News - Important and Interesting

“Brand Managers are . . . congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism” writes Vinod Mehta, one of my favourite journalists in a heartfelt guest article in Agencyfaqs. He says Brand Managers can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. A similar thought was echoed a couple of years back by a senior BBC journalist who compared journalism that only reflects what a majority of people want to read, to a politician who spouts inflammatory rhetoric in front of an angry mob of rioters under the pretext that’s what people want to hear.

Coincidentally, Michael Hirschorn has an even more nuanced perspective on the subject in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. He recommends newspapers to “stop being important and start being interesting”, saying “news” in the classical sense of the word is a commodity today. What is more relevant to people are “non-commodifiable virtues” like deep reporting, distinctive point of view and sharp analysis. All of which actually often get reflected in the “most popular / e-mailed” boxes on the websites of newspapers. And “the most–e-mailed lists suggest that readers will consume meaningful, interesting (and maybe even “important”) journalism if they feel compelled, beguiled, seduced”.

What is interesting to me is how the solution to Vinod Mehta’s plea to give readers more than what they want, give them the unexpected can lie in the online space. And he’ll surely find it gratifying that online lists suggest that people don’t always want to read about Britney Spears. Friedman and Maureen Dowd routinely turn up on the NYT’s most popular lists. There’s hope still.

PYTs and Rich, Old Fools

Last year a billboard for the newspaper DNA quizzed us on where pretty young girls would find rich, old fools if the dance bars of Mumbai shut down. Steven Levitt answers on his post The Economics of Gold-Digging !!

A Better Mousetrap

The greater the barrage of ads that people are exposed to, the more adept they get at filtering out what they aren’t interested in. Strangely, we in the advertising and marketing business continue to do more of the same. The latest ad may be more creative than last year’s, but viewer’s ennui with our collective output still outstrips the incremental creativity.

Over the last few years it’s become commonplace to take product parity for granted and hence depend on created communication to be the differentiator. This in turn makes the advertising try harder than ever to stretch the metaphors, sometimes leading to the ridiculous; I mean, a soap will not exactly make India a better place. This trend reminds me of the consumer who once said when you sell a shoe, sell a shoe and don’t sing the national anthem while you are at it. Given all this I wonder if sooner rather than later, we will we go back to the times when companies actually attempted to deliver superior products vis-à-vis competition? Will be very long before a marketer actually decides to reduce investments in communication and invest more in simply designing better products – from delivery to packaging to experiences. We see a lot of that already in technology brands, some of whom have become cult. So why not shoes or soap?

Of Civic Campaigns and Talent Searches

Two leading newspapers are currently in the middle of initiatives that seek to encourage public debate and participation in civic issues. The Times of India is doing the Lead India campaign and the Mumbai Project is Hindustan Times’ attempt at raising, debating and engaging stakeholders on civic issues plaguing the city (and god knows we have many).

While both are public campaigns, the differences are very telling. The TOI campaign takes a top-down approach – it invited SMS votes to select a candidate who may actually participate in the country’s electoral politics. The HT initiative is a completely bottom-up approach. Over two weeks, there were a lot of facts and some very good debates that were stirred and the newspaper simply served as a platform raising civic raising issues.

The TOI’s Lead India campaign was a marketing initiative complete with televised debates and celebrity moderators (they even asked a candidate’s wife to sing his favourite song on the TV show). They also roped in Shah Rukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan and the likes to promote the initiative with a huge television and outdoor campaign. Not that marketing the campaign by itself is wrong (in fact some of the TV ads are very nice). But at some point, it became a campaign highlighting the personalities rather than the issues they represented. And while I am willing to accept drama being a surrogate for singing in shows like the Indian Idol; issues like governance, education, infrastructure etc. are far too important to be decided through SMS campaigns.

The HT’s Mumbai Project on the contrary was primarily a journalist-driven initiative. It had a lot of meaningful content, in-depth analysis and a platform to debate those issues. The content was obviously put together with a lot of assiduous effort and hence there was enough material to have a serious engagement with.

In fact spending 15 minutes on each of the campaign websites highlights the stark differences between the two initiatives. One filled with relevant content and the other, a slickly packaged show. I don’t know about the larger world, but I would any day take the content.

A judge in New York state lost his job because he ordered 46 people in his courtroom to be taken in custody after they refused to admit whose mobile phone had rung while his court was in session. I feel he was doing what many of us fervently desire when the woman sitting behind in a cinema theatre instructs her son to look for the dal in the top row of the refrigerator. Hope somebody starts an online petition to reinstate the honourable judge.

Outside of a dog, a Kindle is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read – Groucho Marx, c. 2007

How's the Market Today?

Yesterday I was reminded me of a comment made by a financial analyst during the last stock market boom – when your grandmother starts looking at the stock prices in newspapers, it’s time to move out. The cabbie who was driving me home from office had a “bhav copy” (a two-sheeter with closing stock prices, printed every trading day) tucked behind his steering wheel. So, there.

On Creativity and Education

I just heard this outstanding speech by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and the role of our education system in nurturing it. It’s simple, inspiring, witty and profound – everything the current education system isn’t. He delivered it over a year ago at the TED conference. What a pity it took me this long to stumble across it. Listen to it, if you haven’t already. Actually listen to again even if you have. It’s beautiful.

Update: Got a couple of mails saying the download was somewhat patchy. So I've uploaded the mp3 version here. Hopefully this should be easier.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit

Today is my birthday. Not relevant for anybody but me.

But the text messages I’ve been receiving is indicative of the pressure a lot of friends are under. Most of the people don’t seem to be happy just wishing a happy birthday. There is almost a compulsion say something more interesting / smart / witty. So all sorts of contorted witticisms find their way to my inbox.

There was a time when greeting cards took away that pressure by being witty. So one just had to spend twenty bucks and bask in somebody else’s wit. Alas, e-greetings have taken that pleasure away. Most of the e-greetings are too busy serving up gif files of cartoons to have anything smart to say. Ditto for mobiles and their dry emoticons. Hence most people are left in the lurch trying to be smart while messaging their friends. Which leads to me believe that people may be willing to pay money to be able to easily access smart quotes for birthdays, anniversaries etc. It saves them the time and trouble of thinking too much and makes them feel good. So what if they aren’t able to conjure it themselves, at least they’ll be seen as having the right sensibilities to choose and appreciate the smart lines; the way I've headlined this post by borrowing a quote from Oscar Wilde. Am I not smart?!!

