Comparison

While the Birlas are on a buying spree to secure raw material for their coal based business and the Tatas too are focussing on such inorganic growth in these uncertain times, if I compare this to my beloved Reliance, it is not doing anything to secure crude oil supply. Infact, other than the shale gas source acquisition in the US, RIL has not even contemplated any major global acquisition. So, on comparison, it seems in that Mr. Kumar Mangalam is focussing more on the future as compared to Mr. Ambani. However, we cannot ignore Ambani uncle coz he is currently focussing on pertochemical consolidation which is not much told in the news. (Inside info hai :P).
Talking about comparison, I am really annoyed when people, specially relatives compare me and my parents with other cousins - specially those staying in Mumbai.
Sometime back, an elderly person of my family asked me about my salary and my profession and stuff so that they can put up this info in the shaadi market. It was fine till then but later on things became more annoying when I eavesdropped. It became like the 'Daadi' sa sort of thing from 'Balika Vadhu' where they started comparing me and my job with those of other eligible cousins. They had the following issues with me:
1. I come home early as compared to all others which suggested that I am not much ambitious kind and do not work hard enough.
2. I am in the profession of chemicals which is not considered very highly as a profession in Finance and allied services.
3. I work at Saki Naka which is considered to be a down market place as compared to places on the Western line like Churchgate, Charni road.
4. I am from Sangli and even though I have spent quite a lot of my youth days in Mumbai, I love Sangli more than Mumbai. This might prove to be a big issue to find a possible prospective girl for me.
5. I avoid boarding in crowded trains and buses as far as possible,not a very talkative person nor seem an interesting person when compared to others or similar aged boys.

Yeh comparison na, is really irritating. First it was about the kind of job and salary comparison with peers and now this. Dont know when people will stop comparison.

Saki-Naka

Most of the people who have a fair amount of knolwedge about Mumbai should know about this area for sure. It is a place in Andheri East - One of the most dreaded places for driving any vehicle. A place where, no matter what time it is, the traffic is always slow moving if not standstill :P. It is one of the few commercial places in Mumbai which is far away from any local railway station, thereby connected only by road & BEST buses, making it a tough place to commute to everyday.
Especially, from Andheri station to SakiNaka is one of the most tiring journeys. No matter what you travel in - a bus, a bike, auto or even a car, you take around 1 hour 15 mins to reach station in the evening - the same time it takes to reach Borivali from Churchgate.
It is said by people that once you start from Andheri, we cannot guess the time to reach the place (Kaab pahuchega bata nahi sakte).
The construction of metro on the road has made the net travelling side of the road very small. At places the effective size of the road is just enough for a bus to pass through.
In the peak hours, there is a bus from Andheri station to sakinaka every 5 minutes, yet, the place being commercially important, the frequency of buses does not seem sufficient. All the buses departing the station run full capacity.
Autos generally refuse to come there and understandably so because the opportunity cost because of the time lost is just too much. He can definitely earn far more in the same time on a different route.
Add to all these things, the unpredictable Mumbai rains, water logging and increase in construction activity in the region make commuting to this place everyday a nightmare for a person who does not like too much crowd and who is from a smaller city.

Hopefully, the metro gets functional fast and ease the trafffic condition in this area. But thats atleast 1 year away. Till then toh commuters have too suffer.

But all is not bad at this place. There are quite a lot of good places around the place - like mcdonalds, urban tadka, ccd, maharaja, 5 seasons, etc where one can get good food.

It is the place where, unfortunately, my office is situated and I have to commute to this place daily. Thankfully, i have this phone with me which can be used for reading newspapers, blogs and chat. And sometimes when i have nothing to do, I sleep or sometimes i write such dumb posts :P.

Strange things at work

It is raining heavily in Mumbai and I am sitting idly at my workplace wondering about my life. I have finally joined a company of my choice finally (3 weeks ho gaye though). Still have no idea whether I took the right decision of not opting for high-profile, high paying jobs. Hopefully, everything will  turn out well in the end (like most Hindi movies :P).

