The Return of the Unboggle

After a successful stint of 3 workshops in the last 3 months, Unboggle the Blog (our first of the blog workshops series)  is back with the 4th Unboggle the Blog, this time at Inorbit Mall Malad.

What’s Unboggle the Blog all about?

We have had people asking us if they can learn how to monetise their blog and we say - ’It’s a lot of hard work, honey. And that’s what we will teach you to do - the hard work’. The hard work is in creating great social content for our blog to maintain and create a community.

Why Unboggle

To maintain a good blog, the most fundamental requirement is interesting content, creating a community on your blog and keeping the conversations on. And at Unboggle you learn just that. Have a blog but unable to create content? We give you some great content ideas to get you started. Want to promote your blog? We will tip you how to get readers, and then manage them too.

What to expect at the workshop:

• Ramya Pandyan and I sharing our experiences and expertise about content creation for your blog
• Many practical non-tech exercises which you won’t find on Google.
• Chai paani

Other vital details: Saturday, 28th April, 10 AM to 5 PM at Inorbit Mall, Link Road, Malad (W)

Attention s’il vous plait:

• You would have to register before 24th April to attend the workshop. The fee structure:

1. Rs 2300/- per person
2. Rs. 6000 for a group of 3

• Registration will be confirmed on full payment. Entry to the workshop will be on presentation of receipt.

To register:

Email us with ‘REGISTER FOR UNBOGGLE’ in the subject line at:

Ramya Pandyan: ideasmithy@gmail.com
Payal Shah Karwa: thewordjockey@gmail.com

You can also call us at 9870964781. This time we got about 15 seats max, so book yours jaldi. 

Hungry For Blogging Kya?

I liken blogging to cooking. Everyone can’t taste it, but the aroma will spread to others’ olfactory and speak volumes about your dish (read blog)

Do you know the secret to great cooking? The same secret applies to everything we do in life – be it  blogging or exercising. The secret

blogging is like cooking

to great cooking or good blogging is you must be impassioned about it.  It should flow from your heart. If money is the end aim, you should rather invest in stocks than start a blog. Assuming you love to blog, here’s some recipe tips to get a great blog:

• So, to create and maintain a good blog, you first decide what you want to create – the overall theme and subject. Don’t blog randomness or wandering limerick style blahs and waste the readers’ time. You don’t use all ingredients stocked in your refrigerator to make that one dish do you? Focus on a topic, else your blog will be tasteless. Want to write about music? Then write about music. Like to write about stationery? It sounds niche but you never know the thousands of interesting stories you can create around a simply theme like stationery.
• Once you have the theme ready, don’t start the blog immediately. You soak in the beans and leave them overnight right? So, soak in the idea and add your content story ideas till you have some sprouts in place. Build your stock of ideas to carry you off for at least a month.
• Plan which post would go when. For instance if you are blogging about the festivals of India, you would need to keep the festival dates in mind, isn’t it?
• Prepare the post. Take the right ingredients and put them together, in the right sequence.  For instance, once your story idea is fixed and you are writing a post, draft the content out with a good headline and overall story outline.
• Marinate, mix and add the spices of interesting tid bits and fill it in with the details. It’s time to cook the story and let the spices gel well to create that taste. For instance, you have created your draft on an event you attended. You write about the whereabouts, when and what the event was in the draft. Following which you fill in the interesting details like the new ideas that struck you, some fun incident which happened, your opinion on the entire event etc.
• The finishing touches are important to ensure the food tastes just right. So if there is any rejuggling of ingredients or adding some more salt, do it. Write and rewrite the post till it looks good to be published.
• Garnish it well. Any dish, if prepped up with a few embellishments like coriander or ketchup looks more appetising. So also, make your post look pretty by adding a couple of nice copyright free visuals or photos which are relevant to the post. Make sure the font is pleasant (arial, calibri or times new roman are the best), the headline is written like the headline of this post and the alignments are proper. Do not center align, prefer left alignment.

