bangalore

Marketing Minds: The Innovation Seminar

September 23, 2007 General Photos

I am back after attending the ‘Tata Marketing Minds 2007’ seminar which explored the subject of Innovation quite deeply. The 2 day seminar was held on the outskirts of Bangalore city, at a place called the Angsana Resort and Spa — a scenic and serene piece of land suited for knowledge building.

The event which was organized by Titan Industries, was kicked-off with a wonderful session by R Gopalakrishnan (ED – TataSons) who spoke about innovation and the history of the Tatas, quoting generously from the book ‘The Creation of Wealth’ by R M Lala. Eminent personalities from various industry domains spoke from branding and marketing to consumer goods and cyberspace innovations, and tried to touch upon the art of innovating ideas. Some of the speakers included Santosh Desai (Futurebrands), Richa Arora (Head of Marketing, Britannia), Alok Kejriwal (CEO, Contests2Win.com), R. Balki (Adman and director of the film Cheeni Mum), Vikram Kaushik (MD, TataSky Ltd.), C Venkataraman (COO, Titan Jewellery Division – Tanishq), Sashi Sinha (Lodestar), Bhaskar Bhatt (MD, Titan Industries) and more. For me personally it was scintillating to see Piyush Pandey (Chairman, O&M India) from close quarters; sort of a dream come true for me. I have idolised him since my art school days when his work for Fevicol was quite well-known and had won many awards.

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The Big Bang(alore)

December 8, 2005 General

Amazingly I have started enjoying my travels to the various parts of the country now. Last week it was Delhi and today I came back from a quick tour of Bangalore – The IT City in the south. The only choice that we didn’t have was in staying overnight at this place.

With the travelling too much one has become critical about airline services. Since Kingfisher Airlines is set as a benchmark for services, all of them are compared ruthlessly with it. Unfortunately then, I would say, we had a booking with Indian Airlines (IA). Least to say the hostesses were far from presentable baring just one in the early morning flight schedule. Just one of them looked keen in serving the passengers, the rest looked like they were doing a routine job. The food wasn’t too good and there was no inflight entertainment provided like Kingfisher and I must say that the private airlines are taking away all the laurels from this 50 year old airline. OK I know I am asking far more from IA but it has to survive in this stiff competition.

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A Step Backward

October 24, 2005 Happenings

N R Narayan MurthyI guess you must be all aware of Narayan Murthy’s resignation as chairman from the Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL). Narayan Murthy is the Chief Mentor of Infosys. This follows after Deve Goda, the ex-prime minister of India accused him of doing nothing in his tenure. Gowda has been accused of delaying some of Bangalore’s key infrastructure projects including the prestigious Mysore-Bangalore expressway. But going public against Narayan Murthy in the media is a bit too much. The whole country knows what he stands for.

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Good Luck Shyam

July 10, 2005 General

Shyam ShriramI met Shyam from the SurfUnion gang for the IAF Aeroshow at Mumbai. Before that he had already carved a name for himself by posting some awesome sketches from his portfolio. The guys at SurfUnion instantly developed a liking for this “great” illustrator since they hadn’t seen anything like this before. Shyam was working for CHIP magazine at that point of time. If you really want to know who shyam is then you should see some of his work here and here. And this work is his self portrait which he revealed today that he used only a mirror (to see himself) and a mouse with Adobe Illustrator (gulp!). Also you can find him at his GFXArtist page where he has a good fan-following.

He’s now off to IDG at Bangalore which publishes such magazines like MacWorld, PC World, etc on a global platform. Since this was going to be his last weekend in Mumbai I decided to spend some time with him. Actually he’s inspired me a lot to take up illustration since I do some caricatures and hence we had decided to buy the WACOM Intuos for myself from Andheri but it could not happen. Later we went to Cafe Coffee Day at Carter Road and then loitered around the promenade there itself. The evening was supposed to be over by 6:00pm but we went for a dinner at Golden Orchid & rounded it off with a Sundae Treat at Cream Center.

It was a great evening no doubt where we discussed, gossiped, shared jokes, & whatever else that means fun :-) Good Luck Shyambhau. I will see you at Bangalore someday…definitely :-)