Read this post on the website: Opening a third front in the Times of India vs Hindu ad battle

As The Times of India versus The Hindu advertising battle rages on, Cutting the Chai thought it was about time to add a new perspective. So here am I, jumping into the arena with a public service advertisement.

Share. Spread the word.

PS: I don’t subscribe to any newspapers anymore. Reasons in a different post.

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: When India became a republic: Front page of The Indian Express (January 28, 1950)

There’s a difference in knowing from a history book and learning via a historical source. Accounts from a time when an historical event happened and later day interpretations by historians have a different flavour and a blend of both is necessary.

Most of us know about January 26, 1950 (and many don’t), but for me the knowledge was mostly through history books. Reading a newspaper account of the events of India’s first Republic Day revealed many dimensions of the day that I was never aware of.

I had read and heard accounts of what the Indian communists did during the 1962 Indo-China War, but wasn’t aware that the commies were also opposed to the idea of India becoming a republic (I wasn’t a history student for long). Discovered this through a news item on violent anti-Republic Day demonstrations by the communists in different parts of the country, on the front page of the January 28, 1950 edition of The Indian Express, Madras.

Also that one BG Keshkar attempted to assassinate the Nizam of Hyderabad the same day.

But what is more captivating is the account of the Republic Day events, as described in the newspaper (January 26, 1950 was a national holiday so there was no Indian Express dated January 27, 1950 and therefore the accounts of the Republic Day were published on the January 28, 1950 edition).

INDIA PROCLAIMED SOVEREIGN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

RAJENDRA PRASAD SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

Proclamation Read Out By Retiring Governor-General

NEW DELHI, Jan. 26.
The birth of the Indian sovereign democratic Republic was proclaimed at 10-18 this morning by the country’s last Governor-General Mr. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari at the Durbar Hall at Government House in the capital and the Republic’s first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad took the oath of office to the boom of a salute of 31 guns at a most brilliant ceremony.

Until 1976, India was constitutionally described only as a “sovereign democratic Republic,” the words “socialist” and “secular” were added by the 42nd Constitutional amendment in 1976. The Government House is what we now knows as the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

The language of news journalism has changed so much over decades. Back then, when there was no 24×7 television news, the language of print was more visual than analytical. Read and you can feel being transported to an India six decades ago.

Front page of The Indian Express, Madras on January 28, 1950

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Audio recording of Swami Vivekananda’s 1893 Chicago address is fake

Today (January 12, 2012) is the 149th birth anniversary of one of India’s most revered philosophers and religious leaders. One of the landmarks of Swami Vivekananda’s life was his address at the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions at Chicago.

As far as I knew, there wasn’t any audio recording of the historic speech and therefore never even bothered to look for it. So when a colleague asked me for an embed code of the speech to accompany a story, I was surprised.

Here’s the audio file in question:

Intently, I listened to the audio and wasn’t convinced. The voice sounded very trained and the pronunciation very modern and hence a hoax. When I pointed this out, another colleagued argued that Swamiji was a great orator and in all likelihood that professional sounding voice would be his. I disagreed and began my research to verify the inauthenticity of the purported voice recording of Swami Vivekananda.

Much of the web seems to agree that voice was indeed of Swami Vivekananda and I was glad to find a few naysayers like me and came across the following article by MS Nanjundiah in the August 2010 edition of The Vedanta (embedded below), a monthly magazine published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai and started at the instance of Swami Vivekananda himself. And therefore in the matters of Swami Vivekananda that source should have some credibility.

MS Nanjundiah contacted people within the Ramakrishna Mission and also historians and libraries and archives in the US and they all were unanimous in their decision that no recording of Swami Vivekanand’s address to World Parliament of Religions ever existed.

Nanjundiah also points out that the audio recording technology available in the US in 1893 could record for only two to three minutes at the most and outside the studio recordings were not practicable. “In view of the limitations of the technology, a recording of the sessions at the Parliament of Religions in 1893 would not have happened,” Nanjundiah asserts.

He also says that it is “unfortunate” that a fake recording is being circulated on the Internet as Swami Vivekananda’s real voice and that the fake recording not only includes the first address but also includes other addresses delivered by Swamiji in Chicago and runs for several minutes.

Another clue that Nanjundiah draws our attention to is that the applause in the audio clip is only for a few seconds while Swami Vivekananda himself had said in a letter that the applause after his opening statement, “Sisters and Brothers of America…” lasted for two minutes.

