CAT (Completely Asinine Test)

(this is one of the blogs I had written when I gave my first CAT in 2005).. found it lying somewhere in my data backup dump.. worth a read)

20^th November, 2005. What better date can I find to write on this topic, than the date on which I gave this bugging exam. Come to think of it, this day probably was one of those ‘weirdest’ days of my life. Too many upheavals, contradictions and all that emotional jargon. I don’t know where to start so I guess I’ll describe my entire day. Maybe that way I’ll understand how I started feeling sick (emotionally).

The morning was pretty normal. I left my house at 9:30. My test centre was St. Xavier’s College. My roomies had decided to go to the church. Maybe the Indian Gods were too busy distributing their blessings to the Hindu CAT aspirants that it would take a long time before we got our blessings. But I guess going to the church seemed a more up market proposition than going to a temple; Whatever! All I knew was that I hadn’t been to a church since quite some time, and I was excited towards the entire deal.

So there I was sitting alone on a bench, hands folded, eyes closed, sitting there and praying, or confessing rather. It seems funny but when you feel that whatever you’re speaking in your mind is being listened to by a very wise person, its gives you a very satisfied feeling. There is a sense of security that your thoughts are getting conveyed to someone potent and whatever that you confess is being conveyed to the person whom you wish to and not to anyone else. To be very frank I simply don’t believe in Hero worship. Not that I’m an atheist, but I do love silent places. Maybe the temples of India have become noisier than a fish market. But I don’t want to get into all that.

The point is I was confessing things that were not supposed to come out at that point of time. Or maybe they shouldn’t have come out at all. I mean THE ACTUAL CAT was less than an hour away, and I was there, sitting peacefully, pouring my heart out on matters everything else other than CAT. There are times when your mind refuses to concentrate on matters more immediate and important and ponders over other things, which are undoubtedly important but not at the current moment. At least it always happens with me. Maybe I’m too shallow I don’t know.

My friends quickly got up and began to leave. Their test centers were different so they had to leave. I wished I could sit there at the church the entire day, talking to an imaginary person seeking the meaning of life, or something less philosophical. But the irony was I had to appear for CAT. I left the church and entered college, trying to find my classroom. And when I did, I realized I had to sit at the last bench. Life can be pretty symbolic at times I tell you.

There too the reporting time was 10:15 a.m., and you don’t get the question paper in hand before 10:45 a.m. So I had another half an hour to spare, all by myself. It wasn’t that we were not allowed to speak. But the scenario was such. Every other person sitting in the classroom and every other person sitting in hundreds of other such classrooms was a competitor. So everyone was busy giving the you’re-dead-meat glances. Thus, I chose to stare at my answer sheet than see glaring faces towards me. Maybe my dressing was too classic (White Shirt and jeans) that people kept staring at me making false assumptions. Who cares?

I don’t exactly remember what all did I do during those 30 minutes, but believe me they seemed unending. Mentally I could’ve recalled my entire life till date in those few minutes. Luckily, this time I did think about CAT. Not how to devise strategies or something, but it was more of an introspection. Strategy development was an impossible option for me. It was like asking a beggar to choose between 3 bungalows for which he had no money to buy. Coming to the introspection part, I realized that, all I did to prepare for the CAT was spend more than a year going to big-big training institutes and adding heaps of material to pile up on my desk. And that was it. It was the be-all and end-all for CAT in Bhushir’s terms. There was a feeling of apathy and lack of grandeur; you could in fact term it as the ‘Underdog Statement of the Year’. And it was during these 30 minutes that the mental transformation was talking place.

Once I got the CAT paper, all those nasty thoughts disappeared instantaneously. But I knew it, deep inside me, they were still lurking somewhere. They had conveyed the message to me only partially. Perhaps the climax was still to come.

