Typing airtel.com on your browser takes you to spanish Vodafone site. Funny this!

Above: A background image in Backupbrain.com - a joint project of Tom Negrino and Dori Smith which serves as the offsite storage of Dori’s memory—somewhere to store all those links she knew she’d want again someday.

Below: The advertisement of IFMR, inviting applications for their 2007 - 2009 PGDBM courses. The following ad appeared on billboards in certain parts of the city in addition to ads in leading national newspapers and magazines.

So who did who? As Dori of Backupbrain.com points out, the two images are based on 19th century concepts of Phrenology - a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head.

Noticed this chap staring intently at this magazine while shopping at Landmark.

Russel Peters is a comedian of Indian-Canadian decent. Apparently, he’s been gaining recongnition through the use of internet streaming videos. I got an email this morning from a friend (thanks Rabi) with links to few streams and it was good fun watching. Check it out -

• The white boy
• Indian Slaves
• Italians and body language

Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad.

Disclaimer - The following post is about a theory that has been giving the author sleepless nights for the past few days. The research and statistics are purely hypothetical and are not attributed to anything on the web or elsewhere. Cynics and people who cant understand good humor are forewarned.

We all use so many products in our lifetime that it becomes too difficult to keep count. Not that it really matters, but it does gives you an idea of the kind of evolution that we tend to take for granted. Take for example - cars. I remember way back when I was little, the kind of cars that kissed the road were very different from those that we see today. They were rather boxy in shape and “beauty” was a word that only a rare breed had the privilege of being called. If you look at cars today, they are trendier, a whole lot more attractive and technologically more advanced. So, the whole “product evolution” thingie makes for an interesting study. The same can be applied to shoes, watches and almost everything that you can think of.

But have you ever wondered about one product thats so ubiquitous and almost spans a lifetime. Yes, the fan!

I’ve always wondered how fan manufacturers make their money. Its interesting because you almost never replace a fan. Majority of the people buy fans (the ceiling variety in particular) while constructing or renovating buildings. Some of these are also passed on to future generations. So that actually gives very little scope for these manufacturers to make any money. Lets do a little hypothesis to understand the situation better - say of the 1.02 billion people in India, about 30% of these stay in cities and the rest 70% in villages. Out of that 70%, say 50% of them have pucca houses and have access to electricity. Putting down the relevant numbers and doing the arithmetic , you’ll find thats its a very small percentage. And for a product that usually lasts a lifetime, it can be a cause of worry for the manufacturers. So, how do these manufacturers survive? Well, it really simple - apply “The Pop Fan Theory”, which is as follows..

The Pop Fan Theory [beta 0.1] states that the construction of buildings is proportional to the rise in population which inturn creates the need for more fans.

In other words…

Inference : If you want to sell more fans, increase the population!

Well, I’m not going to delve into how these faceless manufacturers are conspiring the “increasing population” bit, lest I get into any political turmoil. However, feel free to add to the TPFT and refine it.