"What Mumbai spirit?"

That is the headline of a blog post on the New Yorker magazine website. Written by Naresh Fernandes after the Mumbai blasts on July 13, the piece gets right down to brass tacks in the opening paragraph itself:

Three hours after a bomb turned a bus stop in Dadar, in central Mumbai, into one of those ingenuously twisted metallic installations that the city’s minor sculptors so love, a murmuring crowd converged on a multiplex less than fifty metres away. What seemed to be the problem? “They’ve cancelled the 10 P.M. show of ‘Delhi Belly,’ ” a man in shorts with an angry demeanor explained. Surely no one had the stomach to watch the scatological sleeper hit on an evening on which three blasts in southern Mumbai had left eighteen people dead and about a hundred and thirty wounded? “These kinds of things happen all the time,” the man replied. “Why should we put our lives on hold just because there have been a few bomb blasts?”

As can be expected, this article did not go down well with some readers, who have been scathing in their comments.

Disclosure: I grew up in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) and lived there for 30 years. As such I am all for lauding the Mumbaikar's spirit. But human nature is such that we tend to (and need to) move on after a tragedy. In that context, Naresh Fernandes may not be far off the mark when he writes what he does in the concluding paragraph of his post.

Read the piece in its entirety (and the comments) here.

• Thank you, Arpan Bhattacharyya (Class of 2010), for sending me the New Yorker link.

Bajrangi and the case for "brand security"

Have you watched the new television ad for Center Fresh gum? The ad shows a bank being robbed. When the thief takes off, the staff starts screaming for security. To their surprise, the thief runs back in. He is the security guard, Bajrangi (see below).

I thought the ad by O&M was funny, clever, and so typical of Center Fresh. I was surprised, therefore, to read the comments by advertising expert Prathap Suthan in Mint. Suthan, who features regularly in the newspaper's Spot Light column, says if he had seen this film years ago, he would have "fallen down, broken my crown and come tumbling after".

He continues:

The production’s all right. The cast’s all right. And the acting, direction, grading, lighting and music is at par. It made me smile. But that was it. It didn’t make me ooze laughter. And it didn’t make me watch it online till I got sick.

And then he makes an important point, a point that should be noted by all those aspiring to an ad career:

I personally have an issue with crime as a brand core. Especially when crime is north-bound. Kidnappings. Heists. Scams. At a deeper level, it corrodes the brand from inside. Innocent fun is one thing. Making crass cool is arsenic. Of course, I’m not the defined target audience. But I happen to be more than a moron who watches television.

Suthan also elaborates on whether this particular strategy works for the brand and he explains how a brand can stand out in such a crowded segment. Read his views here.

• Also read: A great series called Spot Light for advertising and marketing professionals.

Why "Delhi Belly"?

Trust Mint Lounge, possibly the most cerebral of India's weekly publications, to figure out that a feature on a "stomach disorder" named after the country's capital would be the perfect story to be published in the week that the Aamir Khan-produced film hit cinemas.

Headlined "We are landing in Delhi, loosen your belts", the article traces the history of Delhi Belly (the stomach ailment, not the film) and provides some interesting asides:

It’s not Al Qaeda, but Americans take Delhi Belly seriously. According to a US diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to share this information, his embassy in New Delhi maintains a laboratory devoted to testing for germs and diseases such as Delhi Belly. Embassy staff often arrive at the office carrying small brown bags that have jars with “poop” samples to be tested at the lab.

It must have taken some doing for the writer, Mayank Austen Soofi, to extricate this piece of information from a diplomat. We also learn that there are limericks on Delhi Belly. Here's one:

A New Delhi tourist called Justin

Sensed a stir in his lower intestine

He made a dash for the dunny

But he felt something runny

Now his shorts are consigned to the dustbin.

We are told that that there is no record of the phrase's first appearance but R.V. Smith, author of several books on the city, claims the term first appeared in the summer of 1857:

The Indian mutineers had taken over the capital and the British were encamped on the Ridge where many of them were incapacitated due to upset tummies. It was they who coined the term Delhi Belly.

