I'm a techie, I love gadgets and hope you do too. I've always wanted an external hard-drive to which I could backup all my neatly categorized photographs, sound files and other important stuff that I cared about. DVD backup was good and all the online photo-sharing sites did their job pretty well but a solid piece of hardware to hold all of your software always sounds more satisfying.
Couple of months ago, on a trip back from Mumbai, I spent some time window shopping at the Tata Croma electronics outlet inside the airport terminal. Thats where my eyes landed on a little red carton which on first glance looked like any other USB based external hard-disk.
Curiously, it had a remote control and the box said that I could hook it up straight to my TV! It sported HDMI/ TV Out and supported most multimedia formats.
But heres the best part: the thing about external HDs is that they need to be hooked up to your laptops with messy USB cables. We've all wished there was a better way and staring right back at me was a box that claimed it had done exactly that!
While I couldn't buy that piece right then and there, I made it a point to visit the Croma outlet in Delhi recently and bought it for around 10K INR (thats ~$200 USD) - more out of curiosity than necessity.
- has a component TV out which connects to the back of my TV (my TV does not have an HDMI port :( ),
- has a few USB ports to which I can connect pen-drives (and WiFi dongles!) and their like,
- has a LAN port which I connected straight to one of the LAN ports on my WiFi router.
I power on the system and it takes a few minutes (yes- that definitely calls for an improvement) to boot up. I turn on my WiFi enabled laptop. Lo and behold, I can browse wirelessly to my external hard-disk. Look ma, no wires (almost)!
I replicated my folders and files on the Screenplay, which took a reasonable amount of time. Then I turned on my TV and used the remote (now I have a three remotes to juggle!). The navigation was smooth, but it took a couple of seconds for Screenplay to load up directories. Well now I could literally browse through all my files using a remote control on my regular TV- pretty neat!
One added bonus was its internet connectivity. There is a menu item called 'Online Media'. Clicking it enables me to read straight off blogs, listen on SHOUTCast radio or even view YouTube videos and Torrents straight off my TV. However, thanks to my measly 256 kbps connection and the not-so-good buffering system, the pauses in between the YouTube videos were a bit irritating (another department for improvement).
Google just recently announced their intent of entering the TV space by coming up with an Andriod driven set-top box? Google TV which does this and a lot, lot more is scheduled sometime later this year. It would sure be interesting to see where this is going... hmm, not many screens left for google to colonize!
Now, heres what appeals to the 'developer' regions of my brain about the Screenplay Director: the software is GPLd. So, I could download the source-code off this link and improvise (that is... time permitting). Cool!
Theres definitely much scope for improvement overall. But certainly a good start and a price point that is not too much of a premium from an ordinary-dumb-1TB-external-hard-disk-drive. Certainly opens up a lot of avenues for innovation. Overall, I'd score it 3 stars out of 5 and a bonus half star for innovation.
Every honcho worth his salt, dealing with rural retail in India, swears by the sachet story and ensures that atleast a slide in the corporate presentation is dedicated to it.
For my lack of better imagination; imagine if every book on a say, 'Engineering Mathematics' started with the same dedication page
This book is dedicated
to
Ms. Sa-Che'
- such is the magnitude of influence of this one word on the way folks (us at Eko included) try to position a product for the not-urban India. The Sachet Story in short, is nothing short of a hyper-polygonal love story (some of our Bollywood movies are still stuck with the triangular variety!), with a whole army of heroes trying to woo 'ol Miss Sachet with whatever they could fling at her.
This essentially says that sometime in the '80 or the '90s a relatively unknown player called CavinKare, literally pulled the carpet under the entire group of global giants trying to sell their shampoos in India by understanding the simple fact that theres only as much as a customer could ever pay. If one could sell something at that price then it required nothing more than a nudge or a light tickle to persuade them to buy that something. So, they sold shampoo in tea-bag sized packets at 90p and then at 50p and viola- Sachet was born!
Chapter 2. Thats extinct!
