Keep your gift and let me home

For several years, we lived next door to a family that owned close to 20 cows. The main source of income for the household came from the milk they sold to people in the neighborhood. They had all kinds of cows – desi ones, big ones, small calves, two headed cows, and there was even one from Germany that flew into Bangalore in 1994 for a princely sum of Rs 45,000. It gave so much milk; the other cows developed a complex after a while. They made wonderful neighbors, and were the typical courteous family that you like to have around. They bought sweets on festivals, and their kids were taught to share crackers with me during Diwali. They had many kids running around the house, for there’s had been a joint establishment.

Anytime you have kids around at home, it’s a co-incidence that you have birthdays to celebrate. And anytime there are birthdays to celebrate, there are other kids to be invited. And anytime kids are invited, parents send their tots with a nicely wrapped gift to be handed over. My aunt was visiting us one evening, and as it turned out it was also one my neighbor’s kid’s birthday. I got the invite to attend the celebration just an hour prior to the actual candle blowing ceremony. And boy was I excited!

There was one issue, however. It was too late to go out and buy presents that I could take. So, my Aunt suggested that I should dig into my own unused stationery stock, make a nice little packet out of it and take it for the kid who was turning 5 or something. Probably re-gifting is not quite the norm with people in their 20s today, but ask anyone 45 or more, and they don’t seem to think it’s bizarre at all. I must have taken with me to the birthday party an imported pencil, a foreign eraser shaped like a light bulb, a stationery box and few more odds and ends as the present.

After the cake was cut and the fun was had, I gifted the little boy what I had got for him. He opened it right in front of me, with his mother standing there looking on. They must have expected to find something outrageous, I guess. But when the kid opened and found some cool looking stationery in it, he was happy. I think you could upgrade that to ‘ecstatic’. His mother assumed I was more grown-up in the head than I actually was, and so she tested me with the line “Oh, why did you bring all this expensive stuff?”

This was my moment to be the big man. It had finally arrived. Without as much as batting an eyelid, I said, “Not a problem, Aunty. All this stuff was at home, and so I decided to get it. No trouble at all.”

I learnt my lesson with gifts that day. I understood that you can never gift that ‘perfect gift’ to anyone. You just can’t. Maybe it’ll be too big for them, maybe it’s too small, maybe it’s the wrong time, maybe they’ll think you’re plain cheap; or maybe, they’ll think you’re just showing off. But whatever it is, they’ll never suspect that you’re re-gifting it. I’m convinced about it. When I get a gift, I might think what a cheapskate the person is, but I would never be inclined to think that he or she is just re-gifting the stuff. That would be the last thought in my head. Maybe this person would re-gift their things to others, but come on; to me? No way.

Then somebody came up with the idea of gift coupons. I once got gifted a voucher for five hundred bucks at a music store. I thought to myself, “The world needs more people like her. By giving me this coupon she’s telling a couple of things at the same time. One, she’s saying, here’s my budget for you. Now go do what you want with it. Two, I don’t really want to waste my time thinking about what you might like, or ask my friends what his tastes are. So three, here’s the money; you go do the shopping for yourself.” I loved this idea. I mean thank goodness I got a gift coupon from this person. What if she had given me something scary instead? Maybe like a horror movie DVD or something. Yuck, I don’t even watch horror stuff.

So off I went to music store and bought a couple of Steven Segal movies, Dirty Dancing and one or two other DVDs. When I looked at the bill total, it was fifty bucks more than the coupon amount of five hundred. I had two choices here: pay the extra fifty or keep back one of the DVDs. I thought about it for a while. Paying the extra money just didn’t seem right. It was a gift after all, and no one pays for a gift. But option two pissed me off even more. By keeping back one of the DVDs, the shop got to keep 50 bucks with them, because the total was now 450. That just didn’t seem fair. So I sprayed chilly powder into the cashier’s eyes and ran out of the door with all the DVDs. “Take that, you suckers.” I said to myself as I ran down the walkway to the store.

Gift coupons in stores are like the casino. The house always wins.

Through the lookers’ eyes: 5 societal trends that IPL ads want us to know

This IPL has been an ad fest. All this while, ads were shown only between overs, drinks breaks and when wickets fell. This time, they’re playing them in between deliveries (took a great deal of self control to refrain from using the word balls); and not just as the fast bowler walks back to take his run-up, even the spinners are not spared. So for the viewers, it’s not just the flurry of ads that is irksome, it’s the fact that most of these ads are pathetic means that one needs a greater degree of tolerance to put up with them. Watch the Tata Docomo ad, where the guy dumps his girlfriend and walks out with this other chik, if you aren’t convinced. Here’s an open appeal to Mr. Ratan Tata to fire the ad agency, and the VP of marketing of Tata Docomo. Shoddy stuff. The Zoozoo ads too are average at best.

