A Crowd In Hand

The last time I experienced Delhi winter I thought it was overrated and the 16 of Bangalore was colder than the 4 of Delhi. I accounted this to the wind speed and altitude difference. This time however the winter already seems cold. Maybe because I’ve been living in Delhi for a little over 4 months and pretty much accustomed to the windless oven. Now I see people leaving for home earlier, shops shutting down earlier, the sun shying away faster and a dead silence descending over the night.

  It was the silence of the cold Friday night. I heard a railway horn blow at a distance. The line was about 1200 – 1500 meters away and would’ve been inaudible if it were not winter. It was in this silence that kept me awake. I finally decided to watch the movie Lucia.

 

I think it was August 2013, when I suddenly started seeing all these posts from on FB about how awesome Lucia is and surprisingly, I BMS-ed  it and what do you know! A PVR in one of the malls of Gurgoan was actually showing Lucia. I didn’t have a lot of company to go watch it, I had found zero Kannadigas and my friends of Delhi weren’t really interested. This wouldn’t have happened if you’re in Bangalore. I’ve been dragged and I’ve dragged my friends to movies of the languages we didn’t follow, but it was fun and it happens often in Bangalore.  

Anyway this post isn’t about language. It’s about the concept of crowd funding. The introduction credits of Lucia movie said that it’s the first CrowdFunded Kannada movie. I googled a little later and found a news result dated Nov 12, 2013. It said the first Crowd Funded Malayalam movie with a Tamil/Malayalam cast and a Bengali Director would release soon, cool so Kannada is ahead (yay :P) More googling lead to a Reuterspost about the movie. It says the story writer had made a blog post where he said that he had tried to source the movie but had failed for 3 years. Suddenly out of the blue he got 200,000 rupees into his bank account from a lady in UK. More funding from random strangers followed and that’s when they decided to make a movie out of funds from the crowd. 

This idea is ingenious! Kannada film industry of the ‘Sandalwood’ is known for its low budget or its Tamil/Telugu adaptations; Lucia was so big and radical that people said it brought a paradigm shift. Though it was still a low budget movie, it was very well received. The plot of the movie itself is so delicate and complex. The actors did good and the songs were pretty good too. The movie all in all was good, it was also released in Pakistan; the Tribune even put a review of Lucia. Sadly I still don’t think I would find people who would want to try the movie. (it was released with subtitles ofcourse)

Last year I had authored a white paper dealing crowdsourcing for software testing and since then I had started to appreciate the benefits of using a crowd. I read a bit more about crowd funding and the more I read the more I was interested, this idea is already catching up, crowd funded movies were already famous in the west. The next result said Crowd Funded travelling; a site called Trevolta said it would sponsor trips! The idea is simple; travelers post their travel plans and the company tries to sponsor it, the sponsors may be from simply inspired and passionate travelers or marketers sponsoring for marketing use. Whatever the case, you get to go on a trip free of cost! Why wouldn’t it work?? The idea is relatively new and the site has very less right now, but you can check out their FB page just in case (I know free publicity right? They better fund one of my trips :P :D )

I was thinking hard about how to make use of this idea, maybe I could use CrowdFunding to raise capital for my entrepreneurial ideas too… and that’s when it hit me that this is what we do in India! A Ganesh mela or a Durga Puja pandal or holika dahan all happen with crowdfunding! We call it chanda and now we’re giving it a fancy name, come to think of it, it doesn’t seem so radical or big or new idea at all! And today, we have so much money; Banks, Investors and VC’s and ready to give you all the money if you have an idea, and if not these guys then you can just get money from the crowd! What we need is planning, transparency and proper IT integration and we could use CrowdFunding for anything! So... Go! 

BMTC Ki Jai

About time I wrote something about the Bangalore Metro Transport Corp. AKA the BMTC. History has known the bus service, then called BTS (and with love called Bitre Tigra Sigalla) to be a loss making and inefficient public mode of transport. The rickety buses that broke down without warnings to no bus for hours and a few other bad memories of Bangaloreans of the 90s were all taken care by the dissolution of the BTS and the formation of the BMTC. 

Don’t worry, I’m not planning on boring you with history, but just know that the buses were not that good in olden times and are now better. That should be enough history.

