confused of calcutta

I  must have been 15 or so when I first heard Noel Coward speak the lines “In Bengal, to move at all is seldom ever done” in a recitation of Mad Dogs and Englishmen; it was at a quiz, probably at the Dalhousie Institute (then regularly referred to as the DI), probably compered by Neil [...]

[Read more →]

One of my favourite parodies is  Ogden Nash’s Song Of the Open Road, a take on Joyce Kilmer’s Trees:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I shall not see a tree at all. 
Amazingly, he wrote this in 1933. Even more amazingly, it is still copyright protected, thirty [...]

[Read more →]

Everything changes. Now one of the changes that has intrigued me this past decade is in the nature of the technology adoption curve. Simply put, for most of my life, I was used to a particular adoption curve. In order to experiment with emerging technologies, you had to be 28-40, a high-achieving professional, working for [...]

[Read more →]

Paul Farnsworth, who works with me, told me about the existence of something like this video, where someone has modelled US air traffic. Fascinating. There’s something about traffic flows I really love, something that helps me understand more about what’s happening in a given space. Inflows and outflows, frequency and pattern, time and space dimensions. [...]

[Read more →]

Some time ago I wrote a few posts about organisations and platforms, and considered the possibility of each firm becoming an open multisided platform. You can find the posts here, here and here.
Over the last month or so, I’ve landed up spending far too much time at airports, partially as a result of a complex [...]

[Read more →]

My partially-self-imposed silence has meant that I’ve got a long list of things I’ve wanted to blog about, a state that Sean has often claimed he’s in.  And one of the things I wanted to bring to your attention was Cory Doctorow’s 30 minute session being an Author@Google.  Here’s the link; I’ve also put it [...]

[Read more →]

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet of late. In terms of posts per day, this is the quietest month I’ve had since I started blogging. Now when you consider the fact that I had a major heart attack last December and still managed to blog pretty regularly, the emptiness of June 2007 [...]

[Read more →]

Being Indian, and having lived there for half my life, I’m used to people chatting for a while before getting down to business, as it were.
Relationships first. Then conversations as a result of relationships. And finally, only where necessary, transactions.
Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. (Doc has a Nigerian pastor story that shows how universal this structure [...]

[Read more →]