Go experiment, fail, learn and improvise. The good thing about blogging is it is virtual, its in your control and can be edited. If you really are hungry for a good blog, feeding it with good content is the only way to satisfy your hunger.

Unboggle the Blog – Workshop on Content Creation for Blogs

The online social space has earned the right to be known as an independent medium. As with other media like magazines, newspapers, radio & television, the social media has its own unique personality. The audience that consumes social media content, differs from typical ‘readers’ or ‘viewers’ of other media. How they consume the content is also markedly different, given that this medium touches their lives differently. Thus, the content that draws and engages them, must have its own specific requirements. A tweet, a status update, a blogpost, an email, a comment or even a shared link have their own code and language.

 With this in mind, we bring you Write Click, a series of workshops on web writing. We began with a very successful workshop on new media at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2011. Now, Write Click presents ‘Unboggle The Blog’, a one-day workshop on blogging content this month.

‘Unboggle The Blog’ addresses the fundamental content requirements of this space. The workshop will look at blog creation & viralling, microblogging, managing conversations and community building.

The Write Click team comprises Payal Shah Karwa (The Word Jockey) – an independent communications consultant and Ramya Pandyan (Ideasmith), a writer/blogger. Both of us have been keen users and observers of this space, since its inception. We each have a corporate background as well as writing experience across different media including social media. So,let’s explore this new medium and create great content together!

The workshop details are in the attached mailer. More details which we would like to share:

Complete Address : The Bombay Hub, 4^th Floor, Candela Bldg, John Baptista Rd. near Mt Mary steps, ahead of Leelavati and Bungalow 9, Above Dilshad Salon, Bandra Reclamation.

Registration will be confirmed on full payment in cash. Wifi access will be available. Participants are welcome to bring along their laptops.

For queries, please email us at: 

Ramya Pandyan: ideasmithy@gmail.com / Payal Shah Karwa: thewordjockey@gmail.com                                      

Or you can also call us at 9870964781.

I AM Impressed: Film Review

I AM team - Captured from a distance

I AM impressed – The Film Review of I AM

Swedish Film Writer Ingmer Bergman once said  “ No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.’ I AM is such a film, which redefines typecast cinema, and gives our otherwise insulted minds some good food for thought. 4 sensitive.. no.. ultra-sensitive societal truths of Homosexuality, Child Sex Abuse, Single voluntary Motherhood and The Kashmir issue have been dealt with in great cinematic style, under a single film with four different character stories woven in beautifully. But the beauty of this film is it is well paced, not at all gory and scripted interestingly. This is one cinematic piece worth a watch, and you wouldn’t feel the weight of facing reality either.

The 4 Stor(ies) of IAM :

I AM Afia, I AM Megha, I AM Abhimanyu and I AM Omar are stories of 4 different characters each, who have faced some harsh, usually hushed up realities of life. The film takes a microscopic look at each of these issues and leaves a strong thought provoking message for the audience, without leaving them shaken or feeling uncomfortable.

Afia (played by Nandita Das) is a 30 something married woman who yearns for a baby and finally decides to make one independently, using a sperm donor, after her husband cheats on her and leaves her.

Megha, (Juhi Chawla), Afia’s friend, is a Kashmiri Pandit whose happy childhood spent in the paradise of Sringar, has suddenly been marred with violent ousting of her family from their homes. When she returns after 20 years to bury the carcass of those dark memories once and for all, the debate between her best friend Rubina (Manisha) showcases the bitter dilemma of life which both are faced with.

Abhimanyu (Sanjay Suri), also shown to be Afia’s friend, has grown upto be an opportunist. But the seeds of his misery have been sown by his stepfather (Anurag Kashyap) who abuses him sexually ever since he is a child till he grows up, and a lovable Mother who has chosen to blindfold herself from the dark truth due to circumstances.

Omar (Arjun Mathur) plays with the feelings of Jai-  a homosexual guy (Rahul Bose as Abhimanyu’s friend). Unable to take the shock of humiliation by the police, Jai is a reflection of gay men being harassed owing to the lack of a just system for homosexuals. Of course, with the judgment of Article 377, being awaited, many gay men and women would soon be liberated from the trauma of being scoffed at and harassed.