The bell rang and I finally began. While I was opening the seal I suddenly realized that I was giving a competitive exam for the first time in my life! Your mind has a habit of throwing facts at some of the oddest moments I tell you. The next 2 hours passed quickly than the 30 minutes I had to spend with myself. Once the paper got over, I was sort of relieved. Most people after giving the CAT crib about having a severe headache or want to go home and sleep. It never happened to me! I mean I didn’t mark circles in the OMR sheet as per my whims and fancies. I did apply my logic, whatever that I possessed and tried my best. While most people feel drained and stressed out after the CAT exam, I was in fact feeling all charged up! Why don’t all these melodramatic transformations happen to me! Maybe I’m the most uninteresting guy on this planet. And I think my White Shirt and Jeans supplemented the fact.

While going back home I saw the church again. It was closed. Or else I could’ve sat there for some more time. While I was waiting for my friends to show up, I did a little bit of statistics on my CAT paper. Just think; 1,70,000 students, 90 questions and 2 hours. This was the test thrown to each CAT aspirant to find out whether he was eligible for an average salary of 7 lacs. It’s a cranky statement I know, but I couldn’t think of any other way to summarize how I felt about CAT. Fundamentally I saw no logic in asking students an RC passage that was all related to Arts & Literature, and thereby also testing one’s aptitude. After giving the CAT, I later found that students of Arts Faculty take a year or so to understand the entire theory, an excerpt of which we got as an RC passage (The theory was on Deconstruction by some loony guy called Derrida). And we were expected to understand whatever he propagated within a matter of 7 minutes and also answer a handful of 4-5 questions on the same. I didn’t find anything wrong about his theory on Deconstruction or whatever. It seemed interesting in fact (During such times anything and everything seems interesting except the CAT paper). But what I didn’t like is that what relation does it hold to you becoming a manager? The previous statement kept ringing in my ears for almost each and every question that I saw in the paper after giving the CAT. Just tell me, how do you judge a person’s ability to undertake responsibility by knowing if he knew synonyms of few inane words like fingummy? Or how would you judge a person’s marketing skills by finding out if he knew the value of 30²⁷²⁰! It’s pretty absurd if you ask me. Is this the way one evaluates your prospects of being a future manager? And on top of it, those scumbag IIT grads take away all the limelight and the seats as well.

Just then, suddenly, that something lurking inside me sprang out. My conscience grabbed hold of me right from the neck and said, “Alright mister, enough is enough. You think you can keep complaining about all the systems in the world and get away with it? You think you can publicize your ‘I’m Different’ theory to whomsoever you wish? Well that isn’t going to happen. Sure you can complain about all the exams in the world, it’s your mouth you’re using. But did you ever question about doing anything worthwhile while working with yourself, alone, away from the protocols of any system in the world? Have you? Ever? I think you need to realize mister that the system is not wrong, you are. The system doesn’t constrict your actual potential. It never does. The only bloody fact is you’re nothing more than a dimwit underdog… Get it. Underdog!”

Underdog. That was all I needed to hear. And I lost it. I couldn’t stand the facts anymore. I just lose my control when someone talks about the obvious things about me. That’s when my scruples forced me to realize that whatever I said to the CAT exam and the IIT dudes was not exactly justified. I had to take back my words, whatever that I had said, simply to save from embarrassing my own self, so that I could prove my own conscience that “See mister! I can gulp down my own puke!” I sometimes seriously hate my conscience; simply because there’s no running away from it.

I know I’m physically unappealing and mentally sick and rationally irrational and every other fancy abuse you can think of. But I always have a put on mask, always hiding the real me. But when it becomes too much, conscience whips you in the butt and brings you back down to ground zero. There are few people in the world to whom I listen to. I’m actually a stubborn bastard in that sense. And when you need such people to tell you things, they’re never around. So your conscience takes the advantage and starts giving you left-and-right. And believe me my conscience is not at all humane when it comes to making me realize certain things.

All I know is that 20^th November was not at all a great day for me. Sure I always keep on talking to myself while driving or so, but that day was heights. I knew I needed to hear what all I told to myself, still I refused to accept it and it’s still lingering all around me. And I realized the enormity of the situation when I went to a friend’s birthday party that night and find that I had lost my appetite.

