As I was coming back from office today, in the cab there was this female who I thought I had seen somewhere. I could not place her in my mind. I came to the conclusion that I had seen her in my school and she was in one of the other sections.
I started talking and I was correct. She went to the same school as I went and even she thought she had seen me somewhere and she could not place me.
She could also remember one of my classmates. This classmate was the most connected person in my batch. And proves yet another thing – that the six degrees of separation is because of certain well connected people. I don’t know how useful this realization would be …
More Details to assist memory later
I was working with the MNC in their Gurgaon Corporate Park Office and I met this person in cab. She was from Greenfields and was in the commerce section.
The power of human mind.
I had written this post 30th April 2007. Just found it buried under one of the folders.
A Marketers Delight
A friend once told me that I am a marketer's delight. Looking back at the spending pattern of last few days, his words sound like prophecy to me.
I have bought a laptop bag because I was hanging out in a market full of bag shops (I needed a bag but the one I bought is something that I did not like).
I bought a PSP that I bought just because I wanted to own one and one of friends was coming from Dubai (I bought an iPod in 2006 for the same reason – that fake sense of ownership).
Two pairs of shoes (not that I hate shoes, its just that I did not need them. The other pair I had sufficed my needs).
This brings me to a confession. I might say that my interest lies in the area of decision-making, but I really suck at it. Need to think more before I make a purchase so as not to make myself a sucker.
And if someone wants me to gift things off my wishlist, please lemme know.
I have bought a laptop bag because I was hanging out in a market full of bag shops (I needed a bag but the one I bought is something that I did not like).
I bought a PSP that I bought just because I wanted to own one and one of friends was coming from Dubai (I bought an iPod in 2006 for the same reason – that fake sense of ownership).
Two pairs of shoes (not that I hate shoes, its just that I did not need them. The other pair I had sufficed my needs).
This brings me to a confession. I might say that my interest lies in the area of decision-making, but I really suck at it. Need to think more before I make a purchase so as not to make myself a sucker.
And if someone wants me to gift things off my wishlist, please lemme know.
Delhi Street Food
Moment I landed in Delhi today, I had craving for the famous Delhi street food. I started with a round of kachori + aaloo at Nehru Place. Nehru Place incidentally is the largest electronics and computing equipment market at least in India. I followed it up with chole + kulche there only. I had to then eat two Veg Puffs at a Café Coffee Day because I was accompanied by a friend who hates street food. Moment she left, I had an awesome rajma + rice, again at Nehru Place.
Moved onto NOIDA and had this awesome Egg Roll. The rolls are called Calcutta rolls for some reason. Logic and assumption tells me that these rolls probably originated in Calcutta. Topped it up with a kulfi + falooda from another vendor. Met another friend over another cup of coffee (this time at Barista). And finally had some home made Daal Makhani. Now if you dint know, a daal makhani is not just any daal topped with lots of butter, but daal makhani is left to cook overnight.
Went to another friends place and since he is a fruit freak, I had to eat an orange. I know fruits are fun but I am not really a fanatic. Finally on my way home, I ended this small street food sampling exercise with Gol Gappe and Tikki from my neighbourhood stall. This guy has been serving Gol Gappe in my locality for last 15 years and people stand in mile long lines for an opportunity to eat his gol gapes.
In next posts, I shall be talking about few famous food joints in Delhi. I would talk about Karim’s in Darya Ganj, Paranthe Wali Gali, Karol Bagh’s Roshan di Kulfi, Pitampura’s Bittoo Tikki Wala, Nehru Place’s famous Rajma Rice.
All these cant really be compared to Mumbai’s late night chai, vada pavs, samosa pavs, omelette pavs, pavs with ketchup, pavs with chutni, basically pavs with anything and everything. They are class apart. Wondering if Delhi food can stand the formidable challenge of Mr. Pav - the staple food of Mumbai .. ?
Related Posts
Paranthe Wali Gali
The day for Junk Food
Moved onto NOIDA and had this awesome Egg Roll. The rolls are called Calcutta rolls for some reason. Logic and assumption tells me that these rolls probably originated in Calcutta. Topped it up with a kulfi + falooda from another vendor. Met another friend over another cup of coffee (this time at Barista). And finally had some home made Daal Makhani. Now if you dint know, a daal makhani is not just any daal topped with lots of butter, but daal makhani is left to cook overnight.