We are also given the other side by Delhi-based Delhi-based Prof. Pushpesh Pant, author of India: The Cookbook:

Delhi Belly is dead. Now our hygiene standards are high, bottled water is available everywhere, dhabas cater to foreigners and many eateries serve gol gappas with mineral water. The Delhi Belly scaremongers are the types who dine at five-star hotels and who like to run down India, which is now a powerhouse economy.

Whether you are outraged at the thought of an attack of the runs being labelled Delhi Belly and want to know why this is so or you just happen to love soaking up new information, this article is an excellent example of a good idea executed well. Read it in its entirety here.

How wait-and-watch policy paid off for Bangalore Mirror journalist

S. Kushala, the intrepid Bangalore Mirror journalist, writes in Monday's edition:

When we were tipped off about a retired judge making his own way to take an illegal turn on M G Road towards Rest House Crescent Road, we brushed it off as a prank. But since our khabri is a reliable one, we thought of checking it out for ourselves. We were told that a unique “ribbon cutting” ceremony takes place almost every morning on MG Road.

Two photographers and this correspondent stationed themselves strategically at the entrance of Rest House Crescent Road on MG Road last week, between 8-9.30 am. We could not believe our eyes when on Saturday, the incident actually happened.

And what happened became an exclusive Page One story (see below) for the newspaper that prides itself on breaking news:

THE STORY THAT GRABBED BANGALOREANS' ATTENTION ON MONDAY.

AREN'T THOSE HEADLINES BRILLIANT?

Read the full story here (Monday, July 4, Pages 1 and 2).

Incidentally, even as I am writing this, S. Kushala is at Commits addressing the new students, talking to them about the joys of journalism, and discussing this very story with them.

A Commits alumna's long-drawn affair with illustrations

STEPPING STONES TO SUCCESS: Rachna Prabhu is a sought-after illustrator now.

A good illustration is sometimes more effective than a photograph. That is why when Rachna Prabhu (Class of 2008) was a student at Commits, the college newspaper featured her work regularly.

Rachna also provided caricatures (see below) of the speakers — to accompany our students' audiovisual speaker introductions — at the Hard Sell seminar organised by Commits in Bangalore in January 2007. It became a tradition afterwards to have students include sketches of the speakers at every Commits seminar.

Rachna, who says she has been "doodling in schoolbooks, paper napkins, other people's important files, on walls, and on unsuspecting people's faces pretty much since I was a five-year-old", is now a full-time children's book illustrator. Recently, after she illustrated a book on entrepreneurship, Entrepedia, written by Prof. Nandini Vaidyanathan, I conducted an email interview with her to learn more about her work:

• How did you get the Entrepedia assignment?

Medini [Prof. Vaidyanathan's daughter and Rachna's Commits classmate] got in touch with me and asked me if I'd like to illustrate Nandini Ma'am's book on entrepreneurship. I was ecstatic because this was the first book I'd be illustrating that wasn't a children's book. I had to follow the normal procedure of sending across a sample illustration that was then first approved by Nandini Ma'am and then the publisher, Embassy Books. Once I had discussed the project details and commercial aspects with the publisher, I got to work on my first gray-scale, non-kiddy book which turned out to be my favourite project thus far. Here's why...

With children's book publishers, they send you a tabulated list of illustrations needed for the story, including the character's expression, clothes, background description, and sometimes even their body structure! This limits your freedom as an illustrator.

With Entrepedia, Nandini Ma'am and the publisher gave me the complete freedom to illustrate the book any way I wanted to. I was just provided with all the chapters and from thereon it was just about me sending across the final illustrations as and when they were ready. The conceptualisation process for Entrepedia was my favourite part of the project.

• What inspired your illustrations?

Nandini Ma'am and Medini told me that they wanted illustrations that looked cartoony yet grown-up. The first illustration for the book took me longer than I thought because I was venturing into new territory with these illustrations but after the first one, the others came easy. I wanted to stick to my drawing style, even if it was for a business book, and so I added the round eyes and big noses.