Why I liked the film:

• Its a courageous film, dealing with otherwise ignored issues like child sex abuse, homosexuality etc
• It strikes a harmonious balance between the darkness of the subject and the dangers of frivolous cinema
• It deals with dark subjects in a relatively sensitive yet engaging style, without a moment of unrequisite drama.
• These subjects NEED to be spoken about in society
• The stories flow smoothly one into the other.
• The impeccable editing is the leading point of the film
• The lead and supporting actors have done a commendable job to look, sound and be as real life as possible
• The stories are based on research and real life stories (e.g. I Am Abhimanyu is based on the lives of Harish Iyer and Ganesh N)
• Simple, Well paced, not gory
• The music is soulful
• Revolutionary. Big thappad on the faces of ‘big’ and self-proclaimed ‘modern’ filmmakers like KJo and clan. Big budgets and stars don’t make big films. The stories do. (sorry, do I sound like a biased bitch?)

 What I AM afraid of, is that a section of viewers might not agree with several nuances or the depth of the film. But My take is for a common man who is not yet sensitised to these topics, the film is a decent dose.

 What I did not like about the film: Why did they not take up some fifth subject too, to get the audiences think beyond brainless entertainment.

 Overall rating: 3.5 on 5. The film releases on April29th, 2011. Go watch it.

 Factoids about I AM:

•  It has travelled across the globe, and won various awards at International Film Festivals, already.
• The first Indian film to be financed through crowdsourcing (common people co-owning the film)
• Nandita Das was actually 5 months pregnant when she was shooting her part for this film
• Onir and Sanjay Suri have together made pathbreaking films like this earlier – My Brother Nikhil, Bas Ek Pal

More interesting factoids and latest news on on www.facebook.com/iamthefilms

Write Click at The Kala Ghoda Festival

The Online Writing market is flooded with assignments. The Social Media Marketing market is ‘tsunamied’ with content requirements. So is that the silver lining or the rainbow for Writers? Net, net for now its raining work. But the question is, are we Writers equipped to write for the new-media?

So we, at The Word Jockey Communications decided to conduct this good-looking module of Write Click – The Web Writing Workshops, to train writers to write for the Web (online/social media). And where better to host the inaugural session than the apna Kala Ghoda Festival? Write Click would be a part of the Literary Section of the Kala Ghoda Festival so you could look it up on their Literary section of their website http://www.kalaghodaassociation.com/ The slot’s booked over the weekend of 12th and 13th February 2011. The module is slated to happen over 2 days with an overview of these topics:

• Social Media Tools for Marketing

 • Blogging Away

• Content Strategies for Social Media

• Online Writing – how different it is from Print etc.

 There are about 20 seats or so, so why guess you should logon to www.kalaghodaassociation.com and quickly write in to them! SM is not just about posting on FB and getting followers on Twitter. It is a science, which must be complimented by the Art of Words. The Writer has the Art, the Workshop shall take care of the Science So Write for the Web, Write right! For more details or to schedule more such workshops, you could also connect with us at : thewordjockey@gmail.com. Cheers!

The People Tree – our new e-book project

designed by www.digitalpicasso.com

To make our speeches impressive, we use the words quoted by the high and mighty, like  The Buddha, Gandhi, Tolstoy, M.Luther King, George Bernard Shaw . The Word Jockey thought – why use only quotes quoted by the icons? Why can’t we get Common People like us, to share thoughtprovoking words with the world? 

We noticed a trend on Facebook, wherein people quoted their original words, and others liked them. Some were super good. Worth spreading, worth talking about. So we decided to start a page on FB called ‘The People Tree’ – words of wisdom of the people, for the people, by the people. Visit our page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/THE-PEOPLE-TREE/168725317728 to know more about it. 