But like Sherlock says in the movie, one can still make order out of chaos. I’ve tried to capture some of the emerging trends in the market place that advertisers are seeing this IPL time and playing to the tunes accordingly.

1) A bit of Tiger for everyone: Aircel started the ‘There are only 1411 left’ campaign, and several folks are now jumping on this boat. A couple of the Vodafone’s zoozoo ads feature the zoozoos’ accidental misadventures with the wild cat. Though not directly featuring the tiger, one of Airtel’s direct cable connection ads shows a cheetah running across and encourages people to watch wild life shows on TV.

2) Nimboo pani: Summer is about to set in, and it’s time for the soft drink makers to up the campaigns. But there are visibly three companies pitching for consumers to drink lemon flavored soft drinks. My guess is that lemon drinks don’t enjoy a high market share in India. And with the colas coming under fire every now and then, companies are looking to back themselves up by creating a larger market for nimbu paani. Minute Maid, Nimbuuuz and 7UP Lemon are at it, with the first two showcasing their product as being no different from freshly cut lime mixed in water.

3) AC for India: Keeping with the theme of summer, this is the perfect time for fan and air conditioner companies to get to work. Havells is excited like never before about its fans and safe-switches for hand held air dryers. But what interested me more were the air-conditioners. Amongst others, Samsung, Voltas and Godrej have been repetitively screening their ads with a heavy emphasis on the fact that their ACs are ‘made for India’. The reason ACs haven’t penetrated household markets in India is primarily due to the fear people have of a high electricity bill that might result therefore. So most people who would like to have an AC at home never buy one due to this fear. If you look at these three ads again, it’s not surprising to find that the central idea is that of ACs that consume less power.

4) Mobile phones for rural markets: It was only after reading a story in last month’s edition of Forbes could I understand the cause for the sudden influx of small time mobile phone makers challenging the Nokias, Sonys and Samsungs. Have you ever stopped and wondered the same thing? Until a few months back who had even heard of mobile phones from Micromax, Maxx, Lemon, Lava, Inq, Spice and Videocon? As much as we see mobile communication all around us, a great part of the rural market still remains untouched. The same is true for dual-sim mobiles for urban crowds. My guess is that most of these new players want a share of both these pies. This has really woken up the established players to start looking at their options. Understand the Samsung Guru mobile ad featuring Aamir Khan from this perspective, and it should make sense.

5) Gojiyo.com: A last observation is the launch of Godrej’s virtual reality portal gojiyo.com. The advertisement displays two subtle yet remarkable trends in the economy. Number one, the Indian youth is ready to accept or at least try a hand at virtual reality; something that Second Life despite all its success in the west could not make a dent in the Indian market. A name like Second Life is very niche, compared to a more mass appealing name like gojiyo. The second observation, in my opinion is to be considered with more weight than the first. It basically says that you still need to advertise a website on television. Since the internet penetration in India in still low, companies still need to go to the television crowds to preview a teaser of their websites. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise if you also observed that the number of ads for television sets is noticeably high this IPL.

This article is not an ad feature, and opinions mentioned here are solely mine. Brand names have been taken out of free-will, and I have kept away from providing back-links to any of them.

If you liked this article, you might also want to read this.

Learning to say 'Venakatarama Govinda'

It’s times like these that are really frustrating. If there’s one leveler of society that turns a blind eye to your bank account, it has to be traffic jams. Last Sunday India’s biggest Mall (at least that’s what the developers claim in their ads), Mantri Square opened on Sampige Road. If you’re a Bangalorean, a landmark would be that it’s opposite to the famous New Krishna Bhavan hotel. The opening of this mall comes just weeks after Big Bazar opened its doors at 5th cross Malleswaram, roughly one kilometer from this mall.

Here’s a primer on Malleswaram: now if you didn’t know, Malleswaram has classically been the traditional, and laid back part of the city. In the true sense, it is old Bangalore, though no one ever refers to it that way. The extent of shopping crowds is usually restricted to the 8th cross market on weekends and on festivals. The place is abound with some of the best eateries in the city. But that was about the extent of attraction of this part of the city. Sampige Road and Margosa road, which are the lifelines of Malleswaram are lined with trees on either sides starting from the 1st cross going all the way till 18. These two roads are relatively narrow and are capable of handling limited traffic. The area is predominantly a residential one, and connects South Bangalore and Majestic to Rajajinagar on one side and Yeshwantpur and Peenya on the other.

