Struck Oil (Read Gas) in Mumbai

After many days of persuation and N number of phone calls finally bharat gas surrenders to Mr & Mrs Machan...

From this day, lets see if poor Mr.Machan survives the onslaught of experiements from his other half, the greatest cook of all time (she claims so... I m not man enough to contest that; more over I have learnt the hard way that keeping mum in certain situations is a lot better)...

They even equip these terrorists with necessary gear such as aprons in this endeavor (I am not joking; see the pic... this is not an ad for everest masala).....

What is in a name?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."-Juliet Capulet in the play Romeo and Juliet






Many instances when someone wants a small, self-sticking bandage they ask for a Band-Aid and if they want a hand held camera, they ask for a Handycam. In some cases it is because they prefer that brand. But more often than not it is because those names have become synonymous with the product types they represent mainly due to good marketing.






Name is very important as far as marketing is concerned unlike what Shakespeare believed. This plays a crucial role when a product is launched in a different region due to linguistic barriers and wrong message may get conveyed. That is exactly what happened to Chevrolet when they introduced their popular model “Nova” in Latin America which means “Won’t Move” even though GM doesn’t admit its flop in Hispanic market. This type of cultural barrier is the reason why Mitsubishi’s “Pajero” is named “Montero” in Spain, USA and Latin America.


Native-speaker checks are good, but they can't neutralise the unseen disaster of a lame advertising campaign. The translation may be perfect, but the concept will never translate completely into another culture. Colgate faced big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command “go hang yourself.”


Spanish is not the only culprit, south Asia offers biggest challenge while naming the products or getting an advertising line. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s slogan, “It’s finger lickin’ good!” was translated into Chinese as “You’ll be eating your fingers!” Coca Cola found it very difficult to make a name with Chinese signs and later settled with "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth." Things were not easy for Pepsi either; in Taiwan, the translation of their punch line "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."


Apart from translation, even pronunciations also may cause trouble. Japan's second-largest tourist agency was mystified when it began receiving unusual requests in English speaking markets. Upon finding out why, Kinki Nippon Tourist Company changed its name. Further, a popular dairy product in Japan is pronounced as “Kow Pis” and a beverage in France is named “Pschitt”.


To become easy to pronounce for every market Toyoda became “Toyota” and “Sony” discarded their family name. There are some very popular names like “Apple”, “Kodak” and “Google” which doesn’t have a reason to name them. In India too, most business houses don’t just stick on with the family name as they used to like the “Tata” or the “Godrej”. So now we see “Airtel” instead of “Mittal’s Cellular” or “Reliance” in place of “Ambani Oil”. Many names now indicate the business they are in such as “Big Bazaar”, “Yatra.com”, “Go Air” or “Easy Cabs” also to enable them to be found easily in the web.


Superstition is another reason why people edit their name from “Akshay” to “Akshaye” or “Sunil” to “Suneil”, mostly found in the film industry where people believe a particular name can bring good luck to a film or an actor. So we now know Dileep as “AR Rehman” and “Rajiv Bhatia” as “Akshay Kumar”. Tata names most of their brands starting with the letter “T” and Suzuki name their two wheeler models with ancient Japanese military designations making “Samurai” or “Shogun” popular. Many auto makers play it safe by naming the models using numerals or alphabets to denote the Cubic Capacity or the load carrying capacity or by just giving some modified adjectives such as “Splendor” or “Marvel”.

The empire that was Russia-Sergei Prokudin

Have you seen a colour photograph of Gandhiji or Hitler? If you have, then it is actually a “Coloured” photograph instead of a colour. Same holds true for the pictures you have seen that of young Pele in the FIFA world cup 1958 or the early depiction of the Beatles. When did colour photography become popular despite the fact that Kodak started selling colour film in 1935? Can you imagine colour snaps with superior quality of present day digital pictures before the 1st world war?


Exactly one hundred years ago a Russian photographer named Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky, began a remarkable project with the blessing and funding of the Tsar, Nicholas II. He embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russian empire in full colour photographs. Many of these pictures look as if they could have been taken yesterday, with only the attire of people captured in their moment of time betraying the age of the work. Thanks to Pokrudin, we now have a record of times a century ago, so clear and vivid with remarkable colour depth. Frequent subjects among the 2,607 distinct images include people, religious architecture, historic sites, industry and agriculture, public works construction, scenes along water and railway transportation routes, and views of villages and cities. An active photographer and scientist, Prokudin undertook most of his ambitious colour documentary project from 1909 to 1915. In 1918, having lost all his money and property during the revolution, Prokudin went into exile, taking with him only his collection of nearly 2,000 glass-plate negatives and his photograph albums. The Library of Congress of USA purchased the collection from his sons in 1948.

He developed an ingenious photographic technique in order for these images to be captured in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in colour in slide lectures using a light-projection system. To enable this He photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter. There was no means to develop color prints at that time, but modern technology has allowed these images to be recombined in their full original colours. Only in 2001, these glass plates could be scanned and, through an innovative process known as digichromatography, brilliant colour images have been produced after 100 years it was photographed. Because of many years of negligent storing, most of the negatives are in very poor condition, and it took hours of scrupulous work to restore their original brilliance. These pictures include the only colour photograph of Leo Tolstoy taken in 1908.

It is just the beginning of the work and hundreds of unique colour images of the past are still waiting to be returned back to life.

Sources: www.loc.gov, www.gridenko.com