Month: July 2015

Categories
Learn

5 ways to teach your children about money

It’s never too soon to teach your child the value of money and how to spend money responsibly. Here’s how.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Kids these days are so attuned to what’s happening in the outside world, they will quickly demand some new product they see on TV, or ask for money to eat the new pizza advertised in the papers. As indulgent parents, we go along with most of our kids’ demands, but stop to ask yourself this: are you harming your child by indulging his every demand?

Instead, why not teach your child the value of proper spending? By giving them whatever they ask for, children do not learn to value money or the effort it takes you to earn it. Unless they learn these lessons, they will grow up fiscally irresponsible and suffer from reckless spending habits.

That is not to say that you clamp down on your child’s every demand and keep preaching about money to him – doing this will instil a negative connotation in the child’s mind, that money is the most important thing to possess. Here’s what you can do:

1. Be a responsible spender yourself. You have no right to preach to your child if you are a reckless spender. Nor can you tell your child to share his possessions or pocket money with a sibling or close friend if you don’t know how to share. Take the middle ground, instead. Cut the temptation to buy everything in sight when you go shopping, and make sure your child sees you shopping for household groceries and paying the household bills before making personal purchases. Let your child see you compare the labels on products and explain why you chose one product over another. This will get the child thinking that shopping must be done thoughtfully and not recklessly.

2. Ask your child to help you balance the books. Children enjoy being treated like grown-ups. The next time you list the monthly expenses in your budget book, invite your child to help you calculate the numbers with a calculator. Your child will be happy to be trusted with the calculation process, and will also learn to see numbers in a new light. Discuss simply where you overshot your expenses and where you saved up. Your child will immediately get an idea about the household budget and if you are in a position to buy him or her something new.

Teaching how to save and spend3. Take your child into confidence. Too often, parents make the mistake of shielding their children from their financial troubles. They are doing so with the intention of not scaring their children and making them insecure. However, if you don’t reveal to your child that your current financial situation is slightly worrisome, he or she will have no clue why you are not increasing their pocket money despite repeated requests, or avoiding giving them money for a new mobile phone. Sit your child down and explain that you are currently facing a slight crunch. Don’t burden them with too many scary details but let them know that you are trying your best to tide over the problem. A sensitive child will even offer to help by breaking his piggy bank for you.

4. Insist that your child save pocket money every month. Give your child a weekly or monthly allowance, and tell him or her that no extra money will be given in that time period under any circumstances. This automatically prompts your child to watch how he spends his money. Also inculcate the habit of saving a part of his pocket money every month. When he or she has saved a sizeable amount, give him a small treat. If he or she has been saving up to buy something, add the equivalent amount that he has saved to encourage him further.

5. Let your child earn privileges. The one thing we must take away from Western parenting is the manner in which parents in the US and UK make their children earn their pocket money by taking up small jobs. We must follow a model where if a child wants to treat his friends on his birthday, you can give him a job to do around the house and pay him per completed task. This teaches the child to help around the house. Also, encourage older children to put their talents to use to earn money – they could give tuitions to younger children, or take art and hobby classes. Let them keep the money they make, but occasionally ask them to go out and buy vegetables or a few groceries without giving them the cash for it. This will inculcate the habit to contribute to the household expenses without being selfish.

What are the ways in which you teach your child about money? Tell us in the comments section below.

(Pictures courtesy micheleborba.com, www.speakingtree.in. Images are used for representational purpose only)

Categories
Become

Talking weddings with The Wedding Filmer

Vishal Punjabi started working in the wedding industry purely by chance – and today, most weddings are incomplete without him.
by Ritika Bhandari Parekh

He has converted ‘Look-here, look-there’ static wedding videos to marvellous, organic and personal wedding movies that every bride dreams of. Vishal Punjabi, with his boyish charm, is the go-to guy if you are looking to have a treasure trove of shaadi memories. His company, ‘The Wedding Filmer’ is on the wish list of every to-be married couple.

