FOR A DREAM

This was a new start in a winter bowl
I saw a lost girl tied to the city pole
She was so beautiful, I asked- Why are you here ?
she blinked her beautiful eyes,this was the first year

In the second, I danced with her,hand in hand
She was soft and strict like my motherland
Her lips, sweet like a blue cranberry
She whispered- will you fly with me on a ferry?

In the third,I woke up at twilight
She was sitting beside me like our wedding night
I knew she was kind hearted and honest
I wanted to bring her back,from east to west

In the fourth, she was back,I sensed her angelic smell
it was like the first time i saw her,in a star shell
she was so elegant , like the aphrodite
her smile made me shiver, thrilled on a cold night

I knew she was generous, like a three year old baby
And, I miss you, Your hair left me all crazy
Sun rays reflecting on your face
you looked like stars shining on my breathing space

I wish I could talk to you once or twice
You wont regret, please, it will be cool like ice
Even if you dont,remember this was written for you
I will wait, defining this girl, forever in a queue !

Shuttle - A cat

Hello my name is shuttle,a cat like a pearl
I am beautiful like my master, mesmerizing like a girl
She says - I am all white
like the freshness of a cold night

I like fresh tuna fish
But I wished if it was not the only dish
I am kind enough to live on milk
though my daily dessert is rat on a feild

I like to hunt with my soft paw
They fear me as I dont follow any law
My teeths are pink and sharp
I am small,but perfect like a bullet in a time warp

I also have a friend, black and a crook
we play a lot, always happy like pictures in a book
He was black and I was white,he was so jealous
Still we shared our pink pillow and called ourselves Team Opress

But I am not happy with my master, she feeds me unhealthy food
I am queen of chinese cats, powerful like a bee's mood
Still I have nine lives, I will choose my manager
he will respect me, because I am a genius achiever

Present Advertising trends

Practice makes a man perfect. Whoever said this line was surely not aware of blunders that it can lead to. The reason is, practicing an erroneous task is not only going to achieve your targets faster but also quicker disregard from the general public. Displeasing Marketing advertisements in mid night are some of the examples of these blunders. But the big question is what makes companies practice this kind of weird stuff with their own ‘close to heart’ products? And what goes on in the minds of marketing division of these firms? Just look it biologically- dislikes are something with which human brain consumes a little more oxygen because extra care is taken in to avoid it, which ultimately means extra effort. Psychology has always served as a base layer for luring consumers and prospective customers. But it’s not only about consumers but it also holds something for the newspapers, television channels, websites, etc. Are products, whose ads are irritating, bought less frequently? The ultimate aim of an Ad is to somehow persuade a person and use all kinds of techniques to influence their behaviour and opinion. Theory of AIDA is still practiced by successful advertisers to attain the ultimate objectives of advertising objectives-to retain consumers for their product, to deliver value driven processes to the consumers and to increase the sales of the product. In the present scenario, the increasing number of never ending ads is making the user experience worse than ever. Marketers are under increasing pressure to create high-impact TV ads, but are they worth being annoying to be remembered? Switch to live telecast of any cricket match in India, majority of viewers will remember every ad at the end of match along with the score of their favourite team. The ads are specially scripted for these situations. The intermediate time period is characterised by short length and high viewership. Short time period makes sure that ads have to be precise. But the irony is that these ads are of sponsors. In India every company dreams of sponsoring cricket match. And with the tremendous increase in the number of television buyers and viewers, every company wants to cash on this media. And if a person wants, he can fully blame everything on cricket. Tiny break of 20-40 seconds when the bowling end of the pitch is changed or when a over ends, gives opportunity to broadcaster of showing commercial advertisements to viewers. Though the viewers are slowly getting used to such traits, but still there is a large portion of them wanting to switch off their television sets before the match gets over. Recently a media house commented over this issue and asked viewers whether they wanted to see sports uninterrupted and if they can pay an extra price to avail this

special facility. The people raised their voice on this issue and questioned him back. Now the big question to answer was –Aren’t people allowed to watch sport without any interruption? When people want to see happy faces of their favourite stars, channels recommend people to forget everything and drink a cola or try a new flavour of cornflakes, as if it was the only thing they wanted in this world. Positive opinion of the brand plays an important role in thisactivity. And it is also one of the reasons, why these companies can experiment with annoying ads. These ads ensure that they are repeated again and again, conditioning the consumer to buy that product. Short duration and annoying jingles make sure that they communicate only one side of the story.

