Saturday, April 03, 2010

JW Marriott Hotel, Quito (Ecuador)

Make each moment you spend at Quito even more special, with your stay at the JW Marriott, which offers amenities as beautiful as the vitality and charm of the city. Get the perfect holiday tan in the hotel’s tropical gardens... Zumay gym and Spa promise a whole new experience of tranquillity and total wellness. Indulge in some of the finest cuisines at the hotel’s restaurant or splash into the resort style pool. The hotel offers recreational activities like golf, biking, table tennis and volley ball. With all this and more, no wonder the hotel has been ranked as the numero uno in Ecuador by Frommers and Tripadvisor.

The view: Situated in the heart of the city, from the hotel terrace, one is greeted with a panoramic view of the entire city. Each room of the hotel offers a spectacular view of the mountain peaks and the famous Cotopaxi Volcano.

Archi Type: The hotel welcomes one with a huge atrium lobby, which is the hotel’s hallmark. The rooms have heavy wooden doors and are decked with wooden furniture and pastel-coloured spreads, a combination that never ceases to impress.

Bon apétit: Luxurious living and fine dining find common ground as one indulges in the delicacies at the hotels restaurants. The various in-house restaurants serve innovative Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Mediterranean, Japanese and international cuisines.

Around the corner: Thanks to its centralised location, the hotel offers a perfect base for visitors to explore the rich heritage of the colonial city. The hotel is located just a short walk away from the old city of Quito, and the famous craft market Otavalo is only a two-hour drive from the hotel.

Under the carpet: Language creates a barrier while communicating with some of the hotel staff. The suites are thin-walled and noises from the adjoining rooms can be a bit of a bother.

In essence: Luxurious accommodations, top-notch services, magnificent views, proximity to tourist destinations and state-of-the-art facilities are some of the features that make JW Marriott one of the most sought-after addresses in Quito.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Friday, April 02, 2010

Meet the break-up agent!

If the romance is long over and you’re struggling to decide how to break-up, here’s someone who’ll do the dirty work for you!

Breaking up with your partner is hard, we know that. The thought of a break-up is not on one’s mind when getting into a relationship (at least not for most of us). Even the term ‘break-up’ can send a shiver down our spine. But what else can one do when one realises that the girl or guy they’re seeing is great, but you two just don’t click? Or worse, you realise the person you are dating is nothing but a loser and on second thoughts you wouldn’t even wish to see your enemy with him/her! How does one tell him that it is just not meant to be, without having to go through the pain of confrontation and the resultant drama and heartache! Well, the days of drama are behind us and now all one has to do is to pay a modest sum and the dirty work would be done by an expert!

Bernd Dressler, a businessman in Germany, started the project ‘Separation Agency’ in 2006 after he stumbled upon this idea on eBay. His job description is basically that if someone wants to break-up and doesn’t have the guts to do it themselves, then all they need to do is get in touch with a break-up artist who would end the relationship on your behalf. In short, it’s the work that actress Britney Brooks does in the film “The Break-Up Artist”.

“I have four packages for the service. The first service is ‘phone call’ in which they remain friends and it is very friendly. The second is a phone call again but it is more direct and that there will be no contact any more. The third is to write a letter, but this service is not booked very often. The fourth option is a personal visit. The normal phone call is around 29.95 Euros and the personal visit costs 65 Euros. The most common service is a phone call for ‘let’s just be friends,’” reveals Dressler.

Agreed, it is tough to break-up and confront your partner, but why involve a third party? “People have a problem because nobody knows what to do. We, as a separation agency, think that we only have a task of sending a message from one person to the other.

It might be interesting to know that two-thirds of my clients are women. Most people are between the age group of 18 to 30s. The common reaction from the ex-partner is of astonishment and that they don’t want to believe this. I always ask my clients to give me three reasons for breaking up. I give these reasons to the ex-partner and most often they agree to the reasons and the problems that are mentioned. I do not console them as the separation agency is only a ‘talking letterman’. My job ends when I bring the message to the ex-partner,” adds Dressler.

Well, there are lot of other (read cheaper) ways to break-up, such as by sending e-cards or by sending poems on break-up. People in unhappy relationships can also seek out free break-up advice online, or peruse through various reasons to break-up!

