Children love to 'SOAK'

In between various commercials which have just started, interrupting the family soap opera being intently watched by my wife, a visuals starts running with a little boy trying to soak himself in a tub full of water with the dirty clothes of his friend and exclaiming “soak karma to bhul hi gaya’’. The clip is from the surf excel commercial which is being aired in between the various soap operas. The clip ends to show another commercial of another brand. All the while my little one who has just completed his 18^th month has been full of circles around the room with his eyes gleefully reflective of the neon glow from the picture tube. He is prancing around on two feet, his hands a motion of wild waves. It is always a welcome change for him (including myself) from the soapy drama in which both of us share very little interest.

Our son who was born on the 1^st of December 2010, just loves TV commercials. By the time he was 4 or 5 months old he could train his eyes to move with the moving images on the TV screen. The TV thus became a medium to cajole him if he cried, or when he refused to feed.. so much so that, now he would simply scream at us if his favorite  TV commercial is running and it stops, as he thinks we have changed the channel. He has even started to try possession of the remote, if it is lying near him.

Any TV commercial will make him running in from whatever he was doing, gleefully screaming and prancing around the room. Like us he also has some favourite commercials which are special to him. One of his favorite is the ones featuring Priyanka chopra with the little Dalmatian pup – Chip-Chipko na-na, Squirrels doing the Kit-Kat ones, Champi-Champi (hair oil). Recently he has started to make us laugh with the hilarious performance of ‘Khujli hai bhai khujli hai’

Like some likeable ads featuring small kids, I have always liked the Surf Excel Ads of ‘Dag Acche hai’ and the numerous avatar and the more recent one with the little boy trying to soak himself in a tub of water.

All commercials have a message towards the end with a tag line and it is this tag lines which we remember and associate with a particular brand. Use of children in commercials has been a long known phenomenon – right from the ‘Farex’ baby, the most identifiable face of a baby in the 80’s.

Now we have numerous ads which are always aired with some peppy music, a peppy tag line and some very clever visuals. Some ads feature brand ambassadors like a filmstar or a cricketer.

The most memorable to me are the one, not with these brand ambassadors – but the ones where we have a kid or for that matter an animal – for example the little dog from Vodaphone.

To many people these commercials bring unnecessary interruptions – like during movies or a family soap opera or a sport. There are moments where it just seems silly enough for the spots to appear – like the one appearing in the final over of a cricket match.

Today, when I see my little one prancing around to his favorite TV commercial, I start to understand a child’s exuberance. To him brands, or the meaning of the ad does not mean anything, what make him happy is the joy he feels hearing the peppy and happy tunes, the happy faces and mood of the children, adults and other characters.

We as adults and parents have a lot of things to learn from our children. In gaining adulthood lots of us has lost the innocence of our childhood. We no longer laugh when we should, we no longer show our exuberance to the lively world around us. It’s like we have forgotten to SOAK OURSELVES in the joy of life. In a sense today’s world is like the commodity in Surf Excel ad – that is being instantly gratifying. We as adults will like the idea that we no longer need to soak our clothes as the new Surf Excel will remove the dirt instantly. But Ask the children who is playing the role model in the ad ‘whether he will like to soak?’ and he will answer ‘Yes’. It is the most exuberant answer we may get from our children, because they are not bothered by how many clothes they have soiled in a day or how their parents try to wash their clothes to make it clean again. But is the knowledge that we are their to safeguard their interest and well being and they would simply love to SOAK all the love we provide. 

Understanding Freelancing and Looking for Income on the Internet

Hi before I begin, let me introduce myself. I am a working professional. Like many of you there I have been hit by the idea of making more money out of the internet. There are a number of programs on the web which offers you money for reading emails, taking surveys, clicking ads….. the list is endless. If you are one like me who had used this programs, you know how frustrating it is to spend hours before the computer connecting to this sites, clicking on ads, reading emails, taking surveys and what do you get? A mere trickle of few cents in your account.

One needs to understand that there are numerous opportunities which the internet provides. The difficulty is finding the right place to start. One thing we need to understand is that for every opportunity there are in the internet, we have to spend our time with the internet doing something.

The question is, are the type of job we are doing in the internet to earn whatever little penny it offers to bring to us worthwhile? The answer is Yes and No. While for some who have plenty of spare time to leisure around it may be paying doing mindless jobs like checking and sending bulk emails, filling out online survey polls and so on.

But after some time this brings monotony to the job and you start feeling bored. Then, there are online available jobs which offer you to showcase your skills, your talents. The fun part of joining such programs is the freedom of choice it gives you. The satisfaction you get doing a job in which you are comfortable. And above all a job where you are not the only one competing for the job but scores of people who may be way better than you.

