In 2012 Anurag Kashyap banged the doors of world cinema with a very, very off beat movie. He took Godfather, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York to name a few and hotchpotch them with the backdrop of rural india. The villages. The unglamorous lives. And probably made a movie that started the spree of these stories…
Do you know how the Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst made his media empire based on newspapers… Well here’s an excerpt from his biography: “Decades before synergy became a corporate cliché, Hearst put the concept into practice.” Yup, the driving force was his publishing mindset. He made the same content that he covered in his…
I don’t smoke cigarettes. The reason being… I just don’t like them. Neither their taste, nor their high. But, I spare myself from judging those who do. After all, it’s none of my business who inhales what. But, what my business is to know Marketing–a field filled with uber-BS people saying uber-BS things all the…
I have this friend who just can’t write. And instead of having nothing to say, it’s exactly opposite. He just can’t sit down and write. It’s his worst nightmare having to sit on a desk for hours, writing. But this attitude is doing him no good but honestly harming him. For example, he really thinks…
In his official biography by Walter Issacson (that I highly recommend reading), Steve’s habit of turning down new ideas was hilarious at times. Quick story: When the idea for an iPod was presented to him by Tony Fadell, the designer behind apple’s leading products, he discarded it with a shout if not a Honestly, that’s…
While writing up the 50 Shades of Content Writing, that is a short and condensed book on the principles of creating content fast. I was amazed how many of its pages were about mindset. And I am not a big fan of either personal development or self-help stuff. It’s not that I’m against self-improvement or…
After yesterday’s email, I got the reply for collaboration. And the question my potential co-writer asked me was how this book on mindset will be different from the ones already in the market? Particularly that of the leaders of this particular market viz. “Ryan Holiday or a Jordan Peterson or a Taleb.” Being a great…
Past few weeks, I’ve been reading and researching about the pulp fiction genre. And one writer in particular: Erle Stanley Gardner. He is credited with writing more than 120 novels in his career and selling hundreds of millions of them. And the reason behind his success is his ability to simplify the story to its…
Mumbai has been the cash capital of India. Every big player from finance to entertainment to journalism to manufacturing to exporting and so on, held their feet first. And this is why it has attracted the hustlers not just from all over India but the world. And with that formed the mafia. I’ve been reading…
The great Hussain Zaidi, that I respect for bringing out the mafia stories from deep within the belly of Bombay. But starting out, aparting from the mortal dangers of working as a crime reporter. He wasn’t as confident owing to his lack of formal journalistic background and “pathetic english.” So he looked for other ways…