Holy smoke and yoga, IT professionals and Bollywood are a few pieces of the giant collage
Uday Sahay
The writer is director, Directorate of Information and Publicity, Delhi Govt
While coining the expression - soft power – Harvard University’s Joseph Nye would never have imagined the kind of impact it would have on a country like India with an unbroken cultural continuity and ability to assimilate influences from outside. India has risen to the need of consciously branding itself through exports like yoga, cinema, ayurveda. Of late, the Indian State has been lobbying to open cultural centres in major capitals and has been organising courses abroad that teach appreciation of Indian culture. These products are offering alternatives to Disney and McDonald of the US and to Confucius and Chinese rock bands in the new world order. Destination branding for asserting soft power has created a buzz in the Indian diplomatic circle. Every who’s who is curious to learn its whys and hows. Appreciating the issue gets easier if some fundamentals of branding in the Indian context are put on the drawing board.
Branding is primarily a game of crafting a distinct and positive picture of a person, destination or an object in a person’s mind. In an over-communicated society, such as urban India, it is indeed a complex task to position one picture in minds cluttered with innumerable number of them.
The foreigners’ image of India is not the result of any conscious branding effort. It is only recently that we see some successful branding attempts made by the government and the industry to draw global attention to Brand India. Till not too long back, India’s image abroad was as a country of serpents and rope tricks, of sadhus and chillums and of gods and goddesses. It was the mystique aura that drew foreigners to India. This attraction was akin to a pickle in a meal which adds to the flavour but does not substitute the main course. Foreigners had an ambivalent image of India. But this ambivalence was for the Indian society, not its polity.
For the Indian polity, the picture was different. The maharajas mirrored it. The White Sahibs found such maharajas interesting to spend evenings with or to go hunting. But they were never keen to learn any art of administration or politics from them. Foreigners’ attraction to the Taj Mahal was actually an extension of the same psyche.
The third picture of India emerged during first few decades of independence through Satyajit Ray’s film like “Pather Pachali”. International acclaim that this film drew inspired many towards the image-rush. Pictures of hunger, unemployment and disease gushed out of such films. It appeared for a while as if India could be represented realistically only through such images.
Liberalisation in the 90s generated a fresh stock of pictures – of English speaking IT professionals. The whole world thought that anyone coming from India was a brainy IT professional. And their thought was not unfounded. In the top four IT companies of the US, more than ten per cent employees are of Indian origin.By 2000, few more gripping pictures of India emerged through yoga, ayurveda, cricket and Bollywood. Many of our yogis and sadhus travelled far and wide and received huge fan following in the wellness industry, whereas Bollywood and cricket rode the media boom. These were natural by-products of social and economic forces.
Now, let us see those branding attempts in India that were results of the efforts of the State. Liberalisation taught many developing nations to create its distinct brand identity through advertising campaigns. At the state-level, Kerala tourism department was the first one to start its destination branding attempt by launching a campaign titled ‘God’s Own Country’. The campaign, replete with images of oil massage, boat race, house boat and Kathakali caught the imagination of high-end tourists. The Kerala experiment was replicated at the pan-India level. But capturing the cultural and geographical diversity of India was a difficult task. Meanwhile, Malaysia was already singing ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia’ whereas Singapore was repeating ‘Live Upto Singapore’ phrase. Thailand coined ‘Amazing Thailand’ to position itself and New Zealand thrived on ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ branding. Passing through a labyrinth route of discussions, ‘Incredible India’ campaign was finally launched in 2002. Starting with Rs 50.71 crore in 2002-2003, its budget allocation reached Rs 110 crore in 2008-09. In October 2007, when this campaign reached New York as ‘Incredible India@60’, Americans were spellbound.
In 2006, CII, with support from the ministry of commerce, launched ‘India Everywhere’ at Davos to position India’s economic brand. Now that India is poised to host the best-ever Commonwealth Games in Delhi, its branding as an organiser of world-class games is shortly about to be etched in the cluttered mind of the world.
Uday Sahay
The writer is director, Directorate of Information and Publicity, Delhi Govt
While coining the expression - soft power – Harvard University’s Joseph Nye would never have imagined the kind of impact it would have on a country like India with an unbroken cultural continuity and ability to assimilate influences from outside. India has risen to the need of consciously branding itself through exports like yoga, cinema, ayurveda. Of late, the Indian State has been lobbying to open cultural centres in major capitals and has been organising courses abroad that teach appreciation of Indian culture. These products are offering alternatives to Disney and McDonald of the US and to Confucius and Chinese rock bands in the new world order. Destination branding for asserting soft power has created a buzz in the Indian diplomatic circle. Every who’s who is curious to learn its whys and hows. Appreciating the issue gets easier if some fundamentals of branding in the Indian context are put on the drawing board.