The Reluctant Politician

“Politicians instead must revel in the political process. They must adore people, jump into crowds, pump hands, kiss babies, travel by train to remotest corners, walk where there are no roads, speak a language that touches hearts, causes tears to flow and raises a million cheers.” . . . Sagarika Ghose writes in today’s Hindustan Times about Dr. Manmohan Singh as the accidental politician. Worth a read.

Reviewing Ads

Like any true blue advertising person, I had a good time venting spleen at an ad that I think stinks. Got the opportunity when I reviewed the Emami Fair & Handsome television commercial in The Mint and had great fun panning it. Some would say it is poetic justice that my acerbic review was trimmed of most vitriol by the 400 word limit that commerce imposed on it.

Media and Creativity

Adage reports that Domino’s Pizza has handed its media planning duties to – Crispin Porter. This is landmark as it puts “creativity” back in the centre. According to Domino’s Chief Marketing Officer, "Crispin Porter & Bogusky is known for creative, and that passion for doing things differently also extends to media."

This move also indicates that despite talks of creative media planning, media agencies derive their primary strength from scale. In today’s environment, media planning actually involves managing the context in which messages get delivered. By that yardstick, an agency which can provide the most creativity in developing the communication content should also be able to provide similar creativity in identifying the right contexts to place that content. I hope this leads to a Domino effect and will we see more large clients working with similar models.

A Matter of Livelihood

I was talking with Sharmila today about the new found passion of our government for SEZs and the public protests against them by local residents in various parts of our country. And the discussion got me really confused. She claims she’s got research papers (she’s working for a not-for-profit organization now) that show how SEZs in particular and most such large schemes in general often end up harming the local people.

I disagreed and felt that development is not a zero-sum game and in the long run, everybody gets pulled up. The problem is that in the short-term a lot of people actually suffer – take for instance the Nandigram issue where a lot of people have been farming the land for generations but don’t have papers to prove the land is theirs. Most such people will not get adequately compensated. They’ll also need to be re-skilled in new jobs; not the easiest of things for people who’re mostly illiterate and lack any soft skills. So what does one do? Do we let them continue with what is undoubtedly subsistence farming and living or should the government encourage industry and try to manage the collateral hurt caused to a lot of the local population?

So many questions. Such limited knowledge. Maybe we should just have a television debate with Mahesh Bhat and Ashok Singhal.

In Rainbows

Radiohead have experimented with business path which few marketers dare tread. Their new album In Rainbows has just been released in digital MP3 format online on their own site inrainbows.com. And here’s the thing - for a single download, it’s priced at whatever you wish to pay for it. You may even choose to download it for free, if you wish to.

The website also sells a discbox which contains the album on a CD, on two LP records plus the lyrics booklet and a specially designed artwork by Stanley Donwood. That’s priced at ₤40.

Radiohead is obviously betting on people paying something for the download – and given the digital format and the direct to consumer approach their costs are likely to be more modest allowing them to get better returns even on smaller amounts that people may pay. There may also be a fair number of people willing to pay ₤40 to hear the music in superior CD format with specially designed artworks etc.

There will also be other benefits – like more people hearing the album because it’s not expensive and thus better turnouts at concerts which are substantial money spinners.

Whether the whole thing turns out to be viable remains to be seen (it’s been reported that on the day of the release, 1.2 million copies on In Rainbows were sold as digital downloads). But trust the artists to try new business models even as established record labels watch transfixed like a deer in headlights.

Update: Social Networking news site Mashable reports that the Radiohead got an average of $8 per album. Just under $10 million within the first week is not bad revenues at all. Concerts and other paraphernalia not included

Craftsmen at Work

What can modern businesses learn from the art of the craftsmen? That was the subject of an excellent episode of In Business on BBC Radio 4 that I heard yesterday.

It again brought to the fore an ongoing discussion on several discussion boards recently – the central role of business in society and what drives successful businesses. Sociologist Richard Sennett put forward his thesis that people who practice a craft know better than “business people” how organizations ought to be run.

Businesses are set up to meet genuine customer needs and they are typically driven by the passion of entrepreneurs who love making and delivering a product or service to their customers. Then the businesses grow. And they get “professionalized”. "Performance optimization” becomes the holy grail and very insidiously, the focus starts shifting – from the product or service to the company’s revenues and stock price.

Soon almost everybody forgets that goal is not making more money but celebrating the craft which gave birth to the business in the first place. Of course lip service is paid every now and then to the core of what the organization is about, but key strategic calls are made with an eye on the Street.

Also a dubious theory gets propounded that craftsmen are so involved with their craft that they don’t know how to run a business. Dubious because there is nothing to suggest that a person adept at a craft will not be able to collaborate with teams, will not be able to develop meaningful relationships with customers and employees and will be unable to command a fair price for his / her product or service. Most of the iconic brands and businesses we talk about reverentially today were created by such craftsmen, people who cared about the businesses rather than care about the money - whether it was a McDonald’s or Starbucks or Apple or Google or whatever. The bigger challenge for businesses in fact is to continue keeping their core craft at the centre of their business – note the classic memo written by Howard Schultz to his employees earlier this year. Even if it is not real, the memo became famous because it so truly seemed to reflect the passion of a founder-entrepreneur for a craft undermined at the altar of efficiency.

Finally going back to the BBC radio programme, the proposition of craftsmen as better businessmen was best articulated by Richard Taylor of the WETA workshop which produced the stunning special effects for movies such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Asked how they run such a stupendously successful creative business without any formal business training whatsoever, he said they did it by turning the accepted business model on its head and driving it from the heart of creativity. Instead of pursuing the last dollar, the bottom line, they looked at producing the most beautiful work creatively and in turn, good business will follow. Now how many businesses can say that hand on heart?

Twenty20

On a talk show on NDTV about Twenty20 vs. Test cricket, Imran Khan made an interesting point. Cricketers, he said need talent, technique and temperament to do well in Test cricket. Twenty20 takes technique and temperament out of that equation. It brings out the sheer force of raw talent which is in abundance in both India and Pakistan. But by that yardstick I wonder how New Zealand reached the semis. They are one team who have plenty of character and spirit but can’t be accused of being too talented.

Where are the Cricket Magazines?