A very good example of one such site is freelancer.com.

Freelancer.com is by far the best website which offers millions of users worldwide to source online jobs and also bids for jobs online.

I am a user of freelancer.com for a couple of years, although I am yet to make much bucks by freelancing services, it is the belief deep down the core of my mind that this is the only site which offers to explore your potentialities to earn money from the internet.

In the following few steps I am going to present why it is necessary to understand freelancing concept and lessons which can be learnt. These lessons can be taken as lessons for good practice to follow to become a successful freelancer.

STEP 1

Showcase yourself as a Product : You may be a very good programmer, a prolific writer or a fine designer. But what is the use if you are not able to showcase your talent to the world? But how can you showcase your talent? How can people know that you have that talent?

The internet is also a like a big supermarket of shops, arcades and malls. Like in the real world, a supermarket  requires good visibility for people to step in and explore. Again, there may be good number of supermarkets in the area. However, it is the location of the supermarket, the surrounding areas, accessibility, the architecture of the building, facilities for recreation like parks, parking lots, cafes etc which attracts shoppers.

Think of the internet also a place similar to this supermarket. And think of yourself as the product people come to buy. You will like to showcase yourself in the trendy supermarket, where people with money always steps in. Like-wise in order to showcase your talent you need a good website to showcase your profile.

Think of a website as a mall or a shopping arcade. Choose a website which has the best visibility. Choose a website which has a well structured layout. Choose a website which offers easy accessibility. Choose a website which provides you a personalised profile. And last not least choose a website which has a large number of users.

Lessons learnt : 

• Search for best internet based business websites.
• Look for ease of use and accessibility
• Look at user followings
• Look for testimonials and user feedbacks
• Follow your instincts and mind
• Be sure of creating your online profile in the website
• Show your photo or an avatar of yourself in your profile
• Give as much information as possible
• Detail out the skills you possess

STEP 2

Set your Price : If you have followed the above step and created your profile, it’s the time to set a price of yourself. Before you start by setting a price, think what is the best price that suits me! How can you ascertain which is the best price for you?

If you have started by thinking yourself as a product, you will realise how big or how small you are. I do not mean how big or small your size is but, how big is your ego! Yes people are egoistical and tend to pretend what they are not. What I mean to say is that, you should be absolutely sure of what you are good at. You cannot go about and brag about your designing skills or your writing skills, if you don’t have one.

The point is, what is key to setting a price about yourself is the level of confidence you have in a task, the requisite expertise required from you and in what way you can present your skill which separates itself from the others. Like all commodities which have its own USP or Unique Sales Point, you should also be able to present your own USP.

To be able to set your price right, you have to be honest with yourself. You need to identify your skill set and you also need to develop trust in people. So it would not harm you if you price yourself lower than the others. By doing so you are not compromising with your dignity. You can price higher than the others, if you are 100% self confident and you make a USP.

Lesson learnt : 

• Bid for projects which you are sure you can do
• Quote a price which are competitive and lower than the best competitive bid
• Give samples of your work
• Specify duration in days you can complete the task in

                       

STEP 3

Value for service :  A consumer will pay certain price to buy a product. All products have a shelf life. For consumer durables it’s the period of years it will work without fail. If the product is serviceable, then service should be available at all times without fail. 

What this interprets is the product for which the customer is paying for should at least give a value to the consumer. Value here is the number of years of trouble free operation or use. This represents to the customer a value for money for the product and gives credence to the quality to the product itself.

Like-wise if you visualize yourself as a product, then the user who is paying a certain amount of money buy the product, should be in a position to get a value for money or a quality product. If your work is of good quality, the user will be well satisfied by your work. He will know that you can do good quality job. This gives credence to your nature of work and the skills you are having for the work.

Next time when you bid for a job from the user or users to whom he has passed information about your quality of work, will give greater weightage for selection.

Lessons Learnt :

• The work or job you do should meet the requirement of the client
• The work should be done exactly as you have promised or stated will be done
• The work should be done well within the stipulated time
• The work should bear user’s originality – that means no plagiarism
• If the work requires continuity or follow up work, you should be able to fulfil it.

I have tried to present few practices which I feel every freelancer should follow to get counted as a successful Freelance developer 

You can also visit http://www.freelancer.com/affiliates/joyprsinha/ to explore other possibilities of earnings from freelance.com

A Giant Leap for Mankind

[After all the hue and cry over the issueless crusade over a thin line that divides humanity and segregates race, caste and creed over the brink, on issues of an imaginary boundary, there is nothing left now but to pick up the remnants of the flesh torn apart - sew up the flesh - gather up the shreds of faceless corpses -resurrect the deadless souls - listen to the voices of remorse - try not to drive a wedge in the realm of make believe world and the thin boundary of trust in humanity, developed regardless of caste, creed and boundaries].