(‘People’ connotes the Indian tree ‘Peepal’ which is a symbol of wisdom and enlightenment.)  The People Tree is a not-for-profit virtual community on Facebook. When we see some nice wise words quoted by common people, we simply repost them (after their permission) to be shared with everyone else. Of course with credits to the author of the quote! This way we intend to have a collaborative collection of wise quotes by us,people! To give this exercise a climax, along came the idea of collecting as many good quotes as possible and converting these into a little e-book of sorts. This would be, of course, distributed FOC to anyone around the world. 

So here we are, with The Word Jockey’s initiative of The People Tree E-book wherein we invite people to quote or vote. To participate, all you got to do is: 

Step 1: 

1) Visit our page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/THE-PEOPLE-TREE/168725317728  

2) Write your quote on our wall! Language no bar, provided people understand the script. 

3) Share the page with your friends and ask them to vote 

 We shall repost your quote  for all our friends and members to vote for it. You too should share this page with your friends to ask for their vote (basically click on the Like button). If you get more than 10 likes, your quote is in! It will become a part of our ‘wall of fame’ and be included in out first edition of The People Tree’s e-book. 

So write in and share this to ask your friends to vote as well. Happy Quoting!. For more details, you could write in to thewordjockey@gmail.com

Building a Career in Writing

It all started in my bedroom. I am talking about my career in Writing and Communications, people! I started with a laptop and an Internet Connection. People wondered how much would I manage to make in a month. Money is important for a living after all, you see. To tell you the truth,I have not made a million yet. And I dont promise that you too will make. But one thing is assured. Immense satisfaction, which is priceless. About the moolah, if not a million, you will definitely make a decent living. Becasue with the e-age now here, we writers have tremendous scope of being utilised and better paid.

So if you too have been looking to build a career in Writing, from your desk, from your kitchen, from your bedroom or even the garage, there’s nothing stopping you. And we all learn from others’ experiences don’t we? Here’s my little bit for all you aspiring writers or already writers, published and non-published, Indian and non-Indian, Rockstars or Scientists, MBA’s and MBE’s (Mind Boggling Extra Terrestrials). Follow this link for a a detailed ‘How to start a Career In Writing’. Read the entire article at this link http://www.vcherish.com/careers-education/building-a-career-as-a-writer.html

Slumdog Billionaire

 The Donate-A-Word campaign kicked off on September 8 which , by the way, was International Literacy Day.Thanks to all the donors including Shobhaa De, Anjum Rajabali and many others who donated a word, The Word Jockey in association with the NGO Adarshmay collated some 250 items comprising pens, pencils, crayons, notebooks and all things sweet to donate to the slum kids on Children’s Day. But since 14th November was a Sunday, we decided to celebrate it on 17th November instead. 17th November happened to be Eid as well as my husband’s Birthday!  So it was more like a triple celebration for the kids. That and it turned out to be one of the most celebrated event of our lives.

Ashish Pawaskar, who runs this NGO, met us at the Govandi Signal from where we were guided inside the little bylanes of Shivaji Nagar. This is where he runs this private school for some slum kids. When he came in his vehicle, jam packed with the kiddos, they were more than just excited to see us. We were warmly welcomed by the all-decked up pack of 11 girls and boys with some happy ‘Hello teacher! Hello miss and Hi Didi’ greetings. My husband Rahul was almost swept inside as they took him in by hand and shook them vigorously to wish him a Happy Birthday. If we were trees and they were monkeys, it would have been a one big happy family!

The school’s White Board wished us Eid Mubarak and A Happy Birthday to the Birthday boy. We met with Ashish’s wife and the volunteer, Vandana who have been kind enough to lend their lives to this cause. The kids surrounded us, smiling and pushing each other to shake hands, but not even once misbehaving themselves. ‘Teacher my name is Arshad’ said one. I looked up and smiled a Colgate smile. I felt how a Tom Cruise would on the Red Carpet. Elated, touched and all that. The group leaders pulled up a mattress where they all squat – like a choreographed symphony – girls on one end and the guys seated on the other. Then one by one, some came up to showcase their singing or dancing skills. They sang the Scout & Guide bhajans, some Bollywood hits, and got playing Passing the Parcel. I digged the very dainty very cute Thumbelina-like girl who enacted a Fruit Salad poem….guess can’t really recall her name yet. We were on a complete roll. It was touching to see Ayesha, Muskaan, Arshad, the very little Sania and the other 20 plus paltan on a celebratory mood.