Just before the excitement around the Manic Monday win (I admit, it does sound better Sizzling Sunday), I was talking to some friends about why cricket magazines in India have never taken off in a big way in India. By all reckoning, it should have been a through and through winning format. There are a huge number of people passionate about cricket, there’s a high level of understanding of the nuances of the game and a national cricketing calendar that is so packed there will never be slag issues.
A lot of people and media companies tried to have a go at a cricketing magazine. Some serious money has been invested and some big names have been signed on to write for those magazines - but all of them have come a cropper. It’s so puzzling we spent a round of drinks debating why it should have been so. Here are some hypotheses that came up:
1. Given that most people have a general aversion to reading, would they pay 20 or 30 bucks every week to read – even if it is about something they are as mad about as cricket. Despite it being free, I doubt a large number (read – commercially viable) of resident Indians visit the sites like Cricinfo or Rediff on non-match days; I suspect a substantial number of visitors to these sites are NRIs who pine for cricket in baseball country.
2. With the surfeit of news and analysis on everything related to cricket on television and newspapers, there is nothing left to be said in magazines.
3. We love to discuss match statistics and minutiae which tend to lose their impact if the immediacy is lost and a lag of a week could render them completely irrelevant.
4. Our affair with cricket is very temperamental – notice the plummeting ratings after the West Indies World Cup and now the T20 ratings. Maybe magazine economics don’t allow for such wild swings in circulation and the resultant unpredictability of ad revenues. (A related point - this unpredictability is a headache for cricket broadcasters too; but the upside on television when India does well is so high that it possibly makes up for the downsides when we sink.)
5. A big source of excitement for sports magazines in the pre-satellite TV days were glossy action pictures. But other than photography connoisseurs, I don’t think many will be interested in those in today’s age of stump cameras and slow motion replays.

Whatever the reason, just for the sake of some good writing I hope a cricket magazine makes good in India.

Does Manic Monday sound better than Sizzling Sunday. Was that the
reason for scheduling the finals of the first Twenty20 championship at
a glorious time of 2 PM local time on a monday afternoon. I am sure
there is a reason. Would love to know what that is.

Free Free Free

Two news items caught my attention yesterday. One, the New York Times made its online content completely free (parts of it were accessible only to paid subscribers till now) and separately, I read that Rupert Murdoch may consider making WSJ online free.

I found this interesting because both these sites (especially WSJ) were generally regarded good examples of generating revenues through subscriptions. Hence this puts into question the business model that was held by many as a beacon of hope for mainline media in the new space – a model that ensured they lived in this online world after their imminent collapse in the offline one. There are I think three main reasons why this model doesn’t work – and irrespective of how well it is couched, the fact is these newspapers are going free because not enough people are paying up.

1. People consume online media by verticals. Unlike offline newspapers or magazines, people don’t read all or even most sections of online newspapers or magazines. They tend to skim and read only those verticals or sections which are of interest to them. It’s difficult to get a consumer to pay for the entire newspaper portal if he / she is going to read only the sports section or the technology section – and they’d rather read that stuff on sites dedicated to those subjects.

2. Most of the traffic to such sites is actually generated by links provided through search engines. And somebody who is directed to a site through such links is unlikely to subscribe just to read a single article of interest at that point in time.

3. A lot of bloggers refrain from linking ‘subscriber access only’ sites. This further reduces the number of possible visits to the sites.

As difficult as it may be for old media owners to reconcile to giving content for free, that’s probably the only way for them to remain relevant in today’s information-rich era. Meanwhile, they’ll just have to keep trying to discover more ways to monetize their content, other than advertising.

Going Going Gone

Just read that frustrated by the political mess in the country, some frustrated soul had put Belgium up for auction on eBay and the bid topped at $17 million before it was stopped by authorities. Guess Shilpa Shetty was ahead of times when she proclaimed "main aai hoon UP Bihar lootne."

On Blogs

I've come across a lot of articles recently on blogging and mainstream media. Mukul Kesavan has written about this in the Telegraph and Amit Varma, whose blog and writings in the Mint I greatly admire has added some very good perspective on the subject.

In addition to those, I believe blogging is about expressing points of views, discussing and having conversations. It’s never meant to replace mainstream media as we know it. Any media will have its own commercial constraints and thus not be able to do justice to the information needs of millions of individuals. Blogging steps in and offers information and perspectives which are by nature niche, appealing to a smaller number of interested people. To that extent communities tend to form around blogs and though each individual community may be too small to be serviced by a dedicated mainstream news magazine, it could be substantial enough to nurture a lot of blogs which feed off each other while dipping into the mainstream media. Exactly, the way this blog references two mainline newspapers and a blog, which in turn references many others.

I read this morning that the Economist once described Naomi Klein (of "No Logo" fame) as having all the “incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent”. Though I don’t quite agree with the sentiment, can’t help but admire the phrase.

Henry Bliss, RIP

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first American pedestrian
killed in a car accident. Henry Bliss was knocked by a cab in
Manhattan on Sept. 13, 1899. The cabbie wasn't named Alistair.

Where's That Needle

Ram forwarded me this post by Seth Godin who outlines yet one more huge opportunity for organising all the information in the world.

What Will We Search For?

Google is synonymous with search marketing, with almost all of its $10 billion plus revenues coming from that domain. And it has fine tuned the art of searching for anything from the arcane to the most mundane in a fraction of a second. But with stock market expectations not abating, how would Google leverage its search expertise to keep ahead?
With its AdWords algorithms, Google plays a central role in serving up relevant ads for any queries users throw at it. This has been further enhanced with other services like mail and image search which is an additional opportunity for Google to place ads relevant to the key words our in our Gmail inbox. All of which is not new. What could take this way further is the gPhone – rumours of which are flying fast and thick.
According to a recent Piper Jaffray study on the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, search is the second most commonly used application on the Internet (after mail). More importantly, it is expected to grow almost three times the current size, to about $45 billion by 2011. And two of the key trends are going to be an explosion of new technologies in the search area and increasing “local search” opportunities. Imagine how potent Google’s search technology will be on a mobile platform and how it can exponentially increase the pool of local advertisers.
One of the key reasons for Google’s success as an advertising platform actually comes from thousands of scattered, small businesses peddling everything from timeshare to VHS cassettes of Citizen Kane played backwards (don’t ask me – somebody seems to want it). Most of these businesses find it far more efficient to advertise specific offers to a tightly defined base online (people who like watching movies backwards?!), rather than spend millions of bucks advertising on newspapers and television. In that sense, Google has actually opened up a new, hitherto fragmented market. Now imagine how much more widespread that that can be if the service can be migrated to a mobile platform. How many more local businesses will make use of advertising that is targeted at a tightly defined user base – either geographically (Lamington Road, Mumbai) or by mobile usage. And if that gPhone is priced at around $100 (as the rumour mills suggest), the Piper Jaffray numbers will suddenly start looking very small indeed.