I know you might be questioning what does a man’s stomach have to do with what’s going on in his head. But for me, frankly speaking, appetite is like a perpetual phenomenon. I’m always hungry… for food, to be precise. And at that night I felt no urge to eat. It means things were not just serious. They were way beyond serious. Stars don’t fall from the sky every day and I don’t keep losing my appetite every now and then. Rarely and I mean rarely has it ever happened. In short I hope you understood how pissed off I was with the entire thing.

Eventually, all I wanted to say was that after giving the ACTUAL CAT, I really feel, getting into IIMs is not that difficult. Maybe you’ve watched too many news channels if you beg to differ. Probably this was THE ONLY good feeling that I had throughout the entire day. I lost one chance, but I haven’t lost it all. Even after all the castigation I had to suffer from my conscience (the stupid whiner) that perpetually questioned my aims regarding Oxford and laptops, I knew for sure, that all is not lost, but it can. It was the truest feeling of all. No consciences or other similar henchmen in the world can break that conviction of mine. All is not lost, but it can. There’s a ray of hope, a small one at that, which gives me strength. But all the while I also need to remember that there’s an underlying danger as well, which I need to avoid at all costs.

Maybe the strength that ray provides is little, but I guess for the time being it’ll have to do. Hierarchy of Needs; as Maslow would put it.

Making Sense of Business

Get your basics straight, and the rest will follow... this is one of the major take-aways from my b-school learning. And this statement applies to anything thats about business and business acumen.

For most enterprises, the prime business question is not about where to get the money from, or the day to day running of business. The question is, how do the entrepreneurs want to see their business grow; in what direction?

This question is crucial because it defines a lot of things, and clears a lot of clutter from one's head.

What is it that you really want your business to be? Volume driven or Value Driven? What is the precise definition of the customer you want to cater to? Simple, basic questions pertaining to who, why, and how. Thats it.

But more often than not, the entrepreneurs don't get the answers to these questions straight in their heads. From the very start, their ideas are not clear about what they really want to create.

And I dont blame them. The world is full of opportunities. And an enthusiastic entrepreneur would always want to make use of every opportunity even if it remotely helps his business. The opportunity might be a new concept/product/pricing/market... anything...

And in this flight of enthisiasm and excitement, they take up these opportunities which might not necessarily be helpful in achieving their final goal.. And few years down the line, you might find that the business has grown, but its scattered across all directions.

However, there's one reason why basics go a little haywire in the process of growing a business for which the entrepreneur needs to be given the benefit of the doubt.

When a business starts, the entrepreneur looks desperately for revenue. There's no better satisfaction than money coming into the business. How it comes, whether its "in-line-with-the-strategic-objectives-of-business" is immaterial. Better toplines are the start of making a business profitable. And in this gamut of achieving financial sustainability, certain objectives go haywire.

Although this cannot serve as an alibi for any entrepreneur for long. Once financial stability is increased, I believe one should always look back, and think of what one really wanted to build, and to what extent has that been achievable.

Numbers towards the end of the day speak a true picture of business. And as long as an entrepreneur is looking at the numbers closely, I doubt he would face troubles in the future. Re-visiting the basics every once in a while is the key to keeping oneself grounded, and in line with reality.

In the end, all I know is that looking back and reflecting on one's actions and looking at numbers are the 2 best ways of keeping one in harmony with one's own business.

Microsoft’s dominance (or the attempt thereof)

As this post goes on the blog thousands of people might have downloaded the recently released beta version of Windows 7, the new operating system from MS. As per the reviews on torrent sites and other articles, Windows 7 does seem to have provided a lot of relief to the Vista using community, with reduced startup times, lesser BSODs and the likes.

While going through the reviews, a few Mac fanboys (like me) also mocked at the desperation of mr.softy to release a beta of a new OS to the open public, and start bragging about it, instead of working on the current OS offering, the Vista.

