Optimism marks out the Indian decade

Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication I’ve had a wonderful time in Pune and Mumbai, two cities to which I had wanted to go for some years. Like some New Agers say: be careful what you put out into the universe. It can come true.    My main reason for going was to address the […]

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Thoughts on Players, the Indian remake of The Italian Job

It’s been known for some time that Players, the official, licensed Indian remake of The Italian Job, will film in New Zealand, but what surprised me is that Wellington is to take the place of Torino in the 21st-century version.    At least they changed the name, because the American remake of The Italian Job […]

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Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai

As I made links for the last post, I noticed there were a lot of comments on AROnline about the replacement for the Roewe 750, the Chinese car that is based on the old Rover 75.    The replacement will be on the Opel Insignia platform, owned by GM. It’s been followed by a lot […]

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Amazon begins charging dormant-account fee

Here’s a new clause in the Amazon Associates’ contract that I never spotted before, which is available publicly for viewing. European countries have a similar one, with differences in the currency. If you have not earned any advertising fees in the 3 years prior to any given calendar month, then on the first day of […]

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Paul Henry is only the tip of the redneck iceberg

Yesterday, I began watching the Indian media get hold of the Paul Henry story. Indians are, rightly, up in arms with the TV host’s insult of Chief Minister Smt. Sheila Dikshit’s name—this, plus the incident questioning whether Governor-General HE Sir Anand Satyanand was a New Zealander, shows a pattern where Henry thinks poorly of people […]

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The other time Paul Henry had it in for someone with Indian heritage

Paul Henry isn’t alone on this: a lot of New Zealand media have been making fun of Delhi Chief Minister Smt. Sheila Dikshit’s surname, purposely mispronouncing it as dick-shit and then giggling away. (For the record, the pronunciation is close to dixit.) Though after his comments about HE Sir Anand Satyanand earlier this week, it’s […]

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Google’s rethink on Red China: you can’t stop the Chinese people

If I were Google, would I have entered Red China with the censored version of Google.cn, hiding things from the Chinese people for the sake of money? In February 2006, I blogged about this very issue and concluded, ‘No.’    Obeying the law is one thing. Providing the people with slanted views to prop up […]

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A new book on nation branding

I still need to get a few book reviews up, and here’s a good one to begin 2010 on. Nation Branding: Concepts and Country Perspectives, edited by Nishit Kumar and Anil Varma and published by ICFAI Press, is a very complete book giving a snapshot of the discipline’s practice in the late 2000s. There are […]

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