When 12 teams from 7 nations come together in a first of its kind competition,
the winner’s trophy becomes the subject of much curiosity and interest. Little
wonder that the ceremony where the Airtel Champions League Twenty20 cup was
revealed began with the audience, made up largely of media professionals,
holding their breath in anticipation. Read more…

The online thesaurus has the following synonyms for the verb pulverize : annihilate, crush, decimate, defeat, demolish, destruct, dynamite, flatten, rub out*, ruin, shatter, smash, tear down*, vanquish, vaporize, wax, wreck

Henceforth, a new term will get added to the list: Gilly.

It means to do all of the above. Two times over.

After the Delhi Daredevils - Deccan Chargers IPL semifinal last night, Adam Gilchrist will find himself in the pages of dictionaries and thesauruses everywhere. And comic books will have a new term to add to their “smash@@$”, “&%#crunch”, and “*&#@pow”’s.

And the Daredevils will be the last ones to argue about it.

Festive occasions. A moment of celebration. Or just a great group idea. Gather your friends around and sport similar gear.

How much does the game actually capture the imagination of our public? Apart from pockets in the country, like Kolkatta and Kerala, does it really fire up people in other parts of the nation? You can see kids kicking a football around with great enthusiasm but does it really equal the maniacal craze that the game of cricket generates? No.. but still, there is enough of interest… the multiplexes are going to be showing the final.. but then thats again for commercial reasons….. dont know about the pubs and the sports bars and other clubs… its going to be some time till cricket faces competition from other sports like football, hockey etc. for the sheer fan following in the country……..

Seriously, do they think we are idiots? The ones who come up with all those goofy ads - the ones that make you want to tear your hair out or inflict great amounts of damage around you ' you know the ones I'm talking about. You would have to think really long and hard to come up with a reasonable explanation for all those ridiculous promotions polluting the environment. Then of course it becomes crystal clear to you in an inspired "Understanding All Marketing Fundamentals Everywhere" moment and you attribute it all to brand communication, positioning, placement, identification, demographics, behavior and socio-economic targeting, unique selling propositions among a host of other such academic explanations (because that is what the learned ones would do). OK. So if that's the truth, then that's the truth. And who am I, an unlearned, marketing-fundamentals-challenged ignoramus, to challenge such a truth?  Having accepted that as the basis for giving free license to advertising professionals everywhere to promote brands whichever way they see professionally fit, lets for the moment go back to our opening statement: Seriously, do they think we are idiots?  

The answer is 'Yes'. Well, to be fair, it's more like they couldn't care less. For, you don't matter. Seriously, if you question any aspect of any concept presented in any manner, you automatically are no longer part of the "target group" and if you are not part of that group then your opinion will have as much impact as a fart in a thunderstorm. And opting out of such a group by questioning the sanity of such branding again will have as much impact as the same fart in a thunderstorm. If you don't believe me, look around you and see how many people walk this planet. We are talking HUGE numbers here. You, I and a thousand others vigorously shaking our heads in disbelief and rolling about on the floor laughing will have as much impact as .you get the picture.

So, as you can see, it doesn't matter what you and I think. For every you and I, there is a million and two out there who think otherwise. And THAT'S who they are after. As long as they have their goofy undivided attention they don't give a rat's ass what you and I think.  And you and I can roll on the floor laughing till the cows come home, those goofy ads will continue to pollute the environment around you.

From every channel on every TV set, from every station on every radio, from every billboard on every street, from inside of every page in every magazine and from every shadowy corner you can think off, they will leap out at you and violate your sensibilities in the foulest way imaginable. And if you don't believe me or have not been subject to this phenomenon then you must live on Mars. To have had the good fortune of not having had goofy ads shower you every third second of your existence, you must be truly blessed - or live on Mars, as the case may be.

But then again this is how the cosmos functions ' at least in our corner of the universe. And as long as this is how equations get solved in the larger scheme of things, I, the unlearned, marketing-fundamentals-challenged ignoramus, shall stay away from the scholarly analysis of the existence of goofy ads every where and get on with less complicated pursuits in life.

