It’s a Jungle Out There
C'est La Vie

It’s a Jungle Out There

The jungle is not a place of predator and prey, instead it’s about collaborating and sharing the same waterhole. For so long, I have heard the phrase “it’s a jungle out there” mentioned in the context of the cruel world of business , and understood it to mean that only the fittest will survive and it’s each man to his own, constantly watching his back, in the fight for survival. There are various other metaphors used which underline this sentiment. At a top management conference of a large, politics ridden organisation, one of them pithily said “let’s face it, either you are the road roller or the road – there is no third option”. Either you are the hunter or the hunted, the predator or the prey. So, when I actually went into the jungle a few months ago, I realised pleasantly that “it’s a jungle out there” isn’t about […]

April 1, 2012 0 Comments
Ladies First
C'est La Vie

Ladies First

Stories of successful women Almost all the “aha” thoughts I have had that helped me navigate through the self-inflicted pain of super-woman-itis, chip-on-the-shoulder gender bias, guilty motherhood, to be she-male or female dilemmas, came from women icons, celebrities, and regular people who were part of my life journey. Last week’s Women’s Day calls for sharing some of these stories. I tagged along with a bunch of senior journalists, on the campaign trail during the last Bihar assembly elections. That’s when I met Rabri Devi. As I watched her impassive face and her placid, “homely” demeanour, I asked her how she managed to do all this chief minister stuff with such little training. Her answer, which I will use as a title if ever I write a book on Indian women, went something like “samay samay par adjust karna padta hai, so kar lete hain.” My takeaway? Hey nothing is such […]

March 11, 2012 0 Comments
Yoganatomy
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Yoganatomy

You might not understand it, but ‘sabar’ yoga might be a most useful life lesson. At the swanky T3 terminal of Delhi airport, I had a “we are like that only” moment. There was a large-ish crowd hanging around a huge mental sculpture, an upward sloping elliptical frame with larger than life human figures fixed on to it. They were going around it, aiming their cellphones, and furiously taking pictures. I used to be amused with Japanese tourists and their cameras, but we Indians have stolen a march over them when it comes to no-frills pragmatic consumption of even something as aesthetic as photography. It took a while to figure out that the sculpture was depicting the surya namaskar sequence and attracting more of middle-class India’s attention than shops selling foreign brands. Maybe we should just chill a bit on the FDI and death-of-the-kirana panic attack. Yoga has made a […]

January 15, 2012 0 Comments
Sincerely Yours
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Sincerely Yours

BIG BAZAAR is a brand that is a symbol of middle class abundance, aspiration for a better living curiosity and thirst for new consumption experiences, and in general of middle India modernity and sophistication–not westernisation but better Indian ways of doing things. If Infosys represents the journey of India abroad in the productivity and earning space, Big Bazaar represents the journey of India at home in the consumption and spending space. Big Bazaar brand’s relationship with its customers is what makes it so special. An old brand health question used to be not “what do you think of the brand?” but “what do you think the brand thinks of you?”. Big Bazaar thinks you are worth it even if you are not “hi-fi”; it doesn’t expect you to speak good English, know how to read signs in straight aisles and work with checklists. It doesn’t laugh at you because you […]

September 15, 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
Super Grooms for Super Brides
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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
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
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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