The Helping Hand
India My Land

The Helping Hand

Unlike her Bombay counterparts, Yellamma doesn’t worry too much about job descriptions. Her paradigm is different. She offers head massages to all my mother’s visitors, some of whom accept and tip well. After my initial splutter at this, I thought she had managed what retailers in malls struggle to do – monetise footfall! She offered me an oil massage too, and suggested moving into a room at the far end of the house to relax better. I thought happily about a conversation that I had with the chairman of an MNC making premium beauty products, who said that they had to recalibrate their notion of luxury and pampering for India; customized massages to home are available only to the very affluent in America, but easily accessible to middle-class India. My happiness was rudely interrupted by Yellamma using the opportunity to tell me to recommend a salary raise for her, in […]

February 12, 2012 0 Comments
The Old Order Has Changed
India My Land

The Old Order Has Changed

One of her case studies was about a TV advertisement of a leading brand of household liquid cleaner in the UK, which had the male voice-over saying, “Kills one hundred percent germs-DEAD”, and a visual showing the woman cleaning the house. She explained that one of the reasons the brand was losing market share was that its ad was out of sync with the rise of feminism. The ad had the male, authoritative voice-over coded as “master” and the workabee female coded as “servant”. A decade or so ago, a popular Indian toilet cleaner brand ran an ad with a woman relaxing with the newspaper and the husband saying appreciatively, “That’s my wife cleaning the toilet”, and explaining how easy it was to achieve great cleaning with no effort. Today, while toilet cleaner ads still talk to the woman and explain the wonders of U-bends and germs to her, it […]

February 4, 2012 0 Comments
The Fuel that Fires Anna-ism
India My Land

The Fuel that Fires Anna-ism

But the Anna-ists have invented yet another category of social activism that wants to job-share with the government in law making – we draft the Bill, you pilot it through Parliament; you implement it as a government, but we monitor your implementation. Even if the Anna-ists calm down soon and this bout of activism fades, it reveals a lot about some of the fundamental changes that have taken place in India recently, which has taken many people by surprise, including the government of the day. And this question is one that has been engaging the more thoughtful print media compared to the frenzied electronic media with its ball-by-ball commentary on television. For a start, a lot of people were wondering why the middle class is not revolting about rising prices. Yet when it comes to corruption, there is an uproar. There has been a general consensus on and disapproval of […]

August 20, 2011 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
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
Too Many Cooks Make The Broth Cost Effective
India My Land

Too Many Cooks Make The Broth Cost Effective

So for sixteen flats with probably a hundred people in them, there were twenty people involved in setting it up. Did it need that many people to do this? Well, everyone except the census people were doing this part time, each spending a tiny amount of time doing it, so it wasn’t that many man hours doing it, though it seems like it. More expensive than if it involved just one or two people? Not to the census bureau because they only paid for their person, while the rest of the activity costs were effectively shared by all of us who pay for the watchmen and the manager and our domestic staff. Cumbersome process? Not really, unless you stop to analyse it. It actually was all quite smooth and well oiled and got the job done smoothly. The fact is that we have lots and lots of people; and people […]

June 19, 2010 0 Comments
Anklets in the Boardroom
India My Land

Anklets in the Boardroom

Anyway, she made a reasonable presentation – not a spectacular one but an adequate one and then, before she left the room, she went around the table once and shook hands with all present. She was wearing payal (anklets) which made a rather loud tinkling sound that was very hard not to notice. She wasn’t doing it for effect. She just wore what she usually wore and was quite unspoilt and oblivious of her surroundings. I, however, cringed with every jangle that happened with every step, and felt that it wasn’t the professional woman thing to do. The chairman of the meeting, known for saying it like it is, sans finesse, looked up as she left the room and muttered loudly, “Where did she come from? Bharatnatyam class?” Some folks, including me, laughed, and the meeting proceeded. But it nagged me. Why did I cringe at the sound of anklets […]

June 1, 2010 0 Comments
An Encore from Dr Manmohan Singh
India My Land

An Encore from Dr Manmohan Singh

If that was Act-I, now it’s time for Act-II, i.e. to do the same in the sphere of education and develop a vibrant education ecosystem in India. As in the case of business, this has to evolve organically and democratically, and cannot be something the government dictates or even lays down the paradigms for. It will, no doubt, take another 20 years of tapasya of a whole lot of people, in quite the same manner that it took for the model for business to evolve; but in the end, it will be well worth it, and it will be sustainable. There are no short cuts to this and we have to spend time discussing the problem, rather than jumping to implement quick-fix solutions. The most important thing, however, is to recognise that the genesis of our new and modern business ecosystem was liberalisation. Liberalisation actually meant two things – allowing […]

April 17, 2010 0 Comments
Celebrating Diversity is Unity
India My Land

Celebrating Diversity is Unity

However even while this angst for the new Indian identity continues in some quarters, everything else is going in the reversing direction. Television is getting more and more determinedly regional, as are the movies. In fact a look at all the serials and soaps on TV show that having distinctive sub communities in which the story is set works – some watch it because they identify with it and others like me because we are curious about how they live. Mata ki Chowki has a cast of a different kind of Indians than Baa Bahu Aur Baby. And it isn’t about religion either. Obama said that his was a country of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Moslems and non believers. Ours is an infinitely more complex fabric – the Tamilian Muslims and Tamilian Hindus have more in common than the Tamil Muslim and the Bihari Muslim. And it isn’t about community of […]

March 8, 2010 0 Comments
More Than Just a Glass Ceiling
India My Land

More Than Just a Glass Ceiling

Most of the Indian women we know, even in GenNext, have grown up with subliminal messages about being a “good girl”, i.e. of behaving in a manner that conforms to society’s stereotypes and prescriptions of what success for a girl looks like. A venerable aunt used to hold up as an example worth emulating a girl who had a PhD in nuclear physics and an amazing job, but “when she walked in to the room you would never know that-she was so simple and ordinary in everything she did and said”. It took many years before we picked up the courage to ask, “But if she was so wonderful, what was the matter with her that she made no waves?” If you are from a middle class family in Tamil Nadu, as one of us is, you have probably been raised with a variety of wheedling voices asking you to […]

March 8, 2010 0 Comments
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