So, if there be others out there like me…., join in .and one and a two .and a three .

Whitu whitu face dekhe

Dilwa beating fast sasura chance maaare re

Oh Very Happy in my heart Dil Dance maaare re

Dance maaare, dance maaare dil yeh dance maaaare re .

Seriously.

Abu Ben Adam (may his tribe increase), awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, looked outside his tent, and saw that all his camels had disappeared.

He looked to the right. He looked to the left. He looked out in front. He looked out in back. No. They were gone. Quite gone. To assure himself that this was not a dream, he jumped back into bed, snored a few times, jumped out of bed and looked out his tent once again. The camels were most definitely completely gone.

Strange things happen in the desert. Abu Ben Adam knew that. He had been around long enough to know that. But this was not one of them. The odd camel may suddenly get bored with life and wander off into the desert night; a couple more may follow him out of sheer curiosity. But a whole herd of them! That was beyond strange. There could be only one explanation. The entire herd had been abducted by aliens. A spaceship had probably zoomed in, hovered over the camp-site, and while Abu Ben and his kin snored into the desert night, the aliens beamed down on the resting camels and transported/transmutated/levitated/whatever them into their waiting spaceship and whooshed off into the outer reaches of space.

Halfway across the world, away from all the sand and the heat, in another time and age, a University student of Quantum Physics turned in a term paper for evaluation. After submission his paper disappeared. The puzzled student wandered over to his professor's office to discuss the disappearance of his paper and found that the professor had disappeared too. He went across to the Department Head’s office to complain about this strange occurrence and found him gone too. He walked out of his office, turned back and found the office gone as well. He whirled around and the department was gone. Before he knew it the whole building had become invisible. He ran out screaming into the University campus which suddenly was not there. The entire University had suddenly, very simply, vanished.

He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths to calm his jangled nerves, when suddenly a vision of a horde of camels leapt out of nowhere and materialized in front of his eyes. He pinched himself a few times to make sure he wasn't dreaming but the University campus stayed out of sight and three hundred invisible camels kept thundering around him. This was too much for him to handle and in a fit of pure panic he ran out into the invisible streets babbling about out of control camels and disappearing university professors.

Somewhere a long ways away from all the camels and vanishing universities, a fat round bald museum curator stood in the main hall and smiled to himself. If there was anything you noticed about him it had to be his smile. It is unlikely you would come across anyone who smiled so wide and smiled so long. Measured end to end his smile would have bridged a normal sized river bank to bank. It took a full four minutes for the smile to begin at one corner of his mouth and crawl its way across the geography of his face traversing several pounds of flesh amply laid on by his creator. And once it had attained full beaming status he kept it on for a good amount of time before letting it start its slow crawl back to its normal resting state. He went through large parts of his life with a near permanent grin plastered on his face. He did so because it was simply too much effort putting it on and then taking it off again. He was simply too fat. And too round. And too bald. But at this particular moment, even though his round face was shining like a full moon on a cloudless night, he had nothing to smile about.

The fat man stood in a state of complete shock. Every nerve in his body and each cell in his brain reverberated to the sound of alarm bells that had started jangling in his head the moment he realized that all the paintings in his museum had, yes you guessed it, disappeared. His brain had flashed the message to his facial muscles to get that grin off but it would be a good three minutes before the smile completed its reverse journey across his face. He couldn't understand it. Security at his museum was very tight. There was no way anyone could have walked out with all the paintings without someone noticing. Harder still would have been walking in with the truckloads of flowers that suddenly somehow had replaced each painting that had previously hung on those walls. For, in exactly the very spot where each painting had stood, was a bunch of flowers. The fat round man, face minus smile now and very perplexed, stared at the wall and scratched his bald head. And suddenly without warning, there flashed through his mind an image of a horde of galloping camels thundering across a vast expanse of desert chasing a fat round bald man in long flowing robes.

