Since the lockdowns, I have been playing around and have been fascinated by the Tik Tok app. It is very popular amongst the teenagers at 46 years of age I am hooked to it. I love the easy functions and the ease with which you can make the videos. The simplicity and bizarreness are what make Tik Tok edgy and different from say an Instagram. Music and film dialogues allow one to do a Kare O Ke or just lip-sync your favorite dialogues. Since it is an app fro the self-indulgent you can use skins, makeup, filters to do a makeover. I used skins that gave me many girl hairstyles and then I sang Girls Just wanna have fun with that get-up.

Then I used a filter that made me look like Charlie Chaplin and I sang” awara Hun Awara Hun !” On that. There are apps that make me look like Dracula or just a Zombie I used the thriller zombie tune for that one.

In one video I game a scarred robot from terminator, in the other I became a cat and then a dog. I experimented with a lot of the skins and filters mainly categorized under the heading of Beauty, Cute, India, Magic, Glasses, Cool, Screen, Game, Filter, Meme.

I could record my own sounds and add effects and ambient sounds as I pleased. The motion filters were the best, they gave me edit options like a slo-mo, circle, and many such bizarre and quick edit and transition options. The fun is that the video gets uploaded on Instagram immediately, although I would think that the skills and style required to be a Tie Tok star are different from that of Insta. The fun element in Tik Tok makes it a notch higher in terms of creativity, I could transport myself into so many characters and literally daydream on the app. The variety and the many permutations and combination one has interns of steel and music is mazing on Tik Tok. It is also purely analytics and AI-based app and serves you exactly what you like to watch in terms of the videos of other people you follow.

It is a great way to do rehearsals for actors, singers, dancers, and. Comedians or just plain mimicry artists. You can Hawn your funny scripts on the app and even do little skits with others. I suggest you use the app more spontaneously, rather than make videos with a lot of preparation.

As of now, I have become a woman, a mad man, a zombie, a girl, a transgender, a cat, a joker, a dog, an ant, a football, and even a circus clown in my many avatars on Tik Tok. I have sung Opera Songs, Yapped on rap tunes, and snapped my figures to Latino and Mahican music. Hell, I have even mounted the famous Sholay Dialogue and Mimicked Dev Anand, while I nag in the rain the tune of the film Sri 420.

The child in me wants to play with this app and it keeps me engaged all day, thinking of one bizarre avatar after another. I am closing on 1000 likes in just two months that for me has been an achievement during the lockdown. In that sense, it is a total time pass app its sheer senselessness is it’s very attractive and it will drive a lot of young people to show off their creative and artistic skills.

The Mumbai Dubba wala has been hit hard by the pandemic and the lack down around the city. With Mumbai under maximum threat, the city has come to a standstill. With everyone inside homes, there are no trains running, and the office turn out is negligible. In this scenario, the dabbawalas system has been in operation for 130 years and uses no electronic, web, or intent-based system to run its’ huge network of 500 odd food packets and lunch box carriers. It relies on an intriguing system of local trains, pushcarts, and bicycles to silver hot lunch and food to offices direct from their homes at the most economical charges.

It delivers more than 2 lakh lunchboxes around the city every day with over 2.6 lakh transitions daily, with a substantial turn over of 45 cr. The union has approached the state government for help as their meters will starve with no business they are finding it difficult to feed themselves and their families. The people who feed the entire city’s workforce and put hot home food on the desk of office goers are going hungry themselves.

Dabba Gol! With the Pandemic having a huge impact on supply chains, distribution, and public transport they are badly hampered with no delivery to make. We’re as at an average a Dabbawalas makes 40 delivers, there are only 12 odd delivers in yeti day to make and no one wants to risk their lives for that.

They are asking for support from donors, NGO’s and others who can help them tie this bad tide were their livelihoods have all but vanished. An old school system but a very efficient, cost-effective, and accurate the Dabbawalas have been called at great universities to explain and present how they do their deliveries, just by using chit’s, markings, tag numbers, and registers. With no use of technology their hardcore base of the common office going Mumbaikar is still intact. They deliver home food, unlike other delivery services that deliver restaurant food. The backbone to the average middle-class Mumbaikar is going through taught times and hope for improvement if things open up again.

Till then they will have to find ways of surviving at an average a Dabbawalas makes Rs 15,000 a month doing deliveries. That income has shrunk to nothing, we look to companies and institutions to come forward and support them during these times of lockdown. Some are also looking to give guest lectures at universities explaining their unique logistics method to students, that is one way to make some money.

