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Urban India’s rising resentment
Policy Perspective

Urban India’s rising resentment

There is resentment building up in the “aam janta” in urban India that the government and policy-makers need to understand better. If for nothing else, at least to promote more empathy and to handle the situation more sensitively to prevent the anger from spilling over onto the streets. In India, big waves are often caused by confluences of little ripples, and there is one brewing that needs to be diffused. The increase in petrol prices, the likely steep rise in LPG expenditure, the increase in the EMI burden and prolonged food inflation, all coming together, destabilises most sections of urban India, barring the very rich and the very poor. The least of the problem is that people will now, like in the old days, have to watch their budgets more closely and make tough “not buying” decisions. That would perhaps be the case with the top 30 per cent of […]

August 20, 2011 0 Comments
Sari State of Affairs
C'est La Vie

Sari State of Affairs

Unlike the designer weaver establishments I had been taken to see in the past, the poverty was appalling and the younger people had obviously deserted the profession, leaving a predominantly older group behind, and few younger women. The physical labour was very hard and I felt that all this sweat was just not worth the beauty of the sari being woven; the more intricate the weave, the more it meant that the man or the woman with an emaciated body and a barely subsistence-level hut would have to work. I was told that the younger generation prefers regular jobs to all this back-breaking work, and I thought with surprising relief, “Thank God, there is some progress”. I did ask myself why anybody in this day and age of gadgets and robotics and artificial intelligence should actually do so much manual labour. If you asked the question, “Does anything else done […]

June 26, 2011 0 Comments
Spooking Ourselves into a Slowdown
Business Strategy

Spooking Ourselves into a Slowdown

Dear Corporate India, why is there so much overt panic about an impending “slowdown” and “policy paralysis” at the centre and unfriendly (to whom?) rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)? It seems to echo the days of the global meltdown when a puzzled foreign investor asked me how it was that all the companies he had met, collectively said things were in a bad way, but individually and privately said things weren’t too bad. Maybe it’s just the business media that doesn’t seem to have a handle on things! Thursday’s headlines in one paper was about such a collective view of bankers about bad times, but Friday’s interview by the head of HDFC Bank – a balanced and mature high-performing organization by any yard stick – was very calm. He said, “Bad debts come when you have a tremendous fall in growth rate that is unexpected. Half […]

June 18, 2011 0 Comments
Super Grooms for Super Brides
C'est La Vie

Super Grooms for Super Brides

My take on this is that parents are now a lot more democratic, and there is little danger that they will force their children to get married to anyone that they don’t want to. The children know this and are outsourcing the hard work of dating and finding their own spouse to their parents. As my friend, adman and cultural analyst, Santosh Desai, says, the dating market has not developed. The mating market has just got more de-controlled. Young people have a word for it – they call it “engineered marriages”. Looking at the surveys in magazines on sexual attitudes and behaviour of GeNext, it seems that there are indeed two “value spaces” that co-exist, one new, one old, one the world of dating, the other, the world of marriage. It isn’t necessary that the dating pool is the one that needs to be waded into, in order to get […]

May 22, 2011 0 Comments
Blind Spots and Slippery Slopes
Corporate Governance

Blind Spots and Slippery Slopes

I read the most brilliant article in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled “Ethical Breakdown” that resonated a great deal with me, and I want to share it, because I suspect that many of us are thinking a lot about the “difficulty of being good” – that lovely phrase which has become my touchstone ever since I read it on the cover of Gurcharan Das’ book. The article deals with the question of why good people do unacceptable things, and why it doesn’t get spotted and stopped early on. Think board dynamics; where we sometimes unthinkingly classify asking questions or insisting on more analysis as disruptive or demoralising behaviour, when the sense of the house is that it is a good decision and there is a time-bound pressure to it so why not go ahead; or in not being appreciative enough of good outcomes that have been […]

May 21, 2011 0 Comments
Bust Your Car
C'est La Vie

Bust Your Car

Only after copious analysis which led to choice of alternative solutions; critical hypotheses, on which the choice would be based, and treasure -hunt- like data searches through the case to validate those hypotheses, would the solution to the problem start to get discussed. In business meetings today, unfortunately, a lot of time gets spent on debating solutions and very little time on discussing or diagnosing the problem. In fact, it is deemed distinctly unfashionable in today’s fastpaced would, with a bias for action and quarterly results, to discuss a problem instead of leaping to instant action. A famous story on problem-solving is about the customer who reported to his car company (GM, I think) that there was something wrong with his car. The man said, “When I go to the ice cream shop to buy vanilla ice cream, my car always starts on my return with no fuss. But when […]

April 24, 2011 0 Comments
Will Consumption Hold Up?
Demand Drivers

Will Consumption Hold Up?

Future income projections will show what we already know based on data of the last five and ten years: that between now and 2015, if there is no dramatic change in policy, past patterns of income growth will perpetuate and the top (richest) 20 percent of Consumer India will increase its income at a much faster rate than the rest of India and get even more unequally rich. We also know from past data that this group has a healthy income surplus, so, despite inflation, it will continue to increase its surplus. That’s why we haven’t seen any demand-led slowdown in expensive durables including cars, the stock market, in high-end smartphones and so on. That is why business class seats are not going a – begging despite ridiculous spot fares, because the opportunity cost of the buyers’ time to earn more is greater. Housing is never a good indicator of […]

April 16, 2011 0 Comments
Maid to Order
C'est La Vie

Maid to Order

Of course, the husband, as usual, also has a meeting or is traveling. (I wonder, are things different for this generation of young mothers? Has the helpful, responsible, gender-roles-disregarding husband finally arrived?) You jump through hoops and manage to live to fight another day, but you just cut a few years off your life and permanently kill more brain cells than you need to and acquire more IOUs that will come back to haunt you. Sadly, such situations repeat in different way over the years- – I have been interrupted during a board meeting, in the midst of an impassioned speech, with desperate “mamma, please call it’s urgent” messages from my 16-year-old. The dog ran out and bit the courier man, who insisted that someone take him to the doctor and maybe the police station as well. The maid dissolved into tears, leaving my daughter at home on study leave […]

March 27, 2011 0 Comments
Maiden Over
C'est La Vie

Maiden Over

In the rest of our lives, I am the one with the religious compulsions and he is the agnostic. But in his cricket life, he is the fervent devotee, and I, the atheist. And so, just as I say a prayer on this behalf when he refuses to enter a temple because the floor is too dirty/ too hot/ cold/ crowded/ noisy, that day too, I said a prayer on his behalf at cricket aarti time, when they rolled the green in the evening with something resembling a road roller. I can tell the progress in my professional gender confidence from how I react to the ritual start of any meeting during cricket season- the detailed discussions on what happened, what should have happened and what will happen next. I have heard grown men take a pause from bashing each other to shed a collective tear over a missed catch. In my […]

March 13, 2011 0 Comments
19 X 19 =?
C'est La Vie

19 X 19 =?

At boot camp, you woke up at 5 am and sat cross-legged on the floor, doing sums from a workbook. Break for breakfast, lunch and afternoon play to refresh your mind (what on earth did body have to do with anything?) and in the evening you did more sums, after which you gratefully crawled into bed. He then sat and erased all the answers that you wrote in the workbook, so that the sums could be recycled a few days later. My brother, who was a bit older, was also an inmate at the boot camp. I can’t remember what maths he did, but he has always maintained that he was burnt out at 10 because he was made to solve simultaneous equations at seven. After boot camp my mark soared, but that only egged my father on. We graduated to multiplication tables. You had to stand with your fingers […]

January 16, 2011 0 Comments
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