"Innum paramugam eno?"

The best examples pertaining to various strategic management and marketing tactics can be seen in Indian pre-marriage activities. You have slick marketing, product augmentation, strategic alliance, horizontal diversification, pricing........well the list is endless.

And these are being followed since time immemorial. One such made an indirect contribution to my being here to write this blog.

The year was 1953. My father, a 23 year old fresh Engineer then from rural Kerala and hailed from a very poor family. As was won't those days, educated poor Brahmin boys were in demand in the marriage market as the girls parents looked out for well educated boys as a way of securing the future of their wards.

Mother was a second generation Bombay born girl, eldest daughter of a family 5, her father having migrated to Bombay in 1930's from Kerala in search of opportunities in the private sector in the big metro. Mother was not very attractive to look at, - 17, thin, very dark and a possessing a reserved demeanour. Father was not impressed when he went to meet my mother at her house, though his poor parents didn't mind the least since mothers family was relatively affluent.

Father had almost decided to refuse the alliance, when someone remarked that my mother sings classical music well and asked her to sing.

Mother sat on the floor opposite to father and started singing. She had studied music for 6 years and had a nice voice. You can call this her USP.

The first song was a small one invoking Lord Ganapathy, as was the norm. Father was impressed with the singing but was firm that he was not marrying this girl.

But little did he know that he was no match for the slick marketing and entrepreneurship of the Bombayites.

Mother started the second song,

'Easane intha ezhaikku iranga innum thamadama...........' This song in the beautiful ragam of Chakravakam loosely translated meant 'Lord, why the delay in condescending to this poor girl'.

It touched an emotional chord as father felt the pangs of guilt as a young girl was asking him (begging) him to marry her through a melodious song. Remember the setting. He was sitting amidst a high pressure crowd of 10-15 relatives of hers, and was already mellowed with high quality sweets and savouries. You also need to remember that for a Palghat born boy, Bombay in 1953 was a whole new world. It was the land of opportunities, like US of today.

Father started wavering a bit. Then came the next song,

'Innum paramugam eno...........................' meaning 'Why are you still diffident? and why don't you take a favourable decision'.............................

Bang!........Poor father fell for it. He thought the songs were suggestions from God directing him to take a positive decision. He consented to the marriage little knowing that all of this was a smart marketing plan implemented to perfection by mother's family.

To the day she died, mother vowed that she never knew the meaning of the songs she sang and that she was asked to sing these songs in the specific order by the elderly ladies (marketing veterans) in the family. And till he died, my father never forgave my mothers family for conning him into the marriage.

We are all naive as compared to those marketing geniuses.

Update

I have not been commenting on current issues. Let me make up.........

Women's Reservation Bill introduced on the last day of the Parliament Session amidst chaos..............yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn..........this is an Ekta Kapoor mega serial episode that is enacted again and again at the end of the Government's term. Whom are our lawmakers trying to fool? They had the whole of last 5 years to pass this. This is nothing by an election gimmick.

Bhajji slapgate...........IPL conducted the enquiry in a couple of days and banned Harbhajan quickly. BCCI is in its typical fashion is taking its own sweet time to conduct the enquiry. And I thought the process followed was the same. Anyway, if reports are correct, things look bleak for Harbhajan, and rightly so.

Indo-US nuclear deal is virtually dead. Well, did it ever have a chance of succeeding when the Government refused to build a national consensus? Especially when the major ruling party is a minority in the Parliament. One should know one's strength before venturing out to attempt something.

Another Parliament session is over with hardly any meaningful work done. Every minute of the functioning (dysfunctioning) costs the exchequer Rs 26000. And most of the time is spent on boycotting, shouting and blocking proceedings. Remember it is your and my money that is being spent. Will any company allow its employees to get away scotfree if they are wasting Rs 26000 per minute?

At last one Governor tried to be different by switching off the lights to empathise with the power cut faced by the common man - Gopalakrishna Gandhi of Bengal. And promptly, the communist government is up in arms asking for the post of Governor to be scrapped. And I thought the communists were more close to the common man than any other party. Well things change.

US accuses Indians and Chinese of eating more that has led to the current food crisis. They have also put the blame on us for the spiralling oil prices. What did they expect us to do? Starve to death and remain in the bullock cart era? For years, they preached the virtue of growth, development , privatization, liberalization and globalization. Now when they feel the pinch, they blame all these things for the ills of the world. Damned if you do, damned it you don't!

Destruction for Construction

In 1914 Thomas Edison’s factory in West Orange, New Jersey, was virtually destroyed by fire. Although the damage exceeded $2 million, the buildings were insured for only $238,000 because they were made of concrete and were thought to be fireproof. Much of Edison’s life work went up in smoke and flames that December night.

