Kodachrome

The strains of the beautiful song of the Simon-Garfunkel duo echo in my ears : “Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away…” as they crooned in harmony in Central Park many summers back.  

The business world is agog with the latest one that bites the dust “Kodak files for bankruptcy”- the papers screamed. Perhaps the writing was on the wall for past few years anyway. But as the obituary of the great iconic organisation is written and discussed, one can’t help but feel sorry for the fall of one of the greatest path-breakers in history of photography.

The tennis great Bjorn Borg had once said that both in life as well in a game of tennis the key lies in getting the right breaks at the right time. True as it is , one can perhaps extend it a wee bit by saying that not only is the time of the break important but also is to get on to the right wave at the right time.

George Eastman, the prolific founder and Kodak, had many firsts to their credit. The irony remains that although they started the digital wave they failed to recognize the full potential of it and lost its way at some point. The phenomenon is not entirely new and we have seen organisations having a head-start lose in the race in failing to catch on to the very innovations that they create.

Organizations are created by visionaries and steered by stalwarts and in business it is always a matter of survival of the fittest, so logically if Kodak could not get it right, they lost the way.  However one cannot help feel a tad of melancholy as the iconic Kodak film and Eastmancolor touched and influenced so many of us in our formative years that we cannot forget so easily.

Simon & Garfunkel had it right when they sang:

Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away…….

Land Ho !

Today’s headline in the Times of India literally shook me up from sleep : “Alliance Air pilot mistakes Kochi for Kozhikode”.  Great way to start the day, I thought.

We have had stories about the fumbling of the airlines, particularly the state owned ones so many times that we have ceased to laugh. But this one tops it all. The pilot has announced after the landing that he thought he had landed in Kozhikode ! Nowadays we have expat pilots from Eastern European countries and we have had a few cases where they had problems with their English. Maybe he thought Kochi was the short form of Kozhikode ! A few days back we read about the bungling of Kingfisher Airlines where they put hundred odd passengers (sorry, guests) in a wrong flight.

But it raises bigger questions : what was the ATC doing ? Did the ATC think it was sitting in Kochi or did they dream of sitting in Kozhikode ? Very soon an enquiry will be called for, the pilot will be de-rostered and our minister will say something on TV to save the face. And all will be forgotten- till the next one comes up.

But serious as it is, we also must give it to the airlines for making our drab mundane life adventurous- just imagine you board a flight not knowing where it will land. It maybe in Kochi or Kozhikode this day, Imphal the next morning and Jaipur in the afternoon, back in Chennai just in time for dinner.

You can have a real bohemian trip- the real magical mystery tour. Maybe this can shore up our foreign exchange reserves- we can promote this as the ultimate tourism for India: please come to this mythical world, take a flight and land you do not know where ! What a catch-line for the ITDC guys. Just arm yourself with a good quality of binoculars and keep looking out of the window and yell “Land Ho !” when you see the terra firma ! People will fly for the sheer novelty of it.

Hey the pilot should not be de-rostered, he must be given an award for shoring up the economy.