We saw what effect the opening of Mantri Square has had on the area only last evening. Now, traffic jams aren’t new to the city, but last evening’s display was scandalizing. It was Saturday evening, and Bangalore decided to check out the latest mall in town. At the same time, families decided to do the week’s household shopping at Big Bazar. And like I mentioned above, both these businesses are located on roads with poor infrastructure. Net result: they infused so much traffic that there was a traffic clog for close to three kilometers, and tempers were flying all over the place. This is the same road that leads to the City Railway station, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if many people missed their trains.

Mantri Square in itself is a huge place and has way too many stores. The nice part is they’ve got the first Taco Bell in India, but what shite; it’s always crowded and you need to stand in line for way too much time to get your tacos. So first, you get caught up in traffic to reach the place, and then you get caught up in queues to get your food. It’s times like these that you feel like ditching the Great Indian Growth Story and moving to Spain. This place also has the multiplex chain Inox with dozens of screens. Multiplexes are the crowd pullers in malls. And all the traffic we witnessed last night was sans the movie going crowd because Inox is yet to open. What then can you expect when the movie screens start functioning? In the words of Anoop Krishnamurthy, all we can say is “Venakatarama Govinda Gooooooooovinda!” (Take the Lord’s name and pray for the best).

This situation is not going away anytime soon; at least that’s what a common man would diagnose. The Bruhat Bangalore Mahangara Palike (BBMP) has options to solve this problem. They need to get the Metro Rail built at the blink of an eye, but we know that statement in itself is a joke. Or the Bangalore City Police has to come up with something incredibly innovative to streamline traffic flow. But I don’t think I’ll put my money on that one. Or the authorities can do what they’re best at: chop down all the trees that have lined these roads for several decades now and widen the roads. Now that, to me sounds like a solution that can be executed really fast. What’s the big deal? It’s just a couple of trees.

Note: If you need to take the route towards Malleswaram, plan it such that you don’t find yourself there between 6 pm and 9:30 pm. Unless you love stress and enjoy pulling your hair out.

Did we get it right?

Sagar and I made the dreadful mistake of crossing an unmanned railway track at a local train station in Mumbai a couple of years ago. What a mistake. We were greeted by the railway police in normal clothes on the opposite platform. They lined us (along-with twenty others who made this stupid mistake) and took us into the station to have a ‘discussion’ with us, I guess. They kept us all in one room. The others were mostly day laborers, and being unaware of the consequences, had unassumingly walked across the tracks. A couple of minutes later, a constable came in and announced that each person would be taken into the inspector’s room where they would have to choose between spending 24 hours in jail, or paying Rs. 1500 as fine. Sagar immediately told me that till we left the station, the two of us would talk only in English or Kannada, and pretend to not know Hindi or Marathi. Guess what? That worked! The top cop gave us an earful, saw our college IDs and let us go.

Only yesterday, I was riding around my Hayabusa and the front number plate literally broke off and came out while I was on the road. I stopped, put the broken piece of metal in my bag and continued to ride. I was out looking for the first place where they make number plates. As rotten as luck can get, a few turns later at a signal, a cop spotted my bike sans the number plate, and as they so often do, he promptly walked up, turned off my gaddi and confiscated the key. So when a cop catches you, what do you do? Whatever you do, pretend like you don’t know the local language. If that ideology worked with the cops in Mumbai, then logically it should work with the cops in Bangalore too, I thought. How far from the truth was that? I rattled and rambled on in English and Top Cop wouldn’t reduce the fine by a rupee. After close to five minutes of this nonsense, I decided to give Sagar’s theory a rest and started off in Kannada. Result: Fine amount cut in half, Top Cop says he acknowledges that the number plate breaking off was unfortunate, and lets me know that his daughter is in eight semester of engineering at ABC College (don't ask why).

The approaches were of opposite nature in the above events, both leading to a desirable result. Which then is a better approach? You can most surely understand how knowing a language can help get your work done faster and in many cases as in mine, it can mean money in your pocket. But not knowing a language can sometimes cause sympathy and end up in a positive result as well.I was telling a friend recently about taking up Dutch classes. After a brief discussion, we came to a consensus that a foreign language class could be expensive. So we said, “Junk it.”

If Bachi Karkaria were to write about this fact- “How much does it cost to learn a language?” she probably would have concluded her article with:

Alec Smart said: “I know how much it costs to learn a language, but I sure don’t know how much it costs not to learn the language.”

