Himanshu Gupta's blog

Whither Tele-Marketing phobia

Who amongst middle and upper middle class Indians hasn't been disturbed by credit card sellers, loan sellers and what not on his/her phone. Most of these tele-marketing agents call at the most inconvenient timings and usually end up receiving angry or harsh words from prospective buyers rather than making a sale.

Any guesses, why this happens? Yes, I understand one reason being the aggressive marketing practices of Indian banks which forces agents to do so. But one of the major reasons behind this failure to sale is that most of these tele-marketing agents working in call centres are young graduates fresh out of school or college, have never used a credit card themselves in their life, have never worked in high level organizations where they can appreciate the value of two minutes of an executive's time, which is all they want during their call.

And this is a big marketing failure on part of all the companies using tele-marketing in India. These companies train their personnel about their products using classroom teaching programs, but forget that you can't inculcate passion about a product or brand in just a classroom. Can a person who has used Nokia 1100 all his life will be able to sell a blackberry or iPhone to an executive, when the main differentiating factor is no longer the price of the phone but the brand name or its service value.

A similar instance was told to me by my teacher Dwari in my retail class lecture at MICA. Most retail salespeople in India selling luxury brands like Gucci, Louie Vuitton have never used these brands themselves, and thus can never appreciate why would somebody be willing to pay millions just for a bag or watch.

This is a challenge all "new to Indian market" and growing business categories will face in India. Anybody with comments on how companies can crack this code, or knowledge on companies which have been able to achieve this in newer markets?

More random news analysis

Read this news story yesterday

A cellphone ringtone that chants "condom, condom!" has been launched in India to promote safe sex and tackle the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The "condom a cappella" has been designed to break down Indians' reluctance to discuss condom use and to make wearing a condom more acceptable.

Organisers of the campaign, funded by the foundation set up by Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, hope the ringtone will become a craze among young Indians.

About 2.5 million people live with HIV in India, said the BBC World Service Trust, the charity behind the ringtone, which was released this month. It can be downloaded at condomcondom.org (via Sonia Faleiro)

After reading the above news story, I too have come up with my own ringtone song based on the iconic soundtrack "ILU ILU" from the movie Saudagar. [ILU used to stand for "I Love You" during my younger days. Many young boys in my school used to write ILU ILU on the desks of the girls they adored, so as to express their harmonal desires. Nowadays, going by latest media reports, it seems that younger boys must be writing IFU on the desks.. but I'm not so sure]. Anyways, here's how my version of song goes:

Jab baag mein

Koi fool khila..

to bhanvre ne kahaa..

CONDOM CONDOM

CONDOM CONDOM..

Jab koooooi achcha lagta hai

bada pyaara pyaara lagta hai

to dil karta hai

CONDOM CONDOM

CONDOM CONDOM..

English version:

Whenever in a garden

a flower blooms,

the bee says

CONDOM CONDOM

CONDOM CONDOM

When somebody feels endeared to you

feels very sweet and loveable to you

the heart says..

CONDOM CONDOM

CONDOM CONDOM

Huh.. all my friends have been cursing me since I've told them of my plans of having above version of song as my ringtone. Sour grapes, it seems.**

In another random net-surfing, I found this utterly hilarious version of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" speech, where it has been made damn funny and dreadful by converting it into a powerpoint:

Barack Obama, "Yes We Can", The Power Point Deck

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: shmula.com can)

** Here "Sour grapes" means that none of them finds themself as creative as I am. Hence they're feeling jealous. Please don't make other latexical assumptions.

How come his coffin is costlier than mine!!

Sandipan Deb, in today's Indian Express, writes one of the best rants I've read in recent times.

The poor of India now know how the rich live, and that’s giving politicians the heebie-jeebies. Till the end of the 20th century, the poor knew that there were a lot of rich people in India, but had only vague notions of how rich they were and how they blew their money. Now nearly everyone owns a TV set, or has access to one, even if it’s in a shop’s show window. They watch the dresses, the gilded staircases, the imported cars, and they realise what they don’t have. They see malls bulging with manicured shopaholics, and want to be in their stilettos. Rising literacy has ensured that many more Indians can get to know that someone gifted his wife a Rs 250-crore plane on her birthday. So who do the poor blame for their plight? They blame the politicians (The fact that they blame politicians, and not the rich is something someone like Karat will never know). So, they keep voting governments out with merciless regularity.

