Legendary Portrait of Life

The Mona Lisa, quoted as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". To paint this portrait, Leonardo da Vinci required a canvas, an Easel (stand on which canvas is placed), and colours. To paint any painting, painter requires these three things but not every painting becomes a legend.

Our Life is also like a painting, where we are the painters painting on the canvas of time placed on a 3 legged Easel of personal life, work and self-development filling the canvas using the 7 colours of thinking, knowledge, attitude, hard work, perseverance, acceptance of failure, and openness to change.

There are millions of paintings, painted by thousands of painters but only some of them maintain their significance through the course of time. Similarly, there are numerous life paintings but only a few of them are legends.

The question which arises is, what is that factor which makes a painting or life's portrait legendary?

For any painting to become legendary, there are 3 requirements

1. Stable Easel

The first and foremost thing to make a good portrait is that the painter must have a stable easel so that the canvas is stable. The time (canvas) of each individual is divided into his personal life, his work and self-development. Most people try to balance only two legs at a time which result in an unstable easel.

If you maintain a balance between personal life and work but forgot about the 3rd which is self-development, your work will slowly gets affected, which results in disturbance of the work life balance and in turn you have an unstable easel. Similary if you try to maintain a balance between work and self development, personnal life suffers and again easel is destabalized.

2. Canvas Utilization

A good painting is determined by how well you utilise the canvas to bring out the maximum of your creativity on paper. In life, every person on this planet has only 24 hours in a day, its what they do in those 24 hours which makes a life's portrait legend.

If you paint in a small area and leave most of the canvas blank it won't be good picture. A person who wastes his time and not utilize time for his personal life, work or self development will just lead a normal life and cannot paint a memorable lif'e portrait.

3. A meaningful colour combination

The pianting is how a painter uses the combination of colours on the canvas to bring out a meaningful picture. In life's portrait, people uses 7 colours of thinking, knowledge, attitude, hard work, perseverance, acceptance of failure, and openness to change, in their time to bring out the success and happiness in their life.

Every painting brings out some meaning and so if every life. Life is meaningful only if both success and happiness comes together in life. People may or may not posess all the 7 colours of life which determines the quality of their life's potrait.

A legendary portrait of life is painted by a painter who uses possess 7 attributes, uses them in his time while optimum utilizing it and maintaining a balance between his personal life, work and self development and lead a happy life with success.

Anyone can paint a legendary portrait of his life, just he needs to understand what he wants to paint and should be creative enough to bring out his thoughts on canvas because leading a meaningful life is an art more than a science.

A new dawn of advertising

Gone are those days when companies and their advertising agencies rely on tried and testing media for promotion of product or services. It is the age of millenniums and generation Z, which spend 90% of the time on the internet even for the things which are available otherwise.

In my blog titled. "If old is 'Gold', new is 'Platinum'..!!", I had mentioned about changing requirements of advertisement to reach the correct target audience. Companies have started giving a prominent share of marketing budget to these new methods of communication along with the old ones.

No company can just completely rely on TV, print, radio and other old methods of just reaching their customers. They need to provide some ways to customers through which they could engage with the brands. In my blog titled, " Hitting the Bull's-eye..!!, I had mentioned new ways which companies are using to provide a platform to their customers to directly interact with brands.

The other media which proves to make companies and brands omnipresent is "the internet". The advertising industry has been witnessing a paradigm shift in marketing medium through the social media marketing, mobile marketing, viral videos and short films.

Many companies like Ola, Uber, Quikr, Kingfisher, Commonfloor, Snapdeal, TrulyMadly, Flipkart, Lenovo, Hotstar and much more had routed their advertising campaigns through youtube sensations like AIB (All India Bakchod) and TVF (The Viral Fever). 

This type of medium gives direct reach to the target customer in a subtle way whose effect is more prominent and long lasting than that of TV or print or radio or even the social media advertisement.