The ideas behind each illustration was different from the other. For instance, in the chapter about 'Where to look for ideas', I drew three men of various age groups looking in all directions through binoculars and a magnifying glass with the light bulbs floating right near them, just waiting to be spotted. In other words, there are ideas everywhere, you just need to find them.

Similarly, in another chapter that was about Business Incubators, I illustrated with an entrepreneur emerging out of an egg (egg=incubator). All in all, it was good fun deciding what to draw for each chapter, especially when there were no limitations.

• Which software did you use?

I am very comfortable with Photoshop and I used it to do all my illustrations. I plan to learn Adobe Illustrator soon.

• How long did you take to complete the job?

I could complete just one illustration a day as I'd allocated only three hours a day for each illustration. I completed the project within a month.

• You can take a look at Rachna's Entrepedia illustrations and her other sketches on her blog, Doodle Doo.

UPDATE (December 9, 2011): Rachna has just begun drawing cartoon strips as a contributor to the Coolest Job campaign page. "The comic strip looks at the light side of life in the corporate world. Here's the first (see below) of many more to come... :)," she wrote on Facebook today.

Rachna is now, as she describes herself, the owner, designer, and "do-it-aller" of Doodle Doo, an online store for illustrated goodies. Check out the store here.

• Also read: Hadi Farahani: Quick on the draw

Uncalled-for criticism of the PR community — and my rejoinder

The recent comments of a Mid Day columnist have riled public relations professionals, and justifiably so.

Writing in the Mumbai edition of the newspaper earlier this week, Sheetal Sukhija first refers to the "innovative ways" PR execs use "to feed their version of 'finger-licking-news' to reporters". She then goes on to lambast the PR community for "hoodwinking reporters".

Agreed, it is rare for journalists and PR professionals to be the best of friends, but these verbal volleys in a leading publication appear to be cheap shots aimed at addressing personal issues. That is why I have posted my response on the Mid Day website, calling this article an unwanted, unwarranted, and unprofessional attack on the PR community.

Here is my rejoinder in full:

This is an unwanted, unwarranted, and unprofessional attack on the PR community. Sure, I have met a few unprofessional PR execs in my time as a journalist (almost 25 years with newspapers and media groups in Mumbai, Dubai, and Bangalore). I was never rude to them but I let them know in subtle ways that I wouldn't give them the time of day.

I have also met some PR professionals who are nice people, but, sadly, they didn't seem to understand that journalists and newspapers are not to be used to promote their clients' agenda.

Why would I be interested in giving publicity to something that has no news value? When I was working as a journalist — I am now the professor of journalism at a media college in Bangalore — what I wanted from a PR professional was news. And I am glad to say I have been fortunate to interact with quite a few no-nonsense PR execs who were brilliant at their work. Give me the news point, I would say to them, and leave it to me to do the story. They understood. I reciprocated.

I believe it is important for PR people to remember that journalists are in the best position to decide what is relevant to the story. I also believe that every industry has its share of rogues and incompetents, so we have bad journalists, sloppy journalists, freeloading journalists — but they are a minority.

Journalists and publicists need each other. So they need to work together. That is why this eternal tussle and, sometimes, nasty feuding between the two communities is sad. And unnecessary. And unproductive.

Coming to your column, if you had a professional issue with a particular PR exec, it would have been better to take it up with the person concerned. There was no need to (mis)use your newspaper column to vent your grievance and tarnish the reputation of the entire PR community.

• Also read: What PR professionals should not do to journalists. And just as important, what journalists should not do to PR professionals. (My rejoinder to the Mid Day article has been adapted from my comments in this Reading Room post.)

• Incidentally, I began my career as a journalist with Mid Day in Mumbai in 1981, becoming the News Editor two years later. The super-boss then was Khalid Ansari, the founder of the newspaper. (Ansari later became the managing editor of Dubai's Khaleej Times, and he offered me the position of features editor at the paper. I joined Khaleej Times in October 1988.) As News Editor of Mid Day, I would have spiked Sheetal Sukhija's diatribe against PR professionals. We had different (higher?) standards then.

• "I've been where you are": Read Nimish Dubey's post, which is in the form of an open letter to PR professionals.

