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
Freedom at Mid Life
C'est La Vie

Freedom at Mid Life

The men decided that the only logical thing to do was to take a break and reassemble after dinner for a few more hours of work, before the scheduled early start the next day. The young lady also gamely agreed to this, thought she looked very unhappy and agitated. After some persuasion, she admitted that her one-year old son didn’t sleep until he saw “mommy”. So she had planned to leave after the meeting, drive two hours to her home and then leave again at the crack of dawn the next day to be back in time for the meeting. Motherhood guilt mingled with a desperate need not to appear unprofessional. As I looked at her stressed state, I thanked the lord that I had long passed her age, and had “been there, done that”. I thought with a heartfelt shudder, that I never wanted to be a young mother […]

December 26, 2010 0 Comments
And the award goes to…
Corporate Governance

And the award goes to…

We certainly have been a chaotic, noisy democracy this last year, with lots of societal churning. As mythology tells us, any churning done jointly by the good guys and the bad guys, yields both poison and nectar, and so we have had good, bad, ugly and funny incidents. This year’s award for constructive disruption goes to the insurance regulator, who issued a fiat that insurance companies must diversify into insurance. It was a “shock and awe” regulation, as a foreign analyst dubbed it, but it ensured that the insurance industry applied its mind to moving beyond the comfortable value space of wealth management and mutual fund-like offerings with a garnish of insurance sprinkled on top. Of course, parts of India Inc shook their heads disapprovingly, as business models fell apart, at the “value destructive” behaviour of the regulator. The “who pulled the trigger” root cause award for this goes to […]

December 18, 2010 0 Comments
Meet or Wed
C'est La Vie

Meet or Wed

I intended to say, “Have to keep car going to Shalimar hotel to meet somebody”. “Meet” became “wed”, because the w-x-y-z key is just below the m-n-o key and a carelessly pressed m became w. The phone then used its brain and said weet is not a word. So the last is extra, maybe it is wed. Why did it think of w-e-d and not w-e-e? Because like all of us, the predictive text is a creature of habit and I use the word wed – short for Wednesday – more than I use the word wee. In fact I never refer to anything as wee. Most of my friends would think that was an SMS typo. So the message read, “Have to keep car going to Shalimar hotel to wed somebody.” I am a total SMS junkie. The ability it gives me to tell people what I think about […]

December 12, 2010 0 Comments
The Bare And Simple Facts
India My Land

The Bare And Simple Facts

I thought of this story as I was looking at some really basic data, unembellished by any rocket science analytics. The data related to the two magical weapons that we think will annihilate all obstacles and take us to superpower glory. One is the demographic dividend and the other is middle class. This column presents simple data with obvious takeaways on the demographic dividend from a 2009 survey by NCAER Centre for Macro Consumer Research (NCAER-CMCR) and pleads with policy makers for a segment-wise, targeted employment generation policy (not employment guaranteed through manual labour policy or even a sporadic skills development set of programmes, but a holistic policy that looks at what people we have, what they can do, what jobs need to be done/can be done, and how to fit the two). It also pleads for marketers to think about youth markets as beyond denim branded jeans and style-statement […]

November 20, 2010 0 Comments
Prince Gusting, RIP – EYE
C'est La Vie

Prince Gusting, RIP – EYE

This is the story of Prince Gusting (‘Gusting’ because I thought he was disgusting and my daughter and husband didn’t). who held our family, friends, domestic staff, and neighbours in thrall and in tyranny for 11 and a half years and died last month, exactly the way he had lived- on his own terms, fighting to the last, and with an encourage in attendance. We are unused to our new freedom-to be able to answer the doorbell without five minutes of pleas and threats; to be able to eat paneer/chicken/papaya without having our elbow jerked and our eardrums shattered; to leave the house without the mandatory dash to the door to escape the furious creature trying to stop us. It is nice to hug family and friends, without furtively looking for Prince, because he disapproved of us having body contact with anybody except him. He disapproved of many things, and […]

November 14, 2010 0 Comments
The Right To Grow
Corporate Governance

The Right To Grow

The Indian economy has been stress tested for the past year and a half, and we are now exhaling a collective but cautious sigh of relief. Yes, the economy has slowed down but we are still hanging in there at a 6.5+% growth, which is much better than what it was in 2000-2003. Also there do not appear to be any major cracks in the edifice of the global economic powerhouse that we are in the process of building. One must admit though that there is some merit to the often made argument that we have not been hit any less than everyone else, since the percentage decline in our GDP growth has been as severe as the economies in the world which have contracted. Hence, our slowdown is equivalent to their recession. However, we have had no collapse of institutions, and what’s more, consumer demand is up and about, […]

November 12, 2010 0 Comments
Ring in the New, Revel in the old
C'est La Vie

Ring in the New, Revel in the old

Diwali shopping, and finding the mecca of the modern Indian shopper I went to the mecca of modern shopping, the new temples of modern India, this weekend to check out what Diwali shopping was like and what modern Indian shoppers and shops were doing. Here’s my amateur anthropologist’s report. There were two X-ray arches to enter the Phoenix Mills complex of malls in Mumbai one for the uber-fancy Palladium Mall, with its shops housing high-end (mostly foreign) brands and hip restaurants; the other was the entrance to the more janta malls, relatively speaking of course. Sort of diwan-e-aam and Diwan-e-khas, but diwan-e-something for sure. The queue to enter the high-end mall was non-existent, and all of us headed purposefully towards the other entrance. In both places, there was not a soul inside the high-end shops be it cosmetic, apparel, footwear, branded accessories, western jewellery, music equipment or toy stores. Not […]

October 31, 2010 0 Comments
Learning to Read Social Change
India My Land

Learning to Read Social Change

For example, how did consumption patterns change after World War II when the men came back to a changed and unfamiliar world, and the women had the upper hand because they had coped independently through the war? What were the consumption behaviour changes when women’s participation in the workplace became the norm in America? Shared responsibility was forced on the men, and when men went to shop for the home or for the children, they did it quite differently from women. It struck me that in India, we have a lot of business strategy discussions in which social, demographic and lifestyle changes are listed. We, however, are yet to sharply define and quantify them, and then relentlessly push for the “so whats” that could be in a variety of areas. In middle-class urban India, with heavy traffic and great distances between home and workplace in big cities, many kids are […]

October 16, 2010 0 Comments
The Magic Ingredient
Corporate Governance

The Magic Ingredient

The assumption that a big-name bank with a set of smaller local partners, yoked together by technology, will automatically win over the local money lenders or the informal financial sector needs to be challenged. “Biometrics” and ATMs are not consumer value propositions, they are the supply side story. The local pawn broker who is usurious is also culturally sensitive. He knows that the mangalsutra mortgaged to him needs to appear on the bride’s neck at the time of a wedding and that is part of his idea of customer service. He will wait behind the venue, both to hand it over and take it back. A friend whose family is in the business tells the story of how it offered the service of making artificial jewellery in exactly the same pattern as the items mortgaged by customers – a winning proposition for both sides. Similarly, in urban slums people talk […]

September 18, 2010 0 Comments
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