Music - the only useful aspect of Time?

Dear folks!
I wish you a great 2012.

This is the season of Carnatic music. There are more than a thousand concerts that happened in Chennai in the last few weeks alone. The Hindu has a wonderful coverage of all the happenings and thoughts on CM. I am enjoying these things without actually being in Chennai...thanks to digital access.

Read this fine article in The Hindu.

I am giving you three musical links. Each features the same main artiste, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer. The mridangam is played by the maestro Palghat Mani Iyer, but the versions differ, renderings separated by decades perhaps. The song is the swarajati masterpiece of syAmA sAstri. He is my favourite composer. This song is very difficult to sing, as it plumbs the depths of the scale and challenges the singer to bring out the beauties of Bhairavi, a typical heavy raga of Carnatic music. The composition seems to have been created for great rhythmic accompaniment. We have here the GREATEST mridangam player thus far in history, playing in very creative ways to embellish the song. (Rightclick and open the Soundcloud track in a new window).

Link- best audio

Link-average audio

Link- poor audio

Those gifted with an ear for Carnatic music would not tire of listening to these items any number of times. After all, I cannot think of anything greater than music to occupy time!

Photographing the Moon

What I learnt, photographing the moon, has been quite interesting.
You need a lens like 600 to 1000 zoom length. You need a very good SLR. You need a very steady hand, as even mounting it on a tripod and using remote exposure has many tricky issues, the reason? Getting the moon in the centre of the view is a challenge, since at that zoom, the moon is moving very fast!

The moon is a very bright object. You need to set a fast exposure, a large aperture, and work on getting the focus right. Take many shots. Only one of them will be good.
Finally, some post-processing doesn\'t harm the photo. I used my favourite, Photoshop Express.

Here is a shot just the other night, right one day after the Lunar Eclipse.
Camera Canon 5D Mk II, Tamron 28-300 VR, 2X doubler, hand-held. exposure 1/320, F6.3, Manual focus.

"Nobody wants to buy the world's cheapest car!"

Why is Nano a failure? Why do I not see the clogged Indian urban arteries displaying vast numbers of the gleaming pea-shaped wonder car?

I read the FT story which says Tata's success with Rover and everything else meant that they would defocus and demote the Nano. Some expert predicted way back that the Nano was "value-destructive".

We of course know of the expensive relocation of the plant from Bengal to Gujarat. But what really is the problem? When I asked my son, who's in the know about cars in general, he said Tata can only build trucks and not cars: their cars lack quality and style.

I got a demo of the Nano seven months ago as we were hoping to get inspired by the Nano for our own internal Super-Value medical device. The demo was pathetic, as the car had a cluncky, dirty and tacky look and feel. The salesman was so inept that he did not know how many Nanos had been sold by the dealer in Bangalore. He was also quick to tell us that one could spend more and get the A/C Premium Deluxe version for well over USD 5K and he wouldn't recommend the basic config. All in all a bad impression.

Today I read another article: Tata Nano Failure

I personally think we have a few reasons for the failure of Nano to take off.

1. Indians want cheap, but at the same time intuit that cheap=poor quality.

2. The car is an Indian middle-class aspiration. The word cheap is not in any aspiration vocabulary.

3. No one, not even Ratan Tata, told the story of the Nano as a wonder car. It was always dubbed a cheap car. Add to that Tata's image of poor quality cars, and you have a killer combo.

4. When Hyundai came in with their ugly cars a decade back, they used SRK to call it a "Tall Boy". SRK being himself of modest altitude, there was a beautiful Indian aspiration built into the theme of a "Tall Boy". All the buttons that would start off a dream for the middle-class. Today there are many small cars costing not too much more than the Nano, coming from famous brands, and having mega ad budgets.

5. Finally, in a cruel irony, Tata themselves advertise a fancier and better car all the time, by using words which pretty much say, "Why settle for less? Go for more!"

How can Tata and India promote the Nano to be the global super brand? I think they need to do some basic marketing stuff here:

1. Promote Nano as the SMART way to drive, not a cheap car.

2. Make it high quality.

3. Avoid feature creep and price upward creep... keep it as a DISTINCT 2.5K$ car.

4. Rope in some smart scientists and techies to advertise.... why it is more intelligent to drive the home-grown Nano and not some far import of technology. which leads to

5. Appeal to the national pride in the famous small car Nano, born in India.