Considering that shows like “Emotional Attyachaar” on UTV Bindass are already showing how Indian relationships are getting messier, we think the day is not far when this kind of service will find a market among the Indians too. Plenty of soft-hearted Indians would be glad to have someone else do the dirty work. So, don’t be surprised if you hear of a break-up.in in the near future!
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Thursday, April 01, 2010

“The sport needs to be marketed”

What other sports can learn from Indian Cricket, and replicate it!

We need about a billion rupees atleast. Yes sure you need a few rupees for infrastructure, a few for nurturing young talent, a few to start academies. But the real serious buck needs to go elsewhere.

Sure, the hardcore sports buff will tell you that winning matters, and as far as cricket is concerned, it was India’s win in the 1983 Prudential World Cup that started the whole revolution in the first place and put cricket firmly on the money map. Over the years, it is the winning ways of team India that has kept it on the radar of fans and sponsors alike, but lets not forget that they have had their fair share of losses as well. So that cannot be the answer. Even when the Indian cricket team had one of its lowest ever points, the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies, sponsors didn’t walk away. So what is the answer? The billion rupees need to be sunk into marketing other sports to compete with cricket. Marketed and dressed up in a way that has the sex appeal of cricket. Sex sells is one of the basic principles of advertising, but it is also a universal truth. Would even the most hardcore hockey loyalist have a poster of Dhanraj Pillay on his wall? What about Koneru Humpy or Vishy Anand for chess lovers? In truth, the sport and sportspersons need to be marketed like any product. Sport is a product. It is big business. And it is a competitive business. One that is happening with cricket at the moment.

Lets have a look at some non cricketers (male and female) who have become icons recently. You will find that 90% of them have some sort of sex appeal. Look at what Vijender has done for the image of boxing and Olympic Sports (how come we remember him more than say Sushil Kumar who also won an Olympic medal?), Sania Mirza has done for tennis, or even Lee and Hesh. Similarly Saina Nehwal for badminton (imagine if Deepika Padukone followed her Dad’s footsteps!). Look at the new generation of chess in Tania Sachdeva. Jyoti Randhawa in golf (a complete package with sizzling wife Chitrangada). Again, someone who has achieved so much but still does not inject glamour, thanks to his personality is ace shooter and Olympic Gold Medalist Abhinav Bindra. Likewise with someone like Anju Bobby George, who has all the makings of glamour but chooses to downplay it. Yes, we need to start winning in sports other than cricket, but India needs more Sainas, more Sanias, more Tanias and more Vijenders to emerge in alternate sports for them to be on par with cricket.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Life Cinema aur Dibakar

With two National Awards in his kitty, it is no wonder Shyam Benegal sees him as a worthy successor. His kind of movies fit the art meets avant-garde meets say-it-hard genre. Dibakar Banerjee says it as it is to Aakriti Bhardwaj

You’ve made movies that appealed to families in the past. But what inspired you to make a movie which could scandalise many?
I did not make family movies. I simply made movies that I wanted to make. It just turned out that my first film was about the triumph of a middle-class family and so the middle-class families all over the country enjoyed it. My second film was about a thief and it was glorifying the thief and his trade. Not only was he stealing, in some ways he was exposing the hypocrisy of the middle-class. “Oye Lucky...” is actually an anti-middle-class film. I know a lot of the audience who had gone to the cinema halls expecting “Khosla...” part-two were slightly taken aback. They didn’t expect “..Lucky” to be the film it was. I don’t think I can claim the happy claim of a family-oriented filmmaker. It’s a film about scandal. But we can get into a very subjective discussion of what is scandalising to you and what is scandalising to me. Something, which describes something as scandalising or shocking is so subjective that beyond a point you really can’t put your finger to it as to whether it is or not. I’m making a film about certain issues which are rampant and prevalent around us in our real life and if those issues are around then a film about the issues can be around. The audience for this film will be the same audience that have enjoyed the earlier two films except that it is an adult film so it is not for kids anymore. For some reason, “Oye Lucky...” was a film that appealed to the kids a lot and I have no idea why. But this film is for adults and a film for those audiences who like new themes, new treatments, and new ways of telling a story. In that respect, it is a film for those who like the new and would like a change from the old. That ways it takes a step forward but I don’t know if my earlier films were made for the family and this one is not. I wouldn’t like to categorise it like that.