Whatever be the case, this blog is essentially a walk down the memory lane and to see how mr.softy tried hard to dominate in a few areas other than Operating Systems.

 

DirectX vs. OpenGL
During the mid 90’s when MS was about to release its first iteration of Windows 95, they also needed to develop and API that would be able to help programmers make games for Windows based OS’s. OpenGL as an API was a standard and highly competitive. Even though OpenGL existed and was a successful API which was cross-platform functional, MS made sure DirectX gained grounds especially amongst game developers and graphic engine manufacturers like nVidia.

Today DirectX is on its 10^th iteration and OpenGL seems to have died in the process.

Silverlight vs. Adobe Flash
Adobe flash is an industry standard plugin to enable rich media to be played on a computer. Rich media includes music/video, animation, vector graphics, the likes…

Flash was working just fine and the industry really didn’t seem to have a problem with the plugin. However, Microsoft had to step in and make its own iteration calling it Silverlight. The first thing mr.softy did was to make its own websites enabled with Silverlight, thus prompting customers to install the plugin to gain full access to rich media on places like msn.com. And customers found it pretty irritating to install Silverlight, for merely accessing a handful of Microsoft’s sites.

Personally, the Silverlight attempt was pretty lame at the outset and although the product inherently is quite promising, its pretty much redundant, since Flash does the same thing and has a much wider acceptance.

Adobe’s Suite vs. Expressions
This one’s my favorite. One day MS got this crazy idea to diversify into the creative sphere. There are already stalwarts like Adobe and Corel which are the de-facto products for graphic applications. And MS tried to venture out with its own iteration of a grphics suite, calling it Microsoft Expressions. Personally I’ve never heard anyone using MS Expressions for graphic intensive projects. Its just plain failure. Even if you take a plain judgement statement, one can never relate Microsoft products being able to create breathtaking visuals or videos. Microsoft products are just plain nerdy, adept at charts, and tables. Graphic design isn’t just their field, and the sheer ignorance of people towards MS Expressions is the proof.

MS Office vs. Open Office/iWorks
This is one area where Mr.Softy wins hands down, and it rightly deserves to be the crown king in Office applications and the likes. Each of its products are downright sturdy, nerdy, and widely used in the industry. Its precisely what an average/high end office would want, and MS has delivered and is delivering flawlessly with every iteration of its MS Office software. True, its office automation software costs more than the OS, but its pretty much worth it.

I love Office, but I also love the Mac :)

Apart from these MS has waged software wars against ERP giants like Oracle and SAP, programming applications, etc. These are domains I’m less aware of, so cant really comment.

All in all, apart from Office productivity softwares there really isn’t much that MS has achieved. Instead of trying its hands on everything they should rather focus on making a more stable OS.

Chinese Imitation vs. European Innovation

With just about 6 months of ‘real corporate experience’ as some of my professors would call it, I’ve realised some of the vital differences between the Europeans and the Chinese.

Both the communities have gone through different periods of highs and lows; each economy had their own share of downfalls, but how they’ve eventually grown up is whats so interesting about them...

Coming to the point, my examples would probably refer more to the cosmetic industry, but I’m sure a lot of it applies to other industries too...

If you go to an international trade exhibition for instance, the way the Europeans set up their stalls is way different from the way Chinese people do. The white dudes always have that panache, that extra thing in their stalls... perfumed tissues and chocolates(tiffany’s and not some shady brand), coffee vending machines, freebies and all that... while the yellow dudes have completely plain and simple stalls, with the weirdest names possible. All they can offer you are bulky brochures and have some thousand pieces on display... As for Europeans, they have minimalistic display of actual products on the stalls... rather there are flat screen displays and cute little ladies with laptops ready with the latest presentations on new products...

While the Chinese people take out a visitor register for you to enter you name and email address and the company you work for, the Europeans have a bowl somewhere to drop your visiting card in... while the Chinese people welcome you with a genuine smile, they really cant get ahead more than that since their language skills are limited... While a European makes sure that he’s not too forthcoming in welcoming attendees to his/her stall and keeps the talk rather focused.