Went to another friends place and since he is a fruit freak, I had to eat an orange. I know fruits are fun but I am not really a fanatic. Finally on my way home, I ended this small street food sampling exercise with Gol Gappe and Tikki from my neighbourhood stall. This guy has been serving Gol Gappe in my locality for last 15 years and people stand in mile long lines for an opportunity to eat his gol gapes.
In next posts, I shall be talking about few famous food joints in Delhi. I would talk about Karim’s in Darya Ganj, Paranthe Wali Gali, Karol Bagh’s Roshan di Kulfi, Pitampura’s Bittoo Tikki Wala, Nehru Place’s famous Rajma Rice.
All these cant really be compared to Mumbai’s late night chai, vada pavs, samosa pavs, omelette pavs, pavs with ketchup, pavs with chutni, basically pavs with anything and everything. They are class apart. Wondering if Delhi food can stand the formidable challenge of Mr. Pav - the staple food of Mumbai .. ?
Related Posts
Paranthe Wali Gali
The day for Junk Food
MDI students to advice Indira Nooyi
Just In, Three students from MDI have won a contest among all business schools in India to win a chance to advice PepsiCo CEO Ms. Indira Nooyi. They would be flown to NY.
Copy pasting the news item from IBNLive.com
Students from a Gurgaon-based business management school would now advise PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi after winning a contest.
The students - Supreet Kaur, Anand Trivedi and Anand Mohan Sharma, part of the team called Midas of Management Development Institute (MDI) - won a contest entitled "Taste the Success - Become Indra's Advisors".
In the competition, PepsiCo India invited business strategies for unlocking the latent demand for beverages in India from the leading management schools.
Kaur, Trivedi and Sharma would be flown to PepsiCo headquarters in New York in April, where they will present and discuss their case solution with the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc.
If the business strategy is found feasible, the team may get an opportunity to engage as advisors on an ongoing basis with PepsiCo to operationalise their ideas.
The first runners-up team from Faculty of Management Studies of the Delhi University received a cash award of Rs.100,000 and the second runners-up, another team from MDI, received a cash award of Rs.50,000.
The top six teams from MDI, FMS and Indian Institute of Management Indore will get an opportunity to appear for a pre-placement interview without going through the initial screening process.
Three cheers for MDI. As we said back then, MDI rocks.
For the record, I passed out of MDI in 2006.
Kishore Biyani - Future Group - India Tomorrow
Kishore Biyani is a model businessman at least for me. He is sowing seeds into a lot of interesting businesses and when the time comes, he would reap rich rewards. He is displaying the true spirits of entrepreneurship. In the process of building his companies, he is helping his customers realize his dreams. His way of creating a company is dreaming big, getting the right people on the board and backing all efforts with solid research and relying on intuition and insight.
Lessons to be learnt? Get the right people on the team, let them take risks, invest in the future and try to empower your customers.
Today in Economics Times article, he made clear his thoughts when he said,
Now this small piece of comment has a lot to say about Mr. Biyani and his thought process. He has identified, at the right time, that Indians are changing the way they live. There was a time when they were saving more than 50% of their earnings and living on basis necessities. Now slowly and gradually they are living lavishly and often spending the entire monthly earnings before a month is over. They are now more confident about opportunities and their economic well being.
I can easily see Future Group leading the new India.
And by the way, look out for BCCL (NO, not the cricket board but the Times of India group) and TV18 group also in times to come.
Lessons to be learnt? Get the right people on the team, let them take risks, invest in the future and try to empower your customers.
Today in Economics Times article, he made clear his thoughts when he said,
...we want to create a strong sectoral play to capture the transition from a savings-led economy to a consumption-led economy.
Now this small piece of comment has a lot to say about Mr. Biyani and his thought process. He has identified, at the right time, that Indians are changing the way they live. There was a time when they were saving more than 50% of their earnings and living on basis necessities. Now slowly and gradually they are living lavishly and often spending the entire monthly earnings before a month is over. They are now more confident about opportunities and their economic well being.
I can easily see Future Group leading the new India.
And by the way, look out for BCCL (NO, not the cricket board but the Times of India group) and TV18 group also in times to come.