How did filmmaking happen? Did your advertising background help you with the kind of films you make?
I was always interested in filmmaking as a child and was an avid film buff. Then, in NID, I was the member of the film club and my exposure and interest in films went up really high. I was exposed to different kinds of cinema. By that time I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a filmmaker. Then I joined advertising and specifically the ad filmmaking side of advertising which kind of worked for me as a training ground. Advertising films actually gave me the practice of how to shoot a scene, how to perform with actors, how to direct actors, how to direct complex physical scenes, to get my hands around the nitty-gritty... That’s what advertising did. Moreover, it helped me exercise my brain continuously because being able to tell a story in 30 seconds is also a very interesting skill. Then I realised when I made my first film “Khosla Ka Ghosla” the crosspollination of the genres had a very salutatory effect on my ad films. My ad film quality went up and the way I was making my films went up. So I find it a mutually nourishing experience.

Shyam Benegal, in an interview with us, had taken your name when asked about who in the current generation had taken after him. What do you have to say to that?
He said that?! I’m very proud of that. I’m proud because when I was a kid watching all kinds of films on Doordarshan, I was most moved by films like “Manthan”. I was eight or nine-years-old when I saw “Manthan”. Also films like “Kalyug” and “Junoon”; I have never seen 1857 revolt brought up like that. Benegal’s “Bhumika”, then Govind Nihalani’s “Aakrosh”, “Tamas”, Ketan Mehta’s “Holi”, “Mirch Masala” and “Bhavni Bhavai”… these are the films that I remember as a kid impacting me through their visuals, images, performances, music. I still remember Naseeruddin Shah’s dialogues from “Manthan” ‘Yeh Sothi humaari hai, sothi humaari hai’, he was talking about the milk problem in the society. I remember Amrish Puri’s dialogues ‘Young man, I made the economy of the country’. So like people remember dialogues from “Sholay”, I remember dialogues from these films. For me, these films are seminal growing up experiences. When the maker of that film says that I am doing something commendable, that’s the biggest reward actually.
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The true story of rising prices

Vikas Kumar and Abhishek Kumar find out an unholy nexus of mandi traders, commission agents and retailers at work

Indian’s billion-plus people are wondering if prices of essential food items will fall. Though neoclassical economics seek to explain the rising prices in terms of rise in demand and fall in supply, it is not reason enough for people like Rageshwari, a receptionist in a small private firm with monthly take home salary of Rs 10,000. She had gone to the local bazaar to find one kg of cauliflower selling at Rs 22. Thousands of commoners are affected, they feel helpless.

Team TSI went on an early morning fact-finding mission in the wholesale mandis of Delhi. Cauliflower was selling at the rate of Rs four to six a kg there. In retail, the same thing was selling at Rs 20 to 25 per kg. The story was pretty much the same for potato, onion and coriander.

A walk in Azadpur Mandi in Delhi, one of the biggest wholesale markets of fruits and vegetables, is not the most enchanting experience but it opens one’s eyes. Here one comes face to face with reality, the murky world of arhatias, commission agents and traders who are ready to take hapless farmers for a ride. No market theory can explain this phenomenon.

Commission agents and traders lead the pack but the local sabziwallah has joined the bandwagon too. Believe it or not, in certain categories of vegetables, their margin of profit has touched 300-400 per cent.

Wholesale prices have dropped to a fraction of what they were at the beginning of the year, but there is hardly any decline in retail prices. You might find it difficult to digest but you are ending up paying three to four times the mandi price.

Wholesale rates at present are actually at the lowest as compared to the past few months due to continuous downward trend since December 2009 and there is reportedly no shortage of any vegetable. Devinder Sharma, noted agriculture expert, says, “I don’t think food inflation will ebb after April of this year. In the days to come, we will first see the impact on prices of the Budget decision to hike duties on fuel. In the past few days, the price of 500 gram of curd in Mother Dairy has gone up by Rs two and that of cheese by Rs four.”

