Category — Business

Throughout my life, I’ve been told that Gujratis and Marwaris are businessmen, and Maharashtrians are people of the working class. And very conveniently, no one has bothered to explain why. The most ‘convincing’ answer I’ve ever received is , “Don’t argue. It’s supposed to be that way.” Last Saturday, I was fortunate enough to read this piece by Aakar Patel in Mint Lounge. And what a wonderfully refreshing take it had on the geographic divide of India.

I’ve had pretty bad experiences in buying from shops which are ‘Marathi owned‘ – so to say. All along, I’d maintained that the poor customer service meted out to me was a function of a businessman not fully understanding what the business demanded of him, and was not dictated by the language he spoke or the region to which he belonged. But it seems that there is a lot of substance in this theory of a certain section of Indians being ‘inherent businessmen/shopkeepers’ or ‘baniyas‘.

There are two sweetmeat shops in and around my place. One is upmarket, hep, expensive, situated in a prime location, trendy, well-marketed and owned by a Shetty. The other is a small, docile Maharashtrian establishment at not so prime a location. A few months ago, I had to buy pedhas and went to this Maharashtrian establishment. I’d wanted to buy a good three kilos of pedhas but demanded them in packs of four. I was promptly told that such a service was not possible, and that I’d only be given them in boxes which were multiples of 250 grams. I tried arguing my case and tried explaining the owner that he’d be losing a customer for life due to his high-headedness. He did not budge. Five minutes later, I was at the Shetty’s shop. I was asked to taste three kinds of pedhas, choose my kind of packaging, and I got my work done in no more than ten minutes. In plain revenue terms, a loss of Rs.1200 for the challenger and a gain of Rs.1200 for the market leader. Whatever happened to the famous Avis motto – “We try harder”.

Is the average Marathi entrepreneur ‘inherently’ inflexible? Has he never heard of the customer being king? Has enterprise been thrust upon him? Abhijeet Badrike once told of a Maharashtrian selling laddoos outside school. That makes perfect business sense, yes. But the only problem was that he sold them in packets of 10. School kids, attending a municipal school, do not have cash to spare. And no kid, would want to buy the whole packet. All the kid aspires for is a single laddoo. And he has money in his pocket for only a single laddoo as well. Months passed, but never was the packet opened and never were laddoos sold loose on a per piece basis. It was completely okay to alienate customers, to lose business but not cool to innovate or step down from that perch of being a ‘Marathi shopkeeper’. You could very well tell that the poor entrepreneur had never been told of the story of the shampoo sachet.

In traditional Maharashtrian houselholds, ‘dhanda‘ is synonymous with flesh-trade and ‘udyog dhanda‘ is what is very reluctantly acknowledged as ‘business‘. Agreed that most Marathi kids grow up in a household where there is little or no impetus for enterprise. But is it  justification for Maharashtrians being poor entrepreneurs (well, shopkeepers at least) ? A good entrepreneur learns, innovates, learns more and innovates again. He understands that aspirational value of customers is the fodder for his business. He sheds his ego and inhibition, and caters to what the consumer wants. A lot of Maharashtrians do nothing of that. Sadly, for a lot of Marathi-speaking people, business is just a money-making tool, often employed in conjunction with criminals, gangsters and politicians.

Businesses don’t make money. Businesses create wealth. Businesses create goodwill. For both the entrepreneur and his customer.

A few days ago I walked into a movie hall to watch a Christopher Nolan movie. My past experiences with The Prestige and Memento ensured that I was fully certain about not “grasping” the movie at all at first go. So, it was more like a walk in the park – just the freshness of the dew clad green grass replaced by the spit stained red carpet of Movietime. A bit of me rued the fact that there were no subtitles. Subtitles have become an essential part of my movie-watching experience. Without them, I feel a bit lost. When I can’t bother to pay attention to detail, I just read the subtitles to get a gist what’s going on, just like flipping through the pages of a really bad-ass book in order to complete it. At the Mahaquizzer three years ago, Q87 went like,

Complete John Updike?s famous poetic lament: ?I think that I shall never view  A French film without _______?.

I vividly remember answering the question with “subtitles” as the answer. The person who evaluated my sheet had a huge bout of laughter when he read that. The answer was in fact Gerard Depardieu.

So, it was a huge surprise when the initial few exchanges were in Japanese with English subtitles to boot. I quipped that the entire movie be this way, in exchange for which I received desultory glances. The movie caught pace as expected and Nolan tried to weave the entire universe into a ball of yarn. The plot was convoluted, garbled with non-linear narration and then the spinning totem right at the end, dwindling and waiting to fall at the blink of your eyelid. A friend had warned that there might be people wanting to stand up and applaud the movie once it got over, but thankfully nothing of that sort happened.As expected, once out of the hall, there was buzz about whether the totem fell or not. Patrons jumped back and forth with consummate ease. There is no merit in trying to take sides as Nolan’s movies are best left not deconstructed. I tried it once with the Usual Suspects – though not a Nolan movie. Eons of writers do it to earn their bread and butter. Here is a piece on Inception and yet another one on Memento.

The world around us wants answers. Answers to questions as part of our annual exams, answers to the malaise of global warming, answers to problems of better housing and sanitation in third world nations, answers to combat issues of terrorism and fanaticism. Companies hire individuals who have answers to their niggling problems, pay them handsomely and pamper them to no end. In this day and age, where the need of the hour and simplify constructs and help disseminate knowledge as far and wide as possible, it is a bit surprising to see junta willing to swear by a concept which poses nothing but questions and makes no attempt to demystify.

To come to think of it, it’s a lot like marketing. The marketing jargon forces to believe that the product is much more sophisticated than it actually is. Slim milk as a friend puts it, is nothing but a legalized way to mix water in milk. Then there are products with “organic” farming. A lot of uneasy prefixed and suffixes are tagged onto products making them Tata Photon+ or Musli Power Xtra or Bharat Petroleum Speed. By adding these syllables or jargon, the marketer is nothing but creating a Nolan-like construct as it is easy to “sell” complexity than simplicity.

When marketers make things complicated or fabricate a “Unique Selling Proposition”, they are looked down upon with a degree of scorn and contempt. When done under the pretext of something more acceptable like a movie, plaudits are not too far. As Raj Kapoor remarked once, “Fellini’s nude woman is considered Art but when I show a woman’s beauty on screen, then it is called exploitation.” It’s a war that marketers and consultants will never win. They shouldn’t try to. Just that it would be better if somehow both parties tried providing answers. Simplifying things. Sealing this post with a KISS – Keep it simple, silly!

Loved the movie. Very detailed. Immense amount of research must have gone into it. Should get nominated to Oscars and all. But I couldn’t bring myself to heap praises over it. And no, if you haven’t watched it yet, you  have not done any irreparable damage to your karma cycle. Come to think of it, inception of the idea in the viewer’s mind that inception of an idea during a dream in real lives is a possibility could be Nolan’s actual motive behind the title “Inception”. Now, that is what you call thought within a thought, motive within a motive