Now that we are more than five months after the first virus case was detected on 25th December 2019 in a Wuhan wet fish market in China, the post COVID world looks very different from the world as we know it up until last year. The new Paradigm is lockdowns, social distancing, face masks, work from home, pay cuts, job losses, lack of income, huge migrant labor problem, lack of mobility. The impact has been severe on the world and national economies, communities, the way people interact with each other, physically and remotely. The impact thus also has been on religion, both organized or otherwise in the shape of sects, guru’s, spirituality shops and meditation, and yoga centers.

It is going to the end of the third lockdown almost 57 days of continuous lockdown in India and we are now headed to the fourth lockdown where some restrictions and business will be opened up. The roads have more private traffic nowadays and you can see more people move about the city in half-empty buses. I have become friends with a PCO and Photocopy shop owner who supplies me with cigarettes in the morning. The home delivery of Mac Donald’s is a bit inconsistent at times but they deliver their fresh and hot burgers to me too much on in the afternoons. That keeps me going for a while. Our hotel was also under the contamination zone and we have been quarantined till the 19th of the month. There are policemen at all times outside the hotel gate making sure no one goes out or comes in. He also sees to it that everyone is wearing a mask.

It will be some time since flights and airports start but there are some trains and services going on to take stranded workers to their homes. It seems everyone is in favor of removing restrictions slowly in a phased manner and it may be till July that we can see train and air services resume fully at-least.

The post corona world will be different, with guidelines of social distancing in place everyone and every business will have to accommodate that feature in there seating arrangements, how they deal with customers, hygiene lots of things will have to be thought through.

I will be shifted to my third hotel Novotel till then let us hope things get better for all of us.

Landing pages have been around for some time in the blogging and B2B digital marketing space. So what are landing pages and how can they benefit an e-marketer or an entrepreneur trying to run a business or make money online. Consider my case I started off with a travel blog and covered my travel writings into books, I further went on to write fiction and nonfiction books on many topics and genres. I began selling online and my blog became a bookselling store, I also sold my books from other online stores and e-commerce sites online, like amazon.com, eBay, Flipkart, etc.

Like every blog or website, you have a home page that is very cluttered with lots of entry points and at times it can be very unfocused for the online visitor, there are too many tabs and the attention of the visitor is scattered. Here landing pages come to the rescue, these are more focused pages with the singular proposition and higher call for action. Basically they focus on one product or a special feature of the product the business is selling. Once on the landing page, the customer can buy with one or two clicks. In that way, they act as lead funnels and can be sued to capture information of the visitor including email id and contact names also.

Better still is to link the landing pages with keywords that are embedded as quick links on your blog. Anyone who searches the keywords on google clicks on one is then lead to a landing page which gives them a singular proportion to buy the product or service. This a page where the visitor can get a detailed in-depth look at the proposition.

With regular SEO effort, you can push your keywords liked to your site and it’s landing pages higher on the google search, so it comes on the first or second page on the search. I have seen that 70% of my traffic comes to form my keyword linked landing pages and only 20% comes to form the home page, which is the face of the blog. That proves the effectiveness of landing pages in driving traffic to my blog.

That way landing pages act as funnels they pull internet traffic towards them where the visitor can be converted to buy with a clear proposition. They are also an excellent lead funnel and data collection points. Every landing page is a proposition to buy a book of mine on poetry, religion, travel, and so on. With one click the visitor is bought to the buy button.

Now that I have started editing work on my Pandemic Saga the only way to do it effectively is through collaborative tools. I can work with my editor who is at a remote location through Google Docs. It’s a simple and free app and has been given away for free by Google so that business can work from home in a more productive manner. It’s simple you can upload words documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and forms and work together on the same file, making changes on a single file. You can re-list and edit if a new idea has come up that ay it facilitates teamwork. The files are stores in google drive, you can buy more storage space on the drive as you go along as it can be used to store photos an images and video’s as well.

The process is simple to upload a file and make corrections as you go along. It keeps saving as you work on the documents and also provides editing cue’s and spell and grammar correction options. Basically all the formatting and insertions can be made here. It also has things like highlights and footnotes that one can use to highlight or suggest changes to certain lines. I would especially recommend this to authors and book editors as a productivity tool.

You can simply plug in the email of the person that you are collaborating with and they will get the document link which can be opened and work can be done on the same file in tandem.

