e Magus

The angry looking Monkey-God, Hanuman, is everywhere. Till about couple of years back he was not much visible in your everyday life. In fact, today, I saw him in the car in front of me, as soon as I left my apartment complex. Then I saw couple of him at the first traffic signal, and many more on my way to the office. It made me think, why is he portrayed angrily? And more importantly why are people increasingly falling in love with his angry avatar? Hanuman was always pictured as a gentle and submissive god. The traditional image of his has a sense of calm on his face, folded hands, or flying peacefully holding a mountain in his palm. The creator of the ‘new-look’ Hanuman, Karan Acharya, said in an interview, he designed this image for his friends, and the intention was designing a Hanuman with an attitude. Looking at the volume of google searches happening for the image, the popular interpretation of ‘attitude’ has been ‘angry’. Below are few of my thoughts

Few days back, thanks to surprisingly less traffic, I checked in early at the airport. Since I had time to kill and the domestic Delhi airport has nothing great to offer in terms of shopping / killing time, I too indulged in the favorite pastime of the nation, or maybe the world, I dare say - Mobile internet (social and search) What caught my attention was the OTA (Online Travel website) banner ad that kept following me. I knew it was because, I had searched for the flight details and fare on their website a few days back, and the cookies were re-targeting me, etc. Couple of thoughts crossed my mind Why were the OTA digital marketing team wasting their ad budget following a 'dead' prospect. I mean, they do not know that I've purchased the ticket from some other place (in my case, directly from the airline website). I had put my date of travel on their website, why didn't the re-targeting ads stop a day before my date of travel. From my

Lately, everyone seems to be talking about personal branding and what it means in today's digital and marketing age. I cringe whenever I get to see any headlines or articles promoting 'Personal Branding' through social media. Every 3rd or 4th article on branding topic in my Flipboard dashboard is about personal branding - how important it is, how to capitalize, listicles on personal branding etc. Over the last 5 years google trends on personal branding shows an interesting pattern. While there is slight increase in terms of the interest over time, it has a jagged growth. The December months sees a huge dip & so also a mid-year dip around June-July. One main reason could be that year ends and mid-year periods are usually lean period for job changes, perhaps? As much as I don't like the whole idea of 'personal branding', this is a new reality and professionals needs to successfully engage with their audience with the available digital tools. While t

The problem with breaking a habit is that breaking a habit becomes the habit. No tongue twister here, it is just my observation for not writing a post/blog for a long time. My OneNote has a list of topics that I had noted down that I want to write and share, but somehow I just didn't find the right motivation to write. That for you is a long form of defining laziness ;) A 2 week business trip to Sydney at the start of the month had given me enough time to think and look around what is happening. I started to look at things with the filter of technology and digital. Here are few of my observations & trends, in no particular order Different people, same behaviour: When it comes to technology behaviour, even though it was 2 different continent, it was same everywhere. People spend most times checking their WhatsApp messages, or Facebooking through their phone. A large number of people were keen on getting their selfies taken against popular backdr