IIMs tryst with Bollywood

I guess this is old news but just thought of publishing it. For those who don't know, one of the major reasons for the Bollywood movie HumTum's success(apart from Saif's and Rani's acting and songs) is the marketing strategy. The best part is that the marketing was done by an IIM-Lukhnow passout, 25-year old Tarun Tripathi who now heads Yash Raj Film's marketing cell. The idea of building a brand value e.g. use of cartoon characters, was all his idea and it paid of well. It has been declared a hit. Wish the IIMs keep on diversifying and adding value.

# posted by Hemal Modi @ 10:04 PM  -   0 comments

 
Silence & Solitude

Last night was I was lying in bed I kept having a wave of silence wash over me. It mainly felt like it was in my brain/head. It was weird.
It was very weird like for a second I didn't exist. For the first time in my life I felt at peace, all is right in the world.

Sometimes its just this dead silence that goes round in my head.There are things that only silence can show you... when I say silence I dont mean an empty sealed room, I mean the silence in your mind, in your eyes. I find silence in an empty street with yellow sodium lamps flickering on the black asphalt at night, I find it in the loneliness of rush-hour traffic-chaos, I find it in eyes of someone beautiful. But there's two sides to it. Sometimes silence hits me like a beautiful dawn, and sometimes I hit the silence like I just realised gravity at 30,000 feet without a parachute. The beautiful dawn I only find in someone elses soul, in someone elses eyes, in someone else's heart, a person more beatiful to me than the dawn itself. But the silence of falling, I find everywhere, when I'm alone in a crowd, or when I'm alone in my head.

I guess I need to explore the Silence & the wonders of Solitude

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1. Solitude is something I usually enjoy, I rarely feel lonely when I am alone.
2. Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life.
3. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
4. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
5. Do not speak- unless it improves on silence.
# posted by Hemal Modi @ 3:29 PM  -   0 comments

 
Welcome 2 GRAD Life
A really cool link for Graduate school survival guide... wish I had it before!!

It seems the comic strips are pages out of my own life!.
Phdcomics, also known as Piled Higher and Deeper, was originally created by Jorge Cham, who got his own PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and is now teaching at Caltech. Here is one strip, even funnier ones are in the archives!.
# posted by Hemal Modi @ 9:54 PM  -   0 comments

 
Back to school

# posted by Hemal Modi @ 1:02 PM  -   0 comments

 
Memory is a funny thing

Remembering 9/11

# posted by Hemal Modi @ 4:07 PM  -   0 comments

 
Camera

My new Canon PowerShot S1 IS Digital Camera (Cost: $335).

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Video compression
I realise the movie mode on my Powershot is little more than a toy, but I've taken a couple of clips that have gone down well. Only when a friend asked me to send him one of the files over MSN Messenger did I notice the huge size of the video files: a 150s movie as 320x200 is 37 MB! So, a tip for anyone taking videos: use the free Virtualdub tool to transcode to a better codec. My 37MB file recompressed to 7MB. Or just use the Windows Movie Maker and save it as a movie.wmv file.
For *nix users: The codec mjpeg, is just a series of pictures (15fps or something) and needs to be converted. For unix flavours you can convert the encoding by using FFMPEG or mencoder (part of mplayer)
Some Reviews: 1, 2
Info on Rechargable Batteries

# posted by Hemal Modi @ 1:03 PM  -   0 comments

 
Frances

This is going to be a wicked hurricane.

My prediction.

In the aftermath of the Hurricane, Bush will go to Florida, give a speech, and offer federal disaster relief. Democrats will complain that it's a political move and then say that the only reason why he’s doing anything is because Florida is a swing state.


# posted by Hemal Modi @ 1:48 PM  -   2 comments