At the height of the fire, Edison’s 24-year-old son, Charles, searched frantically for his father. He finally found him, calmly watching the fire, his face glowing in the reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind.

“My heart ached for him,” said Charles.

Edison was then 67 — no longer a young man — and everything was going up in flames.

However, when he saw me, he shouted, “Charles, where’s your mother?” When I told him I didn’t know, he said, "Find her. Bring her here. She will never see anything like this as long as she lives."’

The next morning, Edison looked at the ruins and said, “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”

Three weeks after the fire, Edison managed to deliver the first phonograph. - adapted from web


One of the motto that has always interested me was the one I saw in Coimbatore. It was that of the Late G D Naidu, Industrialist, inventor, entrepreneur and educationalist. The motto read 'Destruction for Construction'. Somehow it has always stayed in my mind.

There is an eternal truth in it. Anything that has to be constructed has to face destruction, and from the ruins will arise new ideas like a phoenix. It says a lot about the resilience of the humans and his never say die spirit.

Understanding others

We always make the mistake of seeing things only from our perspective. Our interpersonal skills will improve many fold if only we were to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and view the problem through their eyes.......well lens for a fact as this incident illustrates,

Like many photographers before him, Richard Zaltman was visiting remote areas of the world to capture images of people living lives far removed from those in the United States. He always used to view the world through his eyes or more correctly through his camera lens.

One morning, while walking through an isolated village in Bhutan, he suddenly got the idea of turning his camera over to the locals to see what they would consider significant enough to show others about themselves.

Later, when he looked at all their pictures, he noticed that most of the photos cut off people’s feet.

“At first, I thought the villagers had just aimed wrong,” Zaltman says. “But it turns out that being barefoot is a sign of poverty. Even though everyone was barefoot, people wanted to hide that - -which is an important message to see.”

You never really know someone until you see the choices he or she makes.

40 years for 30 seconds

"A woman approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth.

Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”

“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.

“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

Skills are not mastered overnight. You need to work on it consistently

Secretiveness

One disturbing trend I have noticed of late is that people tend to be secretive and not transparent. Maybe it has got something to do with the break up of the joint family system. Or maybe the absurd behaviour of the government which revels on putting a lid on any transaction under the official secrets act has percolated down to the individuals in the society.

India is one of the few countries which has put every single scrap of information under the category of classified information thereby denying it to the public at large. Most of the developed countries declassify almost everything after a reasonable period of say 25 years by which time it has lost its value and the protagonists are long dead. This way, the average citizen gets to know the logic or lack of it behind the crucial decisions taken a while ago that had profound impact on the society at large. There is a past in present. Hence it is important for the Government of the day to come out in the open and be transparent on all aspects barring those of critical national importance. We live in an era of information explosion. Since the percolation of information, secrets or not, through blogs and other tools on the Internet is so fast, it is absurd to hold back anything as it shall lead to more gossips.

Take the case of the much publicized visit of Priyanka Gandhi with one of the convicted in the Rajiv Gandhi case, Nalini. The news media had a field day with someone even quoting Priyanka having said that she has come to terms now with her grief. I have no complaints on Priyanka meeting Nalini and getting some mileage out of it. The twist in the tail comes a month later, when the Jail Superintendant where Nalini is interned has given a written submission on a query filed under the RTI act that the meeting never took place and that the jail records did not show Priyanka having ever visited Nalini. Now this is strange. It can mean only two things, either Priyanka is lying or the Vellore Jail allowed Priyanka to visit a life term convict without any records and thereby violating all the rules. I suspect it is the later, in which case both Priyanka and the Jail authorities have a lot to explain. Why should be make a mess of such a simple issue?

Five minutes

While at the park one day, a woman sat down next to a man on a bench near a playground.

“That’s my son over there,” she said, pointing to a little boy in a red sweater who was gliding down the slide.

“He’s a fine looking boy,” the man said. “That’s my son on the swing in the blue sweater.”

Then, looking at his watch, he called to his son. “What do you say we go, son?”

Son pleaded, “Just five more minutes, Father. Please? Just five more minutes.”

The man nodded and the son continued to swing to his heart’s content. Minutes passed and the father stood and called again to his son. “Time to go now?” Again son pleaded, “Five more minutes. Just five more minutes.”

The man smiled and said, “O.K.”

“My, you certainly are a patient father,” the woman responded.

The man smiled and then said, “My older son was killed by a drunk driver last year while he was riding his bike near here. I never spent much time with him and now I ‘d give anything for just five more minutes with him. I’ve vowed not to make the same mistake with the younger one. He thinks he has five more minutes to swing. The truth is, I get Five more minutes to watch him play.” - adapted from web

Savour those precious minutes. They are more important than anything else in the world