I’m very thrilled to report that AgentsOfIshq has run my piece on surviving dark skin prejudice and reclaiming my pride. I called the piece ‘Golden Girl’ but they changed it to ‘You Should Wear Maroon For Your Skin’ And Other Advice I’ve Ignored As A Non-Fair Woman’ which also works,…
The last time I wrote here, I was on the other side of a birthday. And it just struck me that I’m now in the last leg of The Thirty Diaries. Appropriately, I’ve had an article published on Arre titled ‘My Tinder Bio: Not Here To Mother 20-Somethings‘. My overall…
I’ve had a rather nice September after the rough times before that. Looks like my health diagnosis was a step in the right direction. I took a break from the Open Mic scene for a month which is why there haven’t been too many poetry videos. But if you saw…
*This is a sponsored post. Two of my friends got married this week. I attended a ceremony that lasted over 6 hours, included a pheras-around-fire ritual, several small in-family practices, a wedding dinner and reception. And this was actually an Indian Wedding Lite. I didn’t have much time to dress…
Content Marketing, yet another buzzword added to the business lexicon. Let’s not go the jargon way. Let’s just talk. Every human interaction is a conversation of a sort. Negotiations are conversations. Transactions are conversations. Information exchange is a conversation. Relationships are a series of evolving and shifting conversations. The power…
Annkur Agarwal (of OnlyGizmos fame) has a new venture. PriceBaba is your one-stop shop for price comparisons. Currently they’re addressing the mobile phone market in Mumbai but there might be bigger plans in the pipeline. So if you’re phone shopping, don’t bother scheduling long hours trekking between shops to check…
Social Media signals a brave, new world of communication and interaction. Correspondingly the content on it pushes the boundaries of power, of ownership, of usage and of consumption. In my latest Social Samosa article, I take a look at what this means. “Think of content on traditional media as a…
The flipside of the Information Age is how it has made the broadcasting of personal information a casual thing.
The social media was all abuzz last month with Facebook taking over Instagram. I took a hard look at this uber-popular image sharing app. I’m still wondering why it got so popular. Here’s my Instagram story on Social Samosa. “The word on the street associates Facebook’s interest in Instagram with…
If you don’t recognize the reference to the ‘Shit XYZ say about ABC’, you’ve probably not been online this year. I loved the concept of this viral because it picked out those silly things that people say & think but don’t actually realize that they believe. I’m using that reference…
Those of you who’ve been around with me and my blogs for awhile will understand my allegiance to, even fascination with anonymous bloggers, having been one myself. One of my delightful online associations is the irrepressible Fake Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. I, like all his other readers don’t know his real identity….
There’s plenty of talk about marketing various products and services through social media. I thought Kiran Manral did something interesting, generating interest for her debut novel, ‘The Reluctant Detective’. Besides the obvious tweeting about it, she also engaged with readers, other writers and organized a number of different events that…
I’ve been spending nearly an hour of my online time every day on Pinterest. In addition to Pinterest’s own features, this exercise of joining and building a usage profile on a new social network/service is interesting too. For the unpinned, Pinterest is an image curation service. And unlike older image…
I had a chance to meet Gul Panag last month. This former Ms.India-turned-Bollywood actress is also one of the better known faces of Twitter celebritydom in India. In person, she turned out to be a no-nonsense, intelligent and fun person to talk to. Over coffee we discussed her varied career…
What do Siddharth Mallya and Arindam Chaudhuri have in common? If Ayesha Takia met Rashmi Bansal, what might they talk about? Let’s add Dhaval Valia to the melee. Any clues? This month, I take a look at the grittier, seamier side of social conversations – public shaming as a social…
Earlier in the month, I began writing for Social Samosa. My brief was to recap the major events in social networking over the past few years in India. Given how vast this is, I broke it up into two parts. I started with an article titled, ‘Social Networking: How Communities…
Kapil Sibal is this week’s hot topic on the Twitterverse. Catch my thoughts on what’s making him news, at Social Samosa. I’m picking a few titbits from the article. Read the full story at Social Samosa and comment! ‘Free to speak except if it hurts somebody else’ is a misnomer….
December opens in one of my favorite ways – a new writing project! 🙂 I’ve been an active member of the online community from 1996 and the social sub-community that emerged in the early years of the last decade. Now I get to lay down my observations in a commentary…
I’ve written an article for this month’s (July 2011) issue of Marie Claire India – ‘The Careerist’ section. The story, ‘The Online Advantage‘ looks at how a professional can use the online social networks to improve their prospects, present themselves better, leverage the value of networking and in general, carve…
My second post for FriendsOfBooks is up! This time I explore a genre that has hit popular fancy in the recent years, on account of blockbuster movies based on classic books. Think dragons, think talking trees, think wizards, I’m talking about Fantasy. I’m looking at my bookshelf and the ten…