Cut! Flashback two decades. Thats me, sweating under a groaning fan, frantically trying to coax the very last hint of black ink out of my fountain pen while the school bell rings and the teacher non-nonchalantly snatches the answer sheets, right underneath my pen's nib, before it could stutter its last dying words. No amount of cursing or praying would make any difference now. Except, maybe it did make a difference :). Well... then came a pen we simply knew as 'Reynolds'. Out went the nib and the ink-pen and the ink well; the 'pencil box' had new international tenants. I could buy a few Reynolds for the price of one ink-pen and the best part was that it democratized and simplified the process of writing. That Reynolds was the first 'sachetization' to have hit most of 'us'. While true connoisseurs did cry foul for reducing the sublime art of writing to its basal nothings; the venerable ink pen was extinct. I must admit though... its been years since I have written more than two straight sentences with any pen; who 'writes' these days anyways!?
Chapter 3. Its Plastic!
If there is anything that has contributed to the growth of the sachet industry, its the advent of plastics. Till the cheap plastics came about, it was neither economical, nor practical to pack gooey dollops of liquids, gels and what nots into gulp sized units and print glossy true-color portraits of dames showing off their photo-shopped long hair. And plastic remains its bane, especially in most emerging countries. While these engines of mass consumption went on an overdrive, generating all forms of consumables in plastic avatars, they stuck a moniker - 'disposable' on them, without having the faintest clue on how to manage their disposal.
Oh, and add to this the fact that somewhere along the path of evolution, after the elaborate drainage systems of Mohejo-daro and Harappa that made it stand out as civilizations, most of us Indians have lost the gene that should have kicked in when throwing trash in public places- its so easy toblame the genes and get away with it ;).
Chapter 4. The Bad
And, TaDa! even our animals seem to have taken to plastics- just that their intestines don't take as kindly to it and they end up dying a slow death.
If only plastic packaging were portrayed as not disposable by default, but as a re-usable novelty! True, this has something to do with the packaging industry on the whole, the sachet industry should not be the prime culprit - but definitely an accomplice.
What if all plastic using companies had to ensure by law, that they also had to buy used plastics back from the customers through the same channel that they sold their goods! ...Nothing more than wishful thinking. Sure, some companies are making token efforts as a part of their CSR programs- but we know that something like this will succeed only if it is a commercial program- an integral part of the product life-cycle.
Chapter 5. The Ugly
Well, if that was the bad, now comes the ugly. Trust me, this one IS ugly. Try this. Walk ten paces in any direction on any road in Delhi (or any place in North India), look down. I can bet you will find at-least one every odd yard. This innocuous package is called 'Pan Masala'. (The scorpion in the pic is not a part of some fancy kickass branding- thats the mandatory warning sign these have to carry)
Paan, I read has been around since ages. It is a betel-leaf wrap with areca-nut, lime and motley spices inside 'em- supposed to be chewed as mouth fresheners post meals. Somewhere down our colonial past, tobacco was added to the list of ingredients.
Commercial Paan Masala was a recent development, where a Rs.5000 crore+ industry has sprung up with various combinations of pan ingredients. The sachetization wave was readily adopted by these manufacturers and it has resulted in their sales shooting straight up. One variety of pan masala was particularly potent- the one with tobacco as an ingredient. It has now been established that pan masala is as addictive as cocaine. In its sachet form, this ended up as the only cheap thrill- that the entire bottom of the pyramid here had access to. This sachet is more ubiquitous than any other, especially in North India. From kids begging on the streets to migrant drivers ferrying their bosses in their posh cars on the streets of Delhi - ALL have a few sachets stashed in their pockets. It either helps them forget their hunger and pain or has become a plain addictive habit that they just cant kick.
Used packets are simply discarded everywhere- literally everywhere. Another unsightly addition to the plastic mess we've landed ourselves in.
The sachet story is a pretty dramatic one. A simple bi-syllabic word that has touched a few billion lives in a few good ways and a few bad ones. One conclusion is unambiguous- Sachet has redefined the word consumption- forever.
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