It is also important to understand that the ad industry plays with various features of human mind like humour, emotions, energy, egoism, budget management, love, family, friends, trust and they make sure that they target only those viewers that can be manipulated. For instance, Indian people being considered more emotional, Banks focus on making emotional ads for credit loans. And at the same time they may be considered irrelevant or ineffective by some viewers. Advertisements also act as a psycho technology manipulating people. The advertisers perform highly funded market research into finding the weak spots in the thinking process and psyche to sell their products to the targeting customers. Repetition of ideas is so mechanical that we fall into their trap. For example, 20 years ago, there was an ad of a mango candy and scary enough to make a child cry. It had such an impact on me that I still remember the name of candy and I can say that the company was very successful in using those 20 seconds in the best possible manner. The purpose of this example was to show how memory can be used to control the purchasing decisions. The Second big question is – what do people value more – the analysis of ad or selection of the best product? The answer lies in the fact that when an ad ends, its nature of repetitiveness and ambiguity helps in making a decision in a fast paced life situations. According to a study, 16 characteristics were found to influence ad irritation. Poor casting, featuring disturbing characters, ads creating tension, poor execution and ad placement are the top causes of ad irritation. But the most common reason for ads being annoying is that they are significantly different from their viewers activities and actions like communication or difference in perception.

The presumptuous nature of annoying ads enables the companies to make the audience focus more on irrelevancy of the ad than on the product. This in turn reduces the evaluation of the brand as compared to those ads which people consider to be a part of their lives. An important factor to take into account is that there are very less people who want to dig down much into their memories only for product decision making, and so they end up purchasing what they can quickly remember. However, when consumers have to make a consumption choice, they don’t remember the annoying nature of ad. To know more about various categories of annoying advertisements, it is necessary to look into different advertising formats like banners, ads that look like website content, video ads and Pop-ups. Ads disguised as website content are mostly misleading, but compared to other formats pop-ups are the common advertising format in today’s world. Pop-ups are online ads that force themselves in front of users. Ad agencies make sure to relate our past activity with ads that we see by continuously monitoring our activities on the internet. For example, if we are searching for fare from A to B, a pop-up ad of a travel company promising you to get best discounts to travel from A to B can be expected in next few minutes. They actively engage the visitors, but most of the time they end up annoying them. If we were to plot a graph having time on x-axis and user anxiety on y-axis of any internet surfer, we should not be surprised to see spikes in between. These pop-ups interfere with our activity so much that most of the users are using pop-up blockers.

The effect of these ads has been such that we have reached a stage called “ad blindness”. This is a phenomenon in which users don’t notice ads and close them even before they show up. Whether it is text based ads or flashing banner ads, consumers have evolved themselves to ignore them. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that intrusiveness in advertising practices has been the chief reason for interrupting the goals of consumers. Though advertisers prefer ads that demand consumers’ attention, eventually they have formed negative attitudes toward such tactics. This has led to ad avoidance and declining rate of interaction between consumers and companies. Ads previously meant for providing information to the customer, are now acting as barriers in making purchasing decisions. But eventually, these are the Ads which consumers remember in the long-run.