An NRI, Punjabi was born and brought up in Ghana before he moved to England for further studies. Having visited India a couple of times, he definitely didn’t know that his destiny was being planned here.

Their video ‘Heartbeats’ was the first Indian marriage video to enter a film festival. The original background song ‘Din Shagna Da’ in the video, is oft heard today when a bride and groom enter the reception hall.

The Wedding FilmerHis soaring popularity has kept him away from the annual family Christmas dinner, which is a ‘big deal at my place’ he confesses – for the past 5 years! But despite the bane of working in the chaotic and evergreen wedding industry, Punjabi is all smiles. Today he teaches youngsters from various cities how to make wedding videos while capturing the essence of a family. He believes that a wedding is a perfect time to invest in family portraits. And if you call Coldplay to perform, he will be there for sure.

In an interview at TWF’s Andheri office, he reveals his roots, the reason for having workshop sessions and why an original soundtrack is the next big thing in the wedding industry.

How did ‘The Wedding Filmer’ happen?

I was trying to make a film based on an Indian wedding but didn’t have a proper script or well-etched characters. My only connection with weddings till then was my sister’s wedding, and Bollywood, which is not real and so glossy.

So I thought, if I shot a wedding, I would get to meet these people first-hand and know them. So it was a kind of script research while shooting. And while doing that, I fell in love with the whole process. When I did my own wedding video, I realised I loved the feeling of watching other people watch their own film.

It has been four years, ‘The Wedding Filmer’ has taken off but my script is still in process. Despite the time, I am sure the material will be very rich in content and based on human understanding.

15 years in the industry…tell us how you started?

In London, I was designing websites for an Indian company. One such website won a couple of awards. At that time, Shah Rukh Khan wanted to make a Bollywood portal and asked me to come down and design it. But that company soon shut down. So I moved to his production house, Arclight Films and Dreams Unlimited.

Over there, I worked on the website and VFX work for the film Ashoka. Doing Ashoka was fun as it was my first time on a Bollywood set. I had never seen anything like that before. I started doing a lot of VFX and found a niche in advertising. I also did quite a few product designs for SRK – who sells anything and everything from pants to pens. We did commercials for every known product to mankind – including Mankind.

One day my director didn’t turn up for the shoot and that’s how I started directing the commercial. I went on to do some 20 to 30 commercials.

How did the transition from commercials to weddings happen?

When you work for SRK, you get spoilt as a director. You get the biggest budgets, the best DOP, the sets and costumes are always amazing. But when mail.google.comyou need to shoot on your own, you realise you know little about the nuances of film-making.

So I went to visit my father in Ghana and over there I tried making documentaries. That’s when I realised I didn’t know much about film-making. So I started learning about smaller camera formats, editing, bringing down the cost of the project and doing most things on my own. You buying the costumes yourself, go for the recce yourself. This got me more involved with projects.

That is why when I started doing weddings. The purpose was to make really good cinema in a very low budget. At TWF, we try to make a nice film, which if we could release in the theatres, we would. We try and find a story that is so powerful, it can move you to say, “Agar yeh theatre mein hota toh kitna achcha hota.”

Tell us about your shooting process.

It is organic because we capture it from a distance. My beautiful team is the one shooting it. We just try and interact with the family as much as we can and give them their space.

The idea for us is to not direct them. We don’t make them act like SRK and Kajol. These are real people, so we honour their ceremonies, respect their guests and their space.

Today, brides demand that their family or fiancé set aside a budget for a wedding shoot by you. How does that feel?

It is very exciting. You know, earlier we would think we wouldn’t be able to shoot more than 12 or 15 weddings a year. But we are doing these workshops and training sessions and are trying to expand as a team, so that a lot more brides can have their dream come true and we can make it a lot cheaper for everyone to afford something like this. We want to shoot it very nicely and package it the way they want it.

Tell us about your workshops, ‘The Classroom of Love’.