While the Europeans guarantee the best in terms of cutting edge research (even for something as boring as plastic bottle packaging), the Chinese guarantee that you give us anything, and we’ll give you a cutting edge copy of the same!

While the Europeans blabber a lot about R&D and innovation in design, thats sadly not something that a Chinese supplier would ever be able to do. But tell him what you want, specify it, guide him, and he’ll give you exactly what you asked for.

The Europeans feel the product. Its as if they add a soul to something so boring as a glass jar and call it exotic or something. But the Chinese just look at the product as a product. A glass jar, is a glass jar, is a glass jar. Cut the crap and get to the point types! They cannot innovate. They cant think on ‘how can I make this better’. They can always say, that, ‘you tell me what to do, and it’ll be done’...

And even when it comes to dealing with Europeans on a business relationship, they’re way too finicky, especially the French. They talk as if, even making a plastic bottle requires so much of care and precision like probably a gourmet dish does. They’re extremely slow in replying to queries and take their own sweet time. The Chinese on the other hand, are like hungry cats, waiting to get new orders. They will do as many changes as asked, to make sure that they get the final order.

And I feel all this is really sad. Its sad because the Europeans just dont see that their businesses are being taken away by Chinese suppliers, while they’re busy being finicky with the customer on how should a bottle look like. And, its also sad to see that a Chinese supplier has no knowledge base of the product he’s making at all, so as to make some improvements to it and give it to the customer...

While one supplier base, can provide real customer service, they’re overdoing at certain areas, whereas the other supplier base can give great value for the goods, but is zilch on any most kinds of customer services... Its like choosing the lesser evil...

Arabs and food

There’s some pretty interesting stuff I found out about Arabs and their relationship with food. Firstly, Arabs as a tribe or as a community is plagued by a compulsive eating disorder. They have to eat… all the time. Doesn’t matter whether they’re hungry, or thirsty, or what time it is… they just have to eat. And that’s really one of the reasons why a large part of the Arab community is so obese. This includes young Arabs too.

Whats more interesting to know, and it’s a sad thing too, is that they purposefully waste food. That is, they never buy things in small sizes. They always buy things in family packs or large quantities. It’s always more than what’s required. If 2 packs of chips would do, they’d buy a family pack of 4 instead, and obviously there’ll be some leftovers, which they’ll throw away.

In a way, its proving that we have so much (in terms of opulence) that we can afford to throw it away.

Sad no?

Zara enters/should enter/should not enter India - Part 3

There are alredy 2 blogs written on this topic earlier. Assuming you’ve read them already, I’ll not waste time on the technicalities of the Zara model, and get to the point.

Should Zara (really) enter India or not? If you look at it in that sense, perhaps every other international brand should enter India. And why not? A sizable part of the population of India is under 30 years of age; disposable incomes are rising, so are aspirations, living standards, customer awareness, and all the economic lingo stuff.

But that’s not the point. Just because things are getting better in an economy doesn’t mean that we have graduated to any other brand/product in the world. As a primer to this statement, lets take the example of a microwave. I think about 7-8 years ago, microwaves were first introduced in India. I really don’t know when, but what I do know is that consumer acceptance of that product wasn’t exactly high. For any American, a microwave is a necessity. Probably an American can live without a stove for a while, but not a microwave. That clearly didn’t happen in India. Heating cold food and feeding it to the children was like a disgrace on a mother’s part.

Today, after such a long time, things are changing aren’t they? And mind you, they’re still in the changing mode. Microwaves still haven’t received absolute acceptance even after giving the consumer so much amount of time to graduate to one.

Same goes for Zara. We as Indians used to wear only traditional dhotis and salwaar-kamiz 80 odd years ago. The transition to the western clothing apparently began during the British rule. So firstly in absolute numbers we’re about 300 years behind the Europeans as far as fashion for western clothing goes.