The Root of Hypocrisy

In the movie Cocktail, Tom Cruise works as a bar tender by evening, and is also finishing up a business degree in a local New York City College, and has high aspirations to make it big in the world of business. In one of the scenes, the teacher gives an assignment to the class to hand in a business plan. When the results come, Tom Cruise’s character Brian Flanagan finds himself with an F for his proposal of a bar franchise business. In his angst at the professor’s disapproval, he accuses to the teacher as being in academics due to lack of guts to face the outside world.

If you’re working in corporate, and for one reason or the other you do move into the academic world, the protective cocoon of the later can feel either warm and fuzzy or completely alien and unchallenging. Though both these reactions are skewed, the truth lies somewhere in the middle and can be attributed to the fact that each ecosystem comes with its inherent set of characteristics.

The corporate world attracts people from all walks of life. While many treat it as a rote job, a hungry handful pursues life here with a one-eyed maniacal focus on career growth. But in between these two extremes again are all the grades of people. If you stop and observe the behavior of folks in the rank and file of a corporation, you’ll need less than two minutes to understand that the whole system is management driven. When you begin to start managing a group of people, the black box in the picture is the passion and commitment of the members involved towards their field of work. And often, if a person isn’t passionate or committed to his work, chances are their work ethic is poor. From this you invoke one of the most used phrases of the IT era called 'slacking off’. But in academia, the situation tends be slightly different. People in this pool know they can’t be in it for the money. That in itself is huge entry barrier. Unlike the corporate world, academia is not your glamour stable. Logically then, you can’t be in it for very many reasons, not counting circumstances that forced you into it. And again, as it’s not hard to observe if you talk to ten professors and twenty PhD students, that they love their subject, and are hence passionate about it. This means that more often than not, a poor work ethic is not tolerated in the top academic and university research environments. Slacking off is for the administrative staff.

Despite the differences shown here and otherwise, there’s a common syndrome that appears in both these places (and in several other places as well) that I like to refer to as the root of hypocrisy.

The root of hypocrisy, unlike what it sounds, is not an incompetence related Peter Principle. It’s best to understand this with examples. Let’s take the corporate world first: an employee is pulled up by his boss for slacking off, and his results at work or the lack of it are questioned. This is usually the employee that gives two hoots at what is being said at team meetings, and will, on several occasions ridicule the boss’ motivational talk as being just hot air. In the event that this person is promoted and given a team to manage, all of a sudden, he now expects his subordinates to cooperate, produce results and stay motivated. He doesn’t tolerate coming in late to work and expects his people to take shorter coffee breaks. He can be seen as being completely oblivious to the fact that he himself was, until recently, an exhibition of all the above stated gray areas. In the academic environment, you can draw parallels. A professor shows little tolerance and patience to the students’ lack of understanding of a subject, notwithstanding the fact that they might have shaky basics in it, just like he/she might have had in earlier years.

We all experience such things, and some of us might be guilty of it ourselves. If you dissect the problem, you can see two entities emerging out of it. A) is what can be called as the individual’s character, and B) is what can be called the role’s character. Every individual in effect wears a hat to play a role. This could be the role of a son, a batsman, an employee, a philanthropist, a mentor, a student and the list is endless. Each role comes with a *set of characteristics* that have to be rightly followed irrespective of who’s stepping in to it. At the same time, the person who steps into the shoes of a particular job also carries with him/her a set of values or a pattern of programming that is unique to that person. When the ball (the individual) sits into the socket (the role), the dimensional constraints of the socket dictates the degree of freedom for the movement of the ball.

A straightforward example, though its mention here might seem partly out of context, is that of an actor. Jim Carey could be the funniest guy on screen in the characters he portrays, but could be a stern and stiff faced bloke in his real life. When you take this analogy and superimpose it on the cases mentioned above, you can understand the case of the employee being promoted to managing staff. The care free employee now finds himself in a role that requires him to act in a manner that is not in accordance with his real self. But for the greater good of his livelihood and that of his family's, he then subdues his inherent nature and plays to the tune of the new piper. Similar is it with the professor and the student. During my torrential teenage years, I remember reading something that I bought then as Gospel truth. It said “Parents of teenagers often behave like they had nothing to do with teenage life themselves” or something similar.

This conflict between the character of the individual and the character of the role can look very confusing from the outside, especially when a person moves through multiple roles in quick successions and takes time to grow into each role. We outsiders, not understanding the inside story, coined a word for this state: hypocrisy.