---A work by Anupam,Dheeraj,Anuj,Hemant based on Internet research 

Privacy invasion and marketing- A cat and rat game

I must say, things are looking good once again. There is door bell in our house, and we make sure that it is only when it rings, that we open the door for someone to come in. There are alarm clocks to wake us up just in case we sleep too long. This all may sound like an ideal scenario to brag about our immaculate life. But, being an optimistic person, I pray daily to god if somehow they can lend us a little intelligence to create alarms and bells in the business world too. The reason being, some of us are busy playing action reaction game in which dollars and rupees play a role of ace or joker. To sum all these thoughts together, I was referring to intrusion, with money in the driver’s seat. We are continuously being analysed, reviewed, classified into groups and tested by companies and in some cases companies might know our likes and dislikes better than our parents.
Are they trying to become our parents? Not really, but it is sure that they want to act like one- Guiding and overruling our choices and decisions. For instance, if you are a regular visitor to a small shop, the owner will know you very well and will guide you like a one year old. And needless to say, everyone likes that kind of hospitality. Your favourite social networking site suggests you friends and coincidentally you might know them all. If you are worried to get best fares from Delhi to Mumbai, it’s just only matter of seconds that you will see a popup saying- get best fare from Delhi to Mumbai and temptation will make us click that Advertisement. Now the big question is – How important are ethics in case of marketing research? The way a company conducts its market research these days have serious ethical repercussions impacting the lives of consumers. And the ease with which companies can gather data about its customers, surely leaves us thinking about the level of privacy invasion. A market research assumes that people are honest and truthful about their choices. But there has to be a level of honesty to ensure that they don’t blow cover of their own privacy. In a recent survey on ethical and methodological practices across three times periods- 1975-76, 1989-90, and 1996-97, the results revealed an increase in deceptive procedures over time reported in human participant studies, from 43% in 1975-76 to 56% in 1996-97, largely due to an overall rise in the use of active deception procedures. So, it becomes necessary to find a perfect balance of honesty and privacy while sharing opinions and ideas.

Privacy and confidentiality are important factors for a business to protect their intellectual property and secret business traits. And in most of them they have been given the status of law. But why a single person fails to take advantage of the same? Best reason according to me is that, they don’t feel insecure while sharing their opinion and they really don’t understand what information they should share with the world. As it might happen that you

are sharing a post online that says –hey I am going to become a mother or father. We might not be even aware, but it’s quite likely that you will start seeing Ads related to childcare. Moreover if we were hesitant enough, coffee shops and restaurants would never had introduced feedback forms asking their email id and numbers, which according to me, are not a part of research and unnecessary. Though still there are some examples which contradict this notion about people. For instance, a Beijing university sued Microsoft for providing a formal contract which had to be accepted to install windows xp.
It is imperative for us to know that if companies are not aware about their customers, then instant offers and discounts will become a distant dream. Marketing division of a company will be useless if they give discounts on product A when they are dealing with customers who like product B. Nowadays we have so many platforms to express ourselves, share our opinions and tell what is right and wrong. This has made marketing products much easier. More Customers are now satisfied with the products they are dealing with. According to a survey from Lab42, among those who like brands on facebook, 82% say facebook is a good place to interact with brands. 75% say they feel more connected to brands. 69% say they have liked a brand because a friend has done so.

It is interesting to see that promotional discounts and coupons are still connected to liking a brand online especially when it’s used to drive sales. And companies are intelligent enough to follow different strategies on different platforms. For example, on LinkedIn there will be more Ads on products/services requiring individual decisions and which are mostly B2B oriented. The only thing which a company can be held accountable for is how much customers rely on their brand and what level of moral relationship is present between them. Companies promoting and motivating morality in its marketing tactics is surely going to earn some respect by the employees as well as customers. It is hard for me to come to a conclusion immediately. I can only suggest that market researchers have obligation to collect data which truly reflects the needs of customers. If he has a one dimensional view, probability of harm to customers increases. Other than that, companies which have lot of data to play with, it becomes mandatory for them to lay down strict laws and regulations to restrict any kind of data sharing and requiring the accent of customers protecting the customer’s right to privacy. A customer should be entitled to opt out of the sharing if he doesn’t want to get involved. People should be aware of what they share with outside world, for example it is quite obvious for a family to trigger robbery just because they have posted online that they are going to be on a holiday. It needs to be kept in mind that, everyone has become quite intelligent and resource and data utilization is no more a challenge for most of the humans. Deceptive marketing is there to stay and it is only by our intelligence and level of awareness that we can protect our privacy