Think about it; even today, if you wear your dad’s shirt and go out, no one would be able to point out that this is an ‘old cut’. The cuts, the stitching techniques have remained the same since a really really long time.

Think about women’s formals for instance. There’s an extremely short range of women formal shirts available in India. And mind you, I’m talking about the design and cuts, not the color of the shirt.

To put it in simple mathematical sense, this is how the 2 ideologies differ:

For Indian Fashion Industry its –
few cuts x lots of color variations

For the Zara Model its –
many cuts x very few color variations

And even if we take colors as a basis, even that sadly isn’t our strongpoint. We were shades of red in summer and wear shades of yellow during winter.

We wear linen in winter sometimes and synthetic materials in summers as well.

There’s no synchrony in us as far as colors, shades, cuts, fabrics go. We wear whatever we feel looks good on us. Every season, has its own shade, color swatch, designs, cuts etc. etc. We’re never so detailed as far as these attributed go. And the Europeans are extremely fetish about these minor details; the same way we’re fetish about cricket maybe.

Also, India follows a 2 season process; Summer/spring collection & winter/monsoon collection. While in Europe there are 4 different collections released for all the 4 different seasons.

Also, I don’t know how many of the readers have seen a Zara store, but Zara doesn’t play with colors a lot. It plays with cuts. And to save on its supply chain costs, you wont find colors other than white, black, grey, cream, red and a few more. Their color swatch is extremely limited, and their design swatch is much higher than an average Indian apparel outlet. You really think Indians will gladly buy only base colors and wear them, when they have so many other vibrant colors being offered by other apparel retailers?

Mango, one of the leading fashion wear brand for urban women has a few stores in India. The collection that it keeps on the Indian stores is one season old already in the International markets.

After reading all this some might see this as a drawback in us Indians, that we’re not so sensitive towards colors and cuts etc; that we haven’t graduated to these details like others have. But honestly are we supposed to graduate? Were shirts and trousers a part of our cultural heritage? We have our own saaris and salwar kameez. That’s where our forte lies. And that’s precisely the reason why Zara originated in Spain and not some shady town in India.

Zara has not been quite a success in the US, and for the simple reason that an average USUS, not in Europe. citizen wants clothing that is completely relaxed, functional and rugged. That’s why jeans were invented in the

Europe has its own fashion, US has its denim jeans, India has its bandhani.

Its seriously wrong for any of us to expect to graduate to the fashion sense that Europeans have. Simply because their definition of fashion is different than ours.

In Gujarati, there’s a saying, ‘gaam khase ke gaadu?’ (should the village move or the bullock cart?)

P.S. Thanks a lot to Sharimbal Kanishk (ex-Globus merchandiser & a NIFT grad) for all the info on Indian Fashion Industry.

cam expose

aha! Another hidden cam expose! Stumbleupon is the sweetest thing on web I’ve found. Good time pass if bored!

Anyways, so this one talks about glasses that says ‘sterilized’ actually being washed in your wash basin instead of some clean washing space.

I’m like so what? At least they’re being washed. One should come to the kitchen of an Indian hotel. That guy will probably faint and wont ever come to eat at a hotel again. Typically Indian 5 star hotels have frozen everything. Frozen juices, frozen chicken, paneer, and stuff like that. All they do is take it out, heat it, add gravy and give it to you.

Still we hog like crazy no? And brag about it in front of the neighbors too the next day… “We had lunch at Le Meridian!”… yeah right… and the food was like probably a year old! But who listens to me anyways!

teachin n all that

sometimes i get an immense feeling that i shall some day teach. i know its not at all an easy task to make people listen to you especially if their hormones are raging and they're too busy noticing the opposite sex.

but yes, this is the first time i'm getting the hang of what a practical work environment looks like. and it seems completely off tangent to what i've been taught in many aspects. there are so many things that one can tell the learning generation to take care of, or to acknowledge so that they stand a better place in the job market.

and apart from that, there are certain notions that i would really like to clear them of. its necessary to make them realise that marketing is not just about big words like branding and advertising and all that. every single aspect in a product or service creation and delivery is a way of marketing your brand.