Some believe that the April harvest would impact the price of food items. The pressure on inflation will ease after the new crop flows into the markets. But those who believe in this are actually living in the fool’s paradise. Sharma explains why this is not feasible,“Fertiliser manufacturers have promised not to raise the price of other fertilisers besides urea in Kharif 2010, but once the monsoon season is over, they will be a given free hand in deciding the prices. That is where the fertiliser manufacturers are waiting to make a killing. This will have a cascading effect on food prices...”
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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Friday, March 26, 2010

Some rights, many wrongs

It is perhaps a sign of the times that we see movie titles as banal as “Right Yaaa Wrong”. So, you have a story about a cop (Sunny Deol) who is paralysed in the lower body after an encounter while his wife (Isha Koppikar) is involved in a secret affair with his stepbrother. And with his paralysis forcing him out of action, he grapples with the meaning of life. He wants to die instead of leading his life as a paraplegic and asks his wife and stepbrother to grant that wish. Things get weirder as you find that Irrfan Khan is playing a fellow straight shooting officer who inevitable has a run in with Deol, suspecting he’s hatching a plan to kill his wife.

The film offers an interesting story, with ample room for ethical dilemmas (Right or wrong? You decide! Get it?) but honestly expecting Sunny Deol and a bunch of small time actors (other than Khan) to deliver top notch stuff as well as director Neerraj Pathak to guide the intrigue was setting your expectations unfairly high. To the film’s credit, the plot still holds some intrigue, and some 80s style twists in the tale will amuse, if not thoroughly thrill and overwhelm you. But the rest of the elements are just about average – whether you talk about dialogue, editing (so important for a thriller) or even the performances. On balance, perhaps, if you are looking for some light enjoyment in the form of a thriller, this one might be the right choice for you.
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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Beating life at its OWN GAME

When the doctors issue you the sentence of imminent death, would you sit in a corner and wait for the Grim Reaper to come and claim you, or would you throw caution to the winds and go skiing instead? 19-year-old Jothy Rosenberg opted for the latter. The loss of a leg and a part of his lung to cancer did not come in the way of his journey to Utah, where he skied for hundred days straight, and returned more alive than ever before. Jothy Rosenberg relates to anu gulmohar the amazing tale of how he went on to defy the verdict of doctors and now 36 years later, has been married for 28 years, is father to three children, started six tech companies, participated in seven bike-a-thons and swum across San Francisco bay 16 times. His ordeal and courage will now seek to inspire through his book “Who Says I Can’t?”

“I think I was a fairly normal, if perhaps a bit of a wilful, kid. Nothing spectacular but there were perhaps a few signs that I had some toughness… When I had to face a real and personal crisis, I actually surprised myself at how I handled it. At the age of 19, when the doctor told me no one had survived what had just happened to me, part of me did not accept that because someone of 19 years typically thinks they are immortal. But embedded in my brain from then on was a worry, and it mostly resulted in me living pretty hard and fast and in me taking risks. I figured that if I really was going to die, like they said, I should live it up while I could. I had always had the attitude that I would prove everyone wrong on any limitations they placed on me – whether it was how many days I would have to stay in the hospital, or that I would never ski as well as two-leggers. But I was not trying to prove them wrong about me dying; I was just trying to live better and faster while I could.

I lost my leg at 16 in January of that year. In March, before the snow was gone, I insisted my parents take me to a local ski hill. I was not even yet fully healed and my stump was still sore and swollen. Regardless, I was determined to find out if skiing was going to be off-limits for me. I used regular ski poles as that is all I knew about (later, I would learn that something called outriggers, which are ski poles with little skis on the ends, was the way to go). When I tried to ski a little and take a turn, I would immediately fall to the snow and it would hurt. Then I would get up and try a turn the other way. One turn direction was much harder because it was unnatural to turn to the left with just a left leg. Still, while my parents were cringing and trying to get me to stop, I began to see that this really was going to be possible. Skiing was the sport I was best at, and I loved it. I really wanted to be able to do it and this early attempt, instead of depressing me, made me elated. No one could see why. But I saw that with super hard work and maniacal focus I could learn this and be good at skiing again. And yes, that gave me a huge lease on life.
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2009


An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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