We get thousands of requests every year and we can’t shoot them all. So somebody needs to shoot them because everybody needs a beautiful memory. It is exciting to know that so many people like your work and want to learn from it. So I wish to inspire the participants with the fact that I didn’t learn at any film school. I learnt film-making on my own. In these workshops, I just guide and teach them that they can also learn on their own.

What would you say is the easiest and the most difficult part of the job?

The easiest part is shooting, anybody can shoot. But the difficult part is editing and cutting. Finding the right song, the right mood, the right emotion, the words and to keep doing that over and over again and staying inspired every time – that’s the difficult part.

What do you enjoy the most about TWF?

Meeting different people and the different cultures I get to experience.  I hardly knew much about India, now I get to travel the world. We get to make a difference to people’s lives. We get to work with them and learn from them.

You think music makes for a great theme at weddings. Why?

Because if you record your own song for your wedding, that song will be yours for life. It will be the song which you danced to, it will be the song you walked to, the song that your father gave you away on. It could be the song that will play in the lobby of the hotel when your guests arrve. It could be played on every anniversary.  It is your song, so music becomes the theme of your wedding and it is way cheaper than any Moroccan fibre palace.

Hear the song recently recorded by The Wedding Filmer:

Chal le Chal | The Wedding Filmer

Categories
Kharcha paani

5 things to know before working in a start up

A job in a start-up company is often a rollercoaster ride. Know what you are getting into before taking the plunge.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

These days, several youngsters are opting to intern or even work part-time at start-ups for the work experience. After all, working in a start-up can prepare one for bigger responsibilities in a way nothing else can.

As training grounds go, start-ups can be a valuable space for grooming and shaping young talent to take on responsibility and different roles. But those who are initially daunted are people who join start-ups after working with traditional corporate set-ups, because the work culture challenges all the concepts they are familiar with.

Here are 5 things you should know before you work at a start-up:

1. The pay is low. You can’t expect to be paid as per industry standards because let’s face it, the company will take a while to match itself to industry standards. Besides, start-ups often cannot promise yearly increments, especially in the first two years of consolidating their own business.

For more experienced employees, it is a good idea to negotiate your pay package at the start itself because there will be few revisions at a later stage. Also, don’t expect a huge increment at the end of the year, especially if the company is doing steady business and is not drawing too much revenue.

2. You will work long hours. Any new business puts in long working hours to get ahead. Occasionally, you may have to even work on weekends, but you can put your foot down if you see this becoming a regular routine. Normally, the working hours even out as the days pass, but if you join the company before it officially launches, you are in for very long hours at the office, sometimes for months at a time.

“I interned with a web development company started by four engineers last year,” says Shreyasi Nakwe, a Mumbai-based media student. “I ran errands for them, made copies, typed out endless paperwork, and I was initially unable to cope with working 12-hour days. But I slowly began to understand their work and even enjoy it.”

Working for startups3. There may be no ‘structure’ to your work. Often, the organisation at start-ups is a more ‘horizontal’ one, with about five key employees and one (or more, if there are partners) bosses. Most companies don’t hire too many people to cut down on overheads. The negative here is that often, you might be required to perform several duties at once. A Mumbai based media management start-up two years ago started with just three employees – the owner and two managers. “For the first six months, the three of us would handle all the tasks ourselves – some days I was the CEO as well as the office boy,” laughs Pratesh Doshi, the owner of the business.

If you like to stick to only doing what your role expects of you, do reconsider your decision to work in a start-up, especially if it has very few people on the payroll, or else it might get frustrating for you.

4. You will grow faster. Since most start-ups have a fairly flat structure, with not many bosses to report to, your work is noticed faster and your growth is higher in less time. A small company size ensures that each individual member is being scrutinised closely and his or her efforts are noticed by top management quicker. Hence, it is possible to go from a junior position to a mid-level position fairly quickly, as compared to bigger workplaces.

