perspectives

Long ago I too thought that the solutions to all traffic woes would be to build flyovers. As many as you possibly can, just build them and the traffic will simple cease. The simple logic being that if you don’t have halts you don’t have traffic.

Reading books by intelligent people gives you a perspective on life that is different than the average Joe. You look at life from different angles. That is the single biggest thing about reading. You understand that there are multiple perspectives and viewpoints for various issues. You also realize how much to trust propaganda and simplistic thinking. Also being in marketing you realize that you are not the center of the world. Most people (even in marketing) market to themselves and their own sensibilities. That’s not the right way to understand things. Just because you like it is no reason to have a pack design in a certain manner. Its what your core customer wants that’s important. I have learnt that India is not English speaking and we continue to throw English inside our communication. We marketer’s believe that everybody understands English. In offices in metros we think since we use English as the primary means of communication, that is the answer to everything. Of course you must understand English. May be earlier it would suffice as the big markets were the well-developed metros. But now as we look beyond the metros the vernacular languages need to addressed. The politicians and the film world have got it bang on. They are ones who have embraced the vernacular since time immemorial. But since we marketing people are based out of cities we forget the basics.

Simplistically as well, we think that the only spending on infrastructure we must do is the roads. So many people (very smart at that) have told me that the solution to Mumbai’s infra mess is more roads, costal roads, ring roads and flyover etc. No one seems to understand the huge amount of money being spent on what is a fraction of the people enjoying the service. Mass Rapid Transport is not about roads for cars but using bus and train services to connect people across the city. A network that takes a huge mass of people from one end to another. This opens out the city and flattens it evenly. People want cheap reliable mode of transport. The car is the worst thing for solving city woes. My argument has been rather simple here. My guess (only a guess) is that the amount of money the city spends on these massive flyovers can be simply utilized to do something else. Suppose we just take the number of busses on the road and triple it thus reaching far off corners and for good measure put air-conditioning to placate the office goers, the cost of which can easily be borne in lieu of the flyover constructed. Me thinks that with this kind of money you can even charge normal rates and give AC service. Ofcourse this is simplistic thinking. Flyover can last many years, far more than an average life of a bus. Plus no point having busses if your roads are jammed to start with. But the thinking is different. The point is to look at lakhs of people at the lower level than the few bums at the top.  

But it’s not easy to change habit. Over the last few years I have got the habit of travelling by car. First at kaliana and then at worli – my house is ill connected to office by public transport. It doesn’t make sense to travel thus. It takes far more time and is tedious. So I have the car habit. While I was in nariman point I used to take pride in travelling by train. This way I got my reading time as well. There is some loose talk that our office will get transferred back to Nariman Point. Jasmine and I saw it differently. I thought great - there is a new freeway from town right upto my building (literally – mine is the first building you get off to) and Jasmine said – great, now you can go by train and catch back on your reading. Oops. I missed that one. No body like change from routine.  I too am a victim of my own routine.

zoom

Last week I was in Udaipur for a personal leave. Jasmine and I have realized the value of staying put in as few places as possible during a leave. First we would go to multiple places in one leave. Like our honey moon, in which we did more than 6 places in 15 days. We covered practically the whole of  Kumaon region in Uttrakhand when we were there. Slowly slowly we were down to three places, then two and now we are at one place one week. The last two holidays have been just that. Reach, plonk yourself and if needed use that as a base to explore further. So this time, it was one week in Udaipur. This also affects the hotel choice. We end up taking a smallish but cute and clean hotel, that is typically family run. And this time for the first time, we deliberately went for a hotel with a pool in it. if you are there for eight nights and you might get a bit of hot weather, you need a pool. So we got, history, culture and relaxation – all in one vacation.

Another thing that we have discovered in India is the Golden Quadrilateral. The new highways of India. I have been hearing about how good. I used to try and get Jasmine to agree on driving holidays. The last time we had no option but to drive to our spot as it was pretty remote. The highways are amazing. These are segregated lanes with flower beds in the middle. And enough space to zip through. When I first drove on Indian highways, it was around 20 years ago. We had a Fiat premier padmini car. Here is a similar model. Ours was white as well.

My dad had bought it second hand. My mom had insisted on buying a car as my eldest sister was marriageable age and we must have a car to prove that we were well off. That we had two flats and that we had stayed in Dubai or whatever else was probably not too much of a show off value. So dad bought his car for around ninety five thousand rupees. A princely sum of course in those days. Must have been around in the year 1990 or thereabouts. The only thing we kids did not like about it was that it did not have an AC in it. We were keen that we have atleast an AC car. We wanted a Maruti but our conservative parents preferred this car, which we made do with. BUT NO AC? That was a bummer. But hell, we still loved that we had a car and as soon as we turned 18, we enrolled into a driving school and got our licenses. Dad actively taught our driving and soon enough we were driving on highways.

The highways. Oh the highways on a premier padmini. It had no acceleration to talk about. It was good for doing 60kmph at bets. Reaching any speeds beyond that required a large empty stretch of road and 90 would be around the best available speed. That too only if we got like a straight road with no traffic on the way. I must crossed that only once in my padimini. Add to that were the state of the highways in India. I was explaining to Jispa that the highways were just one road with one lane going up and another lane going down, with no segregation. The lanes were simply painted. So when you drive you have to be very carefull. For overtaking every time, you would have to tail the truck in front of you and then move little to the right and check for oncoming traffic. Then if you found the coast clear you would press the accelerator completely and hope to pass the truck before an oncoming vehicle came face to face with you. But that’s not enough similarly you have to constantly look for incoming vehicles that are overtaking by coming onto your lane. You would have to adjust your speed accordingly. I have been pushed off road one more than one occasions by a truck who has mistimed his overtaking. So I move off the road rather than get smashed into as pulp.