Because no democratic government can fulfil the sort of aspirations the impoverished Indian harbours in his heart, within five years. And the rich don’t vote anyway. Their lives are unaffected, whoever runs the government. They have built their own infrastructure, and the only discomforts they haven’t yet found a solution to are traffic gridlock, and the monsoon floodings of our cities. But then, every time Mumbai goes underwater, or there’s a terrorist attack on the city, we, like Pavlov’s dog, start applauding the spirit of the Mumbaiite. Presumably, Mumbaiites give high fives to one another, and go back to their derelict homes and read inspirational texts.

And we rock on. We are spending more money on looking good than ever before, we are more spiritual than ever before: swarms of gurus, Chinese arcana. Our iPods are working, our next holidays are being planned; the men ponder ponytails, the women where the tattoo should be. And one day we will be very old, and proud that our middle-aged kids call us “Dad-o”, and we will think: It has been a good life. A significant section of today’s poor will also be doing much better. A couple may even be owning multiplexes and partying with vapid models. And then we would have one day amused ourselves to death.

Word limit over, so my rant ends. Hope it was entertaining. Thank you.

Superheroes

We human beings love superheroes. Superman, Spiderman, Batman.. all of them. We just love the concept of sitting at the sidelines while someone else does the job for us. That's why Obama wins the plot, that's how all politicians win their elections.

In modern complex system of work and production, talented people sit through gruelling endless interviews in order to become managers/bosses/leaders of unknown faces that they've never encountered in life. Nobody ever says in a interview "I don't like being ruled over by other individuals, I'd rather rule them all". Why do all politicians answer in similar fashion in all their interviews: "I want to lead you because I want to change your lives". Why do never answer -- "I want to lead you because I want to rule you people.. I want to have power over you all".

It's deemed impolite, too rude to say so. But that's what all governments do to their people.

Golden Quadrilateral is one of the major infrastructural development schemes in India. Its main aim was to connect the four metros across India through four, and wherever possible six lane roads. However, as usual, it ran into problems of land acquisition and sometimes its benefits not matching with those of some vested local political interests. Now, there will always be opposing viewpoints on issue of 'developments vs people' but one thing both sides will agree is that development is necessary and if managed properly, will provide rich dividends to the people in the long run.

Continuing from my last post on stories on India, I'll narrate an incident that happened with a friend of my younger brother. One arm of  Golden Quadrilateral(GQ) project runs through Jabalpur(my home town) also. My brother's friend -- Gulaab, owns some land property in Mandla area which is used for farming by his family.

Now, this is how infrastructure projects operate in India. The project is put for auction to private contractors who put their respective bids. In an ideal scenario, the contractor with the best bid and best experience in handling similar kind of project must be given preference. However, as it actually happens, the contractor which promises the highest bribe(lobbying fees) to influential politicians in that area get the contract. And thereafter, the winning contractor has a free hand as far as treatment to labourers, quality of material purchased, etc. is concerned.

And hence, when this winner contractor company came to Mandla, it told all the farmers of the area that Government needs their soil for increasing the height of the road in that area and make it a four-lane highway. Now, since most of farmers are gullible, they accepted the promise of the government officials/private contractors that they'd be given highest quality of 'black soil' for their lands in lieu of this rather *low* quality soil that was sustaining their families till now. However, my brother's friend, Gulaab, wasn't so innocent. When he came to know of this incident, he immediately asked my brother Ankit to search on internet for all the concerned land laws and government norms, took a printout of everything and then went to the engineer who was in charge of whole project.

Gulaab threatened the engineer with dire consequences of his action and told him of every rule of book that his company was violating. Fearing that the boy isn't a fool after all like the rest of villagers, the engineer ordered the workers to put Gulaab's soil back into his fields. Hence, the road got built, Gulaab got his farm soil in the same good condition as before, while the rest of villagers kept waiting in the hope that they'll get soil in their fields -- eventually losing their livelihood means, or selling their land to some land sharks and shifting to city in state of penury.

I asked my brother Ankit that why didn't Gulaab try to create a mass movement amongst his villagers -- the whole village would have benefited. Ankit said that Gulaab has become so cynical that he doesn't even care for his family, leave alone his village folk.

