Regular readers of the blog would recall that I started hosting Saturday Night Movie Marathons last month in the hope that they will become an interesting social context to meet new people.
What happens in the movie marathons? Well, basically, we meet up on a Saturday night at someone’s place and watch four back-to-back movies, from dinner to brunch.
However, this week’s Saturday Night Movie Marathon has a twist two twists. The first twist is that it starts at three in the afternoon, and the second twist is that it is followed by a house party.
I first heard about Patricia Martin and her book RenGen (Renaissance Generation) while I was listening to Susan Bratton’s Dishy Mix, one of my favorite podcasts.
The basic premise of RenGen is that we are about to see a cultural movement that is similar in scope and scale to the Renaissance. This movement will be spearheaded by a sophisticated and demanding group of ‘cultural consumers’ who are expressing themselves creatively and organizing themselves into communities using the powerful tools provided by social media. To succeed in this context, brands will need to transform big ideas into reality (idea brands), build compassionate relationships (compassion brands), provide the tools to remove anxiety (anxiety brands), fuse opposites into a holistic collage and provide authentic experiences.
Filed in Insights, Owning vs. Experiencing, Research
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Tagged Authenticity, Creative Class, Cultural Consumer, Dishy Mix, LitLamp Communications Group, New Rich, Patricia Martin, Personalization, Renaissance Generation, RenGen, Richard Florida, Simplicity, Social Media, Susan Bratton, Timothy ferris
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
I spent last Sunday at Crossword book store in Kemps Corner, reading Timothy Ferris’s ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’.
Given Tim’s ‘live it up’ image, I expected it to be a book about having more; instead, it turned out to be a book about finding happiness in having less.
The basic premise of the book is that we have a choice between work and leisure. An income of $100000 a year means very different things when it requires a 60 hour work week and a 40 hour work week. At more than 60 hours a week, typical of Asia and America, it inevitably results in stress-related health disorders. At less than 40 hours a week, typical of Europe, it results in a happy work-life balance. At 4 hours a week, typical of Tim, it means nirvana.
When you can’t buy things, you learn to ask for things, and when you ask for things, you learn something about yourself and others.
Throughout last week, I have been asking my friends to make me aloo parathas.
It started last Sunday, when Kanishka and Avantika came over for lunch. My cooking range is limited to pasta and pulao so, if you eat at my place regularly, you might find the menu a little repetitive. Knowing that, I had made two different types of pasta — farfalle, bell peppers and spring onions in Mexican salsa sauce and casarecce and baby corn in cheese and wine sauce — and added mushrooms on toast as a side dish. However, I wasn’t really surprised when, five minutes into lunch, Avantika took a break from picking at her food and asked me —
Filed in Conversations, Food Cravings, Learning to Ask, Zero Dollar Dating
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Tagged Aloo Paratha, Avantika, Colaba, Friends, Gift, Gifting, Kala Ghoda, Kanishka, Merlot, Pasta
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I haven’t watched TV or read newspapers or magazines for more than a year now, with one exception — twice a month, I stop by at the roadside magazine stall opposite my house and hand over thirty rupees for a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
However, even though I have been buying the magazine for almost two years now, I only started to think of it as a necessity when I started my experiment.
Filed in Free Culture, Popular Culture
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Tagged A Good Marriage, Alliance Francaise, American Center, Crossword, Documentary, Eric Rohmer, Film, Helke Sander, Liberators and Liberties, Malin Suri, Master Class on Film, Max Mueller Bhavan, Michael Moore, Mumbai, My Night at Maud's, National Center for Performing Arts, NCPA, Patrick French, Pauline at the Beach, Preuves a l'appui, Screening, Shekhar Kapur, Sicko, Sudhir Mishra, The All Round Reduced Personality - Redupers, The Subjective Factor, The Trouble With Love, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V, Time Out, Time Out Mumbai
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