How many lives did you save again?

I have a friend who works in the advertising industry in Mumbai, India.

What I get to hear every time I talk to this friend is that the client has asked for some last minute changes to the ad campaign or to the material or the artwork or some such thing. It is not uncommon in the ad industry to spend late hours on the job. In fact, it is extremely rare for someone in the ad industry to work like normal human beings.

Here is the problem I have with the frenzy.

What happens if these people just slow down a bit and live like normal people? What happens if the ad comes out a day later than it was supposed to? I know that in certain cases, the timing of the ad is of paramount importance, but that has to be the exception rather than the rule, right?

Consider the case of the financial services industry or the telecom industry. Their requirements are not advert based, but technology based these days to support the growing number of subscribers to their service.

If a system supporting their business fails, millions of people are impacted. In case of the financial services industry, it could mean that a lot of people cannot trade on the stock exchange or a lot of people cannot get access to their salaries. In the telecom space, a lot of people may not be communicable or entire organizations may not be able to talk to one another. In the healthcare industry, the normal flow of patients may be severely impacted if they have a problem with their system.

So in all these critical circumstances, there is, and rightly so, frantic activity to resolve the problem. But when things are going well, people don't always work late.

Coming back to the ad world, almost every day is a late night at the office. And a lot of people take pride in this.

But isn't advertising an implied form of generating revenue? The entire concept of advertising is to get as many eyeballs to see the product the ad is trying to hawk. Just because I see an ad does not mean that I will buy that product. Of course, I will be a little bit influenced in the direction of the product after seeing the ad, but it definitely does not make up my mind.

So when you consider the amount of money spent on advertising campaigns, billboards, multi-million-rupee endorsement contracts with celebrities, all it amounts to is the indirect implication of increased revenue.

I know that the ad industry is extremely crucial to business and that it hugely helps businesses make a lot more money than what they would have made without advertising, but the frenzy is something I cannot understand.

You cannot have chaos all the time. That speaks of a disorganized industry. Where personal lives are not cared about. Where people invest most of their time on working for someone else who does not give two shakes of a rat's ass about your life.

Unless you are someone like Bharat Dabholkar, Allyque Padamsee, Prasoon Joshi, Balki or Piyush Pandey (all of who have worked on some really brilliant campaigns), I wonder if you wake up the next day and feel a sense of achievement in the previous day's work.

Was the frenetic activity worth it? Was spending time away from family and friends, and more importantly, from yourself worth the effort you put it?

Does the ad industry consider these things? As an outsider, I may have the wrong idea, but I need someone to help correct it.

I miss my baby

I haven't seen her for a really long time and I really miss her.

Just talking to her for a few minutes is all I have for the last few weeks, what with she being in India. I knew this was going to be the case when she was leaving, but I did not expect how much I would miss her.

Even when I talk to her, she is usually in a hurry to get off the phone. And I don't blame her. Why waste time talking to me when there are more interesting things to do and more important people to be with?

All I can say is that I cannot wait for Thursday evening. That's when I fly off to India. And that's when I get to see my baby. I can't wait.

The countdown has reached fever pitch!

Tomorrow at this time...

I will be making final checks and preparing to leave for the airport!

Tomorrow I land back home. After just one week short of a year in Singapore. God, I really miss that place. The people, the food, the warmth. I guess you learn to appreciate it when it's not around.

And more than anything, I get to meet my family and my friends. And more than anything, my baby! Haven't seen her for so long. She's the one I miss the most.

Well, just one more night and half a day to endure. And then "I'm leaving on a jet plane..." (taking just a line out of John Denver's ever green song).

Isn't that size too big for you?

As I got into the elevator this afternoon, a petite chinese woman get on as well. As I was waiting for my floor to come over, I was not particularly doing anything, just looking at my shoes.

That's when I realized this really short woman was wearing shoes at least 3 sizes bigger than her feet!

At least 3 sizes! And that's when I looked closer and saw that she had really tiny feet. Smaller than my 6 year old's. And that's when I realized.

She was actually shorter than my 6 year old!

That's a lotta coins

I have this habit of not carrying change. I don't have a change pouch in my wallet. Neither do I want one. Cause I just dont like to carry change.

So what I do is empty all the change jingling in my pocket through the day and drop it into this little porcelain dish we bought for exactly that purpose.

Yesterday, I decided to count how much had accumulated into the dish in the last couple of months. I was pleasantly surprised.

I had more than a hundred and ten Singapore dollars worth of jingleware lying in that dish!

So what I did was made them into bunches of ten coins (of the same type, of course) and am going to the bank to get paper in return for them.

That should help subsidize at least a round of golf when I head back to India tomorrow :-)

340 users, 3885 posts, 540 topics

I wish these were the stats from my blog, but no such luck.

IndiPPC, our very own Pocket PC forum, is on a roll. We now have a fairly large base of users, a lot of contribution from our members and a very healthy discussion about our handheld device of choice.

And it feels really good to see so many people, who have never met each other in person, work so hard to solve somebody's problem.

This is the spirit of participation! The spirit of the Internet!

Two days left to endure

Yesssss!!!!

I am leaving for my vacation on Thursday night. I am headed back home. And I can't wait to meet my friends and family. It's been a really long time since I have see them. It's been way too long that I have eaten the kind of food you get in India. It's been a while that I have visited my old hangouts.

I am going to do all of that. 15 days of bliss, hopefully.

I just hope God gives me a bit of respite with not too much of rain. Especially the first few days when I am going to be in Bangalore where a couple of rounds of golf have been planned.

I am already packed! Can you believe it? I am already almost completely packed. Done. Just a few last minute things that need to be stuffed in. And then I am done.

Can't wait to leave. Can't wait for Thursday to come.