I'd like to leave aside the issue of personal ethics of Gulaab here, since he's just a 19-20 year old kid right now who never gets to buy a single bit of clothing for 6-8 months of year and just manages to scrape through his life till the farm crop gets harvested. Because it's during that time he gets his 6-8 pairs of clothes which he wears for the whole year till the next crop harvest since there is no other source of cash inflow in his house.

My question is: Does the development process has to be so devoid of empathy, that the people whom it's supposed to benefit get run over by the development itself in the process. Probably Gulaab didn't stand up for his own village because making the whole village stand up would have been tantamount to stopping the construction of road, which would be equivalent to creating a political movement. Gulaab didn't want to become a political figure, instead he wanted to concentrate on his engineering studies so as to become an earning member of his family. Why we should blame him?

We want Gulaab to become a superhero. We want Obama to become a superhero. Any guesses why one donned the mantle while other ignored it altogether? Because Superheroes are all about power, not about changing our world -- That task was and always will be done by common people through long and arduous political movements.

As a common jingle goes:

Faster than a speeding bullet,
More powerful than a locomotive,
Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird!
It's a plane!
It's Superman.

May be it's time we stop looking at the sky and start looking in the mirror to search for our superheroes.

Farmers on a pilgrimage to modern India

It’s an old Hindu tradition in India that when a person becomes old, he goes on pilgrimage to visit holy shrines and temples to pay his homage to Gods. In earlier times, it was a kind of lifetime ambition as people wouldn’t have so much money to go on multiple pilgrimages and due to poor infrastructure and lack of medical help, many would die. The old people, who finally came back from the pilgrimage, before they entered their homes, were worshipped by their children and families. Even today, few drops of charan-amrit(water obtained after washing feet) of people coming back from Pilgrimage is drank as Prasad as it is supposed to contain magical powers. This story of mine is about fulfilment of one such lifetime ambition of one Indian farmer’s family.

Around 6 months back, I was going from Mumbai to Delhi on an Air Deccan flight. Now, some explanations here:

1. Air Deccan is a low cost no-frills air carrier in India
2. Ticket cost is in range of Rs. 2200+ i.e. $55 upwards. Average income/capita in India is roughly $1100 per annum.
3. My family has graduated from a middle class to slight bit upper-middle class in last twenty years. In my family of my parents and two brothers, my mother and younger brother have never flown on a flight. I myself flew for the first time when I was sent onsite to Germany by my company around one year back. Now, that I had been working in an I.T. company for 2 years, I was able to fly on my own Salary without feeling much guilty about it(Compared to Government subsidised train fares, Air fares still seem like a luxury)
4. India is a highly class and caste conscious society even today. Even though people wouldn’t verbally object to intermingling between persons from different strata of society, their minds would instantly recognize any case falling into extreme scenario as the inherent notions of centuries old society structure still exist.

Hence, when I encountered this lot of villagers as soon as I boarded my flight, I became quite excited, and started talking with them.

Since it’s been 6 months since this trip happened, I’ve forgotten the name of this person. Let’s call him Ramlal. He had come along with 5 other people from his circle of close family to board the Air Deccan flight.

Ramlal and his family were villagers from the inner countryside of Uttar Pradesh. Their profession was farming and they weren’t too rich as was obvious from their clothes. They had come from all the way to U.P. to Mumbai just to sit in a flight and have the experience of their lifetime. Two days back, they had come from Delhi to Mumbai via a train. Then, they had stayed at some relative’s house in Mumbai and now they were going back by ‘the aeroplane’.

There was one gentleman sitting besides me, who couldn’t believe his eyes. “How come these people are here?” was the question that uttered out of his mouth. He called an air hostess to check whether these people weren’t relatives of some Air Deccan staff or, whether these people were travelling on free-ticket or something. The Air Deccan air hostess promptly replied that there was no such thing and that Air Deccan has no such policy of free-tickets for anyone.

Our guy Ramlal was quite fascinated by the in-flight magazines. He even tried showing me the Advertisement of some Condom brand in which a girl in lingerie was shown, a gesture which wasn’t very well appreciated by his wife sitting besides him. In the middle of flight, Ramlal enquired me whether he can walk the aisle of the plane to which I affirmatively replied.

Later, when the plane started descending, all six of these people started trying to peek out of the windows rather than putting on their seat-belts, and the visibly flustered air hostesses had a tough time managing them. It was all fun to watch for a guy like me. 

Hence, I came back with images of ‘India Shining’ written in bold in my mind. In next post, I’d try to explore the alternate angles and in some other economic sectors where growth isn’t perhaps being managed properly.