I found some strange things here:

1. For a company with a turn-over of around Rs. 1000 crore and over 200 employees, I found it strange for the Managing Director to call me up during the first week and ask "Kaise chal raha hai Purav ji". I had not known the names of all the products manufactured by then . (I still dont know all though :P)

2. The Managing Director has access to all the company emails of the important employees (Mine included. Can call myself important then :P) and once a week, (when I think he is bored to work), he goes through all the emails and gets hard copies of important mails during the week and sends the copies to the people to whom the email is addressed to. Strange.

3. He is completely obsessed over growth. Everytime I see him he gives me names of 4-5 chemicals and asks me to get the market information for them, which I find too tough to do. But feels nice to know that I will be involved in formulating the future strategy of the company.

4. I believe I have been given too much of a free hand at work - access to all internet sites (including facebook), a printer and lots of time to think over while collecting data. Strangely, no one minds here if I do a bit of facebooking and other tp like blog reading etc. In fact, I am advised to read blogs of people related to chemical fields as a part of RSS feed in Microsoft Outlook.

While I have been introduced to the people at the top like VP marketing, Director Finance, I have had almost no interaction with their colleagues and as such I have had no idea about what people, in general, feel about the company and bosses. I guess, insteaad of writing this blog, I need to speak to them now. :P

Random Observations

Travelled in the rush hour by a local train today and tomorrow and was surprised to see people say Ganpati Bappa Morya just as the train leaves. Though taking Ganesh's name at the beginning of any work is considered auspicious, I guess it was more out of the fear and they took God's name to pray for their safe return back home in the evening.

At Andheri Agarkar chowk, I observed that for boarding the same bus, there were two queues - One for people wishing to sit and the other one for people wishing to stand. This was something unique not seen before by me.

A little patience and tactic can help you get a seat in bus/train even on the week days in the morning.

Saw that people trvelling together everyday who had become train friends celebrating birthday on a local train and distributing sweets to everyone around - Something to cheer for in the packed train compartment.

Vodafone has the worst possible customer care support system in mumbai. The customer care representatives (and gallery people for that matter) do not have access to the call history of numbers from outside mumbai. - wonder why it is gaining market share.

A different life altogether

Long away from the hustle and bustle of cities, in small towns and villages, lie the manufacturing units of most of the product based companies which account for the basic source of revenue for these companies. The lives of people working at these manufacturing units is competely different than that of those working at their respective head offices.
I have been to such factories for quite a lot of times but a recent visit to a chemical plant (& stay there for around 4 days) last week has made me appreciate the contrasting nature of lives of people working - not financially but in other terms. Financially, in fact, plant officials are adequately paid so as to retain them.

A weeks' at the rural location made me appreciate nature and its beauty. With the travelling time from home to office cut down from 2 hrs to 5 minutes, I suddenly had a lot of spare time after working hours. I could now read books, surf the internet, learn stock market investing tricks or think about starting a new business.
I, however, did neither and spent the free time talking to a colleague, watching television and sleeping more than required. The point is that we could get time to think about other things.

Here, life revloves around the shifts at the factory. People have to plan everything w.r.t their shifts in the factory. Odd meal hours, odd sleep hours, etc form part of the routine. Enjoying power naps during the night shift, bitching about work (not) done by previous shift people, delaying work so that work can be transferred to people of the next shift, forming friends who would cover each other during absence, etc are some of the joys while working specially in production.
Here, people get to spend a lot of free time with family, bond with like-minded individuals and develop long-term friendships. Things like respect for elders, respect to seniors, etc automatically fall into the culture because of the discipline there. A lovely world of its own really.

However, this may be true and be good for people in their late 40s, young people taking up jobs at factory locations end up being frustrated - partly because of the isolaion from major cities, partly because of pollution and partly beacause of the same mundane routine life. Also the fact that factory individuals take more time to reach the top as compared to those at offices adds to their discontent. I talked to a couple of newly joined youngsters when I realized that they were quite discontented and wanted to make it to an urban place asap.

