Data on the job: How Mumbai sent letters to the editor

Flashback, circa 2005: As the junior-most on the staff of Downtown Plus - once the South #Mumbai supplement of the Times of India and known for coining the term SoBo for South Bombay - my job was to read the letters to the editor, design contests and interact with the readers (besides writing and reporting). I started maintaining an Excel sheet of all the readers who would write in. I mapped the areas where they were from and discovered that the bulk of our readers were from Byculla and Colaba. I found it amusing because our marketing never considered Byculla as our reader base. Generating graphs, maps, etc, wasn't a part of my job profile but the data looked exciting so for the two years I was there, I worked with it and a couple of times showed it to my colleagues, discussing the trends in the readership. The marketing wasn't too thrilled that we had more readers from the eastern side of south Mumbai than the more 'upmarket' western areas of Worli and Breach Candy (the population difference they didn't want to consider. The central and eastern parts of south Mumbai are more populous than western and southern parts). I jogged down to the archives on the second floor and found a microfilm of TOI papers in the early 1880s. Back in those days there was no Marine Drive and the seven islands of Bombay were being linked by causeways and bridges. The poshest places were around Byculla Club. And  first few pages of the newspapers were devoted to ads (news started appearing on page 1 only in the 1940s) from Byculla and Pydhonie. In 2008, I was the youngest on the Mumbai Mirror desk and hence tasked to check the responses and letters to the editor. The demographic was different (whole Mumbai with 8,00,000 copies) but again, there were more responses from Mumbai's less affluent eastern and northern parts than the west and south, interestingly.

#DataOnTheJob

Sridhar Ramakrishnan Ashishwang Godha Swati Soni Srabana Lahiri Sudipta Basu

Something fishy in Gujarat

Gujarat has the country's longest coastline and some world-class fisheries but when you walk into a restaurant in the state and ask for seafood, you're more likely to be served basa from Vietnam instead of red crab from Kutch. Somebody once told me they got freshwater hilsa from Narmada in Bharuch. I retorted, "Really? How many chemicals did you get on your plate?" The gorgeous river is lined with chemical industries that discharge their effluents into it. So if you're eating anything that was caught in the Narmada, make sure it was caught somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. That's probably the reason why farmed basa from Vietnam is the safe choice for restaurants.

Why I did not become a beauty blogger

Musing while using Crabtree&Evelyn hand cream: 13 years ago, in a bid to break away from community-based journalism, I attempted a job interview at a news channel. They wanted people who could write and talk fashion and beauty. I liked brands so I wore my Aldo shoes, Levis jeans, Fossil wooden-band watch, Tommy Hilfiger perfume, Maybelline kajal and Revlon lipstick and carried my Sheaffer pens. The interview was just a talk and then the HR asked me to take a test. It was supposed to be customary but one look at the questions and I panicked. They were about moisturisers, shampoos, lotions, soaps, lipsticks, creams, powders, eyeshadows - brands and purchasing behaviours, taglines, etc. Sitting there in the old factory shed-turned media office in Lower Parel, I realised that makeup is serious business that someone like me who didn't use much wouldn't know. It's one thing to read/watch in magazines and TV. It's another thing to keep track of Carolina Herrera's latest perfume and compare it with her last. I wrote the test but requested to the HR to not consider it since I had changed my mind. Good call!

What I learn from videos on Facebook

Here's what I learn from #Facebook videos:
1. Middle-aged white men need to wax their nose-hair
2. There's a thing called eyebrow-sticker
3. Couples jump off fences to show they work out together (going for a run is so old-fashioned)
4. Dogs can be shamed on camera (cats not as much)
5. When people talk about food 'all over the world' they mean one place each in Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Dubai, Paris, London, Mexico City and six cities in the US
6. A lot more people are eating gold than I had imagined
7. Changing outfits in front of the camera is a thing
8. You can do your bedroom in six different ways

Feel free to comment about what you learn from videos on FB