Chipping Away...

If you are an ice-cream man why would you not let your customer lick (or bite) the luscious scoops on the cone as soon as you hand it out? Having spent so much in making the packaging look attractive it is insane to make it extraordinarily difficult for the user to start using the product (or for the consumer to start consuming it). I recently bought a bag of Lay's chips and settled down on my recliner to watch the Manchester United versus Liverpool soccer match last Sunday. No matter how hard I tugged at the seams the bag just refused to open up. I had to
(1) get up from the recliner (read give up my comfortable posture)
(2) walk into the kitchen
(3) find a pair of kitchen scissors (they are not a standard issue in my kitchen)
(4) Cut open the top of the bag
(5) dispose the sliver of plastic into the kitchen bin
(6) get back to my recliner and taste the first chip from the bag
Shouldn't bags be designed to give way at the slightest tug? Especially when quicker I get the opening bit out of the way I can get to the reason why the food company exist.

To find the bestseller...

...don't go to your neighborhood bookstore.

Bookstores typically have a section called "Bestsellers" - mostly located near the entrance to the store, targeting the fad-conscious, non-enterprising reader. Books in this section are the ones the store wants to sell to you and has little to do with sales activity (how else can you explain finding "Black Swan" there. That is not a book picked up by the masses). A definitive direction towards bestsellers can be found on the sidewalks with vendors who sell pirated books. Laws of economics demand that they invest in books that are greatly in demand (low inventory risk, which is compounded by the possibility of police raid and ultimate confiscation). Yes - they also know how to place the better-bestsellers near the edges of their spread-outs (ask for "The Last Moghul" by Dalrympyle and it will take a while to for the stall owner to fish it out from a remote sack).

The most obvious things may not be always found at the most obvious places.

I upgraded to IE6.0

I recently upgraded to IE 6.0. I was quite irritated at the way my earlier version of IE was behaving and thus made this choice. I was using IE 7.0 earlier

Generation in Transition

If the advertisements are to be believed, the Indians haven't yet decided if shunning the US is a better option or embracing it is.

There is this advertisement of a motorbike that has an young Indian riding in the dilemma of accepting or rejecting an employment offer from the US. He goes to a construction site, looks up at the impressing skyscrapers in the making and makes the decision on the spot. He will stay back. "I don't need your job, Mr. Richards", he says and displays the Indian side to his civic sense by tearing up his acceptance letter and littering the street with debris.

Then there are two ads, both from HDFC, the financial services behemoth in India. The more poignant one is where a dejected daughter returns to inform her parents that while she was accepted to an US school, the scholarship she managed would cover just half the expenses. Her mischievously beaming father breaks it to her how he has been saving for this situation ever since the girl was a toddler.

As we transcend from one generation to another, hopes and aspirations are changing as is changing the outlook towards the West. I sincerely hope we imbibe from the West something more than just calling the last alphabet "zee". Whether we do it by going to the United States or otherwise is an individual choice.