So why did I start writing about BMTC? Well… I was always scared and unhappy about travelling in buses, as a 9-10 year old kid with his school just 3 stops away I had a lot to complain about. The bus would be so crowded, I couldn’t go deep in the bus or stand by the door and not to mention that I’d generally forget the pass and try to get by without paying. Apart from the school part, the 3 of us would take the bus on Sundays and on holidays to go visit the aquarium and other pet stores. I never really liked it. Once I remember someone sticking a burning cigarette in my ear while I was trying to get on. I guess smoking wasn’t banned in those days. 

It was probably in 2002 that the BMTC first started reporting small profits. It still didn’t matter to me; I stayed 3 just stops away from my school and didn’t like travelling in the bus. 

Oops! :D Even though I said I won’t bore you with history I guess I somehow still managed it. Anyway… So after I joined college, I was for the first time I was able to travel long distances. It was then that I fell in love with the buses and the BMTC.

By this time the BMTC had started reporting profits almost every year. They had increased their fairs, but they had also introduced new things that were never seen in Bangalore. They started by abandoning all old buses and got new coaches. Here they introduced the auto door system. The Driver would open the doors when there’s a stop and he would close it as soon as the bus departs from the stop. This idea of having a door surprised many people. People believed it just made things bad from the public, so we can’t climb onto the bus when the doors are not open? What about signals? Well, they generally wont let us in even there! 

Then came a rush of ideas, a pass bus for all those who have passes, it was generally intended for students but everyone with a pass, even monthly and daily pass would be allowed. Then came the Pink Bus, the women’s special bus, it worked well first, but you might’ve seen the pic on fb, men got in and the idea failed. Then they still maintained the Pushpak bus, which has better suspensions and costly by a rupee. 

A Lady Driver of the BMTC

There was also the advent of Vajra, the Vovlo AC bus. This took everyone by surprise. An AC city bus! Yay! After a couple of years, BMTC bought a few Marcopolo buses too, these are the AC buses that run on the streets of New Delhi. They are a little cheaper but eww! Look so ugly! :D 

You can say BMTC is the Muhammad Bin Tughlaq of Bangalore, they came up with so many innovative ideas and well... Not all of them caught on.  

Some such ideas were:

Janti vahana: Two coaches connected (like a train!)at the middle with a seating capacity of about 60

The Orange and Blue Lines: High Frequency buses that go around a route

Big 10: Buses that connect suburbs on 10 Big and famous roads to the center of the city.

The Atal Sarige: Named after PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the bus connects places with low income earning people with the city.

Bus Day

The Hopital Bus: Makes a route around the bigger hospitals in Bangalroe

The ORRCA: Outer Ring Road Companies Association route, that goes around the IT companies on Outer Ring Road. 

The 156 Stops On Route 601

Ring Route Buses: These just keep circling around the city. My fav in Route # 601, it has 156 stops!! 

Then theres the Vayu Vajra AKA the BIAS, it connects the city to the Airport, now this is interesting, the then transport minister R Ashoka tried a lot of new things here too, like LCDs and Mobile Pantry and WiFi hot spots on these buses. Some of them still work I suspect.

Bus Day:  The 4^th of every month is to be Bus day in Bangalore. It’s to spread awareness of public transport, buses won’t cost less, but there would be many buses that day. And the officials of BMTC won’t use their personal vehicles that day. 

Now there are the JnNurm Air Suspension buses, Metro Feeder service and a lot more. Another thing that deserves mentioning is the maintainance of these buses. Well, I'm not much of a mechanic, but you dont generally see a broken down bus these days :)

The Only Remaining Double Decker in Bangalore

So the thing about BMTC is that it’s sitting on a huge pile of money and the officials and ministers are not afraid of trying new things. Ofcourse all this came because they improved the service and improved their coverage. BMTC covers... well lakhs of KMs everyday and ferries even more people, you can look for more facts and figures on their site. 

BTW they launched a new site a few days ago, check it out its got all the details from routes to fairs to maps and everything!

http://www.mybmtc.com/

KSRTC is not far behind; they have lots of services too, from regular non A/C to A/C pushback, multi-axel Volvo’s and Mercedes to buses with LCDs on the back of every seat, mini pantry and on board chemical toilet! The KSRTC has got to be one of the best state owned bus service in the country! 

 

Recently, Or maybe that was last year, I read in the paper that BMTC and KSRTC are the only profit making Bus service in  the country, and traveling in BMTC actually made me like buses now, I make it a point to take atleast 1 bus when I’m in another town. 