Media controls our capacity for independent thoughts

Against-
Being a grown up man I can say Nouns have a great effect on our lives. But there are many perceptions. Originated from Late Latin period, Media as a noun, has gained enough respect to influence our lives early in the morning. Newspapers, Internet, Television, magazines, etc have become an essential component of our tracks without which our train of life will refuse to run. But the big question is why media is able to influence our ideas and decisions? Are we languid or is our hunger for knowledge or our habit of gaping into others lives has no well defined boundaries. But whatever the reason be, one should not forget that media industry is the most insulting, as it alternates between different thoughts of people.
When a person or a group of highly educated person present their views to a larger mass of population, it becomes a form of media. This may sound like a lame definition for something so complicated and diverse in nature, but this is what defines the media industry. Newspaper reports and articles are written by a single person but reviewed by many. Television news and debates by experts are the combination of hundreds of ideas. Looking at it statistically, these ideas present only a small part of the population, so it is expected that overall consensus of the population will not be much deviated from the sample. But this may not be the case every time. For instance in Gujarat 2002 riot case, Media might not have played a huge role in aggravating the situation. Because whenever news channels broadcast anything related to death, injury, loss and suffering or any riot inspired by religious sentiments, it takes only few moments for country to divide and at the same time various communities or group of people to reunite for a special purpose. Today, the after effects of any such incidents are predictable as the government is more aware of different categories of reactions. The government is also quite helpless given the inherent nature of the Indian people and historically proven reactions on incidents of similar intensity and nature.
Also, recently in Bofor’s case, Amitabh Bachchan was given a clean chit. In an interview with a leading daily newspaper, he revealed that Indian investigators probing the scandal plotted all the accusations on him when they went to Sweden to procure the list. But, did the superstar lose all the glamour and success in this period of 22 years? The answer is evident in the fact that he was invited to host Kaun banega crorepati and people loved his work in Bollywood. The point here is that this story was not able to influence people because there was a factor of trust and his goodwill successfully overshadowed the accusations. This element in attitude of the people is also well evident in historical incidents like assassination of Indira Gandhi which was followed by anti-sikh riots. There were no news channels at that time and government was forced to stop international and local media from covering the riots. The major question to answer is that had the media been there, would it have been possible for the people to stay unaffected and not take action against the perpetrators?
But no one seems to buy in this simple logic. Even in Assam, seeing the history of instability in the state, riots between local Bodos and migrants from Bangladesh created doubts in the minds of people much before  newspapers and news channels reported incidents of attacks on the people of north-east. It is important here to understand that whatever information we hear is from the source, people rely in general; In this case it was the local people living in Assam who were in touch with their family and friends through social media or electronic media and they were not the followers but the observers which ultimately helped them in building a personal opinion in this incident. In today’s scenario it may not be quite evident, but the truth is people are still using their ideas and thoughts for their own interest using something new and innovative as a medium.