You must be a team player. “Start-ups thrive on team spirit and team building,” says Rupam Gala, an HR professional who liaises with several start-ups in the country for personnel training purposes. “Employees have to remember that since the company is new, even the owner and CEO are fairly new to the game. In that sense, the entire team is on the journey together.” The company will expect you to pull more than your weight in the initial days of work, and if you have been hired at a senior position, you will be expected to take on a mentoring role. “Everyone has to gel with the team because the nature of the business can change drastically in a single day,” Rupam says.

(Pictures courtesy trak.in, e27.co. Images are used for representational purpose only)

Categories
Deal with it

6 ways to identify a shopping addict

Here are surefire ways to identify a shopping addict and get them help before they are completely broke and depressed.
by Reyna Mathur

All of us know at least one person who is so addicted to shopping, he or she will not think twice before spending even when they are broke. Do you identify with this scenario: A young girl works in a private firm. In her spare time, she surfs shopping sites and keeps adding items to her virtual shopping cart. Not a single day passes without her buying something for herself, and when packages arrive at her home and office on a daily basis.

Then her credit card bills catch up on her. Soon, she buys many credit cards to settle the bills on the previous ones – and also to increase her spending power. The situation soon lands her in huge debt, but through it all, she still can’t stop shopping.

If this sounds familiar, you or someone you know is a shopping addict. It is a dangerous addiction that lands people in a severe financial crunch, but like other addictions, this one too compels the victim to give in to his or her constant urges to acquire the next object of their fancy. Unfortunately, most people don’t take this addiction seriously enough, and fail to see that it is a form of mental illness.

It is easy to tell when a person is a shopping addict.

1. Constantly wanting to buy things. All of us like to shop, but some people take it to another extreme level by buying something, big or small, every single day. If they pass by a store and see something on display that they like, they will buy it immediately without considering if they have enough money for it.

2. They are unable to rest till they buy what they want. There have been cases where shopping addicts have reported insomnia, anxiety and depression to their doctors and therapists, all brought on by their inability to buy something they really liked. They see it as a personal failure to be unable to gratify their own wishes, and this leads to feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness. In the West, there are support groups for people falling under this category, where people come together and share their fears and insecurities about themselves related to their finances. Many of them express a wish to get professional help after finally understanding that they are in the grip of an illness.

Shopping addicts3. They don’t much care how much something costs. All of us are fitted with an invisible ‘radar’ that alerts us when we are considering a purchase. The voice in our heads cautions us with questions like, ‘Can you afford this new TV? Shouldn’t you first pay off your maintenance bills before buying that dinner set?’ The difference with a shopping addict is that he or she can choose to ignore this radar at will, often leading them into a deep financial pit where they flounder but cannot come out of.

4. They are the biggest consumers of EMI spending. Many e-commerce sites have smartly tapped on to people’s tendency to purchase something expensive if there is a reasonable monthly EMI attached to it. A shopping addict will normally explore this option, because it means they can adopt the same principle and buy several more items that month.

5. They borrow money to go shopping. We are conditioned to spend only what we have in our pockets, so it goes against the grain to borrow money. However, most of us borrow money for sudden unavoidable expenses and we set targets to repay the money back as soon as we can. But a shopping addict, normally running short of money owing to his or her spending habits, has no qualms borrowing money to buy a new mobile phone or an expensive saree or even to go on a trip. There is a very high chance that the money will not be repaid on time, because the person will never have enough cash to pay back the loan in time.

6. They don’t use most of the things they buy. For a shopping addict, the thing is in acquiring the object of their affections, not necessarily in using it. With so many purchases piling up one over the other, it is little wonder that they get around to using even half the items that they buy so passionately.