10.30 PM Headline News

It’s 10.45 PM now and mindless channel surfing across four Hindi TV news channels tells me that:

Mangetar ki chaahat . . . saheli ka balaatkaar

Shouhar ki khaaish . . . biwi ki blue film

Ek missed call . . badal gayi jindagi uski

Videsh se lauta . . . flyover kaa lutera

Thankfully, a fourth channel had sports news so I learnt that Sachin ne sanyaas lene se inkaar kiya.

That is how India kept abreast with news, today.
Don’t worry. Be happy. Aur bhi gam hain jamaane mein.

Emotional Benefits and Mighty Hearts

There is this article in today’s Mint that talks about brands owning emotions because functional differentiators don’t exist anymore. Also supposedly, consumers feel before they think. Examples in the article include Benetton, Nike, Disney etc.

But owning emotions is not a simple academic exercise as it is often made out to be. It is not about tagging an emotional payoff to a rational benefit. The classic, this brand will make your child healthier and hence will he will be more confident is old tripe.

I think it’s more important to define a brand as a personality that evokes real emotions and then bring that personality alive. To truly resonate with people, this personality needs to be real, warts and all. In our frequent attempts to treat our brand as a holy grail we often deify the brand to an extent where it becomes an insipid caricature, shorn of all truth. And such smarmy personalities rarely connect – whether they are brands or living people.

Amongst many other things, connection calls for empathy and transparency. Almost all brands that achieve iconic status have a deep understanding of their customers and deliver on their promise. Many of them often reflect the personal passion of the brand’s owner – whether a professional or an entrepreneur. Many of them don’t even advertise in the conventional sense of the term. Iconic brands often show off their idiosyncrasies – and that actually makes them human and we love them all the more for it.

I reckon, owning an emotional benefit is more about courage. Courage to let your brand be human and to let people engage with your brand on their terms. To that extent, it’s not about the size of your budget or even the size of your intellect; it’s about the size of your heart.

What’s your Avatar?

First one that is. In all the brouhaha about virtual second lives, I came across this simple site with its tongue firmly in cheek.

Cricket in Any Language . . .

Watching the first India-England One Day match on the new Star Cricket channel with Hindi commentary was an interesting experience. I had always assumed that the Hindi commentary one used to hear years ago on radio and early DD and which nowadays gets mocked in television commercials was history. But I realized otherwise. The commentary that I heard Tuesday was a throwback to those days. But going beyond language, I also feel the Hindi and English commentaries are one more reflection of the vastly different sensibilities of different sections of Indians.
1. The Hindi commentary was high on statistics and facts (two slips, a leg gully, a sweeper and a long on - a nod to the old “aakhon dekha haal”) whereas English commentaries were more casual and seemed more interested in communicating the feel of the game – there was a discussion on the Barmy Army being made to pay more for a trip to Australia to watch the last Ashes.
2. The Hindi commentary seemed like a series of breathless exclamations; the English one was much more sober and considered.
3. The Hindi commentators seemed to carry on monologues for entire overs; they almost seemed to be afraid of silences (btw, have you noticed how audiences in a Hindi cinema hall start twittering and shifting uncomfortably when there is a silent pause in an emotionally laden scene). The English commentary was more of a dialogue with long pauses, which also gave the viewer time to ponder and form a point of view on the happenings.
4. The Hindi commentary seemed to be high on repetition, saying the same thing again and again (this also reminded me of the way Hindi News Channels play the same news footage looped over and over). On the other hand, the English commentators seemed to be better at building up a story and forming hypotheses.
I think these differences reflect a different idiom of not just speaking, but also feeling – for the game as much as anything else of consequence. That also explains the different type of news coverage in English and Hindi News Channels. That’s also probably why Chak De does well in the metros while Partner is the biggest hit of the year in the rest of the country.

From Sea Shell to New York City

I saw this billboard at Thane, on the extremely hazardous and pothole-ridden road that passes off for the Mumbai-Nashik Eastern Express Highway. Sandwiched between aggressive paan-spewing Indica cab drivers and 14-wheeled monstrosities that precariously straddle giant potholes, the promise of New York City seemed a bit surreal and truly poignant.

It also reminded me that what we choose to call our houses reflect our changing aspirations. The house I grew up in didn’t have a name at all, just a number. Those were quieter, humbler and dare I say more innocent times. In the city where I grew up, either the houses were named after people who owned them (after all there were no apartments), or they had names like Aashirwaad, Tulsi, Sneh Sadan etc. – with all the inventiveness of a Balaji serial. The house that had the first television in the locality where I was growing up was Shalmali. The most exotic one for us used to be quite a fancy looking house named Sea Shell - the owner used to work in merchant navy.

The 90’s were truly depressing times; Disasters like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Khuda Gawah happened, Sooraj Barjatiyya made super-duper hits and Govinda sang Sarkhailyo Khatiya. I remember buildings with names like Highway Darshan (I am not joking) and Lake View which used to overlook a mosquito infested swampland.

Now, as the front-pages of newspapers never tire of reminding us, we are living the India story. The world is ours and the names of our abodes should obviously reflect that. So we have buildings named Phoenix, Dreamz, Englewood and Wellington and roads named Central Avenue and Forest Avenue which cut through 14-storied buildings. Seen in that light New York City (which I learn is a housing complex coming up at Kasarvadavli in Thane) is one more leap of imagination, hope and stubborn optimism – the potholes be damned.

Song of the Open Road

The debate on making parts of Mumbai hoardings-free, though contentious reminded me of this Ogden Nash poem:
I think I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

That was in the nineteen thirties.

Gorby's New Bags

Mikhail Gorbhachev is one the latest faces of Louis Vuitton luggage. He is supposed to have agreed reluctantly in return for a donation the brand made to Green Cross International, his environmental charity.

I found the use of Gorbachev very interesting because firstly it’s refreshing to see a face that is not associated with sports or movies. Secondly by using him, the brand is also making a statement about fashion by moving away from flash and glitz. In a way, it is showcasing its credentials on other dimensions of fashion – wealth, understated class, exotic travel etc.

