Where have all the English theatres gone?
I moved back to Bombay in May last year after a 13-year stint abroad. Having been born and raised in Bombay, I came back to a city I am very familiar with. Globalisation, a booming stock market, BPO empires may all be new, but the old adage springs to mind – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
One of the most annoying, even insidious, changes I’ve noticed is the phenomenon of the “turncoat movie theater”. You know the ones I am talking about… the Regals and Eroses of our city. Theatres that once only screened English movies.
I suppose times change and business is business, but it saddens me that these theatres are now reduced to (almost) exclusively screening the copious drivel that Bollywood churns out.
At one time on any given weekend one could find at least 10 English films playing around the city. Now I’m hard pressed to find even 5. I peg the blame for this squarely on “turncoats”. Back in the day they could be counted on to be screening an English movie. Now, however, it’s a casino crap shoot… you may get lucky and find that Regal is playing an English film, or, as is more often the case… the Bollywood house wins the hand!
I just had to laugh…
Thanks to Mike Davidson.
Who the hell did approve this atrocity?
And if that brings tears to your eyes, don’t even think about looking at this.
Michael Porter on Strategy
Acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost business thinkers, Michael Porter says it best:
“The essence of strategy is what not to do.”
Editor’s note: The emphasis on “not” is added by fridaycity.
The truth about Google’s home page
From The Beauty of Simplicity we learn the secret story of how Google’s home page was born.
All of us agree: Google’s home page couldn’t be friendlier or easier to use. How many designers worked on it? How many reviews, iterations and meetings did it go through?
Here’s the truth:
“The original home-page design was dumb luck. In 1998, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were consumed with writing code for their engine. Brin just wanted to hack together something to send queries to the back end, where the cool technology resided. Google didn’t have a Web master, and Brin didn’t do HTML. So he designed as little as he could get away with.
“The accident became an icon, of course, and a key reason the company enjoys a commanding lead.”
Moral: Get your product out there as fast as you can, users will vote with their clicks; you’ll always have time to make it better.
fridaycity Blog
We’re a bunch of likeminded Mumbai (Bombay, whatever…) dwellers who share similar interests but can often be found in violent disagreement. Well, sometimes it’s violent agreement, we just haven’t realised it yet.
We’ll be blogging here a little bit about different things that interest us – how we can continue to lead interesting and fulfilling lives in Mumbai; Apple, since all of use Macs; and the Web in general, as we all work in and around the Internet.
We figured if we find some of the random things we talk about in the office interesting, there’s likely to be some other people out there who will also get a laugh out of them.