Food For Thought
Yet another blog (located at FooForThought.Wordpress.com). This time, I shall be talking about technology, businesses and perspectives of customers.
Here is a brief QnA with myself about Foo For Thought.
Why a new blog?
How is it different from other similar blogs?
Are you trying to say that you are a visionary and an evangelist?
What tools would you use?
Keep watching it for action. I would give occasional updates here also.
Please leave your comments and thoughts.
(As if there are going to be a lot of visitors)
Here is a brief QnA with myself about Foo For Thought.
Why a new blog?
I realized that War of Words is a personal blog with too many things that a reader might not want to read. Hence a new location and a new start.
How is it different from other similar blogs?
First and foremost, I would not be peddling news like a lot of other blogs. I would talk about things that I think are relevant for businesses and what most people often ignore. These are softer issues related to how humans use and interact with businesses. I would act as a customer advocate, an eager student and an egomaniac visionary.
Are you trying to say that you are a visionary and an evangelist?
Not at all. I am not an expert and dont want to be one. I just want to meet new people, interact with them and learn from them.
What tools would you use?
I would use the most potent tool of them all - commonsense. Then I would rely a lot on feedback and observations. I would also use few examples from history, biology, anthropology, physics, politics, economics, design etc. One of my gurus taught me the importance of multidisciplinary thinking and Foo For Thought would echo that.
Keep watching it for action. I would give occasional updates here also.
Please leave your comments and thoughts.
(As if there are going to be a lot of visitors)
Presentation1.ppt
For my work, I have to make a lot of presentations. And lazy me takes the first shortcut available and calls all my presentations with the default word - Presentation1.ppt.
Today I was asked to hunt for a file and I keyed in .ppt on the search bar. I got a list of some 20 presentation1.ppts. No points for guessing how happy I was with the search results. I did not get the work done and now I am renaming all those files to something that is more searchable.
The key lesson here is that search plays an important role in the way we humans work. More than search, retrival plays even more critical role. It is so easy to stuff a closet with million things and it is equally difficult to retrieve one particular thing from that heap of million things. No wonder Google has done so well as a company. It makes the entire process of retrival so easy and intuitive. Google for me is more of a retrival compay rather than search.
And this leads me to my lesson # 1 for the day. Any business that I get into will have to have a minimal search cost. I define the search cost as the amount of effort on part of end user to identify a service provider (as one of the alternatives to fulfill the demand). And by virtue of this definition, lesser the search cost, easier it is for the end user to find your service.
In fact advertising is a way to reduce the search cost for consumers. Your product might be the best in the world but the customers will never be able to find it if the search cost is too high. The good news is that there are ways to reduce or eliminate this search cost. Case in point, Bisleri. Bisleri by virtue of age has now replaced "mineral water" in vocabulary of Indians. Search cost for Bisleri is hence zero.
Now this concept of search cost can be extended to any business activity. Take for example hiring. You are a growing company. You want to attract and eventually hire the best talent. There are two problems now. One, you dont know where to look for good talent. And two, even though you might find awesome talent, the talent might not know about you. He hasnt heard about you and in all likelihood he would join one of the better known brands.
Think about the Internet. On Internet, a lot of things are noise and a very very few are actually signals. Search cost for anyone on Internet is very high. All of us use feed readers, aggregators, social bookmarking etc. to discover content. Discovery is getting more and more difficult as more and more spam blogs are being published.
How do you then reduce this search cost? How do you make yourself as the default choice for any customer? Is advertising the only way? Is this the core function of advertising?
Any thoughts?
Today I was asked to hunt for a file and I keyed in .ppt on the search bar. I got a list of some 20 presentation1.ppts. No points for guessing how happy I was with the search results. I did not get the work done and now I am renaming all those files to something that is more searchable.
The key lesson here is that search plays an important role in the way we humans work. More than search, retrival plays even more critical role. It is so easy to stuff a closet with million things and it is equally difficult to retrieve one particular thing from that heap of million things. No wonder Google has done so well as a company. It makes the entire process of retrival so easy and intuitive. Google for me is more of a retrival compay rather than search.
And this leads me to my lesson # 1 for the day. Any business that I get into will have to have a minimal search cost. I define the search cost as the amount of effort on part of end user to identify a service provider (as one of the alternatives to fulfill the demand). And by virtue of this definition, lesser the search cost, easier it is for the end user to find your service.