Thinking aloud – who could be an equivalent for Louis Vuitton in India. Any retired politicians?

What is the meaning of Jugaad - Part 2

This story on IBN about “Jugaar” – rural India’s new hot wheels, makes for interesting reading.

“Jugaar” is a cross-over vehicle made with Kirloskar irrigation pump, Mahindra Jeep tyres, and a steering wheel and moving at a constant speed of 30 km/h. It’s also another example of the common Indian’s vibrant mix of entrepreneurial instinct and make-shift engineering which meets a real consumer need and makes a decent profit for the owner.
Not that this is new. I believe that two of the most fundamental changes in India over the last fifteen years – the cable TV revolution and the ubiquitous PCO - have been driven by thousands of small entrepreneurs scattered across the country.

There is a huge potential for bigger, more organised companies to tap into this. But it calls for a new business model and a lot of patience and energy to manage the vast multitude of people and partnerships. One company that is doing an admirable job of attempting this, I think is Tata Motors. Though Mr. Ratan Tata now feels that they haven’t done enough to reinvent the business processes, they are making brave attempts with their sub-One Lakh Rupee car. Wonder how long it will be before more organizations start to look at this as viable opportunity.

Knock Knock

My friend, Ram forwarded me this new ebook by Seth Godin on making websites more effective. It’s a succinct, commonsense-filled approach; made me wonder why more online outfits didn’t think of it – especially the ones I interacted with during my mobile phone purchase. Read it for yourself by downloading it from here.

Googled

Business Week has stirred up a debate by carrying a piece questioning if Google was killing intellect.

The article went on to talk about how the mammoth engine who promised to “never be evil” delivers facts, information and nowadays, even references– check scholar.google.com –makes us intellectually lazy. Who will wade through arcane sources trying to know about Virgil, when Google does that for you in flat 0.28 seconds (and by the way, also tells you about Virgil’s Root Beer, brewed in the north of England)

I have personally witnessed people digging out reams of information and data on all kinds of subjects without much corresponding insights or understanding. So I have some sympathy for the view that very often collation of information becomes a surrogate for intellectual rigour; that making so much available so easily results in reducing knowledge to the trivial. In the process, it reduces our respect for knowledge. It also, so goes a point of view, turns users away from more considered sources of learning and knowledge like books, classes etc.

But in today’s context, this perspective seems dated. It also seems rooted in a certain kind of misplaced class consciousness. It smacks of arguments that were put forth in feudal times for not translating works of classics in the commoners’ language. The argument went that making the work more accessible makes it less of a classic and reduces the “gravitas” of the work.

Like it or not, Google and its Wiki cousins have democratized information.
They have become the language of today’s commoner. They are as much of tools as pen or paper. (By the way I just realized that I have been forgetting my pen at home for a couple of days and have not missed it at all – can’t say the same about my computer or mobile). Today, and more so in the future, just giving somebody information will make him / her as smart as giving them a pen. They’ll have a useful tool but that’s pretty much it. What they do with that information, how well they internalise it, play with it and give it new dimensions; that’s what will make will them winners. And that puts a greater onus on the rest of society; to evaluate the quality of ideas and concepts a person comes up with based on all the freely available information. Tougher on all of us? Yes. But eventually it’s also a step towards creating a richer, more evolved bunch of people.

God of Small Things

I bought a new mobile phone over the weekend. Here are a few random observations about the purchase:

1. I spent over four hours searching the net and comparing different handsets, features, price etc. Not once did I get a relevant banner telling me anything relevant about the models or anything exciting to make the purchase more enticing. Wonder why mobile manufacturers or their dealers can’t make better use of the much vaunted “digital space”.

2. There are a lot of blogs and community sites which rave and rant about various phone models (they are very democratic – all major brands are berated equally). Unfortunately, none of the big brands participate or engage with these blogs. Could there be an opportunity for brands to play a constructive role.

3. Nokia Europe hosts a community site for comments about their products. But they don’t seem to have any constructive things to offer about product problems that users post on the site. The moderator simply directs irate users to a corporate site which in turn has fancy flash videos but doesn’t solve consumers’ problems with the phones. But at least it’s a start – maybe they’ll upgrade to being more specific soon.

4. Even now the most impressive part of the purchase was an old fashioned store at which a young Sardar answered questions, came across as more or less transparent and assured me he was always around if I had problems – the old neighbourhood “Hum Hain Na" retailer who finally sold me the phone. So much for online marketing.

If all this seems too small or trivial, maybe that’s what marketing in the digital space will be about. It’s not about one big bang piece of communication but many small things which aggregate into something big and meaningful. That could be the new nature of things and it fits in perfectly with the nature of “online”. So I wonder if we are ready to be the God of Small Things; to focus on doing all the seemingly "trivial" stuff because they make a difference while selling; to talk to the masses, one person at a time.

Bhiku Ban Gaya Socialite

Returned to Mumbai after three weeks. Among other things, the society pages inform me that Manoj Bajpai is the latest addition to the Page 3 regulars lists.

Whose Space is it Anyway

Cities, like people need to breathe. Cities, like people need space to be fallow. Some societies allow these to their cities.
Some people believe in maximizing returns from an urban place – which means building up every square metre, inhabit it with people and generate more taxes. Others believe in optimizing returns from urban space – which means giving the city dwellers space to love and grow with the place they stay in and hence draw better people and better industries thus generating greater tax revenues.
Some people believe that a piece of open space in an urban area is a hallowed place that allows the people to loosen up and take time outs. Hence there are a lot of these spaces spread out over a large area. The spaces are hospitable and they have facilities which make it an attractive breather for people in between their urban madness. In turn, people who use it are expected to keep it that way. It sure beats taking a breather at Phoenix Mills.

Some societies are also very particular about not letting these public spaces be used for private purposes – even if earns a lot of money by way of rentals or taxes. Because by definition, a public space is meant for everybody and not a select few.

Some civil societies go to great lengths to maintain the sanctity of these public spaces. Maybe it’s a matter of affluence. When you are busy trying to figure out where you are going to be sleeping tonight, sunlight shimmering off a pond in a park may not exactly catch your fancy. But somehow, I believe that’s not the case. You don’t have to particularly well-off to carry your empty bag of Lays chips back with you. I think it finally boils down to this – some people believe a public space belongs to everybody; some believe it belongs to nobody. What do you think we believe?