(Pictures courtesy www.addictioncam.com, feinlawyer.com. Images are used for representational purpose only)

Categories
Tech

Review: Nubia Z9 Mini

We take a look at Chinese company ZTE’s new phone and find a great camera and just about passable features.
by Manik Kakra | @Manik_K on Twitter

ZTE is a Chinese company that’s into 3G dongles and smartphones, but like a few other brands (Micromax has YU), ZTE too, is now out with a separate sub-brand that caters mainly to online retailers. The Nubia Z9 mini, available exclusively on Amazon, is a mid-range Android 5.0 smartphone that the company says is more than any other smartphone launched in this price category. But is this claim really true?

The looks. The Nubia Z9 mini (NX511J) follows a rather premium design and feel. As soon as you hold it, you will notice its double glass back and front (both are prone to smudges) as well as metallic rim across its sides, and if you don’t spot that rear-cover slot, you may conclude the cover doesn’t come off. The front has three backlit capacitive touch keys — you can change what function other two buttons perform (Menu/Options or Back), the circular Home button is more prominent and doubles up as LED notification.

Above the 5-inch full HD screen, you have an 8 MP front-facing camera, speaker grille and sensors. On the back, the 16 MP camera as a Red outline, LED flash, Nubia logo in horizontal all over a nice dotted pattern from the phone’s black colour. Removing the back cover reveals the microSD card and non-accessible 2,900 mAh battery unit. The right side has volume rockers and Power/ Lock key (both are tactile), and the left side only has SIM card tray (two nano SIM card slots). At the bottom, there’s the chrome-outlined microUSB port, loudspeaker jack and primary mic; while the top has 3.5mm headset and secondary mic.

The screen. The phone’s 5-inch full HD LCD has good bright colours. It can handle HD content, but struggles with its viewing angles. For general photo viewing and Web browsing, it is just as good a screen as any in this price range.

Camera. The phone boasts a 16 MP (f/2.0) camera, and here are a few sample images.

The camera is the best thing about this phone. The rear camera takes detailed shots with good contrast levels. In daylight, photos came out saturated, while low-light, too, wasn’t bad. There’s a Pro mode that lets you play around with camera settings among other modes like Field of Depth and HDR. This is surely one of the best phone cameras available under Rs 18,000 today.

Audio. The loudspeaker at the bottom isn’t great. It performs well for pop music, but is extremely inadequate for rock, something that I haven’t seen on phones for a while. In-ear voice quality, though, is on par and so is network reception. The only connectivity issue I found was that the phone just won’t switch off location (GPS). It will keep showing you the GPS icon in the status bar even when you have manually switch it off.

Battery. The phone struggled to last 20 hours on a full charge. With brightness at around 25 per cent, two Email Accounts in sync, a lot of Twitter and some YouTube videos, this phone’s 2,900 mAh battery is not meant for a full day’s use in case of heavy usage.

Software and performance. The phone is equipped with a Snapdragon 615 SoC (1.5 GHz quad-core + 1.1 GHz quad-core processor, Adreno 405 GPU) along with 2 GB of RAM. The device runs on Android 5.0.2 with Nubia 2.8 UI on top. In terms of general performance, I found the phone to be initially pretty responsive. But once you have a few apps opened and Webpages on browser, it starts to slow down a little. It worked fine for baisc apps but does get a little hot when playing games.

Nubia UI follows no separate app launcher pattern, and is mostly made of Red and White gradients. Apart from a few grammatical errors in the OS and weird-looking pop-up box for Shut down and battery low message, Nubia UI seems aesthetically nice. Nubia UI has similar customization options as most other Android OEMs today and nothing much that stands out or is worth mentioning here. However, the company could certainly try and fix bugs like clearing Recent Apps list doesn’t work from the clear button in horizontal list or from the toggle button. The user gets about 11 GB of storage space, which can of course be further expanded using a microSD card.

Thus, the Nubia Z9 Mini is a mixed bag. It has a great camera, good screen, standout design for this price range, but average battery life and passable software. It really depends what your priority is — camera, looks and screen, but if not, you may prefer looking somewhere else.

(Picture courtesy www.gizchina.com)

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