It's been a crazy, busy month. First went on a short vacation home, followed by crazy work schedules and then a lot of activity on the personal front, leaving me totally exhausted at the end of the day (or the start of the morning, depending on my shift at work) with no energy left to fire up Blogger and post something.
Today, after a long while, I have a part of my Sunday to myself and while the clothes wash themselves in the washing machine, I thought of putting to rest the concerns of readers and friends who seem have the inkling that I've abandoned this blog.
The last post on this blog was a month back. And it was about Blip.tv deleting my videos, the update is that I've (thanks to Blip.tv) managed to download all the videos and now have to upload them elsehwere (this is going to take some time given the number of videos that I had posted).
Far from giving up on this blog, I have some grandoise (by my standards) plans on my mind and am slowly working towards it. That, again, will take some time.
For starters, let me introduce you to a new experimental (not that new since it is online since August) website/blog - DOBMW.com. Essentially an abbreviation for the Directory of Official Bollywood Movie Websites.
You can know more about it in the About Us and FAQs sections.
This is still in a development stage, with me doing all the work (with a little lot of help from Google search). While I intend to keep it simple, will add some elements to make the indexing and search better.
And even before a formal announcement people have started to take notice.
Coincidentally, both Cutting the Chai and DOBMW.com were featured on AOL's Asylum India Indian Blogs We Love - Debut Edition.
About DOBMW.com, they say:
Or DOBMW for short, is a blog dedicated to achieving just one goal - being the one-stop source to all the official movie websites for upcoming Bollywood releases. Though it seems the site only began archiving in August this year, we feel it's still not too late to start; considering having official websites for marketing purposes came into practice in India only recently. It's quite a useful website if you love looking up Bollywood releases, wallpapers, filmi downloads and are just too lazy to search for them on the web.
You want another reason to bookmark this blog? They don't like Himesh Reshammiya either. (They say so in their FAQs!)
And on Cutting the
Chai:
Run by Soumyadip, a New Delhi-based media professional, soumyadipc.blogspot.com is a blog centered around the world of Indian advertising - the good and the bad. From print ads to video commercials, special categories dedicated to condom ads (he calls it "Rubbers of India"), Soumyadip highlights the creative talent (and sometimes the lack of it that) that exist in Indian advertising. From time to time, he posts his thoughts on other media and even gives away Indian railway announcements as ringtones.
Do send in the feedback.
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In a blatant act of self-promotion if I were to highlight a blurb on the side panels of this blog, then this does sound good:
"We recommend this tea" - The Sunday Indian Express
Since I don't intend to be very clamant about this, but at the same time being unable to hide my glee, I'm posting a post instead.
This blog was reviewed in today's edition of
The Sunday Indian Express and they had some good things to say and I'm pleased. I couldn't find the same posted on their website (where many links on the home page lead to dead ends), but they do have it in the epaper.
AD WISE
A lowdown on the top-ranking Indian blogs
CUTTING THE CHAI
(http://soumyadipc.blogspot.com)
It's a pitch black screen with bright yellow strips and a silhouette of the Red Fort which fails to mitigate the starkness. Visually, the site rightfully reflects its contents. For, Cutting the Chai is an explosion, a riot of thought, videos and downloads, For Soumyadip, the creator, this blog is a tribute to Indian advertising talent: from the black-and-white prints of the 1940s to the recent controversial Amul underwear ad.
Though this blog has a large repository of amusing and entertaining ads, a running commentary on each picture makes the entire experience hilarious. The author fully exploits the blog platform by providing videos of each TV ad he picks. In some cases, ringtone downloads are also added so that the reader can hear his favourite jingle every time the phone rings. This Chai has other flavours as well: movie reviews, mobile phone releases, among others. We recommend this tea.
Just a small correction, the ads featured on this blog date back not only to the 1940s
but to the 19th century.
Incidentally, Cutting the
Chai is also the featured blog at India Blogs'
list of top Indian blogs (August 25, 2007). There's some illustrious company that I share the space with. It's humbling.
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[My daytime job requires me to write. But I refrain from reproducing it here, on the blog. Primarily because they are two different entities. The me on the blog is quite different from the me in the publications I work for. But the following is different. One, I don't work for this publication. Two, I didn't write this for the greens. Three, this is because of what I do on this blog and it was just an extension on printed paper.
I would also like to thank two people. Shivam who asked me to do this and Shyama Haldar, who I believe did the subbing on the piece (adding a great deal of readability to the original info-clogged crap).
Sub-editing is a thankless job. You have to dirty your hands clearing all the rubbish and rearranging the stuff. Often ending up rewriting the entire thing, only to see the byline reading someone else's name.
A little misspelt surname can always be ignored]
Excerpted from Tehelka (Vol. 3 Issue 48. For the week of December 3-9, 2006).
"If the product is good, what do they need to advertise it for?” is the dour sort of question most of us grew up hearing from our elders at home. Regardless of the offence it gave the older generation’s socialist sensibilities, and despite the nationalisation of private entities, advertising in India continued nonetheless to thrive, just as it had done ever since the Irishman James Augustus Hickey published Hickey’s Bengal Gazette, two-and-a-quarter centuries ago. As a six-year-old pouring over Indrajal comics, there’s no way I could have known, or cared, what ads were doing to help keep the price of Phantom, Bahadur and Mandrake in reach. Today, of course, I know better. Advertising gives me free-to-air channels, helps me run a personal space on the Internet for free, provides me with instant e-communication at no explicit cost and gets me newspapers at a price so low I can get a substantial part of it repaid by the raddiwallah.
Unabashedly, I am one of those people who hordes old magazines and newspaper clippings; under my bed hibernate cartons of half-century-old printed pulp, fraying edges providing tell-tale evidence of well-fed silverfish. Flipping through them, it’s the ads that still arrest: quaint, even rudimentary by today’s glossy standards, yet their appeal not just intact but enhanced by nostalgia’s natural preservatives. Ads, after all, tell stories history tellers might not have thought worth picking up on. In the early years of Indian advertising, till the 1930s, foreign manufacturers used the same advertising here as they did in their home countries. The first Lux-loving Indian film star was featured in 1941 (Leela Chitnis). The Hinglish that purists so despise had made its incursions into advertising lingo by the last quarter of the 19th century. Colour ads entered The Times of India in 1910. Kodak’s revolutionary, “You press the button. We do the rest” inspired this chilling spin-off from G. Edward’s & Co, a Calcutta-based taxidermist: “You shoot!! We do the rest,” to the near-extinction of the national animal.
The complete text can be accessed here.
Click on the links below for a complete newspaper view (complete with select vintage ads).
Page 1: JPEG | PDF
Page 2: JPEG | PDF
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