Thursday, January 24, 2013

A child's mind


My posts have taken a long time coming, I promised myself this New Year I would do more regularly what I like doing and that is to write. I still am 24 days late but I guess never late than never.

So what sparked this post? A beautiful advert by Microsoft!
Microsoft really needs a new ad agency because some of their recent adverts plain and simply suck, but this one they have got it right. 

Watch the video below:



 Now assuming that you guys have watched the video, let me ramble along.

So what did we learn? Windows 8 is good/easy?
I don't know and honestly don't care much ( Sorry Steve Ballmer, I know you have paid millions to the ad agency who created this agency, the same ad agency you should have fired long time back!).

What I really liked about this advert is that knowingly or unknowingly they have brought forward the real picture of how people look at new technology. To think of it, the kid wouldn't have seen much of the previous OS's of Windows (for the Techno Geeks - Linux and others), his mind was fresh and ready to learn.
Compare that to how a lot of your friends would have said about Windows 8, 
"It takes time to understand"
"I have no idea how to figure out Windows 8"

There are obviously a few techno dead people around who just cannot grasp a technology and that's fine, but the others saying this is the point I want to make.

Over a period of time, we have filled our minds with preconceived notions and ideas. Our minds have been industrialized to react to situations we are more likely to encounter. What this has done to us is, left us unwilling to accept different. I am not blaming anyone for anything because this is something which is common to most of us, had this not been the case technology would have taken us to unimaginable heights. Let me give a few examples, the touch phones/ Smartphone’s/tablets have all been around even before the iPhone era. Microsoft launched a tablet way back in 2002!

The thing is that today most technology companies have accepted that Mankind in general is slow to react to change and they cannot simply bombard new technologies all together on us, instead, we are given a glimpse into the future which is nothing but getting us used to the idea of doing something differently.

See the innovative technologies we see today is not very different from the imagination of a child’s mind. I remember when I was a kid (I guess this is part of getting older, isn't it?) I saw this magic slate on which we would write and it wouldn't appear unless we lifted its small lid. I never owned it but it was the first thing I would look at when we went shopping. The kids today would simply pull out their touch screen smart phones and say what the magic in that? This is one of the reasons I am hooked on to these smart phones. It is like a dream which I saw when I was younger, to use something like this. This is my Cinderella moment!

I guess the picture I am trying to draw is that we all dream of achieving our childhood dreams and imaginations. But we sometimes don’t appreciate the path en-route. Open up your minds like a kid, believe that every path will lead you to a magical world we always dream of, and you never know. Maybe there is another guy working as hard as ever out there to achieve what he thinks are his dreams but at the same time so many other dreams too! All he needs is your acceptance and a fresher perspective, we can give him that.

Three worlds- – my entry to the GetPublished contest

The Idea:

The story is an amalgamation of three stories.The central character/ narrator is the first one to board a train, wanting to get done with the journey. Through his eyes he sees the other two stories, one of which is about a group of blind students travelling and the other of a couple sitting right across him in the train. As the narrator observes the love brewing between two students from the blind school, he compares his own troubled love life which is suffering from insecurity. At the same time he also observes the love or the lack of it, between the couple sitting across him. The story grows as the journey comes close to its end. The narrator throu


This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal andHarperCollins India.