execution. I expect this to be a clean and well documented start to a new journey I begin. Hopelessly as ever it is multi pronged and the challenge now is to keep each track focused and in motion.

I tell stories in different forms at http://vemana.in/storytelling.

I write about new media and technology at MET (Media Entertainment and Technology)

This is the blog. [All That] for everything else

My tumblr [Just Blog] will be for posting the interesting media and content I find. It is now at http://vemana.me

 So this was the announcement of a new life for Vemana.in, hopefully one that is full of content.

p.s: As always WordPress is amazing. The network feature is a lifesaver.

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