What do you think?

I just finished watching an episode from British series "Coupling". The episode revolved about the misery of a poor guy whose fiancée asked him for his opinion about which furniture to buy. The poor guy spent the entire week (of course he was extremely lucky to get a week) relentlessly trying to form his opinion about the few selections his fiancée had already made. But all he could do in a week is to form just one opinion about the furniture: men can’t have an opinion about sofas, cushions, curtains or ladies’ dresses.

This question “What do you think?” is not going to bother you only when you are buying furniture for your house. This is like one ubiquitous question when you are into a relationship. Fellas you know this situation.You and your partner are out for shopping. She is all lost into pool of dresses while you are wondering “Gosh I wish I could watch this football match at a pub with my friends. What would be the score by now? Its 30 minutes into the game. May be Manchester United is leading 1-0”

Just then the question comes and shakes your conscious into life. After a couple of hours of filtering & screening, two lucky garments made it to the final list just to get you into more trouble. “Which one is better?” Of course you have absolutely no clue which one to chose? You try to be politically smart by saying “Honey you look gorgeous in both of these. Why don’t you buy both??” What the hell!!! You just burnt a big hole in your pocket.

You just made the blunder of not carefully selecting your words. What if you say something like this “Honey I think this one would look much better on a slimmer figure”. You are screwed up big time.

Even if you are lucky one to give your opinion over just one dress, she will make it tough for you by maneuvering her tone in such way which suggests she think that designer designed this dress with me only in his mind. You simply can’t say that this dress is not pretty.

And by the way do you think that your opinion matters? Is she going to change her preference if you suggest that none of this is a good buy? You realize your mistake instantaneously and try to appease her by choosing the third one which in all probability will make you shell out even more bucks.

Moral of the story: Chose your words carefully before you pass on your judgment. Take your time to make your all your calculations. Oh by the way make sure the pause doesn’t seem to be eternal one. You have to be fast..really fast.

What you got to share?

Masand's (a well known critic) review of the movie “Kaminey” said its “imaginative & original”. And the same day a spam on IP (intranet messenger we use to multicast the masala khabars) said “ITCOMM…plz download Kaminey…” And the very next day our beloved & dedicated ITCOMMERS made it available to the Zamorin. (Our shared server that offers us virtually everything that we need on our laptops.)

Apart from Microsoft windows, I can’t recall any software for which I had to pay to use it. I could have avoided that too if that wasn’t forced on to us as bundled OS with our laptop. After all why would I or anyone for that matter pay for something that can be got without shelling a single penny out of your pocket?

I also added the “Kaminey” to my movies collection and shared the same in my Zamorin account. After all I had to ensure that if somebody strays at my account, he/she says “the guy has shared some nice stuff…” Just like any other indicator, this unveils a lot of information about person’s likings or disliking. Apparently the one with collection of sad songs is a "Devdas". Even the size does matter. I’ll dig into a person’s collection for latest additions if I see his shared data counting to hundreds of Gigabytes. Strangely this seems to work even when we use our virtual identities such as “Neo” Or “Joker” or “Ripper” which itself can have N number of reasons why we do so. May be it’s an another gimmick to invite surfers. Don’t ask me why I chose “Abracadabra”. I have got my reasons to do that.

There has been ever going debate whether sharing & downloading data fr om peer to peer networks is stealing or not. A whopping 78% of respondents said they don’t think that they are stealing while they are downloading. I wasn’t one of the respondents otherwise this number would have further increased, increment being miniscule though. I am not going to put forward my point if it is stealing or not but one thing that I think worth mentioning is the impact on industry.

One obvious effect would be reduced sales of copyrighted materials. But a counter argument to this can be that since people anticipate file sharing, there can be increase in sales too. Say a group of teenagers buy a copy of latest videogame and share with each other later on. But the one industry that has been riding high on the wave due to piracy is portable music players industry & mobile phones. As the price for music plummeted, demand for portable players soared with Apple gaining the maximum out of it. Microsoft tried to come up with a portable player called Zune which used DRMs to put a check on piracy. You need to have –ve IQ to be unable to guess that it was a big flop.

May be there will be some technological advances to prevent the piracy, but I guess there will always be smarter people to find a loophole in that. As I finish this humble attempt of mine to express my thoughts, download status says that latest episode of Entourage has been downloaded. Time to say Adios!!

Time for your puppies to get hi-tech

A flea bitten dog is going to fly back to her home. She’ll be reunited with her owners after nine years after she disappeared. Yeah this is one of the many happy ending stories where a lost dog was tracked down to its owners because it was micro-chipped! The owners had micro-chipped Muffy nine years back. When RSPCA Melbourne checked the microchip ID of the dog sleeping on tattered piece of cardboard with the database, they traced the owners back to Brisbane. So sweet na!! (A little girly expression commonly used by XX-es would be “Choo Chweet”. Pardon me I’m being bogged down by Kyle-XY fever these days).

The Animal Welfare Board of India has made it mandatory for the pet owners to get their pets registered. But the tag carried by the pets doesn’t seem to fare well when it comes to tracking down your lost puppy. And here are the opportunistic marketers with another product: Microchip for the puppies. And why wouldn’t they? There are people who will buy just anything for their pets. I need not to talk about any other place; my place is good enough to accentuate my belief. Although Cheeku (yeah that’s my pet’s name) has not been lucky enough to enjoy such high tech products, but for sure he has got larger assortment of soaps & shampoos than all of us XY-es (except if you are a metro sexual shelling out half of your salary on cosmetics).

Pets so easily get gelled with your family. They learn things as the babies do, they like things that we like (atleast Cheeku loves “Rajma Chawal” & corn). Probably they are no more pets for a family; they are members, family members. I reckon that explains why my sister ties a Rakhi to Cheeku every Rakshabandhan.

No wonder all the usual consumer behavior fundas do seem to fit in well when we consider shopping for pets. It’s much very similar to a mom buying the products for the babies. “Which one should I buy? There are all sorts of products for all sorts of shapes n sizes; Pomeranians, poodle, dash hounds, Labradors. This neck-collar will look nice on him”. Not to forget the peer pressure also coming into play: how can my neighbor’s dog has a better neck-collar than my dog? What will he think when he finds out that other dog has got better jacket than him? Poor dog, all he might be interested in is playing with the other dogs or wooing the cutest female dog in the society. This is even more apparent whenever I have visited veterinary hospital to get Cheeku Vaccinated. Everybody there seems to be claiming that my dog is the smartest by making him obey the orders: Tommy sit, Tommy come here, Tommy Shake hand (Remember har kutte ka naam tommy nahin hota. Read it as "not every dog is named Tommy". So never try this to a dog in owner’s absence).

Now Government has been pushing unique citizen ID project, it’s just a matter of time when your puppies will get be roaming here & there with microchips embedded in their body. It seems to be a rational step which might help us tackling the rabies which leads to 30,000 deaths in India every year, highest across the globe.