I was explaining this to Jispa and she found it quite amusing. The highway to Udaipur is around 800 km long and is one super straight drive. Only in one 50 km patch between Ahmedabad and Ghandinagar is the old style highway. I guess that is because it is the Ghandinagar bypass. If you go through the city then you get the segregated lanes all the way. This is like a shortcut. It helped to have it as it was like giving a live demo to Jispa. I talked to her while I was driving. See now I must overtake this way. Now I must look for this truck. She now found all it even funnier. All the cars waiting behind a truck and then suddenly all of them accelerating together and overtaking. Then she saw how we were stuck behind a truck at 40kmph waiting for a chance to overtake. As opposed to 100 -120 kmph on the normal highway, it felt like a hare waiting impatiently behind a tortoise waiting for an opening.

The superb highways made me think about my political leaning. The bridges in Mumbai which got much acclaim were thanks to the right winged group in power. The Golden quad highway project was a brain child of the same right winged combo in power at the center. The more secular party leans almost left and is a ‘welfarist’ at heart. While I think some of the legislation like the NREGA which guarantees employment may have much greater long term impact than what most understand, I need good roads and bridges now. No I am not talking like a spoiled brat who wants roads for a self drive vacation. But I see the benefits of good infrastructure.

Long ago in my naivety I had argued that India does not need so much infrastructure. After all we led the IT boom in spite of the no government support and in the absence of any backing. Adversity led to innovation. But I couldn’t have been more stupider. We desperately need it and the multiplier effect is for there to see. Good roads means better transport for goods and materials, we can now use large trucks on the highways, better trucks, better facilities for drivers, faster transportation. May be capital intensive in the short run but cheaper in the long run. Business comes up in and around the area and you definitely gain in terms of efficiency. It’s bloody important. So this time around if I vote right winged, it’s not that I love secular less, but that I love infrastructure more (sorry Brutus).

you never know what you can get

It’s always great fun to meet a veteran, from any business and at the same time it’s pretty irritating to meet a cousin (especially wife’s) who you have never ever met, but you have to and exchange pleasantries. So last week I was pretty unexcited at the prospect of meeting one such relative. But since my mom in law doesn’t normally ask me to come and meet, I thought of going nevertheless.

He was Jasmine’s cousin and a veteran in the old coconut oil trade from Cochin. It was quite nice and mentally I ate some humble pie. I judged before I met and if I don’t meet then how would I learn from others. There were a few things that he said that hit me. One of it was when he explained why the middle men in Cochin in the coconut oil business completely died. It seems Jasmine’s grand dad from her mother’s side was a kingpin of sorts in the business. The business died when Marico professionalized and bought directly from the manufacturers. The middle man was bound to die a natural death. He said that three things contributed to the death of the middle man. They were road, mobile telephony and banking. Bang on. These three improvements surely have contributed a large amount to the productivity gains and of course productivity can’t be enhanced without squeezing the middle man.

 14 years ago I worked as a sales guy in rural Guajarati. The mobile telecom boom hadn’t happened and I had to call up the Area sales manager in the evening at his home to get through to him. There was no contact possible when I was on the road and my ASM’s would have no clue what I was up to. I also used it to my advantage in those days by disappearing and fudging reports. I learnt later the power of diligently working and not bunking office. But at the time, I was shuttling between Gujarat and Mumbai, trying to squeeze every second I got by coming home. I wouldn’t recommend slacking off to anyone. But the point is that mobiles would have greatly enhanced our productivity. We would be in touch a lot more with each other in the sales system. I for one would not have gone missing. Though I did not see this one coming, it surely

Roads for sure would help. Rural Gujarat meant a lot of travelling. It was evident that road network needed improvement. I travelled all across the place to encounter bad roads. I travelled in buss, three wheelers, trucks, matadors, scooters and what not. It definitely screwed up my back completely. The lack of a road network would mean that we would not be able to transport goods cheap and fast across the country. Markets would remain inaccessible and the transfer of goods based on price movements would be severely curtailed. Roads are great and having roads is a greater leveler than what I had imagined.

Banking. I had got this one right. I remember my first cheque quite clearly. It was a non MICR cheque. In other words, Ahmedabad did not participate in MICR clearning – that is the cheques did not have the magnetic ink at the bottom. This is the number that helps the RBI in clearing the cheques. I found it highly amusing. Gujarat had a plethora of co-operative banks in every nook and corner. When we collected cheques from the distributor we had a list of approved banks. The thing was that for cash management services we had tied up with a third party provider. We used to have blank cheque leaves signed by the distributor at our end. We would send the stock and write the amount on the cheque and give it to the third party whose job it was to get the money. When I first heard the concept, I was quite confused. Why would you need someone to help you clear the cheque. Our deal was that I would get the money within two or three days of presenting the cheque and the third party would somehow get the clear funds from the banks in question. This is pretty stupid archaic concept. You present a cheque you should get the money, right? It seems there was a huge delay in banks clearing payments. Especially if it was a cooperative bank. Some of my distributors were the heads of the banks themselves and cheques would be held back for two weeks before being released. The third party would give us a list of banks they thought were acceptable and would accept cheques only from them. This was a system that was plagued with obvious difficulties and inefficiencies. During the 2000 dotcom boom, I knew that the banking industry would be able to add percentage points to a nation’s GDP by digitizing all their transactions and records all over India. Access to credit, access to creditworthiness and the ability to effect instant payments would be a huge booster to business and productivity. It had to work.

So banking, telecom and infrastructure were the three buzz words that removed the middle men in India. Well said ‘cousin of Jasmine’. Well said. I agree whole heartedly. Sorry Jasmine. Next time I will come without whining.