In fact advertising is a way to reduce the search cost for consumers. Your product might be the best in the world but the customers will never be able to find it if the search cost is too high. The good news is that there are ways to reduce or eliminate this search cost. Case in point, Bisleri. Bisleri by virtue of age has now replaced "mineral water" in vocabulary of Indians. Search cost for Bisleri is hence zero.
Now this concept of search cost can be extended to any business activity. Take for example hiring. You are a growing company. You want to attract and eventually hire the best talent. There are two problems now. One, you dont know where to look for good talent. And two, even though you might find awesome talent, the talent might not know about you. He hasnt heard about you and in all likelihood he would join one of the better known brands.
Think about the Internet. On Internet, a lot of things are noise and a very very few are actually signals. Search cost for anyone on Internet is very high. All of us use feed readers, aggregators, social bookmarking etc. to discover content. Discovery is getting more and more difficult as more and more spam blogs are being published.
How do you then reduce this search cost? How do you make yourself as the default choice for any customer? Is advertising the only way? Is this the core function of advertising?
Any thoughts?
Flash Fiction: The House of Cards
SG has decided to set upon a very difficult task. He wants to erect a house of cards. There is nothing new about house of cards. People have been making houses ever since a deck of cards was invented. Yet, for him, making this house is a mammoth task.
No he is not a "differently-abled" kid. It's just that he lacks one of the biggest virtues of humandom – patience. He is one of those few people who can't sit at one place for more than a minute without some distraction. He is not fickle-minded or easily distracted.
He is of the opinion that humandom offers so many things that in achieving expertise in something particular is waste of time. He thinks that in order to be called an expert by the world at large, you don't experiment and experience a lot of other things. He thinks there is more pleasure in being jack of all trades rather than being a master of one.
He knows that the time he can spend at humandom is very limited. It is only one life after all. And this is what he wants to change. He wants to live more than just a life time at humandom.
This house of cards is his attempt to start a task and finish it. It is similar to a lot of other experiments he keeps doing. All the other tasks he has ever taken have been left unfinished. He doesn't know where would be get inspiration from, but he is determined.
So he sets upon this task of placing cards one by one.
Other Flash Fiction
The Bus. Stopped.
No he is not a "differently-abled" kid. It's just that he lacks one of the biggest virtues of humandom – patience. He is one of those few people who can't sit at one place for more than a minute without some distraction. He is not fickle-minded or easily distracted.
He is of the opinion that humandom offers so many things that in achieving expertise in something particular is waste of time. He thinks that in order to be called an expert by the world at large, you don't experiment and experience a lot of other things. He thinks there is more pleasure in being jack of all trades rather than being a master of one.
He knows that the time he can spend at humandom is very limited. It is only one life after all. And this is what he wants to change. He wants to live more than just a life time at humandom.
This house of cards is his attempt to start a task and finish it. It is similar to a lot of other experiments he keeps doing. All the other tasks he has ever taken have been left unfinished. He doesn't know where would be get inspiration from, but he is determined.
So he sets upon this task of placing cards one by one.
Other Flash Fiction
The Bus. Stopped.
Questioning Unity in Diversity
Go to South India and talk about North Indians, interested things would be said and heard. For North Indians, anyone from south of Mumbai is a Madrasi. They dont know about Mals, Telugus, Tamils or Kannadigas, leave apart Aiyers, Aiyengars and others. All they know is one single word. Madrasi. The entire nation looks at East Indians as chinks. They are as Indians as anyone we can be. They are still laughed at, mocked at in public places. Now in Maharashtra, Mr. Raj Thackery is proclaiming that North Indians should be driven out of Maharashtra. There have even been incidences of violence. One person actually lost his life. Greater than any economic loss.
I think we need to remind all these people that an Indian citizen has been granted a few fundamental rights by our constitution. These fundamental rights are very critical pillars of our democracy. Pillars of the Republic of India.
Why is this happening? Is it good? I am keeping this post open for more perspectives from visitors. Please send in your comments.
I think we need to remind all these people that an Indian citizen has been granted a few fundamental rights by our constitution. These fundamental rights are very critical pillars of our democracy. Pillars of the Republic of India.
Why is this happening? Is it good? I am keeping this post open for more perspectives from visitors. Please send in your comments.
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