I like the new Pepsi ad – especially when they advise the guy in plaster not to run after speeding vehicles for one Coke bottle and instead to switch to Pepsi which is available everywhere. :-)Damn smart on the part of the Pepsi guys to spoof the Coke ad to sell their own product! But I have always been a Coke fan – Pepsi is tad too sweet for my taste. So I am hoping that the Coke team will come up with an even smarter rejoinder.

And I like the ad by Jeevansathi as well. It’s free of the usual clutter of smiling cheerful bride and groom and happier faces of the parents and relatives. It’s a smart take on the age-old complaint of the male fraternity that we women cannot keep a secret. As a woman, I say “Bah! What rubbish” to this cliché but that doesn’t stop me from admiring this ad. I agree that “searching for a bride/groom without letting the whole world and your friendly neighborhood aunt know about it” is not the USP of Jeevansathi. Scores of other matrimonial sites are doing the same, in fact, that’s the cornerstone of such sites. However, this fresh idea and more importantly, what they call its “execution” in the ad is, I feel well-done.

I have seen the ad by Godrej - in which a school principal decides to get rid of the formality in his attire one fine day and walks across the campus to the admiring glances of his students – scores of times. In fact, whenever this ad is aired, I make it a point to bring the TV out of its Mute mode. I just want to know what this ad is all about. I must admit though that despite watching it many times I am yet to figure out what Godrej is trying to convey through it. :-(

Another ad that comes across as a whiff of fresh air (Pun intended!) is that of Air Wick. It uses cute animations of animals like squirrel/chipmunk and octopus (who is pink colored, God knows why!) to drive home their point (and product!).

Girl who loved Tom Gordon

I was running short of time when I reached the library last time. I couldn’t see any of the books which I had marked last time I was there. I spent 10 minutes browsing various titles. I picked up and kept down “The Alchemist” – “Maybe next time” I said to myself. I also checked out a couple of books by Stephen King but all of them looked bulky and I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest so much of my time in reading a horror book. One of them even had a creepy alien’s face on the front page – stuff the nightmares are made up of! Finally I selected a relatively slimmer offering of his – “Girl who loved Tom Gordon”. The plot looked promising enough – a nine-year old getting lost in the woods. And the back cover had these lines at the end of the synopsis – There’s something else in the woods – watching, waiting!

The first few pages were good enough and then little Trisha got lost in the woods. Her nightmare began and mine too with her. Somehow I felt that King put in too much of detail of her surroundings in the story. The mosquitoes and insects were mentioned frequently and in agonizing detail. I agree it added to the horror of the kid’s situation but I think that only screenplay of a horror movie merits such details. When made part of a paper book, they excruciatingly slowed the pace of the story - in my humble opinion.

I don’t understand a thing about baseball and so the details of how Tom Gordon was playing made me skip many pages. And that’s what made me wonder if I should go on with this book. I hate abandoning any book right in the middle of reading. But this time I didn’t seem to have much of a choice. I just quickly skipped to the end of the book to check if little Trisha survived this ordeal. I am taking the book back to the library. I don’t want to know anything more about the girl who loved Tom Gordon.

I finally managed to watch the latest adventures of Indie :-) I kind of dreaded watching Harrison Ford in this movie that would undoubtedly have a lot of stunts. After all, isn’t he 60+? But I needn’t have feared. I must confess though that after the arrival of the teenager I lost track of what is happening in the story and just watched the action sequences. The last scenes did remind me of “The Mummy Returns” :-)

I am wondering if I should go watch “The Happening”. The reviews on imdb.com aren’t exactly inspiring any confidence. I have a mixed opinion about Shyamlan’s movies. His “Sixth Sense” and “Signs” are my all-time favorites. I didn’t understand what he was trying to convey through “Unbreakable”. I liked “The Village” until the time the leading lady’s father discloses the secret behind the creatures that visit the village at night. I don’t know why Shyamlan chose to let the cat out of the bag so soon in the story. Somehow I felt that if he had disclosed it after the girl comes back from the city with the medicines it would have had more impact. I chose not to see “Lady in the water”. Should I or should I not watch “The Happening”?

I think I don’t understand much of advertising. That’s because I always find myself with an opinion that runs counter to what Economic Times’ Brand Equity team has when it comes to rating the TV ads.

Take for example, that sweet-as-honey Airtel ad in which a bored-looking Vidya Balan takes call from Madhawan for the umpteenth time. The ET panel found the ad good while I roll my eyes heavenward each time this Karan Johar inspired ad airs. The Virgin Mobile ad - in which a teenage girl wrings permission to go on a vacation to Goa with her friends from her reluctant parents by pretending that she is lesbian – didn’t curry favor with the ET panel but I found the ad witty and refreshing down to the last sound byte.