My Films

User generated content has been experimented with for quite some time now. Here's a big promotion that is currently on here in the US for Heinz ketchup inviting consumers to make their own TV films for Heinz and submit it online. The winners would get to see their films on national TV and also win over $50,000.

So will the next metal winner be John Doe from Suburbanville, or will Geeta from Gorakhpur beat him to it.

Those Long Lines

Saw an interview with Bill Aitkinson, Apple employee 51 who was standing in a line outside an Apple store in Cupertino, California last Friday evening to buy his iPhone. He believes an year from now the number of people on the internet would double because they’ll be logging in through the iPhone.

I agree. At some point, I think exponential growth in internet penetration in less developed countries like India will come about because of mobile phone devices which are more intuitive and less dependant on “literacy”. Though I doubt iPhone will be that phone – they’ll simply not be able to deliver a value proposition to the mass even in the US, let alone a less developed country like India.

I also had an opportunity to try out the iPhone. Though the phone felt robust, sleek and everything one expected it to be, surfing was Stone-Age due to the slow network speed. I waited for three minutes for agencyfaqs page to open up and then gave up. But the phone itself deserves two thumbs up.

BTW, Steve Jobs was the first in that line outside the Apple store. Talk about great marketing. We in advertising have a lot to learn from him.

What Happened to US?

This is a project by Dan Perjovschi, a Romanian visual artist who mixes drawing, cartoons and graffiti. As his first solo exhibition in the US, he has covered a huge wall at the MoMA with graffiti and cartoons. It’s a humourous, poignant and scathing commentary on our times.

The best one to my mind was a dialogue between a figure saying “free speech” and another facing him saying “nice shoes”.

Iconography

Book from the Ground, an installation by Chinese-American Xu Bing is an on going compilation of icons used in modern society. As he says, icon traditionally meant objects of worship. Today, it’s come to mean company logos and instruction symbols. He’s doing a “Book from the Ground” which tells short stories using only icons. Extremely interesting – check it at his website xubing.com

What is the meaning of Jugad?

That was my four cents worth addition to a very interesting exhibit that’s been put up at the Museum of Modern Arts (or MoMA, as it’s commonly called). The exhibition titled “Automatic Update” reflects on the confluence of design art and technology. One of the installations called “33 questions per minute” put up by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invites all visitors to type out a question which it first flashes on an LCD display. Then a computer algorithm takes random words from different questions and combines them to form new questions which are perfect syntax but complete nonsense. I saw some like “How hot is the speed of pumpkin?” or a beautiful “Why is sex faster than dreams?”

As the write up to the installation said, the installation adds more dimensions to the age old question of how long will it take for a chimpanzee randomly hitting at a keyboard churn out Hamlet. Maybe because of my question now, hamlet will jugad his way through his foes in the Automatic Update version of Hamlet being written out the MoMA

! India Everywhere !

Edison, New Jersey is about 60 km from New York. Feels more like 60 km from Ahmedabad.

The Sound of Music

Last year all the casinos here changed from using coins to dollar bills on their slot machines. But they ensured that the recorded sound of coins keep playing on the machines. It seems people get enthused listening to that sound. A soundless game with dollar bills is an emasculated version of the real thrill – that of a constant promise of winning a pocketful of money. And coins jingling are the strongest signal of that thrill.

The Great Gamblers

Atlantic City in South New Jersey was the capital of the gambling world until the mob decided to move a large chunk their business to Las Vegas, then a desolate desert town in Nevada. But Atlantic City has made a come back of sorts. I am given to understand that there are about 15 casinos here today, drawing over 100,000 people on an average summer weekday.

Old, retired empty nesters jostle with young compulsive gamblers on slot machines, and on poker and blackjack tables. Ostensibly they are all there to have a good time – spend a day or two at some of the plush casinos, eat, drink and gamble some money. The casinos are only too happy. They offer fancy rooms at heavily discounted rates and put on great food. They also keep rates for their movies-on-demand on TV very high and don’t have swimming pools or any other typical five star luxuries. This essentially ensures that customers spend a large part of their time at the playing table.

The playing area itself is always lit up in neon and bright spotlights with a constant night time feel and comfortable temperature. It is the same 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It lulls one into a state of timelessness; sitting at a table you won’t know the difference between 1 pm and 1 am and 7 am. You are just focused on getting the right hand or hoping that your slot machine combination wins you a jackpot. And you keep playing one more game after one more game. The drinks keep coming, the bonhomie is infectious the sound of coins jingling in the slot machines keeps you feeling good about yourself and it’s very easy to forget that nobody ever wins against the house - Harrahs Entertainment, one of the largest casino operators in the US has seen its stock shoot up and is now being traded at an all time high.

The Wait is Almost Over

99 Dollars – that’s what you’ve got pay somebody to stand in a queue for your iPhone on the day of its launch. The marketing blitz has started. Ads (quite ordinary) are being bombarded; the stores have started the tease and there is anticipation in the air. The wait for the iPhone is almost over.

There are reports of young people trying to get jobs at Apple stores just so they can lay their hands on the iPhone before their friends. Stocks of Cingular-AT&T which has an exclusive deal to sell iPhone packages are up and analysts forecast a 4% subscriber churn in the first three months from other service providers to AT&T.

There is unanimity that Apple will simply not be able to meet demand for the iPhone, at least in the short term despite ramping up production to over 4 million sets in the first year. As is always the case, there are also naysayers who feel that Nokia, Motorola etc. will soon come up with new models which will be more competitive than the iPhone – especially since they know mobiles better than Apple.

Since I am in Atlantic City and the casinos’ spirit is all pervasive, here’s my bet - the iPhone will change the way mobiles are used. It will go through the usual hiccups before taking flight but eventually it will.

And it all starts on Friday, June 29 at 5 PM.

To Market, To Market

Spent day at a flea market. Like most other things here, a super-sized one. It’s amazing how many people drive over 100 miles to visit a flea market.

It was good old-fashioned commerce on a bright, sunny Saturday. There was negotiation, bargains to be had and deals to be made. On everything from trinkets to electronics to Playstation games.

Like in any good market, we fought with one vendor who tried to con us, got thrilled with another who gave us a five dollar trinket free and generally had a good time spending money. One of the definitions of commerce is a transaction where both the buyer and seller walk away feeling they got a good deal. By that definition, yesterday’s flea market was a roaring success.