Three different people. Three separate parts of the world. Three separate time periods. All face the 'sudden disappearance' phenomenon. What are the odds? What is the probability that this can happen? What are the chances that all three can have a common experience? Maybe very high. But what about the experience itself? There one minute. Gone the next. Wham. Just like that. Three hundred camels resting in the desert sand. Wham. Gone. An entire University complete with buildings, students, faculty and one submitted paper. Wham. Gone. A museum full of paintings. Wham. Gone. Wham. Wham. Wham. Now that doesn't happen every day. Not even once a year. Not even once a century. When was the last time you heard of such a thing happening? Or read about such a thing happening? If you didn't then it's not surprising. Because it doesn't happen. Camels simply do not vanish into the night.

But strange as it may sound, it did happen. And here is where the strange starts moving into the weird. For the three separate people we talked about in the story above are all the same person. And now we move from the weird into the bizarre. The same person above is me.

Yes. Abu Ben Adam, the University student and the fat round bald man are all me. Those camels that faded into the night were mine. The paper that disappeared was mine. The University that vanished was mine. The paintings that were replaced with flowers were mine. All mine. All there one minute. Gone the next. Ever since then I have been searching high and low for them, for an answer, an explanation, if nothing else. But none has been forthcoming.

Someday, somewhere I will find the answer. And when I do I will stride forth into whatever place it is where that evil force is holed up and reclaim my paintings and my writing and my camels. And then I shall take hold of this evil person/thing/whatever, tie him to one of the camels, and set the whole bunch free to roam the deserts of the world for all eternity. And how is all this going to happen? Well that's for me to know and that camel grabber to see.

Gross, Ketchhup et al[1] laid the groundwork for the  formalization of the definition of perspective ambiguity. In the early part of their work they dwell at length on the assumptions that lead to their version of the definition. In the later part of their work they dwell at length on how those assumptions do not entirely hold thereby leading to the removal of large parts of the definition. With the result that this work offers a dangling definition affording a tilted view of ambiguity resulting in a perspective that is hard to stomach.

Bugg, Lows, Leech and Meng[2] build on this set of assumptions removing large amounts of ambiguity thereby affording a cleaner view of the underlying assumptions that lead to the definition. The only problem with this is that in the process of disambiguation they proceed to remove large amounts of the ambiguity also and end up with a perfectly sanitized definition for deviant behavior in cats which no longer applies to perspective ambiguity whichever way you look at it.

Rastogi, Ganguly, Siddappa and Muthukrishnan [3] proposed an approach for formalizing a definition starting with the basic assumptions that lie behind Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Although this affords an extremely interesting perspective on the cross influences of unrelated theories on each other, it does little to further the cause of research in this particular area.

As is evident from the observations recorded above, there is very little relevant reference work available for research work in the area of proposing formal approaches to arriving at a definition for a Non-linear Disambiguation of Dimensionally Diversified Perspectives. So here is what I decided to do. Dump all plans for arriving at a formal definition and wing it.

To start with, here is some perspective to think about. Take a good hard look at yourself in a mirror after you are plastered ' say a good 7 to 8 drinks down should do nicely for a start. Then as you stare hard at yourself in the mirror, you pose your question to the face in the mirror. Don't wait for an answer. There will be none forthcoming. Come back after a couple of drinks and listen to the answer to the question you had posed earlier. After having listened to the answer, if you can relate it with the question that you had posed earlier and in the process make sense of the question and the answer as they relate to each other ' then that, my friend, is perspective. Put another way, it is being able to relate entities that are spread across dimensions of time, space and sense of identity.

The ability to comprehend with absolute clarity complex relationships between entities with shifting identities, in itself an art, and further being able to do it, while dealing with the ambiguities spanning dimensions, is known as non-linear disambiguation of dimensionally diverse perspectives.

Maybe it's called something else but I like to call it that.

The ability to define relationships spanning radically differing contexts constitutes what your everyday right-brained dude terms 'Creativity'. It is not, as the same dude thinks, the ability to come up with a few smartass lines for a TV/radio commercial or splotch up an abstract and label it 'My Conscience Inverted'. That, my friend, is just that - a splotch on the conscience of any right-minded individual, with or without a conscience, inverted or otherwise ' and there is nothing ambiguous about that.