In conclusion Nanjundiah brings in another technical evidence. “Recordings of that era (such as Edison cylinder recordings) when retrieved after many years have an ‘accumulated noise’ which, if removed, will distort the sound; the recording under circulation has no such noise. It cannot, therefore, be an authentic recording.” And I agree.

A little more online research led me to this page on RPG Group’s HamaraCD.com. The Vivekananda speeches being circulated online origin from this album. The credits on the page clearly mention that the voice belongs to Subir Ghosh and not Swami Vivekananda.

While the Internet is a rich resource (richer than any other) of information, it is also the richest resource of misinformation. We should always be sceptical of what we stumble upon, and quite like the Swami Vivekandana voice recording could very well be bogus.

Swami Vivekananda’s Voice Recording?
A note on voice recordings of speeches given at the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893
MS NANJUNDIAH

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Cutting the Chai Calendar 2012 (printable, A4, with Indian holidays)

Given the time I spend Googooling these days, that the 2012 – and therefore the sixth edition of – Cutting the Chai calendar is up on this blog is an achievement in itself.

As expected, the Cutting the Chai Calendar hasn’t changed much except the dates and a few touch ups. You can download the calendar in any version that suits you and take a printout in an A4 size paper or use it as a desktop wallpaper. Simple, na?

No limited edition stuff, no calendar girls you don’t want your son to ogle at and no flipping at the beginning of a new month.

This one-page wonder also includes Indian festivals and holidays (in concurrence with the official Government of India list of holidays, both gazetted and restricted, for the year 2012 List embedded below).

Have a wonderful 2012!

Preview

Download printable A4 one-page 2012 calendar with Indian festivals and holidays

2012 Calendar in PDF [2.23 MB]
2012 Calendar in PNG [361 KB]
2012 Calendar in GIF [307 KB]
2012 Calendar in JPG [866 KB]

Government of India official list of gazetted and restricted holidays in 2012

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Meet Googool, the Chaiwallah Jr.

It’s been two-weeks since the last post on Cutting the Chai, and the reason for the pause is the arrival of Googool, the new member in the Chaiwallah family. He entered this world, and our lives, on 20.11.2011 (November 20, 2011).

It's a boy! The little one with curious eyes entered our lives this afternoon. Such a feeling can't be translated into words.

November 20, 2011 6:54 PM via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@soumyadip

Soumyadip Choudhury

Those of you who are in touch with me via Twitter or Facebook would have already got the news. The experience of fatherhood was so overwhelming that I just couldn’t get myself to type a blog post.

Now that I have somewhat mastered the art of nappy changing and am making steady progress in deciphering baby cries thought it was about time to introduce the Chaiwallah Jr. to Cutting the Chai readers.

The name (rather nickname) of the apple of my eye is Googool, inspired by, but not to be confused with Google. We also pronounce it a little different (Goo-goo-l).

Hello world! I am Googool (nickname inspired by, but not to be confused with @google), born on 20.11.2011. http://t.co/nMClNY4I

November 22, 2011 1:15 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@soumyadip

Soumyadip Choudhury

Nicknames, I believe should not necessarily have a meaning. They are affectionate sounds where the only meaning is love. In fact, the Chaiwali and me had decided on the nickname for our expected child (irrespective of the baby’s gender) early in her pregnancy. With a technophile for a father, it was expected (or atleast this is what friends tell me).

Children have always fascinated me, and I’ve been a favourite uncle to my nephews and nieces. But having a child of my own is an altogether different experience. With Googool I am reliving my infancy days of which there are no traces in my memory. The smile on his lips is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Now on a milk-only diet, I hope he develops a taste for chai later in life.

The biggest challenge now is choosing an ‘official’ name for Googool. The name that will appear in his school records and other places. I have been flipping through the pages Maneka Gandhi’s Book of Hindu Names, but without much success.

The reason why we are stuck is because of four self-imposed conditions: The name that we want for our son has to be not-so-common (it will therefore also easy for him to get the username of his choice on online services); the sound should have a nice ring to it; it should have a desirable meaning; and it shouldn’t be very long (the Chaiwali insists).

If you have some suggestions (origins and the initial letter are not a condition) please help us in our quest to find a name for Googool.

Till then here are some photos that I, whenever away from him, browse through numerous times a day.

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: How to embed any document in a webpage (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more)

I had been thinking about finding an easy solution to embedding PDF files in HTML pages, but never got around looking for it until recently. Though there are services such as Scribd and Issuu but these require you to first upload the file.