• UPDATE (October 26, 2011):  Senior journalist Vanita Kohli-Khandekar, writing in Business Standard, says that, in the middle of two stereotypes, thousands of journalists and PR people quietly do their jobs in getting information and analyses out to readers. Read the sober and sensible opinion piece here: "About PR and journalism".

The problem with quotation marks...

...is that many people still don't know how to use them in a running quote (one that runs into two or more paragraphs).

Take this example from the July 1 issue of Forbes India:

Says Badri, “In the first year, in order to choose my humanity subject, I had to take an English test. All those who got good marks were allowed to choose German or other easy subjects and all those who ‘failed’ that test were forced to take English. Needless to say, I failed. I was saddled with English for two semesters. But the sad thing was I couldn’t do well in those classes either.

Here was an English teacher who knew pretty well that she had to deal with the ‘dregs’ of the society, and she hated it and made it clear in the class what she thought of us. 

I can remember only two friends for much of the first semester in Mechanical Engineering out of a class of 65 or so, because those two were the only ones who would speak to me in Tamil. Then it widened to about five friends. Normally, most freshers get a room only on the ground floor (considered to be low class!). By the end of first year, all those in the ground floor move to first or second. I was so friendless that I simply decided to stay for the second year at a stretch in the ground floor. Only in my third year did I move to the first floor.”

From that first floor at IIT Madras to Cornell in Ithaca, USA, wasn’t that difficult a transition. At Cornell, he successfully completed his doctoral work. But towards the end, he got disenchanted with the cliques and politics of the academic world and this is when a chance encounter with a researcher in England and a cricket enthusiast in Australia led to cricinfo.com.

The first three paragraphs in this excerpt from Subroto Bagchi's Zen Garden column in the magazine are made up of a long quotation from the interviewee, Badri Seshadri of New Horizon Media, a Bangalore-based company. Now, since the quote continues in the second and third paragraphs, there should be open quotation marks at the beginning of each of those paragraphs. So where are they?

I have learned, from past experience as a teacher, that there are a lot of people out there who do not know how to use quotation marks in a running quote. IT guru Subroto Bagchi may be one of them. But the journalists at the Forbes India desk should have caught this slip.

Here's the rule you should know: "When quotes run into two or more paragraphs, each new paragraph takes opening quote marks, but only the final paragraph takes closing quote marks."

Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and Lady Gaga

Who would have thought that Mother Teresa could have anything in common with Lady Gaga? Well, apparently both have become the latest icons of the leadership industry.

LEADERSHIP QUALITIES: THE KEY WORD IS "CHARISMA".

Writing in The Economist of June 4, "Schumpeter" (that's a pseudonym, by the way; the magazine is famous for, among other things, not carrying bylines) says there may be obvious differences between the singer and the founder of the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata but these differences may matter less than their similarities:

Mother Teresa built her Missionaries of Charity from nothing into a global operation with fingers in over 100 countries. Lady Gaga is forecast to earn over $100m in 2011 and may soon outstrip supergroups like U2. Both women are also role models for corporate leaders [according to two recent publications, Mother Teresa, CEO, a book, and Lady Gaga: Born This Way?, a case study].

It is not just that, early in their careers, they traded in long, barely-pronounceable names for catchy short ones: Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu became Mother Teresa, Stefani Germanotta became Lady Gaga. As the two publications argue, both women succeeded by developing simple, clear brands, which coincidentally both identified with outsiders. Mother Teresa ministered to the poor and the sick: people “shunned by everyone”. Lady Gaga describes herself as “a freak, a maverick, a lost soul looking for peers”. She assures her fans that it is OK to be odd. This is a comforting message not only for gays but also for most teenagers.

While it is not too much of a stretch to picture Mother Teresa being venerated as a leader, it will surely come as a surprise to learn that the young woman who gave raw meat a new life as a fashion statement has what the authors of the case study call "leadership projection" ("charisma" to you and me).

Lady Gaga has the “ability to build emotional commitment” in those she leads, says [one of the authors]. This ability is increasingly valuable in today’s business world, he believes. In The Fine Art of Success, a book he and his co-authors released last year, they examine it at length. They are now working with Egon Zehnder, an executive-recruitment firm, to figure out how to identify whether candidates for top corporate jobs have the ability to “project leadership” the way Lady Gaga does.