What's the real story?

I and my friends love to talk about India – few of my friends have very strong views that this whole growth saga is just a media projected image, while someone like me would like to believe the opposite.

Looking from a macro level, India’s GDP per capita is growing. The Gini coefficient which is an indicator of inequality in a country is hovering in the range of 0.3-0.4 for last one decade, which means that inequality isn’t growing, and hence the fruits of growth are percolating to all levels of society.

Still, as one encounters stories from personal life, as one goes into personal level human stories, one gets to understand that there is a lot of churn happening at the micro level. At few places, some families, localities and even whole villages might have come out of poverty in last one decade; while in some other places, this mad rush for growth has brought together a bunch of land sharks, greedy capitalists and politicians together who have used the flaws in the system and gullibility of innocent people to their own advantage.

I’d be documenting stories from my personal experiences on this blog and I’d expect my readers to augment my understanding of India, as well tell me experiences from their own part of the world. In next few posts, I’d try to put some bits of my understandings of India and the changes that I’ve been observing.

Human behaviour as a function of Mobility

The Economist has a survey on Mobility in its latest issue, as how the tools of mobility are having an impact on Human societies and leading to change in communication and behavioural patterns across the world. Excepts:

SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to “the emergence of a new type of person”. In the distant, landline-dominated past, she says, people thought: “I have a feeling so I want to make a call.” Young people today, including Ms Turkle's teenage daughter, seem to be thinking instead: “I want to have a feeling, so I need to make a call.” What she means is that there is something inorganic, derivative and inauthentic about a lot of mobile communication.

It also notes that with mobile phones, family members and friends today are more regularly in touch with each other compared to the past, which creates an emotional space around the person where he might choose to ignore those physically around him:

With mobile phones, on the other hand, people call, text or e-mail one another constantly throughout the day. Since they are always, in effect, contacting a person rather than a place, and since the receiver can see the caller's name, and probably his picture, they often dispense with greetings altogether. The exchanges now tend to be frequent and short. People expect less content but instead a feeling of permanent connection, as though they were in fact together during the entire time between their physical meetings.
[..]

The potential problem with connected presence is that it usually excludes other people who may be physically present. In situations that might once have been an opportunity to talk to a stranger—waiting for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say—people now fill the time with a few messages to parents, lovers or friends. This strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to “bounded solidarity”, when cliques become so turned in on themselves that they all but stop interacting with the wider society around them.

Some interesting stuff there. Go read.

Related stuff: Jan Chipchase writes an interesting and insightful blog on how users across various societies are getting influenced by technology, and how this interaction might shape the future tools of mobility. Go through his blog if you find this topic interesting.

Note: The Economist's article are free online only for one week, after that they go into subscription only access. If any of you is not having its subscription and is interested in reading the survey, I'd suggest you to do it before 17th of April.

Pay commission hike -- On defense forces

Today, A friend forwarded me this online petition asking for increase in the remuneration of Indian Defense Forces, as they've been treated poorly with respect to Civil Servants as per the latest hike by Pay Commission. The argument given is also very straightforward: These Jawans ought to be paid more, after all they pay with their lives for us. So, If you're not supporting this current pay hike demand, You're bound to be called a rich capitalist pig.

As Raj wrote in one of his posts, The above kind of arguments are flawed, with the most famous of such arguments being that of George W Bush when he stated, “Either you are with us or against us in the war on terrorism”. Now, I'm no expert on defense matters and wouldn't be able to give a proper analysis based on numbers on this matter, but I'd try to justify why I support the demand for pay hike but not in its current form.

To take an example, anyone who has seen Indian education system would understand that the current Indian education system can never be brought out of its current mess just by increasing the salaries of government school teachers. There is no accountability -- the labour laws in India guarantee that a teacher can never be fired whatever be his/her performance, no respect for meritocracy -- the networks and political games determine the promotions. Unless the incentives change for teachers as well as for administrators, the situation won't change just by a salary hike.

Some would argue that even if 60% goes as waste, the rest 40% money spent would actually work -- and we should not care for the costs when it comes to the future of our children/farmers/soldiers and other such emotional heroes. But what people do not think about, is what if that 60% of wasted amount was put to a better use? What if that money was used to build toilets for girl students[In my childhood, I've studied in a school where there were none for the students. So, girls used to go out for toilet in groups. While one or two girls relieved themselves, the rest kept a watch so as to shoo away boys].

