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Of Yellow Lines and Ponies
C'est La Vie

Of Yellow Lines and Ponies

When Chinese precision meets Indian flexibility on a journey to Kailash Mansarovar My trip to Kailash Mansarovar was flagged off by a wry, tongue-in-cheek comment from a dear friend about going all the way to pray in the Chinese language to Hindu gods. The trip had its share of spectacular personal highs, but it also had its fair share of interesting sidelights that make you think about the world you live in. Perhaps, such worldly reflections are as much the point of pilgrimages as the hope for a glimpse of divinity. I strongly recommend a visit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) or equivalent senior delegation to Zhangmu on the China-Nepal border for a reality check. On the one side is laid-back human authority and on the other, just across a short bridge, envious, formidable, faceless efficiency, including insistence on straight lines. On our return, as we queued up […]

August 19, 2012 0 Comments
Desi Geek’s Ideal
Business Strategy

Desi Geek’s Ideal

Integrity and intellect have been the cornerstones of Infosys’ journey as one of India’s most respected brands. BRANDS are often markers and symbols of major social transitions, and the Infosys brand is a multi-faceted one that encapsulates the transition from a socialist, closed India to a globally connected modern market economy. The Infosys brand is a representation of India’s journey from zero to hero on the global stage– from providing unskilled labour to the richer world to being a country of smart people who have higher order skills to service the IT needs of even the most advanced countries in the world. Just as the Apple brand is seen to represent the symbolic new frontiers of California and Silicon Valley, the Infosys brand represents the symbolic new frontiers of new India and the International Indian: A desi geek and not a westernized sophisticate, middle-class and understated not affluent and flamboyant; […]

September 1, 2011 0 Comments
IT major Infosys needs to sound more confident about its strategy
Business Strategy

IT major Infosys needs to sound more confident about its strategy

What’s wrong with Infosys? But wait, that’s not the right question. What’s right with Infosys and what’s wrong with it that it can’t better communicate what’s right – those are the right questions. To see why these are the right questions for a blue-chip company under so much scrutiny, a broader perspective is useful. It is not hard to recall all the strident criticism of Indian IT majors from industry watchers. That they were not “going up the value chain”, they were merely doing application development and maintenance (ADM), they were not creating products or intellectual property, they were not integrating with their clients’ businesses, they were just a mega labour arbitraging machine. But despite all the criticism it was a machine that was throwing up large and ever increasing amounts of free cash, the darling of the stock market, the definitive gold standard for businesses in India to benchmark […]

July 15, 2012 0 Comments
Jewel in the Crown
Business Strategy

Jewel in the Crown

Tanishq has not only revolutionized the way Indian women buy jewellery, it has also brought in a set of standards and ethical norms into the jewellery trade. Tanishq is not an iconic brand marking big national social and economic transitions like Big Bazaar or Infosys. But it is a very noteworthy brand because it is one of the few Indian examples of valuable businesses built on the foundation of a “brand platform”; and because it has accomplished the herculean task of building trust for a high value item like jewellery, which is loaded with all kinds of cultural meaning, and prying loose the dominating grip of the traditional jeweler with great customer relationships spanning generations of a family. It is an example of how one brand with grit can reprogramme how customers have thought and bought for ages. It is also the only national jewellery retail chain in a country […]

September 1, 2011 0 Comments
The Add-On Card
C'est La Vie

The Add-On Card

A new-age way for helicopter parents to track their children’s whereabouts The add-on credit card and the SMS that follows after it is used is one of the greatest new-age developments to delight helicopter parents. Offspring, who seldom answer cellphones, never fail to swipe their add-on credit cards. It is also a double-edged gift given by people who haven’t kicked the parental micromanaging habit, despite their children having moved out of home and into college dorms far away. “Comedy club at 2am? What is she thinking, who is her escort?” “Yes, I know I told him to buy any birthday gift he wanted using the add-on card, but at such an expensive shop? Must give him a lecture on brand illusion.” Add-on cards also help to keep tabs on hyperactive mothers. “Ratnadeep supermart at 9am on a Sunday, and so much stuff? Mom, are you having a party, didn’t the […]