Those who appreciate good writing will love the way "Schumpeter" elaborates on the subject of charisma towards the end of this article. The columnist writes:

Management tracts with famous names in the titles are mostly guff. There is only so much a manager can learn from Genghis Khan — it is no longer practical to impale competitors on spikes.

And then we learn that some may doubt that "the secrets of Lady Gaga’s success, or Mother Teresa’s, can usefully be applied to, say, a company that makes ball-bearings".

Finally, we get examples of well-known names from the business world in connection with "charisma":

Yet charisma matters in business, and celebrities do tell us something about how it can be wielded. It is no longer enough for a corporate boss to be clever and good at giving orders. Modern knowledge workers may not put up with a hard, old-fashioned boss like Jack Welch, who used to run General Electric. Many respond better to one who communicates warmly: Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo sometimes writes to the parents of her managers to thank them for bringing up such fine children. Employees crave a sense of purpose, and the boss who can supply it will get the best out of them. Personal stories help: Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, whose business empires depend on their charisma, both play up their pasts as educational dropouts. Charisma is tough to learn, but it is not gaga to seek guidance in the stars.

This is clearly the work of someone who is intelligent, well-read, and who knows how to write. Someone who has read both publications referred to in the article and realised the significance of writing about it for a serious magazine, someone who knows the backgrounds of the world's top business leaders, who has analysed the qualities of these leaders and understood what works best for them and for their employees, someone who has then been able to put it all down in words in a style that is so interesting for readers.

Media students can learn a lot from reading the column in its entirety here: "The angel and the monster".

• The Economist was first published in September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress". More than 150 years later, the weekly magazine continues to engage, entertain, and enlighten readers like no other publication today. Pick up a copy today. Or read it online.

UPDATE (May 3, 2013): Dave Kerpen, an American CEO who is also a New York Times best-selling author and keynote speaker, and whose posts I have featured on the Reading Room, has just put up something interesting concerning five marketing lessons you can learn from Lady Gaga. Read Kerpen's post here.

A tribute to the god of advertising

Today is the 100th birth anniversary of David Ogilvy.

Writing in Mint, Abhilasha Ojha and Anushree Chandran say the man who changed the advertising landscape around the world continues to inspire many in the industry.

Ogilvy, who famously declared that “every word in the copy must count,” died in 1999 at age 88 after a prolonged illness. O&M, the company he founded in 1948, is running a global campaign on Twitter inviting people to answer the question: What inspires you?

And that’s just a prelude to the red carpet roll-out at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, an annual event for the advertising fraternity held in France.

The longest red carpet will go along the entire length of the Croisette (one of the main roads in Cannes) today, leading to a giant billboard outside the event’s main venue that will state: “On this day, 100 years ago, David was born to inspire.”

Read the article in its entirety and take a look at some of Ogilvy's legendary ad campaigns here: "Making every word count".

• Also read: "David Ogilvy on why reading is important".

• Also read on Maria Popova's brilliant blog, Brain Pickings: "10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy" and "How To Praise like David Ogilvy" and "David Ogilvy’s Timeless Principles of Creative Management".

The 10 commandments of social networking etiquette

Everyone is on Facebook. And Twitter. And LinkedIn. But, sadly, not everyone is aware of online protocol.

Here's a checklist of things you should not be indulging in on social networking sites:

• Playing games on other people’s Walls
• Saying no to your mother
• Using all caps
• Tagging your friends to your advertisement
• Making your virtual world more real than your real one
• Sending a friend request more than once
• Sending auto messages
• Lying about yourself online
• Smelly status updates
• Peeking in

This list was put together by Shweta Taneja and published in Mint yesterday. She writes: "We know you have the right to go to the bathroom as many times as you like and the power to post inane recordings of your mundane life on Facebook or Twitter, but if you are looking for some respect online, refrain from giving minute descriptions of your boring life."

For details, go to "While online, thou shalt not...".

Also read:

• Facebook: Boon or bane?