Goodwill Learning

Going through exam days and the days prior to it were painful. But watching my brothers at home go through the same pain now is not nearly as hurtful to me as it was for me to go through it. They’re in the classes 9 and 10, and are busy stuck in the race to meet society's goals to get a cut above 90 or whatever, so as to land a decent seat for classes 11 and 12 (or PU 1 (Pre-University) and PU 2 as it’s called in Karnataka).

The ability to produce good results consistently, be it in academics or in a sport, or in acting often has the same underlying basis: that of being a good student of the subject. Being a student comes with the implication of being a superior learner. What then makes for ‘good learning’? Here are 5 points in their order of importance that I think makes sense.

1) A desire for the subject: It’s another way of saying 'you’ve got to do what you like'. A desire for a subject is so paramount to the learner and for learning, simply because it makes the learning process much easier. The desire is like a drug; an anesthetic. You don’t feel the pain of the learning process. This one factor is of such giant importance that placing it anywhere but one would be undermining it to a large extent. History has scores of literature to support this fact.

2) A teachable attitude: I can have all the desire in the world to learn cooking, but if my attitude towards learning stinks, I’m not getting anywhere close to making tasty pasta. And attitude towards learning could mean a whole lot of things – patience, subduing one’s ego for the benefit of learning, stickability to the subject over a period of time, asking questions and not questioning everything, curiosity and initiative, and so much more.

3) Superior Coaching: The saying goes that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And the converse is true as well. A student who wants to learn and is willing to pay the price for it will, by the Law of Attraction, bring in a coach into the circumstance. And superior coaching can bring about (and always does) the difference between doing well and a stellar performance.

4) A competitive fire: The connotation of the word ‘competition’ to mean dog-eat-dog is rampant today. But this is not that kind of a competitive fire that I’m referring to here. It’s that traditional and boring meaning that you’re Principal in school told you about: each day, am I getting better than I was the previous day. It’s that competition with the self.

5) Rote repetition and mastery of the basics: Once these four factors are in place, it’s time to sharpen the pencil, learn the technique and get good at it. Unfortunately, most of us put this at number one. Learning the basics, sticking to it and repeating it over and over again is really the key. There’s nothing fancy to the big win. It’s very unsexy, but who cares; it works all the time.

What other factors do you think can be added to this list?

And btw,here's a great video that captures the essence of being a student and great learner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKXFGVMO3pc

Putting an end to the paranormal

Talking about paranormal stuff is just so cool, isn’t it? I don’t know about the girls, but I think no man can ever admit that he’s scared of watching horror on screen. And if you were to spot a bunch of eighteen year-olds discussing ghost stories, it’ll not be hard to notice that each one is waiting for the other to finish his story. Every boy wants to pounce on the rest of them with his tale, and each one hopes that his story is the one that freaks everybody the most. I have scores of tales from my engineering days to demonstrate this fact. There’s the story of Vinod Kambli’s fan, last room in the corridor girl’s room-mate, the Ambassador party, the Hotel waiter, the guy in the time capsule and many more. I mean, these are actual stories that have happened to either me or people close to me. But we won’t go into that until sometime later.

Many many years ago while in high school, I remember reading a book about paranormal stuff that people had experienced. One of the stories was about a couple that lived in some part of the world and had always wanted to visit France. Now this story happened sometime in the 70’s from what I recollect. So they decide to vacation there, and in a few weeks they find themselves checking into a hotel room in Paris. Later that evening, the husband and wife are walking down a street. Suddenly the man turns to the wife and remarks that if they were to walk till the end of the road and turn right, they would find a restaurant that went by a certain name, and he said the name of the place. The wife thought her husband was playing a fun game since they had never visited Paris before, and so how could he possibly know the name of this place and the fact that it existed there? But true to his word, they turned right at the road’s end, and found the restaurant with exactly the same name as he had said.

You might have heard this story, or something similar in the past. You might have even experienced something like this yourself. But that was in the 70’s. Let’s see what happens in the year 2009. I’m on a bike with my friend. We are headed some place in the city for some errand that I can’t recollect now. My friend is riding the bike and we are headed to this place. Now both of us haven’t been to that part of the city before. I’m hoping to get directions from people on the streets. After covering some distance, we reach a signal. My friend stops and shuts off the bike. He turns around and tells me that if you go straight from the signal and take a right, there’s a flyover and near that flyover is a Chinese restaurant by the name of Blah Blah. No passerby that we got directions from ever said anything of this kind to us. I thought it could be that this guy had come here before, but that was untrue. So obviously, this must be paranormal.

Not really. Our man had been spending too much time on Google maps before we left home. Darn it, they sucked all the fun out of ghost stories.