Blah-Blah!

Sheryl Crow’s toilet talk

One person, really struggling hard for environment’s sake, is songstress Sheryl Crow. In her latest blog entry, she made a peculiar plea to the readers – to use a ‘fabric sleeve’ as a pseudonapkin (designed by her – in case you were thinking of purchasing some) and to also utilise just one square of toilet paper per rest room visit! While Crow did retract the latter part of her statement later and claimed to have said that only to make people take notice of her cause – global warming – the damage was done. For as of now, Sheryl Crow’s image of a sane woman has officially been flushed down the drain!

Daddy’s home!

Well yes, ill health has its benefits too! For after his beloved Rosa brokeup with him and his heart-ache landed him in hospital, the dapper star got to stay at home for quite a while, which resulted in getting him some quality time with his children Sarah and Ibrahim. And as he endured lengthy shootings in New York for Ta Ra Rum Pum, the two child actors, Angelina Idnani and Haji Ali, kept reminding him of his own kids back home. Intending to maintain such strong bonds with his kids, Saif ’s now seriously planning out his time...

Of love, handles and Lovely Singh!

Kick-ass Kareena has lately been setting the silver-screen afire with her hot number in the film Kya Love Story Hai… And news is that she did the number as a friendly gesture for director Lovely Singh (who happens to be a close pal), though she did refuse to wear revealing clothes for the same. Well, at least there’s someone who knows how to handle love-handles!

No kidding, this time!

After her recent visit to an orphanage in Russia, the former Baywatch star, Pamela Anderson obliged her online diary by chronicling the same… Apparently, she was touched and inspired to meet kids as old as her own two boys, Brandon and Dylan, but unlike them, they had nothing to really call their own. Although her entries indicate a very humane face of the star, it also perhaps portends yet another celebrity adoption. You know… it’s the ‘in thing’.

Conspiracy 2350: Destroy all intelligent life forms!

Yes, technology has helped make life easier in more ways than one. Or has it? Think again. It could ultimately prove to be the biggest curse on mankind...

It’s 2025 and Marie’s 3-year-old has been into a bad accident. An already vexed Marie’s worry is compounded when all she has for assistance is her domesticated robot – who dials the automated ambulance service. Marie also realises that when she reaches the hi-tech hospital in the neighborhood, she’ll be greeted by a bunch of machines again, and one of them will operate upon her son. Her precious son in the hands of merciless machines that albeit assiduously programmed, will nevertheless lack the human touch. Is this for real?

Well, the way technology moves forward, one cannot discount this possibilitiy. Millions of cleaning robots and myriad tactical robots are already being used all over the world today. By the end of this year, they could be manning some airport lounges & traffic monitoring. Even humanoid robots are a reality; they would even demand rights, according to the British government, years later. And who knows, these marvels of technology could wreak havoc with civilisation. Are we sounding too alarmist? Look around you, and you will realise that technology has already managed to enslave humans. Imagine life today without cars, television, radio, computers, gaming consoles, printers, washing machines, email, Internet, PDAs, cell phones, iPods, credit cards, ATMs & GPS devices. Especially when these concepts were unimaginable a few decades ago. Consider what happened in North America just a few weeks ago, when the BlackBerry wireless e-mail service from Research In Motion suffered an 8-hour outage. Millions of hapless ‘humans’ had their schedules thrown off gear as they could not access their emails on the go.

In fact, things are getting more and more complicated and amusing at the same time. For instance, TV programmes are available on television (naturally!), mobile as well as on the computer via IPTV. That too when the busy, stressful lifestyles of people means they spend less and less time on the idiot box. Music is on the iPod, on the music system in your home & car, on your mobile and again, on your computer! It’s almost like they want us to stay wired to our machines always, whether or not we spend any time at all with our families.

And if that’s this generation, think of the generations to follow – ‘blessed’ by the wonders of technology and living lives that are starved of relationships. It’s a scenario similar to that in the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix, which is as perilous as it is fascinating. And Morpheus sums up the plight of the people in the Matrix aptly thus tells Neo, “... these people are still a part of that system... And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” And the way we are going, we already seem to be part of a Matrix, that seeks to take over. Can we stop its endemic, or are we indeed doomed to be swept away?

Girls uninterrupted!

Angie and Uma go ‘beyond borders’ in love, life and acting

When goddesses placed their ethereal feet on Earth and mingled with mortals in epic times, their devastating beauty and power destroyed nations (remember the golden Apple of Discord?). Once again, two goddesses, who have no golden apple but who rule the silver screen nonetheless, are mesmerizing audiences. Racing towards legendary Hollywood status, Uma Th urman and Angelina Jolie have married femininity with athleticism, and spirituality with the material. Emblematizing the American melting pot, Angelina, born on June 4th 1975, inherited her enviable genes from French-Canadian model/actress Marcheline Bertrand and the Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight. Uma, born on April 29th, 1970, also grew up in a multi-cultural milieu with a Swedish model as a mother and a father who is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. Besides their privileged and culturally diverse upbringing, the Uma-Angelina story has been running a parallel course for years.