Dumbing it down a bit, creativity, as I see it, is the ability to take two totally unconnected entities and draw a connection between them. My friend the Graphic Designer disagrees, and fails to see any connection between me and my definition. Now getting him to see the connection would amount to being really creative. But this is not about him so we will leave him and his pony-tail to figure out the connection of one with the other and stay on the topic on hand.

A little mental exercise for you ' consider two items ' a green pea and the latest bollywood film that would have opened at the box office. If you were to say that the film was made by a bunch of people with the IQ of a green pea, then you would be on your way to creative satisfaction. Staying on the same topic and drawing further connections would get your creative juices flowing fairly freely. You get the idea. You could exercise your mind and soon you would be a fountain of creativity with the juices flowing on a production scale. Hell, you could set up a bottling plant and market your creative juices. The brand name could come from some outsourced agency, who would think up the name in an inspired moment of juice making. All of which will not be possible if you were not to give them a brief and the freedom to go innovate in the first place. That then becomes cooperative creativity. Of course the franchises will step in and find value-add options that go with the bottled stuff ' now you are looking beyond the cooperative and moving onto collaborative turf. Find an overseas market and you are progressing nicely into the global. And to think it can all begin with a humble green pea and a stupid bollywood film. Which lets us conclude that almost anything and everything can be a source of great inspiration.

So there you have it. My submission on Creativity and Non-linear Disambiguation of Dimensionally Diverse Perspectives. And if it doesn't agree with the pony-tails out there, well, as the man said, to each his own. And I am sure there is nothing ambiguous about that.

References:

[1]Gross, Manuel; Ketchhup, Bruno; Abrams, Kasturi Peter (1969). 'Birds of A Feather: Social Analysis in the Developing World’. Vol. 4.

[2]Bugg, Manolo; Lows, Utpatan; Leech, Keeda and Meng, Ming (1978) ‘What, Where, Who, Why? Pertinence in a Mixed-Up World’.

[3]Raman, Jignes; Ganguly, Jignes; Siddappa, Jignes; Muthukrishnan, Jignes (1996) ‘Hum Sab Ek Hai: Cross-referential Identity Differentiation’

Note: The above is a work of fiction. All references to people, states of mind and theories contained therein are a by-product of the author’s regular thought process and any resemblence to any persons living, dead or in any ambiguous state, is not intended and purely coincidental. The references to pony-tails, however, are not.

Whats the deal with the strategy of picking up a few early wickets? Though not a deranged fan of the game of cricket, I do enjoy the game in moderation, watching matches on TV and not really losing sleep over the outcome. But be as it may, I cant for the life of me understand one line that keeps popping up with great regularity no matter which match on which channel playing which teams I watch. Its the response to the inevitable question posed by the commentators to (usually) the captains of the teams, which is ‘what would your strategy be for this game’ - the inevitable response, among others lines, features “we’ll be looking to picking up a few early wickets”. Now. I ask you. Is that strategy? I mean, who, no matter which part of which country they play cricket in, would NOT be looking to pick up a few early wickets? A few early wickets? I would think it would be more like many early wickets, if not all early wickets. Thats not strategy. Thats a wish. Thats an ideal. Thats heaven. I am captain of a team, what I would want to do is I would want to go in there and hope to pick up ALL wickets early - preferably as early as midway through the second over. So I could go in knock off the required runs and settle down to a leisurely evening watching some of my favourite movies with a glass of my favourite beer.

So as you can see I am many confused with this line I keep hearing over and over again. So if there are any kindly souls out there with a take on this, and I am sure there must be many, please feel free to enlighten this dumb soul as to this particular strategy that seems to have completely escaped my comprehensive capabilities.

Many thanks in advance from one who has just witnessed the Mumbai Indians completely decimate the Rajastan Royals for just over a hundred. Now THAT - that which helped achieve this, whatever you may call it, is what i would call strategy. And the early wickets, just happened to be a result of that.