Such a process is not only a bit tedious and you may also not have the rights to upload the content on to your own account. So how you display the amazing document that you found online in a PDF (or for that matter Excel sheets, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and more) on your blog or website?

Simple. Use Google Docs Viewer. Google Docs viewer is a one-stop solution for all your document embedding needs. It supports over 15 different file types (19, if we include the variations). As I haven’t noticed too may people using Google Docs Viewer to embed their documents, thought it called for a post.

All you need is the URL of the document that you wish to display embedded on a webpage. This not only makes its easy for you to embed content uploaded by others but also your own documents.

Then go to http://docs.google.com/viewer and follow the steps to generate the embed code or you can also easily construct the embed code yourself (just replace the INSERT-URL-OF-DOCUMENT-HERE text in the code below with the URL of the document you wish to embed):

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=INSERT-URL-OF-DOCUMENT-HERE&embedded=true" style="width:610px; height:800px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>

The width and the height in the embed code can be modified to suit your requirements.

The best part of Google Docs Viewer is its wide support for a wide range of popular document and other formats (and also archive file types).

Here’s a list of all that you can do on your blog or website using Google Docs Viewer.

1. Embed Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
2. Embed Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
3. Embed Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
4. Embed Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
5. Embed Apple Pages (.PAGES)
6. Embed Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
7. Embed Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
8. Embed Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
9. Embed Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
10. Embed Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
11. Embed PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
12. Embed TrueType (.TTF)
13. Embed XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
14. Embed Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

(The last item on the list can be put to other creative uses. This calls for a separate post.)

I find it a smoother and more fulfilling experience to find documents within the webpage itself instead following a link to access them.

The Google Docs Viewer includes basic navigation controls and zoom. It would have been great if it also included an embed option within the viewer itself.

Happy embedding!

Example of a PDF document embedded in a blog post using Google Docs Viewer:

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Snapshot: 11:11:11 on 11/11/11

One of the first lessons taught to us in the introduction to decimals class was the difference between face value and place value of numbers. The date time combination in the photograph below is of great face value as it is one of those rare palindromic dates (and also that this happens only one in a century), but of hardly any place value is the date is otherwise inconsequential.

This one in a century event calls for a digital record of the moment when the watch showed 11:11:11 on 11/11/11 and I was ready with my camera for the fleeting second when it was all 1s on the LCD display (well almost, as the year is 2011 and not 1111).

Behold!

A closer crop of the same image.

I am a digital watch person. And it helps in moments such as these.

Note: The presence of the Nescafé mug in the frame was only to add to the visual appeal and not a product placement

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Add-on incompatibility could be a reason behind Firefox’s decline

Google’s marketing push for its Chrome Web browser seems to be paying back rich dividends. Microsoft may have also rolled up its sleeves, but that didn’t help much to prevent Internet Explorer dip to almost 40 percent in November 2011 from the 95.5 percent market share it had back in June 2004.

The new-kid-on-the-block Google Chrome (released in September 2008) has rapidly risen to capture 25 percent of the market and will any day now overtake Firefox which is only a few decimal points higher in the Web browser market share, according to StatCounter figures.

My experience suggests that the Chrome Web browsing experience is much smoother and faster than on Firefox (or maybe my Firefox is just bloated with additional tweaks), but I have diligently stuck with Mozilla’s software because I think I know the browser inside out (as a user) and the tons of add-ons available to satisfy my quirks.

Not oblivious of the competition Mozilla has moved to a rapid release development cycle and within a span of four and a half months we have seen Firefox moving through four versions (5.0 to 8.0). And here lies the problem.

Every time I initiate the upgrade process, I am irked to find a list of much-loved rendered incompatible. I understand the responsibility to make the add-ons compatible with newer versions of the browser rests with the individual developers but Mozilla should find a way to make it easier for users to continue using the ‘incompatible’ add-ons. But the rate at which Mozilla is rolling out Firefox updates, it has become hard for developers to keep pace.

Such frequent upgrades take a toll on the add-on developers’ time and not all may have resources to spare to fix the beautiful tools that they had built when they had some time to spare.

There are ways to get around the add-on incompatibility issue and not all users will go under the hood to fix things themselves.

I suspect add-on incompatibility may deter many users from upgrading to newer versions or worse, abandon the browser for another.

StatCounter’s browser share graph shows a constant dip in Firefox’s market share since June 2011. It was in June when Firefox 5.0 came out, the first edition under Mozilla’s rapid release development cycle.

