Saturday, April 19, 2008

Behind "Coffee With Bandar"

I heard that many of you who don't follow Sundar's blog (i.e. everybody), had a difficult time understanding my earlier post on his way of taking interviews.
So to give you a bit of background on his blogging style, let me now re-tell his interview with me:

The following transcript appeared as Coffee with Bandar* here.
* Note: No animals were harmed during the making of this post. No coffee was wasted either, only time and energy were.

Sundar's blog is read all over our office.
The truth is nobody here could possibly ignore his blinding status messages, bolded and underlined signature in the mails, or his frequent and loud utterances of "make sure you read todays awesomely popular post in coffee-with-bandar dot com" punctuated in the middle of every conversation.
Hence I decided to have a small chat with him on why he is, well, so annoying.

Me: Mr. Bandar, how do you generate so many ideas for all the boring posts that you put in your blog? Do you read a lot?
Bandar: Yes, I do! Even last week I read the story of Three Little Pigs. But those are not the places from where I get ideas. I do pure research!
You see, I like to provide my audience with only quality content synthesized from hand picked blogs, so that they don't have to waste their time on them and instead waste the cumulative time reading my blog.

Me : But what you do, sounds like plagiarism!
Bandar : No, it shouldn't, because I have never heard of that word.

Me : Duh! Okay, How many page views do you usually get everyday?
Bandar : It ranges from zero to a few thousands. Sometimes when I am very bored, I continuously reload the page till the pageviews reach the three figure mark.

Me: Seeing your hit counter, it seems that you get bored very often...
Can you reveal to us how many unique visitors are there who have no work and don't care for their soul and actually read your blog?
Bandar: Well, it is a secret. Including you and me, the total count has now surpassed 3.
The third being my alter ego. Actually thinking of it, if I could teach my dog to read, it would increase the count by 43% !

Me: Wow, thats great!
Ok, I would like to put a graph of these stats. I am opening up Analytics in my browser, can you login ...
Wait a min! Whats that ugly thing doing in my Firefox?
Bandar: Thats my coffee-with-bandar toolbar! I just installed it in your browser when you were distracted by the mole on my left cheek.

Me: Holy monkey (no, not a racial abuse)! What do you need a toolbar for?
Bandar: The toolbar basically takes screenshots of all the pages that you visit and mails them to me. This way I can analyze what my readers really like and write posts on that.

Me : But it sounds scary. Is it secure? Are you sure it wont spread any viruses?
Bandar : How can it when that itself is a virus! He he he.

Me: Hmmm, you seem to think very deep. Do you consider anybody as a role model?
Bandar : No, None at all. In fact, apart from gastroenteritis, I am in perfect health.

Me: I think you got confused here. I asked if you emulate somebody…
Bandar: Oh yes, I truly admire Miss Teen Carolina! She is my mole mode, errr.. super model, oooops, role model. I am already emulating her in my blogs by writing nonsensical stuff...
Someday I wish to have a chat with her over a cup of coffee and would blog about it. Don't miss that post!

Me: Sure, and many thanks for doing this mokkai interview with me. Hope my readers stay bored after reading this.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

A Quick Reference for "Coffee with Bandar"

If you are an ardent follower of "Coffee with Bandar" posts, you would often want to know what exactly goes into the mind of our genius reporter, Mr Bandarrrajan, when he poses his trademark questions to the "famous" celebrities.
Many times you would wish for somebody to explain the deep and hidden meanings behind those intellectual conversations.
Sweat no more, for I have compiled a quick reference guide for the three most repeated phrases that Mr Bandar uses in all his interviews.

Phrase 1: (Bandar to his readers) "I welcome our super ultra special guest for today who needs no introduction...".
What Bandar really means:
"My bulk mails to people who are really famous did not fetch any response. So I have to now resort to interview everybody who is anybody in my vicinity, who then grudgingly replies in one liners with smilies put at the end of each sentence to pass off as "cool" answers.
(Scratching his cheeks) I should do something about the mole in my left cheek, it seems to put off people..."

Phrase 2: "Hi [interviewee name]. Hearty welcome to this really special edition of CWS".
What really goes in the mind of the interviewee:
"What the heck is CWS? Why am I here? I shouldn't have agreed to answer his stupid questions for the sake a free cup of coffee.. I must first kill that NIT junior of his, who set me up with him. I wish Bandar's gastroenteritis would get severe and burst him out now."

Phrase 3: "What message do u want to give to the budding younger generation of readers who are at present not wasting their time by reading my blogs?".
What Bandar really means when he says this:
"Thanks for your banal replies to my canned questions. Even my dog which reads my blogs, would have got bored of it.
Heck, now I have to reload this post more frequently to make up for the page views lost due to this junk interview...
"

What the interviewees really think when he says this:
"Holy grass! You must be really stupid to think that your readers (all three of them) are eagerly awaiting for my advise with bated breadth and yearning to follow it.
In fact, I would advise them stop reading your posts and explore other harmless methods of self torture."


PS:
1) Apparently Mr Bandar tried to take an interview of Blogger's product manager at Google, who then promptly quit his job and moved to Alaska to avoid meeting him. We will miss you Eric!
2) Don't forget to take a micro-xerox of this cheat sheet and keep in your pocket for ready reference; you may never know when Mr Bandar may catch you and force you to read his blog.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

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Jai Sri Ram

 
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