Friday, January 28, 2011

Heil, mein Führer !

If you are planning to travel to germany in the near future, make sure you know these 'Bizarre' german laws !

=> no washing cars or mowing lawns on Sundays
=> no playing at playgrounds between the hours of 1300 and 1500
=> no shopping on Sundays;
=> It is against the law to mention the date 1966 in any football ground.
=> no barking dogs especially after 2100 or between 1300 and 1500 or before 0900 !! (most funniest)
=> A pillow can be considered a "passive" weapon


There are lot more of 'em actually.. These might sound funny but if you happen to violate them, then your fate could be the same as Turks in germany !

Post second world war period, Germany, which was recovering slowly from the war chaos, started following the european staes for welfare. In order to shed off its 'Racist' & 'Religious bias' labels and to counter the lack of skilled labours, it started looking upon UK for achieving the so called 'multicult' tag..As a result they stared allowing mass immigration of turks into theirr country,to address the issues and achieve the desired multicultural' & 'multiethnic' tags. Now the Turkish, akin to the asians, work hard and for longer hours. As a result Turkish shops and businesses started opening in the wee hours at center of Berlin and stayed open until late evenings.This really pissed off the 'LAW ABIDING' germans so much that they started hating the turks and their very existence in the german soil was perceived as anti-german !. This went to such an extreme that, German Chancellor Angela Morkel declared multiculturalism has indeed failed in germany.

The video of that is here ::





Wednesday, January 12, 2011

WWW.DDTV.IN/DESI-PLAYER !!

Received a letter yesterday to renew my TV license from BBC. Was thinking hard, whether to go for it, since it will cost me a good 145£ per year - Which is quite a lot of money ! I could have actually decided not to go for it straightaway, but the very thought of missing my favourite shows and documentaries in 'beeb' (that's BBC's 'medium form') made me think again and am still pondering. Something inside me tells that i will get it - The nation's first public & national broadcaster is luring me with its endless charm !!

Having decided that, a thought about our own 'Doordarshan' a.k.a DD (NO - Not 'flashbacking' and nostalgia on 'Giant Robots' & 'Oliyum Oliyum') flashed across my mind.. How quickly it's fame spread and how much swifter was the recess. A quick googling on DD and its viewership share brought a 'latest' hindu article dated '2002' and apparently in that year the viewership of DD national was a mammoth 2.38 %.

A majority of the decline can be attributed to intense competition and DD's inability to stay in the fray. True that there are a plethora of channels hogging the TRP limelight with their enormously benefitable programs - 'VIP samayals' & 'Deala no deala' and the ever famous 'cry-baby-six-to-eleven-serials'. Of course there are a few channels, which despite being a part of the entertainment war, provide us some quality viewership now & then. Add to this political influence, and every party having their own channel,one can quite understand the stiff competition.

Point is,all the aforementioned things happened to Beeb as well. Its monopoly in broadcasting was (& is) challenged by numerous private players like sky, Virgin, Channel 4, ITV, which started mushrooming every day. Did Beeb give out so easily - Nope. It went back to the drawing board and clinched on to its mantra - INNOVATION. One great result of such innovations was the 'iplayer' which revolutionized internet viewing of documentaries and tv shows (with Digital rights management). It was such a big success that the internet service providers started complaining about the sudden rush of traffic to their site and demanded that the network bandwidths be improved. Verdict was out in a few days - Iplayer was an astounding success !! Try visting www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer once and i gurantee that you will be startled by its appeal ! The quality of videos there is mind boggling - so much that you can see people play videos from that to test the display quality of new Laptops !

BBC is funded by 'public licensing'- It's operation is funded by people. Question is Can't DD come up with a similar idea - Take money from the mass and start looking at improvements ? Might sound a silly idea but who knows, it could work out. After all DD itself started as a part of the All India Radio program in some makeshift studios! When people can pay 100-150 Rs for Cable television, am sure they would not mind shelling out a few bucks for their once-upon-a-time-beloved-DD. Of course this isnt going to be simple idea because 'DD' as a brand has already been dubbed as 'old' and 'uninteresting' by our population. So convincing people that they can be back with a bang and provide quality viewership is going to take some effort !! Everything lies in the hands of Prasar bharathi !!

Neverthless, i still keep dreaming about seeing my favourite programs in WWW.DDTV.IN/DESI-PLAYER, one day in the near future !!!!