TVF Pitchers successfully provided a platform for companies to showcase their brands and became the first sitcom to be listed in IMDB top 250 worldwide.

Then TVF Permanent roommates touched the hearts and showcased brands like ola cabs in every episode through a character named Purshottam.

Movie and TV celebrities endorsement has been a constant practice by most of the companies to register their brands in customers' mind, but always presenting the communication just as an advertisement reduces the impact of celebrities.

But the recent work of advertisement from capital foods, the owner of Ching's Secret has flabbergasted both advertising and entertainment fraternity.

The video titled "Ranveer Ching Returns | A Rohit Shetty Film | Ranveer Singh & Tamannaah" is not another bollywood movie featuring the bad ass actor Ranveer Singh and sizzling Tamannaah Bhatia, but it is a wonderful piece of communication for chings brand.

It was released in the format of any other bollywood movie release format by releasing a trailer and own poster.

The video's trailer was released around a week before the full short film of 5 minutes and 33 seconds, got more than 3 million views and the full movie released on 19th August got 2 million views in just 2 days of its release.

How this marks the new dawn of advertising in India?

First of all, this advertisement which is in the form of a short film starts as any bollywood movie.

Secondly, mentioning Rohit Shetty, a known producer, and director of bollywood movies gives more credibility to it of being a movie only.

Thirdly, it casts Ranveer Singh who is currently the youth icon after winning national award for best actor and Tamannaah, who is one of the best actresses of tollywood. Thus creating excitement in both North and South Indian audience.

The first time any viewer will watch this video, he/ she will expect it being another movie directed by Rohit Shetty having Ranveer and Tamannaah as lead actor and actress.

It creates a win-win situation for all the stakeholders, capital foods getting advertisement, Rohit 

Shetty, Ranveer and Tamannaah getting a publicity and buzz in the audience.

Certainly, short films were made before to inject the brand communication in customers' in a subtle way, but chings have come up with the never before concept which will definitely change a lot in this industry.

In this new dawn of advertising, there were advertising rays of viral video advertising, customer engaging advertising and another ray of short film advertising just emerged from the horizon.

The Managerial Syndrome

Crying our lungs out, resting in the hands of a doctor this is how we came into this world. With our birth, we were given a name by our parents and everyone used to call us by that name. As we grew up we started responding to that name and it became our identity for the rest of our lives.

The name is a powerful tool to make us feel who we are and respond accordingly. The same power corporate designation has on us. 

You all must have come across several corporate designations and most of you must be holding a designation which includes the term 'manager' in it. Whether it's any function, be it sales, marketing, human resource, operations or finance, all incorporate the term 'manager' in their designation.

Not only at function but also at every employee grade, manager term is used in the designations

We daily come across several quotes, stories, case studies on managers vs leaders and the best description in a single phrase is "Managing is role but leadership is the attribute."

Every leader is ought to be a good manager but not vice versa. Hence being just a manager is not enough.



The question is why the corporate world loves word 'manager' so much when we all know we want leaders. It is fascinating to witness companies spending millions, on one hand, to develop leaders among their employees while designating them as managers only.

This is same as calling out someone's else name but wants to call someone else. This paradoxical condition is the managerial syndrome which further develops leadership deficiency syndrome by which maximum companies are suffering these days.

Why don't we designate our employees with the term 'leaders' in it?

Be it any function or any grade, remove the term manager and start using leader instead. Area sales leader, marketing leader, national sales leader and so on. Just changing the name changes what is expected from the employees.

People don't work with companies, people work with people. People only create companies and in turn companies create people. A manager can only develop another manager, it's a leader who creates another leader. The problem with today's corporate world is not lack of leadership, but the excess of managerial attitude.

If a company hires a potential leader, the seed of leadership in him is not nourished and crushed under a load of managers and thus leading to the lack of leadership.

The managerial syndrome starts with the designation itself. Small changes can lead to the big difference, change the name and change everything.