FOR-
In today’s world which is led by technological advances there are many forms of media touching our lives. Be it Newspaper, Television, Radio or Internet, each and every form of media has become an integral and inseparable part of an individual’s daily routine. According to a research over the past 5 years the average media consumption has increased from 5 hrs to 7.5 hrs daily. Media is consumed for various purposes like keeping an individual informed about the happenings around the world, entertainment and for socializing. Media, which has become our shadow, affects the way we act and think. For instance, don’t we want a hairstyle and physique just like our favourite movie star? Why is Iphone5 still a hotshot even though it is not significantly distinct from Iphone4? These are some of the perfect examples of profound influence of media on our behaviour and decision taking abilities.
It is usually argued whether television reflects society or society reflects what they see on television. Television has become a major part of every home. When Hum Log, the first soap was aired for the first time in India, millions of viewers across India sat glued to their sets sharing the joys and heartbreaks of the characters and identifying with their middle class attitude. Carrying on the tradition from there, soaps have been successful in playing with the psychological emotions of the viewers. The extent of the effect is such that at one hand they are promoting Indian values and tradition through characters like ‘Tulsi’ and on the other hand instead of promoting rational thinking they are producing a herd mentality in people who tend to behave in a similar fashion as their ‘soap idol’. Similarly, on one hand, we have reality shows like Satyamev Jayate which made Parliament pass a Bill to protect children from sexual abuse and on the other hand we have shows like WWE and Roadies which promote violence and disregard for values among the most vulnerable yet most powerful section of the society i.e. youth.
Media in the form of printed as well as television news has played a vital role in shaping our society and creating informed citizens. While in the past printed media like ‘Kesari’ promoted revolutionary thinking against oppressive British rule, in the present times, we have seen media exposing big scams like the Commonwealth, Coalgate and 2G scam. However, media too suffers from certain pitfalls like growing consumerism and materialism, partisan attitude, sectarian outlook and biased individualism. Often, in fierce rivalries, ethics of journalism are thrown out of the window to settle old scores. Hence, media must avoid deliberately creating sensational stuff to attract popularity.
Incidences like Assam Riots exhibit how media can influence the momentum with which certain news can spread and trigger chain reactions. Also, on the issues like FDI in retail media should make sure that they present both the sides of the coin. It is important for media to realize that they shoulder responsibility of dealing with the psychology and viewpoints of the people.
The most viral form of media which is gaining popularity these days is Social Media in the form of networking websites like Facebook, twitter and video sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. Apart from pornography and violent video games which already affected the psyche of youth, this new born baby of Internet is making people spend hours posting their photos, videos and useless status messages rather than using that time constructively. New research reveals that the British economy is losing €14 billion a year due to wasted work time on social networking websites. The research found that roughly two million workers spend at least an hour each day on Facebook, Twitter and Myspace when they should be working.
To conclude let me quote Malcolm X who said “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent because they control the minds of the masses”. Media should utilize its power in such a manner it becomes a boon for the society and not a bane.

Being creative !

It is the spring of april like a thirty three
she asked me -are you falling in love with me?
Smile was again knocking me out ,
I began running from it ,A 100 yards from the cloud

Well,who can ignore eyes with a glow never seen before
pure as burning candle with ice at its core
yes , a little girl ,i am talking about
hey look she’s here ,she’s going to make me proud

With a hair like a ribbon tree
she was impatient , bugging like a honeybee
With a smile like silent river
trust me,it was the best ,It made me shiver

She is kind and independent like a chime
beautiful like a snowflake in the winter time
It’s hard to define you in limited words
I asked -don’t you want to stay ,we will fly like birds

It was just only one picture ,I described
sitting with her before me ,my life revived
At last , I can see you smile ,dont decline
Wait , let me bring a camera ,click ,now its all mine

Dedicated to Titli

click click click , just 3 clicks to you
holding a white snow ball ,adrenaline cuts me through
The most amazing part, your eyes
hehehe, My both lungs dont regret saying high fives

you are a liar ,I guess
BUt with you,hoping my life isn't a mess
Oi,Now dont smile,I can sense you see
Come on you can do it ,its beautiful like a ribbon tree

By the way , your hair is also cool
HOnest and innocent ,like a sheep and the wool
I wish I could touch it ,its silky
Papa ,mummy ,this boy is very tricky

oh ! you are a sweet little girl
shining like a diamond and a pearl
i really mean it ,dont you believe
my heart's stolen ,you pretty thieve

I just wanted to make you smile
congrats ,now you are a happy,atleast for a while
So let me ask you something,i know its fate
Will you be my date ??