Frequently topping various ‘Most Beautiful’ lists, Angelina and Uma fi rst cracked into showbiz by modeling at the young ages of 16 and 15. At 24, both proved their mettle as actresses and were nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Whereas Angelina took home the Oscar in 1999 for her role in Girl, Interrupted, Uma lost out and did not bag the prestigious award for her 1994 fi lm Pulp Fiction. Uncannily, both were fi rst married to British actors, Johnny Lee Miller (married to Angelina for 3 years) and Gary Oldman (married to Uma for 2 years). They both married American actors the second time, meeting their (now ex) husbands, Billy Bob Th ornton and Ethan Hawke, on the sets of Pushing Tin and Gattaca respectively. Rather than ruining men, Uma and Angelina use their fame to advance philanthropic causes. While Uma actively supports peace initiatives in the Middle East and is a fi rm advocate of gun control laws in the US, Angelina has shamed many a celebrity by donating one third of her income to charity, being a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and adopting two children. Th e spiritual education of the two is startlingly similar; because of her desire that her adopted son, Maddox, know about his Cambodian heritage, Angelina has immersed herself in Buddhist culture in order to teach him. Uma, too, has a life-long tie with Buddhism: her father’s deep-rooted interest in Buddhism meant that not only were Uma and her three brothers given Buddhist names (a tradition that she followed by naming her fi rstborn ‘Maya Ray’), but they were also brought up as Buddhists and spent a considerable portion of their younger years in the Indo-Tibet region.

Bringing their individuality to their work, they’ve ventured off the beaten track and portrayed characters such as a sociopath, a Roman goddess, a ditzy model, and a femme fatale between them. Depicting a proclivity for strong characters and a visible aggression in both personal and professional lives, Uma and Angelina have acted in volumes of Kill Bill and Lara Croft , making both thespians a household name, and popularizing the idea of tough-yet-sexy women.

With their acting prowess and incomparable allure, it’s no wonder that these divas have bonded as friends. Setting the screen alight this year are Uma in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Angelina in Th e Good Shepherd. Here’s to these gorgeous, gumptious gals!

Don’t pay for your calls...

... but rest assured you will pay for SMS, video, mCommerce, et al! VAS is the new emerging segment

It’s tough to charge you premiums for making calls nowadays with the cutthroat battle for market shares in the Indian telecom sector. As a logical follow through, companies are looking for attractive avenues to improve their ARPUS, and it is here that mobile VAS services come to the rescue. According to a recent report by the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the VAS industry in India is estimated at Rs.28.5 billion and is expected to grow by 60% to touch Rs.45.6 billion by the end of 2007.

It’s the right time to exploit all emerging opportunities in the mobile communications space. Sanjiv Mittal, CEO, Bharti Telesoft (VAS division of Bharti Enterprises Group), elucidates, “Th e main opportunity is the vast amount of content that can be delivered via mobile. The key is to collect that broad range of content and ensure it can be packaged and delivered in a meaningful & appealing way to individual subscribers and subscriber segments.”

Telecom companies, marketers, content providers and aggregators alike have realized this and are trying to reach out to conquer this relatively new terrain, but the road is tough. Anupam Mittal, CMD of People Group – Mauj Telecom, observes that as his company reaches the next level, “operational excellence, disruptive innovation and an unflinching focus on discovering customer needs is what we (Mauj Telecom) will need to distinguish ourselves.”

Entertainment hogs the limelight in the VAS space with P2P applications & ringtones attracting 75% of revenues. There are new, promising areas like mCommerce, which are yet to gain momentum. The low level of awareness, coupled with apprehensions of conducting transactions on mobile are the key reasons for the sluggish growth. The other prominent challenge that faces the industry at the moment is the revenue sharing mechanism in the industry between aggregator, copyright owner & operator. In fact, the discrepancy in revenue sharing is deterring lots of VCs from investing. With operators retaining the biggest chunk of revenues, the proposition of investing in content companies from the point of view of investors, becomes less & less lucrative.

This is a real concern, according to Rajiv Hiranandani of Mobile2win, one of the biggest players in the segment. “A lot of investments and resources go into creating and developing regional content. This can only be covered if telecom carriers give us a higher revenue share,” he said. Resolving issues like this, quickly, will benefit the sector.

With rapid mobile penetration, the VAS industry in India is standing at the vanguard of ocean of opportunities. Domestic and international remittances, cash-in and cash-out services and many other financial services on mobiles can become highly profitable stars in the near future, since there’s a rising need for speedy transactions. VAS will be the key differentiator for players in this competitive environment, as they will be able to profitably tap various customer segments for their services. As they say, companies always know how to make their customers ‘pay’!

THE BLASTOFF

THE BLASTOFF: Those who believed that the industry is moving towards the executive & premium segment, and that the economy segment is losing its shine, need to necessarily shift to euro 10 norms, pretty fast! Kalpesh Parekh, AVP, Equity Research, rejoins, “Companies can’t afford to neglect the economy segment. They need to have a dual model strategy. They should work on the economy segment for rural India and executive, premium segment bikes for the urban India.” Furthermore, in this rolling fiscal, Indian two wheeler space, especially the urban markets, will be driven by a technology revolution. Not counting the new bike launches, which occur faster than how ‘KK’ serials change on Rupert Murdoch’s cable channels. Evidently, two-wheeler gods & kings will be battling for the technological edge, even in the new launches. Hero Honda has already launched a fuel-injection model with 125-cc Glamour F1. The technology will be a brand new experience for Indian consumers. Closely on the heels of Hero Honda, Bajaj too is gearing up to launch the 200 (plus)-cc Pulsar armed with the world beater DTS-Fi (digital twin spark-fuel injection) technology (as opposed to the DTSi). Being successful with these truly innovative products will be the real test of mettle for both the emperors. Indian bikes for sure were due for a major electronic and technical overhaul, more than just mere cosmetic makeovers. But the biggest worry for both these companies would be, are Indian consumers getting so rich that they might just skip buying bikes (and shift to, say the Tata Rs.1 lakh car)? Well, all we know is that the scooter industry’s already dead... Long live