Branding is primarily a game of crafting a distinct and positive picture of a person, destination or an object in a person’s mind. In an over-communicated society, such as urban India, it is indeed a complex task to position one picture in minds cluttered with innumerable number of them.
The foreigners’ image of India is not the result of any conscious branding effort. It is only recently that we see some successful branding attempts made by the government and the industry to draw global attention to Brand India. Till not too long back, India’s image abroad was as a country of serpents and rope tricks, of sadhus and chillums and of gods and goddesses. It was the mystique aura that drew foreigners to India. This attraction was akin to a pickle in a meal which adds to the flavour but does not substitute the main course. Foreigners had an ambivalent image of India. But this ambivalence was for the Indian society, not its polity.
For the Indian polity, the picture was different. The maharajas mirrored it. The White Sahibs found such maharajas interesting to spend evenings with or to go hunting. But they were never keen to learn any art of administration or politics from them. Foreigners’ attraction to the Taj Mahal was actually an extension of the same psyche.
The third picture of India emerged during first few decades of independence through Satyajit Ray’s film like “Pather Pachali”. International acclaim that this film drew inspired many towards the image-rush. Pictures of hunger, unemployment and disease gushed out of such films. It appeared for a while as if India could be represented realistically only through such images.
Liberalisation in the 90s generated a fresh stock of pictures – of English speaking IT professionals. The whole world thought that anyone coming from India was a brainy IT professional. And their thought was not unfounded. In the top four IT companies of the US, more than ten per cent employees are of Indian origin.By 2000, few more gripping pictures of India emerged through yoga, ayurveda, cricket and Bollywood. Many of our yogis and sadhus travelled far and wide and received huge fan following in the wellness industry, whereas Bollywood and cricket rode the media boom. These were natural by-products of social and economic forces.
Now, let us see those branding attempts in India that were results of the efforts of the State. Liberalisation taught many developing nations to create its distinct brand identity through advertising campaigns. At the state-level, Kerala tourism department was the first one to start its destination branding attempt by launching a campaign titled ‘God’s Own Country’. The campaign, replete with images of oil massage, boat race, house boat and Kathakali caught the imagination of high-end tourists. The Kerala experiment was replicated at the pan-India level. But capturing the cultural and geographical diversity of India was a difficult task. Meanwhile, Malaysia was already singing ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia’ whereas Singapore was repeating ‘Live Upto Singapore’ phrase. Thailand coined ‘Amazing Thailand’ to position itself and New Zealand thrived on ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ branding. Passing through a labyrinth route of discussions, ‘Incredible India’ campaign was finally launched in 2002. Starting with Rs 50.71 crore in 2002-2003, its budget allocation reached Rs 110 crore in 2008-09. In October 2007, when this campaign reached New York as ‘Incredible India@60’, Americans were spellbound.
In 2006, CII, with support from the ministry of commerce, launched ‘India Everywhere’ at Davos to position India’s economic brand. Now that India is poised to host the best-ever Commonwealth Games in Delhi, its branding as an organiser of world-class games is shortly about to be etched in the cluttered mind of the world.
Read these article :-
Delhi/ NCR B- Schools get better
IIPM fights meltdown
IIPM
1 LAKH COPY SOLD in less than ten days of Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri's new book Discover The Diamond In You
24 seats – down from their previous tally of 61. In West Bengal – once the Red Citadel – the CPI (M)’s share of MPs dropped vertically, from 27 to nine. It lagged behind the Trinamool Congress and Congress in over 200 of the 294 assembly segments. Indeed the outlook is so bleak that in the 13th West Bengal Legislative Assembly polls in 2011, even the CPI (M)’s friends expect the once impregnable fortress to collapse as the Berlin Wall did in 1989!