As for me, I got a chance to interact with a lot of people, a chance to spend sometime all alone, a chance to see houses at Konkan and a chance to see another chemical plant.
While going to the plant, my senior mentioned "jis chiz ko hume beenchna hain woh kaise banti hain jaao dekh aao" which reminds me of the dialogue from the movie Lakshya "Jis chiz ki hum raksha kaar rahe hain, jaao dekh aao".

P.S. Frankly, as I mentioned that I was from Sangli, people started becoming friendlier and things started becoming less formal from that point onwards. There's certainly a charm about my lovely city :P

first post using mobile

This is my first post using newly bought smartphone. I have now finally started travelling up the technology ladder. Still I am a long way to be called tech-savy. Yet, it feels great multi-tasking on this phone.                                                                       I am currently on a vacation. It is the first time in 8 years that I am at my home at Sangli for such a long time. I had the television all to myself this time and I had all the time to watch the different news channels being aired 24x7.                                              I was taken aback by the common nature of news running across all the general news channels. Even the timings of special shows were the same. So, at any time, one could get similar kind of news across all channels or special shows like maut ka saugadar, katil kaon, etc. There is no differentiation in the product offered. Even the english general news channels were the same. The only exception being the business news channels where each channel recommended different companies to invest depending on the money offered to them.Aaj tak has maintained its uniqueness by the absurd nature of news aired. However, channels like india tv, star news are fast catching up w.r.t absurdness. Aaj tak needs to make up more strange news to maintain its market leadership in the news market.Really the news channels have become more of sensation generation now. DD news being the lone exception where news are really relevant and to the point.                                   As rightly said by prominent people like Pritish Nandy, Aamir Khan, Rajdeepsardesai, etc the I too observed that the life of a particular news has shortened. E.g: the almost uprising on account of the LokPal bill was no longer discussed 2 days after the leader, Hazare, broke his hunger strike.         I do realize that i am not making any sense in this post, but this qwerty keypad is really convenient to use making me type more.̉

Tatas - Great brand makers

I have always admired the Tatas. They are truly the only Indian corporate to be truly global in nature. Recently, the Tata brand was selected as the third most trusted brand across the globe.

While I applaud the management at the group to run the whole empire smoothly and responsibly, what I have come to observe off late is that it is the marketing aspect of the group which makes it stand apart from others.
The Tatas have been great at identifying the product differentiators and have been able to come up with simple yet great methods to communicate it to the people - especially in businesses where the product is sold directly to the consumers. Tatas have always been able to come up with products with some unique point(s) directly relevant to the Indian audience. At times, their point of differentiation is so appealing and so effectively communicated that inspite of the product being mediocre, the Tatas have been able to get good sales. I would like to mention some of their products:


1.  Tata DoCoMo: Being one of the last ones to enter the Indian GSM telecom network, it needed something great to penetrate the already clogged telecom market. The product was the same yet their strategy of charging 1 paise per second and effectively implemented advertising campaign made the whole market change their pricing strategies. That no doubt led to a price war but the brand was effectively reinforced amongst the mass audience.
Similar thing has now been done again by the Tatas. Instead of talking of their product, it has now come up with a simple strategy to be emphatic to the audience towards the customer care related issues. This point of differentiation though common was not taken up by anyone and Tatas have effectively, yet again , been able to communicate these to the audience through the Ranbir Kapoor stand-up comedy campaign. Simple but highly effective.

2.  Tata Nano : Branded as the cheapest car in the world and endorsed by none other than Ratan Tata himself, this differentiation (of being cheapest) has stayed with the audience inspite of very little promotion effort by the company. The awe generated during launch was more than sufficient to leave a mark upon the audience.

3. Tata Salt: The old campaign of the Tatas of having Iodine as the differentiating factor was again very effective to build the brand image. So, even in a simple and a pretty undistinguished product like salt, the tatas came up with a good distinguishing factor.