Of course I am not a zero-emotion robot or else I wouldn’t have liked the new Maruti ad. Right from the couple with their newborn meeting the grandparents and the kids running out of a car through the rains in the arms of their mom waiting outside the home to the teenager asking for a lift with the board “need to be home for diwali”, every frame in this collage rings true to the song that plays in the background “Ghar aa gaya Hindustan” (Indian comes home in a Maruti). But again I am a hopeless sucker for all the ads that use words like “Hindustan”, “Bharat” and “India”. What to do? Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani ;-)

Oh, and did anyone see that ad of Parle Milk Shakti? The frail looking granny who bends the pan in one stroke is cute as a button but MS Dhoni surprisingly does a fine imitation of someone who has just witnessed something totally impossible.

The great Indian circus called IPL has ended. Not that I am pleased with the outcome because as a true blue Mumbaikar, Mumbai Indians was my favorite team. I am especially mad at Sachin for spoiling it all. I am not superstitious but I think Sachin’s comeback ended the winning streak for Mumbai Indians. My blood boiled with rage when I saw him sitting with the spectators for the final. And this worried me because outside IPL he still belongs to the Indian team. That’s why I am happy that we won’t hear of IPL till the next season rolls in.

And I read some English novels – notably, 2 Prison Diaries by my favorite author - Jeffrey Archer. It is true what they say about the public memory being short. I really can’t remember what he was sent to the prison for. The diaries opened up a new world for me. It was a sort of “Domain knowledge” session :-) - one I hope I don’t ever have to utilize for anything. It was amusing to find the ubiquitous “Chicken Tikka Masala” under a Prison menu at Belmarsh. Has it truly become the national dish of Great Britain? :-) I am yet to read his third and last diary.

Seems like India has become the flavor of the season because even in the novel “Beach Babylon” - which I picked up with considerable reluctance (the picture of a blonde babe sunning herself out in the sun didn’t help matters much!) - had a Dr. Singh working as the in-house physician at this island resort. Even the book I am reading now – “The Ghost” by Robert Harris – has an aged publisher married to a younger Bollywood actress. Not to mention that the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh finds itself mentioned when the ghost writer is trying to sort out his email problems.

BTW, the author claims that “Beach Babylon” is based on the experiences of a Manager who has been working in the hospitality sector for years. It was an eye-opener (and an eye-popper too!) because I never knew the filthy rich could so ruthlessly throw money about to get what they wanted – going to the extent of even removing shrubs planted between 2 villas so they could keep an eye on their children (being cared for by their nanny!) staying in the next villa.

This novel also brought forth the other side of the hospitality industry – from the perspective of those working at these resorts. The situation becomes even more miserable for them if such resorts are situated far away from the civilization. I thought back on my Ooty vacation. Ok, I agree that that resort - though a 5-star one - wasn’t a patch on this novel’s home-away-from-home of the celebrities. The similarity however is that it too wasn’t situated stone’s throw away from any metro either. The town of Coimbatore was a good 3 hours away through the twisted roads in the laps of the Nilgiris. Can’t imagine the scene during monsoon! Guess I will try to remember this next time I am there and open my mouth to complain about some minor inconvenience.

If this blog could talk, it would have welcomed me with “Hello Stranger!” – I have been away for that long. :-(

I think I should seriously check out how blogging is done through a mobile. Because as I continue working throughout the day there are hundreds of things that I want to write about but then sheer laziness prevents me from logging in to post them here after coming home. Also, I must say that spending the better part of the day in front of office desktop doesn’t exactly fill me with much enthusiasm at the sight of my personal laptop. :-(

First things first, I have been reading a lot – as usual. This time I read a lot of Marathi (my mother tongue) books. 2-3 of them were novels set against a historical backdrop. I love that genre. At the back of your mind you know that this might not be necessarily how the events turned out or how the people behaved in those times. But still it fills you up with anger, frustration and many times a kind of helplessness. You can’t help wonder how history would have turned out to be if choices made by the people involved were different. And the life of the Hindu women 4-5 centuries ago shocked me to the core – so totally dependent on their menfolk that after the death of their husbands their choice was either a death on his funeral pyre or a lifetime of neglected, miserable existence in dark dank rooms. It’s worse than being caught between the devil and the deep sea. Not that the lot of the women has improved drastically these days but it still is a notch better – at least in the cities.

Then there was a book by a female author who has traveled the length and breadth of India – from the hot deserts of Rajasthan to the cold foothills of the Himalayas. I read on in fascination - unable to mask my envy as she talked about some remote village in the Himalayas where the Indian Laws scarcely apply, about a long-forgotten cave where their group stayed for the night, about the glittering Golden Temple at Amritsar, about the magnificent Valley Of Flowers, about forests lovely, dark and deep……