another feather to the increasing Indo-US bonhomie and vindicates that USA’s crusade against terrorism is not essentially one against those which are directed towards the US only. Interestingly, the Indian government at large, the major political parties as well as the intelligentsia and the common man in India don’t seem to be too much concerned about this particular news and aren’t much grateful towards the US either for the incredible feat of FBI in unearthing this major conspiracy. One wonders what would have happened if this plan had succeeded. Reports state that this one was on its way to even dwarf the mayhem created by the ghastly terror attack of 26/11. So, essentially, we owe much to the US for nipping this plan in the bud. No wonder that there would be many a conspiracy theory that would be erected to drive home the staple logic of India’s left leaning pseudo intellectuals that this was all stage managed by the US for inching closer to India for business purposes. No wonder now that the next 26/11 type incident has been avoided for the time being, everyone would conveniently forget about it and not try taking lessons. Interestingly, reports even state that these two perpetrators were even involved with the planning part of last year’s 26/11. Further, if one looks at the series of incidents in the post 26/11 scenario, whatever actions are being taken by the Pakistan government against the likes of Taliban and al-Qaida or others is primarily because of the pressures from the US government rather than the same from India. No doubt India’s current Home Minister P Chidambaram has done a lot in improving the response capability of Indian state in the last one year and no doubt that in J&K and North-east the armed forces have been successful in neutralising several terror modules based on real time intelligence but those two parts of India are special cases with special powers being given to the armed forces. With respect to the rest of India, one wonders as to whether India would continue to only end up catching the foot soldiers of terror modules or strengthen the intelligence gathering machinery to that extent that it can catch the real ‘rainmakers’ the way FBI did this time. A huge conventional army is literally helpless when pitted against the invisible terror modules or the guerilla tactics of Maoists. It is being repeatedly proved in the fight against Maoists in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. The designs of al-Qaida and its sister networks is far more sinister than what they look. An attack now on Indian soil would surely provoke India to wage a war against the already fragile Pakistan state and then the whole current outrage against the Jihadis over there would turn towards India, thereby benefiting the Taliban and al-Qaida. Pakistan army would be forced to withdraw its forces from Swat and Waziristan to defend the eastern borders thereby giving a breather to the beleaguered Taliban. And thus the best way to prevent such a situation to come is by preventing such terror attacks from happening, which cannot happen merely by increasing the size of paramilitary and the NSG. It can only happen through the setting up of a fool proof intelligence grid and a strong network with other nations for intelligence sharing. It’s time we become a little more rational. Remaining non-aligned didn’t help India ever. And with wonderful neighbours like China, fuelling Maoists and North-East militants,and Pakistan, the mother of all kind of Jihad, around, it has no option but to take sides. Under the present scenario, the US seems least likely to be a ‘fair weather friend’ only. And thus… India’s best friend in need.
dedicated merely two lines to Romania Cinema, one of which emphasised that the Communist nation had “produced some interesting cartoons but in the field of feature film there has been little of importance.” Now every critic worth his salt can tell you that in critics’ lexicon, ‘Little’ means “even if there was a bit, I didn’t notice it.”
Faced with Tamil opposition, Bandaranaike attempted compromise solutions, but the forces of reaction that he unleashed devoured him. On September 25, 1959, he was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in his residence. The assassin represented powerful forces – Buddhist monks, teachers and disgruntled politicians. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the “weeping widow” as she was called, came to power on a racist platform and went further in her acts of discrimination against the Tamils.
had used obscene language against her). I shall quote the final paragraph of that memorable letter: “….. Be that as it may, it is my earnest and sincere hope that with all the knowledge and deep understanding of human affairs, you, as President of the United States and reflecting the will, the aspirations and idealism of the great American people, will at least let me know where precisely we have gone wrong before representatives or spokesmen deal with us with such harshness of language.” Richard Nixon did not reply.
for commercial release, unless reversed by the Centre, will go down as the blackest day in Indian history for its impact on India’s food security, health, farming and environment. We, who are well conversant with the details of the appraisal of the Mahyco-Monsanto safety dossier by four world renowned scientists (Seralini, Carman, Heinemann & Gurian-Sherman), shudder to imagine the extent of the disaster that will unfold. Seralini, of Crigen France, did major assessments for the EU of various Monsanto Bt corn products. These were subsequently banned for planting in most EU countries. He says that Mahyco’s own dossier of rat feeding studies shows worrying results both clinically and statistically, on various parameters of health, in the blood, in the cells and organs of animals being tested. Bt brinjal is toxic and its release must be forbidden. No long-term feeding studies for chronic toxicity have been conducted. The inescapable conclusion of these feeding studies of Mahyco is that they have been ‘engineered’ or designed to throw up ‘no significant differences’.
went for trials and the chairman of the selection committee, Dr Thimmappaiaha, a medical doctor, was worried about my safety. I was rejected. Later on, when I was captain for the state team, Thimmappaiaha was the chairman of the selection committee. I once asked him casually whether I had been rejected because of my lack of inches. He told me, "Yeah, that’s true. I was really worried that you would be hit.” I was very lean and short. I can imagine his fatherly feelings towards all of us.
encourage the Lankan government to settle the Sinhalese in Tamil areas. Calling the move a politically motivated one, AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalithaa says: “The CM knows that the Centre would not grant citizenship to Tamil refugees because this would encourage refugees from Bangaladesh, Myanmar and Tibet to demand it too.” Says the state’s BJP vice president H Raja: “The Tamils should be rehabilitated in the island. Efforts to give them citizenship only reinforces Rajapaksa’s plan of ethnic cleansing.” Raja and Nachiapapan are being backed by a large number of refugees who are languishing in 115 camps across TN.