4. Tata Swach : Here, they used the trust commanded by brand name Tata as the point of distinction used very effectively to compete with the network of HUL (Pureit).

Thus, while their products may sometimes not be with great features, I feel that it is their marketing effort that really sets Tatas apart. They are able to know the Indian audience very well and develop strategies that effectively identifies a point of distinction relevant to the masses and communicate it to them. Thus, marketing has been one of the most important pillars on which the success of Tatas can be attributed to. 

Highway Driving

I have always loved driving on the highways, specially on the highways from Sangli where we have the opportunity to drive along 2 way highway and also a one way highway of the golden quadrilateral.
The thrill of driving at high speeds, the fun to overtake vehicles, the excitement of racing with other cars, etc are some of the things which we cannot experience elsewhere.
At present, as a part of golden quadrilateral and other porjects, most of the national highways have been or are being converted to one way 4 or 6 lane highways, way too big as compared to the previous 2 lane, 2 ways roads. While, these one way roads have been able to decrease the average travel time, increase the safety levels, while driving on a small patch of the national highway today, I felt that the excitement of driving was missing. I feel that driving on these one-way highways has made driving a lot monotonous. We generally drive in one lane and be in the same lane as long as we do not need to overtake anybody. There is no body coming from the opposite side. We only care about overtaking cars and not worry about anyone from the opposite direction. We mainly focus on the cars coming from behind while keeping a safe distance from cars in front. Thats it. So, it creates a monotony - specially for someone with Maruti or Alto which cannot compete with high powered small vehicles. (Baas ek lane pakad ke go on).
In the 2 way roads, we had to concentrate on cars coming from behind, the car in front of us and also on the cars coming from the opposite direction. Here, overtaking is far riskier and requires a lot of  judgement with regards to the speed of the vehicle in front and also of the speed of any vehicle coming from opposite direction. The thrill of making it to our lane just in time after an overtake is an experience in itself. (Its risky but always need to maintain a safe distance). Today, while driving on the 2 way road from Kolhapur to Sangli, I thought of these things (and many more)

While the above is a completely personal opinion, I feel that driving on a highway has a lot of advantages and we can learn quite a lot. Some of the things which I feel we can learn are:

1. Concentration: I feel driving is a great way to improve concentration levels since we need to focus on a lot while driving specially on 2 way highways. You cannot let your mind wonder off even at slower speeds. A good mind exercise I should say to stay alert all the time.

2. Leveller : The highway acts as a great leveller for all vehicles. We do not know who will drive in what manner and so we need to treat everyone equally and as such acts as a good leveller.

3. Judgement : Driving helps us develop judgemental skills. Gets developed slowly and steadily.

4. Knowing when to call it quits : A highway offers huge scope for speeding cars. It depends on the individual to decide to what speed he will go before he calls it quits. So, in a way highway helps to see the risk apetite of an individual too. Not only the speed aspect, the way in which a person overtakes other vehicles says a lot about the risk taking ability of the driver.


5. Know your strengths/skills before jumping - A highway teaches us to first know our own strengths and capacities before competing. A Maruti 800 cannot compete with BMWs on a highway. We need to understand our limitations and decide our path accordingly.

6. Never underestimate small players: Most of the accidents on highways happen due to 2-wheelers on the highways. 2 - wheelers overtake from the left side, occupy a whole lane and hence are the cause of majority of the accidents on highways (after of course tractors :P). While driving, we need to tackle these 2-wheelers smartly. We can never underestimate these 2 wheelers. They are bound to raise troubles when we overtake if we ignore them like nobody.

 In addition to these things, at the stops at small dhabas we make on highways for meals, we can learn a great deal about the lives of drivers, the way they protect their consignments at night, the pressures they face due to the rising costs, etc. Such talks are really insightful, especially for a marketeer.

I wish all drivers a safe and a cautious journey and follow all the journey rules.