Marketing gurus- Has the bubble bust?

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, when I decided to update my LinkedIn and expand my connections.  I also saw a few profiles (or rather stalked) and found a plethora of creative and never heard before designations like

•       Startup Enthusiast
•       Design Ninja
•       Marketing guru
•       Growth hacker/Growth marketer
•      Creative superhero among others.

Most of these designations are related to digital marketing. The digital world has expanded and more people are coming online than ever before, leading to exponential increase in digital marketing. But only a select few actually know what they are doing in social media or other search networks.

I often draw parallels between digital marketing & teenage sex. Everyone knows a little bit about it, very few have tried everything, but everyone talks like an expert.

One such upcoming breed are the ‘digital marketing gurus’ who claim to know everything about this industry. But do we have too many of them? Let me show you results of some generic keywords

Digital marketing jobs India	3,40,00,000 results (0.48 sec)
Digital marketing agency India	1,07,00,000 results (0.32 sec)
Digital Marketing Professionals India	1,09,00,000 results (0.32 seconds)
Digital Marketing experts India	About 56,60,000 results (0.40 seconds)

Some observation from the above data:

• For every job, there are three digital marketing professionals. i.e. ratio of professionals to available jobs is 1:3
• This is a gem. The number of agencies in India is almost equal to the number of digital marketing professionals.

•  Every second digital marketing professional is an expert. i.e professional to expert ratio is ~2:1

As I said earlier, there are more people talking about digital marketing than the number of people actually practicing it.  With the IT sector reaching maturity, digital marketing is definitely going to be the next big job spinner in India.  The aim I feel should be create more doers. I would consider this done, only if the professionals to job ratio is reverse of what it is now and the professionals to expert ratio is a bit widens a bit. 

Let your work do the talking, not your ‘creative’ designations.

P.S: I am a digital marketing professional, just learning the tricks of the trade now :P. Far from even being the G in guru. ;)

Are we trivializing the meaning of rape?

Words and phrases like most teen cultural expressions come and go out of fashion.  Certain phrases we use in our ‘casual conversations’ might leave our previous generation (or the slightly older ones from the current gen) a bit perplexed even though they might be harmless.

One such fad off late has been the use of the word ‘rape’ to describe negative stuff like defeats, injury etc. or to represent positive things like beating, winning among others.  How often have we heard this-

• “ I am gonna be raped tomorrow”
• “My team will rape the opponents”
• “Oh, I just raped the economics exam. Fuck yeah”.
• “Team A got raped by Team B”.

And every time I hear this, it startles me as to why the word rape has been  tossed around to describe such small things, as if it's a joke? How can one team winning over the other be equated to rape? There is nothing cool about rape and committing such heinous crime. Imagine how a victim of sexual assault ( might be one near you as well) would feel hearing the word being thrown so casually in our daily conversations. To use rape so ‘casually’ to describe simple things trivializes its actual meaning. One of my friends pointed out, the use of ‘rape’ in casual conversations is accompanied by laughter. Have we forgotten the devastation of the act, and the vulnerability of the men and women who face it?

Rape is not the only word to be used  in this context. Kill, murder,  have undergone this, and with the current usage, its not long before ‘rape’ will  be used to describe petty things.

Let me try to dissect this for you.

• 97 women are raped in India everyday.
• Of all the rape cases that have been reported, nearly 14,000 victims include minors as victims.
• Nearly 77% of the rape convicts have not seen jail even once in their life. They are still roaming scott free among us. 

These are just the cream of chilling facts about rape. Many foreigners, label our society and hence our country as the rape capital. By using this word so casually, we seemingly appear to approve of sexual violence against men and women.  And as I pointed out earlier, diluting the meaning of such words. 

Will you be using the word so casually if it was someone you know who was subjected to rape? Probably not. Enough said. 

Do I have a solution for this? Sadly no. As a start, I ask my friends from not using it so casually. Secondly, I try to spread awareness and talk to people regarding the trauma people go through post this. And finally, share this stuff on all possible platforms I can.

Are you considering changing yourself after this? If yes Great. If not, I don't know what will.

Open to suggestions and comments. 

My President- A Rocket Scientist

APJ is no more. This tribute post is dedicated to one of the greatest Indians to have ever lived. I am just going to pen down what ever I feel. I will start with one of his recent tweets, which truly defined him

Remember. . "I can do it we can do it india will do it."

— APJ Abdul Kalam (@APJAbdulKalam) June 20, 2015

You know what a great human being he was, when WhatsApp groups that have been inactive for an eternity suddenly becomes active, informing the passing away of this great man.

One thing that every APJ fan can be proud of, he passed away doing something that he loved: Teaching and inspiring young minds.

Born in small town in southern part of Tamil Nadu, he was always far ahead of his times. At a time when many in the country where skeptical, he openly supported the Kudankulam nuclear power plant project.He ignited minds, inspired young & old alike.

In a country where parents don't trust their kids to do small things, he believed in us to make India a super power by 2020.

So many people in my timeline (Twitter & FB) are talking about their experience of meeting Kalam, spending time, and sharing their pictures with him. Just goes to show how accessible he was. He literally made the office of president accessible to the general public.

Well, I don't know what else to add. The man who ushered Indian on a remarkable journey is no more. I sincerely hope we make his Vision 2020 a reality.


One of my favourite speech he made at the EU parliament (Just the highlights).

RIP Sir. Jai Hind.