How Coca-Cola Used Vending Machines To Try To Unite The People Of India And Pakistan
Relations between India and Pakistan are marked by many things—and happiness is generally not one of them. But Coca-Cola recently brought people from both nations together—or at least brought citizens of both countries face to face—over vending machines.
No ordinary vending machines, the Small World Machines, created by Coke and Leo Burnett, were equipped with full-length webcams that allowed participants to see each other and interact in real time. They were placed in malls—one in Lahore, Pakistan, the other in New Dehli, India—in March.
As part of its larger mission to associate its product with happiness
“Coke has always been a brand that’s about positivity and optimism, and we’re always talking about how we can provoke just a little bit more happiness in the world, and increasingly we’ve tried to create experiences to actually bring people together in intimate moments of connectivity,” Jantos Tulloch says.
“Telling this story through the lens of India and Pakistan really came from our team on the ground there who knows better than anyone that the people really want more positive connection and more positive communication between them.”
“Every human being is born with an inherent desire to create,” says the Indian film director Shekhar Kapur.
With that in mind, Kapur, who directed Elizabeth: The Golden Age among other films, teamed up with Indian musician A. R. Rahman (best known in the West for his Academy Award-winning work on Slumdog Millionaire) to cofound Qyuki, a social network that fosters creativity.
Dubbed “a community of creative expression,” Qyuki launched late last year with an initial investment from Cisco Systems.
Anand Shah’s company Sarvajal is working to bring clean water to India. But it’s not just giving it away. Instead, it’s Each of these franchisees sets up “water ATMs,” where rural Indians can go and see their water being purified and bottled.
No discussion of the life and work of Oscar Niemeyer is complete without Brasília, the dazzling capital that sprung up in the Brazilian savanna in 1961. The Brazilian starchitect who passed away on Wednesday, was responsible for the project’s crowning achievement: the monumental government buildings that stood proudly as emblems of the power of Modernist architecture’s promise—and, later, unfortunate failure—to shape a utopian society.
What gets less attention is that, a decade earlier, another urban vision was taking form more than 8,000 miles away, in India, under the supervision of Le Corbusier. Chandigarh, like Brasília, was intended to be a sparkling new city, created from scratch as a way of shaking off the albatross of colonialism and instating a native, democratic government. And modern notions of urban planning and architecture were central to both new capitals, as the premier architectural photographer Iwan Baan documents in a recent book, “Brasília-Chandigarh”. Fifty years into existence, the two cities have evolved into examples of how grand utopian projects can both inspire and disappoint.
A group called Genomic Gastronomy is using a dessert ingredient as an atmospheric sensor, and a way to get people to face the horrible air they’re breathing every day.
The Indian government is teaming up with Chinese tech giant Huawei to search imported smartphones and communications devices for signs of malware and spyware. However, some Indians are nervous because of Huawei’s close ties to the People’s Liberation Army and fear that the firm could be complicit in cyberattacks.
The exhibition is “design by the people, for the people, of Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Pune,” says Agrawal, and showcases everyday innovations of slum-dwelling residents and the designers and architects who work around them.
Agrawal, a Delhi native, studied at New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture and worked with the acclaimed Achyut P. Kanvinde, and later completed his Master’s in Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture. Kanvinde was one of the first to bring modern design to India. But the jugaad exhibit presents a different take on modern urbanism in India—that of the everyman.