Now we are off to experience yet another avatar of capitalism. The casinos of Atlantic City.

Yoga Camp USA

The Swami Ramdev juggernaut rolls on. He is conducting a two day camp in New York on June 30 and July 1. Registration fee - $100 and $200. Sponsored by Sahara One and Aastha Channel, both available on DirecTV. Tickets available at Patel Video and Shreeji Grocery!

65 Feels Like 60

That's what the weather report says about today. The first week I spent here saw cold weather and thunderstorms on two days – though the thunderstorms here lasts an hour and is really intense. Then, sunshine. Bright, warm, toasty sunshine.

It also became clear why weather reports here are such a big deal. Every publication, channel, radio station and portal carries it and everybody talks about it. As the newspapers here say, “65, feels like 60”. That left me with two things to get used to at one shot. Firstly, convert Fahrenheit into Celsius. And secondly, try to understand why 65 degrees should feel like 60. That’s supposedly because of the wind chill factor. Coming from sweltering Mumbai, it takes getting used to – bright sunshine and hot under the sun with a really chilly wind blowing. That’s obviously why people here worship the sun.

The Meeting Place

Doesn’t matter how many times I see Times Square, it continues to awe me. They say, if you stand in Times Square for 15 minutes, you’ll meet the entire world. Couldn’t be said better.

Celebrating movies at the Grand Central

The Grand Central Terminal, one of the main train stations in New York is striking not just in terms of how beautiful the building is, but how wonderfully preserved. The architecture itself is wonderful with a huge main concourse leading up to the ticket windows and a then again gigantic doors opening on the platforms.

Part of the concourse, I understand is usually let out for public exhibitions. The last few days has seen “City of Giants – Skylines of Fantasy”, an exhibition celebrating New York in movies. The exhibition coincides with a book on the same subject which has just been released. It features most of the memorable New York movie moments; from the old King Kong to Taxi Driver to Doing the Right Thing to You’ve got Mail. It has rare pictures of these movies being shot in various New York neighbourhoods, quotes from various writers and even a giant United Nations building background against which Cary Grant was shot for Hitchcock’s North by North West because the UN refused permission to shoot the movie in its premises. The exhibition memorably brings alive the romance that New York evokes in the rest of this country – indeed in the rest of the world. Joan Didion wonderfully articulates this in her introduction to the exhibition.

Now just think of the immense potential for a similar exhibition in Mumbai celebrating movies from Paying Guest to Gharonda to Satya – in the splendour of CST station. Ah! But first we must fight whether it is VT or CST.

Of art and tolerance

Posts over the last one week have been tardy; the start of a long vacation is always filled with hundreds of things to do. This post comes from New York where I’ve been vegetating for the last six days.

Saw a Broadway play, “Inherit the Wind” at the Lyceum Theatre. Set in early 20th century Southern America, the play revolves around the conflict between the evolutionists who accept Darwin’s evolution theory and the Creationists; religious groups who insist on interpreting the Bible literally that God created Man in his own image and the entire universe was created in seven days. It’s surprising how live this issue is even today in this country, and how polarizing. The play itself was a piece of outstanding scripting and great acting by Christopher Plummer (yes, he of The Sound of Music and The Insider fame).

I am given to understand that there are entire parts of this country where even today, the evolution theory that all of us descend from apes is still thought of as heresy and taught in schools with a lot of riders.

But what I found truly inspiring is that this play with a lot of what could be considered incendiary dialogues related to Christianity, played to packed houses in mid-town Manhattan. I can’t bring myself to believe that a similar play with “strongly worded” dialogues, taking digs at religion could play in Mumbai (or most other Indian cities) without resulting in protests, vandalism and broken theatres. And if things go to plan, maybe a bandh.

For all our smug superiority about being the largest democracy etc., we still have some things to learn from this oldest democracy about tolerance for a radically different (and for some people, vile) point of view.

A Million Voices

"A million penguins” is an interesting project in keeping with the current spirit of collaborative networks. Initiated by Penguin publishers, this is a project which seeks to get individual amateur writers (hopefully, they also read) to collaborate in the making of an online book – a wiki-based creative writing exercise as they called it. Anybody can pick up the story where the last writer has left off and write the next chapter or so before getting tired and going off to sleep, leaving the next chapter to another aspiring Booker prize winner. People could also come back and edit a portion as many have done.

Over 1500 people wrote more than 1000 pages novel. And if proof is needed of the amount of trash that poses as serious user-generated content, this is it. The experiment is interesting for two reasons:
It shows up the number of people who are keen on experimenting with form and structure of the novel. Never mind that they don’t have the talent to follow that keenness up.
It also proves the point yet again that creative writing is simply not a collaborative exercise.

This is not new, but the second point in particular is important. Comment is today cheap; anybody can write a post or a comment. But quality / origin of that idea is a huge suspect.

As quality of novels go, the online space would be better off without it. At the end of it all, “a million penguins” is interesting for its ambitious scope and for helping make the point that many good voices can occasionally be a symphony but, untalented and untrained, it’s more likely to be a cacophony.

Of Briefs and Propositions

As I was reading about different kinds of briefs and “briefing formats”, it struck me how the notion of a good brief (and indeed, “briefing”) is changing.

Years back, we used to focus on the proposition as the core of all briefs. I believe today, the proposition is just one more small part of the brand’s offering. As product parity becomes a norm, the more important part of the brief are the values our brand stands for. That could be a far greater differentiator. Not that this is new in itself. What is new, I think is the relative importance of What I (i.e. the brand) Do vs. Who I Am.

The What I Do for you way of approaching most brand issues seems naïve in today’s complex environment. Beyond a point, a soap isn’t going to do anything dramatically different from what it did 20 years back; nor is a detergent or a bank or a biscuit. Behavioural and cultural insights can be mined to an extent but there’s a limit on how far they can take us. Laddering product benefits can make the output even more farcical – as someone once said when you want to sell a shoe, just sell the shoe and don’t sing the national anthem while you are at it.

In such times a bigger opportunity for a brand could well be, to adopt values and a personality that resonates with its consumers. Nuanced correctly, these values could make a person look at a brand much more positively. Today, as our society (at least parts of it) moves from scarcity to plenty, people will move towards buying brands that stand for what they as individuals stand for. That’s the Who I Am part of the brand.