So are incompatible add-ons the reason behind the decline in Firefox’s market share? It may not be THE reason, but I believe it surely is one of the very important ones.

If Mozilla wants to ward off the rise of Google Chrome and a possible resurrection of Internet Explorer, it desperately needs to find a fix in Firefox 9.0. I hope they do. I still have not come to terms with the possibility of shifting to another Web browser and will be glad if Mozilla is able to help me evade any such eventuality.

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Bhupen Hazarika (1926-2011). North-East India loses a star

The legendary Bhupen Hazarika died of multiple organ failure in a Bombay hospital today. He was one of the few stars of North East India that the rest of the country widely accepted and applauded. For someone from that part of the country his departure hurts a little more.

This Star Cement advertising hoarding photographed about a year ago on the outskirts of Shillong features some of North East India’s singing sensations. Two legends, Bhupen Hazarika and Shillong’s very own Lou Majaw, along with Tripura’s Sourobhee Debbarma and Mizoram’s Mami Varte representing the present generation.

Our North-East.
Our Star.

Star Cement
Solid Setting

The pride of North East
Sourobhee Debbarma, Bhupen Hazarika, Mami Varte, Lou Majaw

A star is gone. Will the night be a little darker?

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury

Read this post on the website: Dear Seventymm, you suck!

A few days ago my brother went to watch Ra.One and he was not very pleased to see Seventymm.com as the merchandise partner for the film (It is a different story that neither my nephew nor my niece were very pleased with the movie either). The reason was that something that I had sent for the kids as a Durga Puja gift via Seventymm.com wasn’t yet delivered. Durga Puja is long gone, so is Diwali. What is Seventymm waiting for? For Santa Claus himself to come down the chimney on Christmas to deliver the gifts?

I had made a mention of my Seventymm woes in an earlier post in which I exposed their callous attitude towards customer information security.

I has been 38 days since I placed my order and when it didn’t get delivered within the stipulated time, I tried to call the Seventymm customer service. It took me six calls (and over an hour) to be able to reach someone who had an answer to my query. The person promised to call back but never did.

Waited for a few more days and then contacted the customer support as well as Seventymm CEO Mudit Khosla via email. A few hours later someone from Seventymm called me to say that they will deliver the items on the same day itself. I didn’t believe a word. And my belief came true when three days later a mail from Seventymm helpdesk informed me that they “will arrange for the dispatch next 2-3 working days.” It has been two weeks since the email and the package still hasn’t surfaced on the horizon.

Today, just before I started writing this post sent an angry mail to Seventymm. I have given up on the company and their shoddy customer service. Waiting for a response from them and am also thinking of dragging Seventymm to consumer court. Have done that in the past, including once with Blazeflash Courier with satisfactory results. We all should learn from our experiences. I have stopped sending my stuff via Blazeflash and will never ever do any shopping with Seventymm.

I not only need a full refund from the company (I paid in advance as it was meant to be a gift) but also damages for the trouble they caused to me and the kids who were eagerly waiting for something their Chachu sent.

Their excuse was that the items were out of stock. But their website showed it to be in stock when I ordered and in case they were unable to deliver for whatsoever reasons, should they not have atleast got in touch with the customer to inform him? Also even after an initial goof-up they continued with their false promises.

I don’t post about my experiences with customer-unfriendly companies just to get back at them, but also to let others know which services to avoid. If my experience is an indicator Seventymm is yet another #fail service.

Some may argue that once I shouldn’t base my judgement on a single incident. But the way a company handles a single nondescript customer tells a lot about its dedication in providing quality service. And this doesn’t say much for Seventymm and therefore the title of the post. If it offends the company, they asked for it. As a consumer it is well within my rights to do so.

At a time when the excellent shopping experience provided by companies such as Flipkart are slowly bringing the sceptics (such as me) to the habit of online shopping, companies such as Seventymm are doing a great disservice to the sector by their sub-standard service.

I understand that not all online shopping services are as inept and therefore this experience will not stop me from making future purchases online. But I will be very choosy about which websites to order from.

Imagine if it had been a first-timer who had to go through this experience. This would have scared him/her away from online shopping for ever, or atleast for a very long period of time.

Therefore it is not only in the interest of the consumers but also the fledgling Indian online retail sector that companies like Seventymm are taken to task.

And I must repeat again (just to rub it in), Seventymm.com, you suck!

Cutting the Chai - A blog on advertising, vintage Indian ads, tech, movies and life in general by Soumyadip Choudhury