allowed to choose one, just one, soldier to fight for you, who would you choose? The Incredible Hulk? Wolverine? Arjuna? Iron Man? It has been a long cherished dream of every army in the world to build the ‘super soldier’, a warrior whose abilities border on the superhuman. With the latest advances in technology, the concept of the super soldier seems poised to leap out of the pages of science fiction, graphic novels and Hollywood screenplays straight into our midst. A soldier who is virtually indestructible or almost immortal would be undoubtedly the ultimate fighting machine. Major Gen. Sheru Thapliyal tells TSI, “To crack the code of being immortal doesn't seem to be a possibility but there is special training that exists, which does not aim at making soldiers immortal, but to train them and incorporate certain skills in them which cannot be performed by an average human being. There are para-troopers in India who are trained to perform special actions and perform them at great speed with huge destructive ability.” Back in May this year, the US Army’s Soldier Research Design and Engineering Centre released a white paper titled ‘Future Soldier 2030 Initiative,’ which outlined the various areas (performance and training, soldier protection, soldier lethality etc.) that the soldier of the future will be enhanced on. Quite a few of the concepts have been inspired by popular fictional characters like the “Hulk” or “Wolverine”. Talk about life imitating art! More specifically, comic book art.
I had to 'restructure' the organisation and focus on the 'vision' of the House of Mewar. It was a tough job to make the transition, while building upon the platforms that one had inherited. I understood how important it was to remain 'loyal' to values, especially the core value of custodianship that’s defined the character of our House for centuries.
celebration of Ram’s return to Ayodhya after he had defeated Ravan and wrested back Sita. The people of Ayodhya, it is said, had lit up the entire city and burst crackers. Apart from being a Hindu festival, Diwali is of relevance to some other religions as well. For the Jains, Lord Mahavir had passed away in the month of Kartik on amavasya day, which is why the Jains light lamps and perform pujas and pray on Diwali. As for the tradition of gambling on Diwali, during samudra manthan by devtas and asuras, while the devtas were hoping for Lakshmi to appear, what they got was ‘Alakshmi’, the opposite of Lakshmi. So they gambled away that ‘Alakshmi’ 
tea gardens and monitor its production, which they then buy from auction at a price than Rs 15000 per kg. Tea is indeed the world's most preferred non-alcoholic beverage. The world’s passion, Indian tea, comes in three varieties based on geographical locations — Darjeeling, Assam and Nilgiri. Highly flavoured Darjeeling tea is of Chinese bush, 20,000 of which were smuggled out of China about 150 years back by a British physician, Robert Fortune. Assam tea dominates in the Indian market as far as quantity goes, but Darjeeling leads in terms of price and global presence. Nilgiri tea was first grown on the grave of coffee, affected by ‘leaf rust’. 
Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. In India, as part of the movement, credit societies were formed. They received contributions and gave loans to its members. 1949, milk producers of Gujarat shaped a cooperative union that later came to be known as Amul. Corruption in some cooperative banks has given the concept a bad name but the movement still survives across the country. 
basin. Back then, women used to consider wearing diamonds unlucky. For centuries, it adorned the crowns of the Mughals. When Nadir Shah invaded India and routed the Mughals in 1739, it travelled to Persia. It was later offered to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab. The British East India Company snatched it from the Sikhs. It was offered to the British ruler, Queen Victoria, in 1849 on the completion of 250 years of the company.
of bowling with broken jaw in Antigua Test? Former West Indian captain Sir Vivian Richards later said, "It was one of the bravest things I've seen on the field of play." On the other hand, his 10-wicket haul in an innings against Pakistan at Feroz Shah Kotla (1999) was an amazing show of craftsmanship. After equalling the world record of Jim Laker, Kumble once told me, “I never anticipated it. After getting the 7th wicket, I started dreaming about world record.” Today, a retired Jumbo is the highest Indian wicket taker in Test matches. In coming days, someone may break his records but Jumbo is always great, both on and off the field. 
hits, including K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam and Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah. Mughal-e-Azam ran in the theatre for four years. Pakeezah, on the other hand, had a slow start, but its heroine, Meena Kumari, passed away a week after the release of the film. The footfalls increased steadily thereafter and history was made. Maratha Mandir's claim to fame today rests on 'Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge', a Shahrukh Khan-Kajol starrer that has been running here for 14 years. 
is one of the biggest stars that the subcontinent has ever seen. Every release of his to this day is a major media event, and his fans - they are a legion - hang on to virtually every word that he utters on the screen and off it. The charismatic Rajnikanth is pushing 60, but his appeal only seems to grow brighter with age. He is a supernova in the real sense of the word - his films make or break the Tamil movie industry.