Obviously some categories are closer to this station than others; but more will reach here eventually. Deciding Who I Am is not as simple as it sounds. The old answer that used to be the last part of the “brief” – my brand stands for honesty, warmth and contemporariness won’t cut ice. People will make their decisions about your brand as much for who you are, as for who you are not. People bond with real values and a real personality, not some cardboard cut-outs. This in turn will call for some serious introspection on the part of marketers and agencies; and horror of horrors, having to make some decisions and tough calls. We can no longer be traditional yet contemporary, or go-getting yet warm. We need to take a stand and hope that stand is in consonance with the stand of the people we want as consumers.

This part of the briefing process used to be considered “soft” and tucked away at the bottom (I suspect, because it is so nebulous and hard to pin down.) I reckon it’s time we learn to get comfortable with this.

Cheeni Kum, Flavour Zyada

Saw Cheeni Kum over the weekend and liked it very much.

After a long time, I saw a film with a sparkling and witty script. It just goes to show that the premise of the film is just the starting point. How it’s taken forward and the sensibilities it showcases is more important and Cheeni Kum scores well above average.

The key characters essayed by Amitabh and Tabu are mature and even the bits which could have easily become soppy, like their courtship, are handled with élan. Their repartees are on the spot and their relationship is handled with a great sense dexterity and light-heartedness.

There have been a lot of discussions in media about a ten year old girl being called “sexy”, and the wrong signals it sends out. I personally have some sympathy for that point of view; but at the same time I’ll stop short of making a huge moral issue out of it. Though it’s no excuse, there s far worse that is happening in our media and society and we’ll be better off focusing our efforts towards those issues.

Coming back to the movie, unlike a lot of films recently, which hold their own until the last 20 minutes before falling apart, Cheeni Kum manages to pace itself right to the end. Even the part at the end where Amitabh breaks down and his conversation with Tabu is very sensitively handled.

Following best traditions, the music by Ilayaraja adds flavour and ambience to the film without seeming to be interludes. The actors are at their best, which means given their caliber, outstanding. Just as I was beginning to forget how good he is (after hamming his way through well-marketed disasters like Black), Amitabh proves again that he has the firepower. But this movie reminds us yet again that it requires a strong script and a skilled director to get that best out of him. Sanjay Leela Bhansali will have to try harder.

Giving Chance a chance

Narayana Murthy’s speech at NYU which was excerpted in today’s Economic Times set me thinking on how receptive we are to learnings from chance events.

Most of us have grown in a learning / professional environment which is primarily western in orientation; these reinforce the importance of the outcome to the exclusion to everything else along the way. Being focused on the task at hand is of primary importance.

A corollary of being goal oriented is that we are so obsessed with the end product, that we miss out on any interesting sidelights we come across. We learn to ignore the process and interesting side paths.

One of the key requirements to being receptive to chance occurrences is the openness to flirt with the unknown. The courage to explore people, lands and events that are unpredictable; knowing they may end up leading nowhere.

It also calls for getting comfortable with doodling. Typically, blank spaces frighten us and we seek to immediately fill it up with something. Left blank, there is chance that more interesting ideas and thoughts accidentally occupy that space. These ideas may not always lead to Penicillin but, hey, you never know.

How Transparent is your Brand

For all the discussions about how digital space is going to change the landscape of brand communications, there is precious little tangible evidence of that, at least in India.

One of the fundamental issues when it comes to meaningful use of digital space is the discomfort with a new way of engaging with people. Typically we have a bias against dialogue, used as we are to playing out our monologues about our brands. And that doesn’t work any more. People aren’t very interested in knowing more about how our enriched products help their health / skin / career whatever. They see through the spiel.

One of the necessities for rich dialogue is transparency. How much of ourselves are we willing to show to people; how honest are we with them; how much we do we seek to cede and how much do we want to control. Conversations are not about control. In such an environment, even when we want to sell, we need to do so with honesty, empathy and the right sensibilities. As brand controllers, most of us are not prepared to handle this role. We aren’t used to individuals creating havoc for our brands (Google “Dell Hell” to see a more celebrated example of the power of the individual)

The challenge before us is to embrace the landscape (not that we have much of a choice, anyway); to use these new opportunities to talk and form relationships with more people; to be authentic without being banal.

Some new, younger and smaller brands and individuals are already showing the way. There are scores of small musicians and soloists who conduct business primarily online. They have strong online presence, they create a fan base using communities and blogs, they perform to smallish audiences in off-beat places and even record and sell their music on iTunes. And people pay what they believe is fair. For the skeptics among you, consider the case of Jane Siberry, a Canadian folk-pop singer who has a very interesting payment system for people who download her songs. She has a “pay what you can” policy, so fans can download the songs for free. But her site also shows the average price other people have paid for a track. This creates a “generally accepted” standard of what the song is worth. As a result, the average price her customers paid is $1.30 a track, much more than what iTunes charges. Chew on that.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

That’s the blurb on the back a book on the English language, I am reading now. A wonderful take on punctuations, and why they matter. Try to lay your hands on it. You won’t regret it.

Making Bharat

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech at CII’s Annual Session on May 24, has created a bit of furore in media. I am sure, most of the reactions to it – and I’ve seen a lot on TV over the weekend – have been voiced without hearing / reading the full text. What he said about doing a reality check on CEO compensation has received a lot of attention and comments. Probably the media played it up because it was a suitably provocative section and allowed for interesting sound bytes; except Mahesh Bhatt I saw almost all the usual suspects on TV holding forth their POV on the issue.

But the speech itself was exemplary – sharp content and very graciously delivered. The issue of what he termed excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives was just one of the many things he said. And in all fairness, there is ample merit to it. Without mandating things, he urged corporates to show more sensitivity in rewarding themselves and temper the display of those rewards. And that’s a very edifying thought.

One can debate the specifics of how this can be done, but in principle, it is a very good thought. And not just for altruistic reasons. It may seem pedantic, but the more inclusive and equitable the growth story is, the more self-perpetuating it is. I am not sure of the ratios of CEO salaries to lower level worker salaries in the US or Europe, but I guess those comparisons are slightly redundant – not when our poor are as wretched as they are and not when farmer suicides are more regular than monsoon harvests.

The media makes these differences starker by showcasing them as trophies – the multi-crore weddings and parties and the vulgar triumphalism of economically successful celebrities.

In light of all this, some sanity and circumspection does help and all the good doctor has done is ask the most illustrious of our corporate chieftains to lead the way. As he said, “India has made us. We must make Bharat”.