How does the earth looks like from the space? It must be a beautiful sight to behold. To the space traveler the glimpse of the earth from the space must be most wonderful view. To him the world must look one mass of water, air and earth. Does he discern the boundaries that make up and separates a country from one to another? Does he see the divide wedged between different continents by their race, caste, creed and ethno city? If all this imaginary boundaries are not visible, then why we the guardian of the humanity as a whole would go to war over issues which could be settled with the discourse of dialogues. It is an endless conflict where we the humanity as a whole would not be able to disassociate ourselves unless we see ourselves as one nation, one humanity and one earth. So we would continue to have the crisis in the Middle East, Latin America, South East Asia and other parts of the world – so and as long as there is this concept of material economy. Maybe Neil Armstrong would not have said when he stepped on the Moon on July 20, 1969. "That’s one small step for a man; and a giant leap for mankind.” if there was a colony of settlers already inhabiting the moon"

Lost Citadel

How I felt when two majestic trees were cut down. Lost Citadel was published in the Nagaland Post in its Editorial Column

My seemingly useless DX2 System.. and why I do not have a heart to part with it?

I am no technophobe, though, I have been a technoholic since 1994 when I first purchased a PC, that too a 486DX2 with a measly 4mb of ram, with no HDD. The machine cost me about Rs. 30000/- or about $600. The OS that time was MS DOS, which needed a FDD every time to boot it up. Needless to say this mean machine, a Hewlett Packard with a Cirrus CPU catered to my everyday task. In no time however I felt the need of a HDD, so I invested a fortune, about $150 for a 640mb drive, another $50 for a CD-ROM, upgraded the RAM with about 32MB RAM, invested another $10 to $15 for an Audio card and migrated to Windows 3.1 & Windows 95. In a way this was the best configuration that one could think of during that time. I used this system till 1998, extracting every ounce of juice & productivity the system will crank out for me. In a sense I am very happy to say this system was able to meet my demands, whatever excruciatingly painfully slow or cranky it was. It did give me 1000 hrs of office productivity, 100s of graphics design, 1000s of PageMaker layouts, played 1000s of multimedia files, scores of databases & numerous of medical thesis for my clients.
With technology changing at a frantic pace, I moved forward from my humble DX2 to an more advanced AMD III 64mb system, then to an Intel Pentium IV, and finally to an Intel Centrino Laptop, cranking around 1.66 GHz power with 2 GHz of Raw Memory. With all these power in my hand (err.. Lap), I cannot feel sometime but utterly at loss of any power to control my system to do the tasks, which my humble DX2 used to do.
This to me have more of a thematic significance as, in our pursuit of power, we tend to neglect the trust we need, the trust we put and the faith we have in our seemingly inanimate objects which earn our trust in our lifetime. I still do treasure my junk of a system lying uselessly unable to boot up due to a worn out BIOS in my attic, and I do not still have a heart to part with it.

Wisdom according to me is?

Wisdom to me is the knowledge passed on to us by our elders and the knowledge which we absorb and pass on to our children..

The Cosmic Truth..

Until few years ago I used to often wonder Who Am I? The uniqueness of being an individual is often wondering whether the universe is centered on oneself. Many great thinkers had often been daunted by the question about the cosmic truth. If one considers the uniqueness of oneself one may soon realize they are a mere speck of dust in this huge vacuum of space and void. This realization that you are there just as there are zillions of things which exists in this universe, the realization also dawns that there is no existential meaning to one’s life. We live because we are born into this cosmos. We are there just because of some fluke and may die out simply out of some fluke. This is the random order of the Cosmos. This leads me to think WHO REALLY I AM? If I do not have any existential meaning, if I am there simply because of some fluke, simply because I happen to be there in the random order of the cosmos, then why I should strive for the ULTIMATE TRUTH. The ultimate truth to me is the moment we are living in. Our activity for this present moment may not have much forbearance to our KARMA. To my belief our KARMA is our very existence and the existence after our death, if we do fit in that random of the Cosmos!

The River Crossing

I was down and out cast in mood of gloom, I posted my first blog just to let out some steam off my pent up emotions. For some years now I have been having a literary impulse of writing an autobiography about my father. No, he is not a famous personality about which one and all may hark upon. But, to me he is someone who had been very special. A beacon of inspiration for what he was, ‘a self made man’, a man who had achieved not many laurels but achieved enough laurels in our heart to be reckoned as the most remarkable person, through all the shades of a human characteristic in him – rustic, eccentric and other times genial. Starting from today I would start to chapterize his life (I had to dig up my old writings, trim it and put it up in this column). Though this chapterizations would appear to be random jottings I hope I would be able to compile good enough words one day to stitch up these columns in to a comprehensive and creditable reading material.