ShareIt, It is another file-sharing app that is used to share files and photo’s along with an app called We Share that is used to share heavy files like audio and visual files

As an economy, we have plunged into a sharp recession with most businesses impacted heavily by the lockdowns and the fatalities due to the virus. There are no customers and buyers out there and very little enthusiasm for the celebration. As the virus goes killing un abated economists are wondering what will be this corona induced recession be like. Many theories and models are being propagated where most economists say that the more mature economies will face a U Shape recession. This means there will be a sharp decline in economic activity and GDP will shrink, the situation will persist for 12 to 24 months before it climbs back gradually to its position pre-COVID -19.

A V-shaped recession where there is a steep decline and an equally steep and quick recovery is out of the question considering the world is still under lockdown and the virus threat is increasing in other counties, each seeing their mown separate peeks. In a V-shaped recession, recovery happens within 2 to four quarters which is unlikely as this is a deeper recession.

There are those experts who point to a W shaped recession it a double-dip. The thing here is that the economy will see a partial recovery and then again plunge into a recession which will remain till it finally recovers and comes back to its new normal. This will create a double-dip of sorts in the shape of a W and that is a likely scenario here economies will crawl back to recovery rather than bounce back and the bottom will be longer and two times.

An L shaped recession is the worst it is a sudden and sharp fall of economic activity which will persist and there will be no recovery once the bottom is reached it will remain so and depression will persist with no bounce back.

Job losses of temporary Staff and salary cuts for employees along with work from home has been away the companies are navigating this tricky economic period. But with on customers and no one ready to spend or venture outdoors, the cost of running a business or just keeping an establishment open will be difficult. The business will have to shut down, some will lose power like the Cinema Hall chain as their clout is much reduced, with producers streaming live through OTT platforms surprisingly Net Flicks had had a V-shaped recovery and has added millions of subscribers.

Home delivery is being encouraged and people are ordering everything online which means that consumer behavior is being influenced by this event. The brick and mortar stores will find it harder to survive in the post COVID scenario as people will be wary to shop outdoors.

But till then just for fun understand what the economic jargons mean.

I have begun to feel the direct impact of the virus, now that I am quarantined in my hotel with a banner hung outside the building that says that it had someone giving in it who tested positive for the virus.

As of now, there are no cops outside the exit gate which was locked when I went down to take a peek, so I pushed it open and went out for a walk. The streets were still empty with the occasional half-empty buses passing by, a tea shop was open there was a cobbler selling his wears who was doing business as it seems he had no choice. A rag picker lay on the footpath trying to sleep under the shed of a cigarette shop. There were groups of dispersed people in fours and threes trying to analyze and asses the times they were living in. The shops had downed their shutters and the overhead bridges and sidewalks were desolate and empty. I was engrossed in soaking in the view and taking pictures. It has been seven weeks off the lockdown and the number of cases in Mumbai is still rising and experts say will peak by July.

Food will be an issue as we are quarantined and no one is allowed to venture out. Within my few minutes of venturing out the manager of the hotel came running out with the cook and asked me to go back into my room. We had been quarantined for 14 days and no one could step out.

Every day new stories of virus mutation emerge, some say the victims are losing their sense of smell, others say it is killing the young too. This has been my first brush with contact tracing, isolation of the infected and quarantine being carried out by the local government, with the app installed on my mobile they can now track my movements and incrassate me if I break lockdown rules or quarantine regulations.

But this is a state of emergency and that is when the police state starts to emerge, the government exerts coral on the people, and civil liberties and right to privacy are jeopardized. I was seeing that happen. The flip side is the authorities need the data to isolate people and then test and treat them as well.

People in the front line like policemen and health workers have also been taken ill by the virus and have borne the brunt of the Pandemic. The poor have had to walk miles to just get back home most of them hungry and without refuge, as the lockdown was suddenly announced, migrant workers are just getting back to their homes and villages. Some of them are carrying the virus with them and spreading it in the rural population.

I managed to make a food delivery from Swiggy who have been delivering food to the hotel, they leave the food packet at the reception  40 min is the time they have said for the delivery to happen.

The rationed food we get at OYO is basic and the variety is getting thin day by day as is the quality, can’t wait to get out into a better hotel Novotel Juhu. I would like to get tested before that and be sure at least I am not a carrier even unknowingly.

Now I have been locked out for well over forty days, it is interesting to know what I did during this idle time at home.

Well, I learned Tik Tok for starters and made many crazy and stupid videos that I sent to my friends. I even wrote about my Tik Tok journey on my blog.

Meditation did lots of that in the morning at about six o clock helped me think better and kept anxiety away.

Wrote an entire Novel called Nineteen on the Pandemic which will be launched next week on amazon.com

Got another ebook out called Mehman on the writings of my guest bloggers

Eat a lot of vegetarian home-cooked food and kept my immunity up by drinking a lot of lemon water with honey and having ginger paste.