Indian Defense forces are in desperate need of officers at the higher level while they need to shed a huge chunk of work force at the lower level, and therefore pay hike and incentives need to be aligned on these basis only. And yet, as Nitin Pai wrote:

India’s transformation into a middle-income country requires its Armed Forces to be more capital-intensive. Yet only around 10% of the defence budget is actually available for modernization, compared with around 30-40% in developed countries.

This is because, firstly, almost three-fourths of annual capital allocation goes towards instalments for items acquired in previous years. Indigenous acquisitions— from PSUs and some private firms—account for 40-45% of the capital budget, leaving around Rs28,000 crore ($7 billion) for foreign acquisitions this year.

Along with targeted pay hike and incentives, consideration need to be given to the family related needs of defense personnels:

Much of the disillusionment within the military stems from issues wider than low salaries or difficult and dangerous service conditions. Hundreds of soldiers, sailors and airmen tell me that they worry most about two major issues. Most troubling for them is the shortage of good schooling for their children, and of family accommodation in many cantonments. And there is equal frustration — particularly amongst the more intelligent — about the stifling professional environment of unquestioning obedience, where autocratic commanders can end promising careers with one stroke of a pen.

Of course, none of this means that I'm in support of pay hike of Civil Servants over Defense forces. But blindly throwing away my taxes is hardly my idea of being an emotional fool. And though my rants wouldn't make an iota of difference to this whole issue, I at least can say that "When they came to loot me, I wrote a blog post about how looting others without their permission wasn't such a good idea."

Ghostly food

In many ghost stories, it happens that a human being -- young child, failed lover, ugly cannibal, etc. -- dies a premature death with an unfulfilled wish and later returns as a Ghost. The Ghost, with the use of latest special effects used by Pixar and Disney studios, terrifies and kills a few human beings; and thus, the legend of haunted house is born.

But millions of chickens, pigs, prawns, fish etc. die everyday and become the diet of other carnivores and human beings. Even plants such as onions, beetroot etc. die once they're uprooted. But I'm yet to hear a story of an angry onion which wants to take a revenge because its plan to mate with the its neighbour female onion was aborted by a poor farmer.

Don't you think it would be a scary thought if all the chickens, fishes and onions you've eaten in all your lifetime start appearing in your dreams, cursing you with lifetime dysentry?

Green movement is good, Green regulation is not

Some time back, Tony wrote a post on Global warming and climate change, with the premise that a cleaner and safer world would be better than a colder world, which I felt, had a lot of insight into average consumer's behaviour and would make for a much convincing and reasonable 'fight GW campaign'.

Today, I read this piece by Devangshu Datta in Business Standard, in which he says that even though the effects and exact causes of GW are uncertain, we should support this mad rush over finding new technologies to stop GW, as it might result in next big human invention. He cites examples of heavy spending on military research, which later lead to some very important inventions used for civilian purposes today such as Gunpowder, satellites, and advanced communication devices. And certainly, if we look at the greener technologies and inventions today, for e.g. in case of CFLs vs incandescent bulb, the greener alternative turns out to be cheaper also in the long run.

But there certainly is a danger of going overboard, as is happening in case of biofuels where distorted subsidy mechanisms by major Governments is playing havoc with the food prices of staples all over the world. What's the use of saving world for our future generations if half of today's world population has to suffer from absolute hunger?

What I feel, the right response is to not go for government regulations/subsidies unless it is backed by a strong data because end result of wrongly designed government policies can be disastrous to the poor. In fact, if the public opinion is in favour of greener alternatives, then indeed private companies will create such products. The OLPC project, though conceived as a charity experiment, has ignited a rush for cheaper laptops which are commercially viable too. The Tata Nano, once it comes on road, would definitely be a cheaper and more fuel efficient alternative compared to other petrol cars around. The greening of Apple, GE's ecomagination campaign, and Toyota's stress on developing hybrid cars, are all initiatives taken by these private firms for purely commercial reasons i.e. building a favourable brand image for themselves in the minds of consumers.

Government incentives which reduce wastage of resources like electricity, water or mineral resources by imposing greater taxes for wastage, would definitely work better rather than the bureaucrats determining arbitrary policies to arrive at unintended consequences. But that wouldn't suit the politicians and various industrialist lobbies which get benefited by these regulations; hence, the status quo continues.