Where the Mind is Without Fear
As I write this post on the occassion of Independence Day, the patriotic fervour has been higher than I have ever seen in my conscious years. In an age where the distance between thought to tweet is 140 characters and an entire nation can be bridged with seven degrees of WhatsApp group separation; thoughts and opinions can travel….fast.
69 long years since India became an independent nation. Time enough for an entire generation to pass. Today’s senior citizens are not those who fought during the Independence movement. We have a Prime Minister who was born in independent India. For a large part of the population today the mention of Vande Matram evokes images of the Bharat Bala produced A.R. Rahman rendered Maa Tujhe Salaam and not the original lyrics penned by
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee that used to float liltingly over the air waves every morning and perhaps still do.The symbols of Digital India’s pride are different from that of the previous generation. The binding glue of today’s India is the mobile phone. If there is one asset that is availble in a majority of the 200 million households which have 996 million mobile subscribers it is the mobile phone and with 280 million of them connected to the internet!
No other medium today can promise this kind of reach or penetration. The various messengers services have woven a web where dissemination of information happens real time as it happens.
Rural-urban, literate-illiterate, the haves- the havenots, young-old there is no chasm that is not bridged today in terms of a common platform of presence. Today, more that ever before the average Indian speaks his mind, airs his opinions and views to the world at large, he tweets, blogs, creates and forwards WhatsApp messages. Today support is not silent, anonymity is not a required condition for going anti-establishment or for that matter anti anything.
The growing confidence of being one of the faces in the crowd and not afraid of being seen as one. Being a part of an uprising or a movement much akin to the crowds that were a part of the independence movement. Only difference, they now do it with a few key punches or screen touches on their phones. In the comfort of their homes or while on the move.
The dream of using the mobile as a vehicle for upliftment, progress, betterment (pick a term of your choice) is not a distant one. The first step of embracing change has been taken and how!!
Today, more than ever before, we really can understand the meaning of Rabindranath Tagore’s immortal words and maybe, just maybe, hope to make our tryst with destiny! To close I quote the poem that inspired this post.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awakeWishing that all of us find and revel in the greatest independence there can be… THE FREE MIND!!
#Selfie Obsession: Are Brands Clicking it Right?
If you are a marketer who has clicked to read about this, chances are, you are as much as at a loss of understanding as I am with this selfie business. Or, if I were to play with words, the disconnect between selfie and business.
Yes, “buzz” and “talkability” are mandates for any brand that exists in the sociosphere. But in my book they can be considered lead indicators of a brands virulence. The real measures have and should according to yours truly always remain in the business realm.
Selfies seem to be the newest big thing on the internet these days or to put it in real terms calling it one is. The rapid proliferation of social networking if nothing else, has given tremendous fillip to the narcissistic instincts of the digital natives. If one were to observe carefully most us have started leading these digital alter-lives and as much as we hate to admit it are pre-occupied with them. Point is, people have been taking self-pics ever since they put cameras on mobile phones and for as long as social networking sites have been around. The proof lies in the fact that with over 4billion taking pictures with their mobile phones, Nokia has perhaps sold more digital cameras by a factor of A VERY BIG NUMBER than the nearest camera maker and that Facebook carries more pictures than the Picasa’s of the world.
So what started as an alleged faux pas with the Obama selfie has snowballed into an acceptable behaviour over a short span of a few months with the Ellen DeGeneres selfie at the Oscars. So much so that we now have marketing campaigns built on selfies. A departure from an era not so long ago where this would have been the digital activation angle for a larger thought.
Ellen @ Oscars Selfie 
Obama @ Mandela Funeral Selfie The concept of #Selfie is inherently linked to cosmetic brands and as mentioned earlier several brands decided to ride the selfie trend and as usual some have it together some sadly don’t. As marketers we tend to get swayed and tempted by latest trends. Under the guise of innovation we flirt with these trends with or without a defined purpose. The flavour the past couple of seasons were flash mobs countless brands spent millions of dollars behind these trends. Someone somewhere must pause to think whether having a new angle on the whole thing is sufficient to press the go button.
Here’s a compendium of campaigns that I came across. Do take a look and judge for yourselves which ones actually helped the brand grow and which ones were “Oh! We did that too”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6NVxRunn_E
Till such time that we find a new craze the #Selfie Obsession continues.