‘The River Crossing’

He lay huddled in a corner of the small country boat. There was an eerie silence punctuated with the occasional shrill shriek of the birds, frightened by the snaking length of the boat appearing to stalk them like a hungry predator. He could also hear the murmuring sound of the men around him. He could not discern what they were saying but caught the words ‘Hindu’ spoken with revile a few times and the long searching stares being thrown on him. The growing dusk has lent a shadow of snaky lines on the surface of the river. He tried to huddle deeper in the hallows of the small boat clutching the end of the small rugged bundle of cloths and the blanket stitched with pieces of his mother’s loin cloth. It was quite dark now, to see clearly into the face of the boy. He was thinly built and of the age of around 14 or 15 years. It was a small face, ordinary looking, like any country boy, but now contorted with terror. His eyes were constantly shifting from side to side and stealing furtive glances at the men, who now seems to have gathered their combined attention to him. He could now hear their voices more clearly “there is no mistake, he is a Hindu alright”, “what should we do with him”, “throw him into the river”, “no no! he is too young, only a child”, “what then! they are killing small childrens and women in India”.
It was the year 1950, India had gained her freedom and the country was in turmoil with the Hindu-Muslim clash after the creation of Pakistan. My father had been now living for some years now with my uncle at Hailakandi town of Cachar. He had just appeared for his matriculation and was growing homesick, his heart longed and yearned for the love of his Mother and Father, whom he had not seen now for 3 years. East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was not carved out at that time, although the Hindu-Muslim clash had been going on for sometime in the western part of India, it had not spread as wildfire in the East. For the boy, it was just a matter of traveling to his village Banukas, a day or two journey by rickety bus and a boat ride across a small river and 20 to 25 kms walk to his village. So he was there now surrounded by men and women who were all Muslims. The news of the clash and the brutality of the killings had started to trickle in, there was anger, the mood was of revenge in the air. His sparse belongings tied in a small bundle along with the rag-tag blanket sewn out of her mother’s loin cloth, which are of a particular traditional design only woven by the women of my father’s village, who were all Hindu had marked him as someone different from the boatloads of Muslims. The word of his mother rang in his mind “son, no matter where you are never lose this blanket, this blanket bears the warmth of your mother’s womb, if you are afraid always wrap this blanket around you and your mother will protect you from all evils as she did for you while you were in my womb”. Now the very blanket had given his identity as a boy of different religion.
Now, the same blanket was clutched tightly by the terrified boy, the words rang out again and again, he now tried to wrap the blanket more tightly around him trying to find solace in the word that rang out in his minds. He could now feel as if the murmur of the men around him has turned into a cacophony of angry voices. “I say kill the boy now, and throw him into the river”, a men with a long beard hanging upto his chest spoke pointing his fingers to the boy. “wait, can’t you see he is only a small boy”, spoke the man who was sitting on the helm of the boat. He had kind eyes with a very small beard around his lower jaw. The man with the long beard gave him a harsh stare and spoke “so what! If he is a boy, are they not killing small boys there in Punjab”, a murmur of voices seems to agree with him. “Do think what you would be doing” spoke the same man with kindly eyes “do have the fear of Allah”. This went on and on – now the voices will all rise again agitatedly, to be calmed down by others who seem to be siding with the man with the kind eyes. It was only a small crossing to the other side of the river, with most of the men and the very few women along with them returning from the town. But to the boy it seemed to be an eternity. All this while he tried to crawl deeper into the hallow of the boat his thin and fearfully quaking body now wrapped tightly around by the small blanket. Slowly the men around him quieted down. Now and then a brief glance were thrown on the boy. But the stares were no longer hostile, for in the growing darkness, the boy who now had wrapped himself tightly with the blanket to him by his mother, appeared like a shroud, the features of the fabric now washed dark by the moonless sky and inkish reflections reflected by the river bed had made the boy look very small and featureless. Slowly the voices around him toned down and the men around him took any notice of the quaking boy who somehow have managed to bury himself in the deep hallow of the small boat. He did not move at all from that position until the last of the passengers of the country boat had disembarked. Still he sat there in the dark trying to muster courage. The long shadow of the shrubs on the river bank seems like to paunch on him the moment he set his foot on the river bank. He lay huddled there maybe for a couple of hours, and when the first twilight threw its rays on the eastern horizon, he stole a look out of the boat, there was not a soul on the bank of the river, still he could not muster enough courage to creep out of his position. At last when the night turned into a crimson bright colour he shook his fear and crept out of the boat and clutching the small bundle of cloths and the blanket which has been so long keeping him shrouded in its warmth, he ran for his village as fast as he could.