I managed to finish the Book deal fro one of my books and singed the contact online.

Learned how to operate the zoom app which helped me in doing business video conferencing

I continued with my blogging writing articles and insights every day along with that wrote promotional posts for others also.

I made a new friend at the hotel and chatted with my close friends and relatives on various issues over a much longer period than usual.

Tried home delivery of food but that I found was erratic as my title was in the red zone

I did go for short walks in the early mornings with a face mask but that was generally to the chemist shop or to buy some sweat buns and chocolates that I enjoyed a lot during the lockdown.

Read a few books and watched a lot of digital content on OTT platforms favorite flicks Guilty, Mast-Ram, Badla, and Pink. Watched youtube.com video for long hours following guys like Satguru, Bill gates, Danpani, London Real.

Followed news on non-Hindi channels like Al Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, CNBC the only Indian news channel I followed and saw was BBC Hindi.

Did venture out in a friend’s car to get some takeaway fish and prawns from restaurants that were closed but did some delivery from the back.

I changed my hotel three times and would be doing it for the fourth time as the lockdown continues.

Downloaded the Corona app and aquatinted me with its features.

Felt strapped for cash as I was unable to go out to get it from an ATM but Paytm and internet backing saved the day and I managed to do all my transactions.

Slept a lot amity without a fixed routine there were weeks I would wake up before dawn and weeks I would sleep through the day and all through the night.

Aquatinted myself about the virus how it acts and followed the progress on the development of a vaccine for it.

Online others did not go to buy booze when liquor shops were allowed to be opened.

I spent time doing idle banter with the cook and the hotel staff as they struggled through the day. I was very cautious about hygiene, made sure my room was cleaned regularly, and wore my mask at all times while going out. Except for one friend, no one visited me in my hotel and I remained in my room majority of the time.

Above all kept my spirits high doing creative wring and cracking jokes on Tin Tok.

So it was true the morning session where two health workers wearing suits and masks landed up at my OYO Rooms hotel in Andheri East was not just a casual visit. The BMC has put the entire hotel its staff and the guests under house arrest, which means we are under quarantine. They have stamped all the workers and taken personal details. By the afternoon four BMC workers and local police put barricades outside the exit gates of our hotel and put a banner that says sealed under quarantine. Full-time police will stay outside our gate and make sure no one goes out or inside the hotel for two weeks. I managed to take some pics while they were locking us out. Why? You ask well there was a guest who had the virus he left two days back with fever, the authorities tracked him to our OYO Rooms and now we all have been locked in for two weeks.

This was chaos, I had plans to move to a better hotel in five days time, what am I to do now cancel my booking as I am locked here for 14 days. The whole COVID  thing was now blowing in-front of me as I realized that now I am directly affected. I have been staying with a carrier for a few days, I could be info ted too. The BMC says they will do some swab testing also, just to see no one is further infected. They will be giving food and rations to us, but someone will be designated to get those otherwise no one steps out and the police waiting outside at all times was going to be insuring that.

“ Fucker I have not downloaded the Aarogya app it is surveillance, the government is using it to spy and track people. If you leave your hotel they will track you back and arrest you, maybe put you in an infected patient ward.” My friend said, as he too was bringing to realize the reality of the situation.” It’s, the liquor shops they owned it, and the infections went up, more than 10,000 infected alone, everywhere in the red zone .” Ashish has been a great help in Corona times with his supply of ganja, cigarettes, and chocolates he has given me company at all times. He has been active driving to my hotel and back home for almost forty days, that he has had a feel of this pandemic situation from the start. He believes things are not going to be easy and the Pandemic is here to stay longer than expected. I reminded him about new mutated strains of the virus and about the second wave of attacks to come.

Now that we are quarantined, tagged, and being tracked it will not be easy for him to come over and visit me as there will be cops standing outside the gates of the hotel. Which means no pot and no idle potty banter and loose talk and gossip that we both have gotten used to in Corona times. Apart from that, I am gear to move to a new hotel just to get better service and be next to the beach, as of now it looks difficult.

I would like to be tested though just to be sure I am not. Carrier and safe from infection, I am sure soon that too will happen as Mumbai is a big hotspot of the country. As of now, I keep monitoring the Ayodhya app to find if I am safe and how many people are infected within one km of my location.

Every day I along with two friends make plans and every day the virus makes sure our plans are canceled. My Gujrati friend has canceled his hotel bookings twice, he even applied for a police permit and almost booked a taxi to his home town in Gujarat, but the dynamic pandemic situation keeps throwing hot water on his plan and indeed mine too.