The contrasts... well we’ll talk about it some other day :)

Here are a few more pictures

Collage of Airavata 

A Fleet of  KSRTC A/C Volvo Buses

Flower Decorated Mercedes Benz in Front of the Vidhana Sauda

Fashionataion

Hey why don’t you post it on your blog too? I’ll give you a free shirt :P thats the reason for this post :D

A friend of mine just joined hands with one of his friends from his days in the UK to deal in fashion. I didn’t really understand what they meant to do but I had a feeling that they were gonna make an online clothing store and sell cloths. As simple as that. But as it turns out, its not that simple. 

I found out about the real deal of craziness… or lets say freakological obsession with fashion and sense of style was clearly pointing to the fact that they had their heads working on doing something bigger.  My friend asked me to write an seo article that could help route traffic towards their site. It  wasn’t  really that hard, but this was only my second article on fashion. The first one was on nail art! :P

Anyway so as I went on writing I did realize that some of the things I said in the write were actually true! :O I know! That never happens in advertisement articles right? At least not mine! :P So I went ahead and looked at the site.. they really did have designers live on the site.. and I just wondered for a sec if I could get someone to stitch me something that’s exactly my size! :D ok im not that bothered about cloths.. cuz I kinda believed that it’s the ‘who’ more important than the ‘what’ or maybe I said it cuz I just couldn’t find fitting cloths :P (just in case your thinking I’m fat.. im not :P)

Ok so heres the article I wrote for him... I’m posting it here cuz hes my bud and well… yeah also for the free shirt :P 

Fashionation is not a real word, at least not yet. It’s a made up word for fashion and fascination. Fashion in a bird’s eye view can mean a way of life where everything you do or wear intrigues and makes a statement. The general perception of fashion is looking good or using something that can make you look good. A fashionable phone or a fashionable article of clothing is generally perceived to be a good looking merchandise that brings you appreciation. Sadly, that’s probably the worst way of defining fashion. 

 

 As I’m writing this article in the wake of a new online clothing store that I saw over the weekend, let’s stick to cloths as fashion. Clothing is probably the biggest way of looking fashionable, and over centuries, people have been expressing themselves by creating and wearing different kinds of cloths. This idea of expression of feelings, thoughts and ideas through dressing cracked open a whole new world of designers and trend makers across the globe. Today as we make way for a world of freedom and expression, we see more and more people taking up this creative way of expressing and adding the much required glamour and valor to the cause.

The biggest dread of all fashion enthusiasts is keeping up with fashion. Being aware of where to find what and when to do what is another major road bump. Just the other day, my friend visiting Bangalore for the first time asked me ‘who’s cloths are hot in Bangalore this winter?’ I fell face first at that. I had no idea of the designers in Bangalore, I always bought from sites or stores that had decent looking cloths. I Looked up a few regular sites online, but couldn’t find anything that tells me who’s selling what. That’s when I stumbled upon www.mydesignersales.com

 

mydesignersales is the online store of a Bangalore based Clothing and Fashion Corporation called United Fashion Mart. The firm itself deals in the manufacture and sales of apparels and accessories with zeal for spreading awareness and tasteful sense of fashion across masses. mydesignersales being the online store makes access to fashion more reachable and affordable to all.  Plus Being in Bangalore, it’s only a matter of time before there are free reigning fashion stylists running amok on the streets!

mydesignersales takes a whole new approach to selling cloths online. It’s like an online version of a boutique where you can get to personally see, meet and socialize with your designers online. mydesignersales has a list of the top selling fashion stylists from different cities across India, or maybe even the world. Going to Delhi for a week? Buy the top selling designs of Delhi in Bangalore and blend in to the Delhi crowd! Try! Designers like Julie Kagti, Anu Nagappa and Arjun Agarwal are some of the top selling labels on mydesignersales. 

Apart from giving you the advantage of meeting your designer, if you’re really really nice and of course ready to pay a little, you can even place requests and get your own designs loaded onto the website! That’s definitely got to be a first! mydesignersales clearly has a lot of new things to offer. In the end, making people express themselves and reflect their personalities using the powers of fashion is what these FashionFreaks aim at. That’s why they say, each time you visit mydesignersales, you’re assured of fashionation! ;)

That was it! Buy clothes from my frn y’all :D 

Oh btw.. if you think Im good at seo then.. you can mail me.. I write for free shirts all the time :P