Finally, before we departed we donated their little kits to them, from the Donate-a-Word campaign.

And in turn they donated to us their love, their respect and their favourite toy – Bluey (we just christened it), the big blue beautiful Dolphin. Now that made us feel like Billionaires. Bluey is now ensconced comfortable in our car boot. How I wish the kids were all that lucky too. But they did get a little ride that day in our car, a scarce privilege for them. As we said goodbye, they again shook hands and waved out. It was touching. Memorable. Made you want to stay back. And when we sped on our way out, it made me feel enriched. Happier. Like some Slumdog Billionaire.

We Donated a Word

Donate A Word

The Word Jockey will celebrate Children’s Day in a special way. Our Donate-a-Word Campaign  which happened in September 2010 on the occasion of International Literacy Day saw quite some decent response. So we shall set out to make some children happy by gifting them a nice goody bag with a pen, pencil, notebooks and a box of crayons or poster colours and a brush.

The Donate-A-Word Campaign was the  brainchild of the Word Jockey, in association with The NGO Adarshmay. We launched this campaign World Literacy Day which falls on 8 September. The drive will now finally see colour on 17th November to celebrate Children’s Day. Though Children’s Day is celebrated on 14th November here in India, it being a Sunday we had to push the donation to a later date. But the enthusiasm hasnt yet died down. Can’t wait to see the excited chatteing and smiles on their faces when they receive the goody bag from us.

The entire idea for doing Donate a Word and not donate-a-something else, was from the point that education is the root solution to all problems marring India today. And as The Word Jockey we want to spread the word of education for children through our little efforts.

Donate -a-Word Donation Day: Wednesday, 17 November 2010 at a Slum School in Chembur, Mumbai India.

What are we donating: Books, Pens, Pencils, Crayons, Poster Colours

So donate-a-word and help a child’s education. For more details you could write to us at thewordjockey@gmail.com or like us on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/The-Word-Jockey-Writing-Communication/105546575744

If you would like to join us, be our guests! Thanks for supporting the cause and we shall keep you posted of the next Donate-a-Word Campaign.

Long Live Literature!

Finally Mumbai has her own Literature Festival! When I had attended the Jaipur Literary Fest in January this year, I kinda cribbed while booking my tickets wondering why couldn’t the event be in Mumbai. (though later I was glad it was Jaipur, owing to the oh-so-charming Diggi Palace). Someone listened to me up there J and the Literature Live festival is happening this weekend at Mumbai’s south corner landmark of NCPA.

We are going to see the who’s who of the Litterati anchoring interesting sessions – my favourite ones seem to be ‘New India, New Writing’ on 12^th Nov at 1.30 pm, E-literature on 13^th Nov at about 11 am (yes, need to be up early this Saturday!), the Kite Runner presentation by Sorab Wadia which begins at about 7pm, Poetry of the City on 14^th November 4 pm (seems to be tentative) and the day-long session at Lavasa the next day – 15^th November. Literally cool! There are a dozen more sessions which you can choose and register for at http://literaturelive.in/programs.html so take your pick.

What’s quite strange though that amidst several Mumbai-based literary maestros like Gulzarsaab or Javed Akhtar, celeb writers like De and Kashyap, new young writers like Reema Moudgil and Anna Zaidi, award winning writers like Adiga etc, they only thought of Chetan Bhagat to be worth the city salt. Maybe the others are all unavailable. Weep! Hope the next year would see better guest speakers and dynamic personalities who shape the literary world. More updates coming up on my blog about the festival as it happens. Long Live Literature!