Tag: Bangalore

club elements

To have a good time takes some planning. To organize a dance party for instance.. Yet, here in Saigon, it’s happenin every night of the week, and more so during this festive holiday. Clubbing however is for stress relief. It got sight, smoke, sound and scene.

The feel.

Players know where to go, to spot a “happenin”.

When young, I often organized dance parties. So I know a thing or two about how to create a structure and space for bon vivant.

Energy creates a chain of its likeness. Contagious.

DJ’s, lighting, booze, dance partners, and those at tables nearby and guards, all contributing to success at clubbing.

The rhythm of the night, I want nobody but you, Every move you make etc…

are the must haves.  There is a peak time for every party, when everyone seems to be “in the zone”. A party synergy.

When no table looks at the others, that’s when people lost themselves in “the rhythm of the night”.

I threw a Christmas party in my basement the first Winter at Penn State.

Vietnamese abroaders showed up. We dimmed the lights and gave it a try.

It was cold out, yet warm inside. Young exile men and a few female foreign exchange students, trying to make the best of the situation and occasion.

Here, it’s so commercialized, and cookie-cutter-ed (almost bionic).

But still, if you thrive in clubbing sector, you can survive in business.

It’s purely market-driven and customer-service oriented, albeit young crowd. The good-time business, whose benchmark was set by studio 54.

They don’t use bouncers here. Instead, the uniformed guards circled among the crowd. And they are in your face, to make sure intoxication doesn’t lead to violence. Some clubs even have dancers on stage to catalyze and stir up the pot.

The sound is always deafening.

It’s as if people are trying to scare away the dark.

Las Vegas thrived on Hoover Dam‘s electric supplies. Here in Saigon, occasional black-outs interrupted the party. Don’t worry, we got

power generators, enough for karaoke upstairs.

Don’t be interrupted. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.

Live, love and laugh. I couldn’t remember where I was until I see the flag which reminded me that I still am in Vietnam, a Vietnam in transition,

with all the right elements in place, club elements.

P.S. As of this edit, the NYT also ran a piece on workers in China went clubbing after hours of assembling those I phones. A few years back, similar article would feature Bangalore‘s call center workers. It’s a logical and predictable outcome of automation, industrialization and human revolt against the machination of it all. The irony is, club elements involve a lot of machines: speakers, turn tables, smoke machines, light switches and fire alarm. Mr Bose, whose name is now the same as best sound system, passed away a few days ago. RIP. Who need more volume, when you can hear just fine, the music that is, and certainly not the conversation. That’s not one of club elements.

 

Fat pipe, fast food

FIOS in Triple Play, for $79.00 for the first six months.

The last time I looked, it was $100 for the Triple Play package: phone, TV and broadband.

In China, kids played until they dropped dead (unwilling to lose their seats at the Internet cafe and online, where supposedly, they were up against competitors from all over the world. Sort of 24/7 Beijing Olympics).

And the China you and I had in mind (Nixon and Mao, Madam Butterfly and man in front of the tanks) is now replaced by a new generation of only boys, obese and online.

It will be just another step before they are online and home alone (at least, they drag themselves out to the internet cafe around the corner for now).  At home, one has access to Haeir small refrigerators: lactose, sugar, carb diet are in abundant supply. Stressed over a lost game? Have some more sweet!

The chairs and screens grow larger to accommodate larger “young” population. The next Billion ( according to Jump Point).

Marketers always seek to win over the next generation. Well, they are no longer the Generation without the Sun as in Japan, but something resembles Bangalore and Beijing. Without repeating Friedman’s mantra, but they are the ones who will take away my kids’ jobs, if not mine already, while we are asleep.

Their older and rural counterparts might have been mistreated and working under age at off-shored garment plants,

but these Asian urban kids are internet savvy, and fast food junkies.

They could multitask (typing and eating fries at the same time), code, and speak two if not three languages. Hard to beat!

The future prospects are quite frightening, if you can envision the Hongkongization of  China. 1.3B entrepreneurs and consumers of every thing fatty: fat pipe and fast food. It’s quite a recipe for a disaster, if not, obesity and obscurity.

Asians kids are by and large, not that extroverted. Now, they spend hours in front of the screen, developing and playing games. We will have to take old maid’s matchmaking from an art to an industry. Honey.com anyone? Remember now, when both boys and girls look like Sumo, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Plus, they can do a lot of stuff online nowadays to alter the look, size and shape of a person. Plastic surgery goes East, right after Madison Ave.

YouTube China will have quite an audience to reckon with, provided they roll out enough fat pipe for fat people.