June 24, 2012 0 Comments
Recipe Remembrances
C'est La Vie

Recipe Remembrances

Finding Light at the End of the Culinary Tunnel In the TV serial Kuch Tho Log Kahenge, Dr Nidhi is cooking her first meal in her sasuraal. She has arranged the cooking implements precisely, as if in an operation theatre and has definitively dismissed Ramu kaka, the elderly family retainer’s offers to assist. Suddenly she has a doubt. What should the exact temperature of the oil be for bhajiyas? Ramu kaka looks bewildered and says “bitiya, taapmaan to hum ne kabhi nahin dekha” (My dear, I’ve never checked the temperature). Of course the bhajiyas were a disaster. It was reassuring to know that times haven’t changed all that much and new brides, even if otherwise capable, still can’t cook; but it was heartening to note that they now guiltlessly find smart solutions and escape the annoying lifelong jokes about their early attempts at cooking. Dr Nidhi quietly ordered food in, from her father’s house. When I got married, […]

June 3, 2012 0 Comments
Not so simple!
India My Land

Not so simple!

Why life is not all about yes and no in India During my market research days, I used to work on global surveys, where the same questions had to be asked across countries and the answers compared. Implicit in this was the assumption that as long as the questions were identical, the answers were comparable. However this was usually quite far from the truth, as all of us with common sense can well imagine. “Can’t say” in India was not “don’t know” as elsewhere, because it was often “won’t say”. “Are you vegetarian or not”, was not so simple because I could be vegetarian only at home or only on Tuesdays. A standard international price testing question was to ask people, “if the price of Brand B went up by Rs x, which brand would you switch to?” This data was then subjected to some rigorous maths to predict what […]

May 13, 2012 0 Comments
Piercing the Veil of Illusion
India My Land

Piercing the Veil of Illusion

It is time to let social scientists take the floor to understand the many maladies afflicting India India has a deeply entrenched knowledge caste system. ‘Science’ is superior to ‘arts’, ‘quantitative’ better than ‘qualitative’; oncology and computer science will benefit the country more than sociology or psychology. Economics is superior to other ‘arts’ because it is quantitative. Consequently even the most pressing problems of national character and society and polity are sought to be solved by technofixes or higher GDP growth rate or understood by some set of quantitative indicators like vote shares or infrastructure outlay or poverty statistics using different measures. Seriously addressing such problems, however, requires rising above the caste system and getting social science disciplines to urgently work on them, or else they will rot the foundations of the country. We need them to urgently put into the public discourse a deep understanding of the real nature […]

April 30, 2012 0 Comments
When the tables turn
C'est La Vie

When the tables turn

The bittersweet moments of role reversals in mother-daughter ties Please remember to switch off the lights as you leave, otherwise my electricity bill shoots up… and please don’t lose my house keys”, the just-started-working young lady said to her mother. The mother was indignant. She thought, “What about all the lights and fans you left on, all those growing up years; and all the milk you poured down the sink when you thought nobody was looking? And all those expensive tuition teachers you persuaded to leave early even though we were paying them by the hour?” But after she got the indignation out of her system, she thought with a gleam in her eye, “ab meri baari“. She had known early on in motherhood, that every 10 years or so, who embarrasses whom changes and power shifts. When her daughter was two, they took her with them to a fancy […]

April 22, 2012 0 Comments
Can Narendra Modi evolve from COO to CEO?
Demand Drivers

Can Narendra Modi evolve from COO to CEO?

There is something seductively reassuring about operational performance improvement (OPI). Narendra Modi’s speeches at business forums have been all about it and he offers himself as an OPI-delivering chief operating officer (COO), with a successful model demonstrated in one pilot state, ready to be scaled to the rest of India. This resonates deeply with Corporate India, which has improved margins and taken advantage of the rising tide of ‘automatic’ GDP-driven revenue growth, for the past 15 years, on the back of an almost maniacal focus on building a lean, mean, efficient, scalable supply machine that could make maximum hay when the sun shone. Given how flabby and dirty the government machine is, there’s clearly a lot to be tangibly gained by the citizen-shareholder too – as is the case with investors in India Inc – and they may well elect him for that reason. Given all the case studies he […]

April 14, 2013 0 Comments
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