i remember my marketing classes during my under graduation were always filled with the mundane and long acknowledged examples. for examples related to luxury you immediately had mercedes and bmw names popping out, for cult followings you always had harley davidson and apple ipods as the most favorite examples, for any other normal question posed by the professor any damn FMCG brand would do just swell. that's how my marketing class ended (and we still thought that we did a pretty darn good job and learned a lot in it).

i really wish that i could make the students realise that there are a lot other brands, a lot many other marketing activities that might give a whole lot of learning than the regular mercedes and Lifebuoy. its not about bragging the fact that i know about brands that you've not even heard of; its about telling that there are products and services which are far more fascinating and technical than a regular FMCG brand.

HLL (or Unilever) has been a star recruiter at IIMs. No offence to the placement committee or the people who join the company, but clearly what they do is not marketing. because if you're trying to tell me that you make brands by letting it eat into your own market share of some other brand, that you make brands by making the holes of your toothpaste nozzle bigger, that you make brands by selling buckets free with your detergents, that you make brands by pushing inventory and pushing even more inventory to your stockist to sell, then honestly you're not really building a building. i mean as far as FMCG is concerned, today a time has come that the market has saturated. you cant make a person use more toothpaste than he previously was by more advertising. you cant make a person use more detergent more than what she previously used. the only way to expand market share is through geographical expansion. there might have been innumberable instances of IIM grads citing experiences of being sent to rural villages for the first 2 months after joining HLL or whatever. but bottomline, thats a sad place for getting to know what marketing is.

alright, enought badgering the FMCG giant.

but if i had the chance i would really like my students to explore about how to market cord blood banking... or i would ask them to study how to market a bottle like SIGG (hit google if you dont know.. but SIGG is probably one of the world's strongest water bottles. each bottle is made out of a single piece of alumnium metal. no welding, no riveting, no clamping of any sort. and one 500ml water bottle costs rs.1000)... or probably how to market an industrial good like motors or machine tools and things like that...

i would want to make them realise, that with websites like blogger, deviantart, istockpro, adobe's softwares, youtube, orkut and facebook, one has as much tools under his/her belt as a normal media powerhouse. i want to make them realise that if they really want, they can easily be a one man(or woman) company, if they know the right trades and techniques, that access to information has become easy that it has put everyone on the same platter, on the same level... you have as much information about the world and its happenings as much as the Prime Minister or the President would have. i would like to tell them that one can really prove his/her worth in this world if the person really has talent; that you dont need politics, or contacts to get to the top.

Today there are bloggers, in their late 30s or so, who are equally popular to the writing sphere as the contemporary people like Shobha De or Sashi Tharoor might be. There are people on youtube who've gained more fame by just uploading 20 videos of the songs they sung, than what Abhijeet Sawant could even imagine, and are far ahead than the ones who won/lost at Indian Idol and other such reality shows. today, most people think that the nearest advertising agency is the best possible solution for their media needs. little do they know that just a computer away at guru.com they'll have access to options far than they could even fathom and at rates which could put even the local ad agency to shame.

and even after such proliferation of information, such access to a wealth of knowledge, people simply overlook aspects that are right on their face, but fail to acknowledge it, or take it for granted.

an intruiging example would be the state transport of Gujarat. over the years i've been travelling in buses, and the upsruge of privately running buses have been increasing. but sadly the state transport which has the largest network under its belt is still incurring losses. why? we saw a turn-around in the railway sector, why not here?

or lets take something else. today cricket by itself is getting a make-over. Cricket is truly becoming the cricket it is supposed to become; where money is paid to cricketers to perform and not for their names. a cricketer is now finally being evaluated as a financial instrument; where he's judged on his Net Present Value, or the expected future returns over money put in right now. this means that any investor looking to invest in a cricketer would like to have a marketplace where he can have all the vital stats of all eligible investments (read cricketers). the first thing that struck to me was that this calls for a centralised data warehouse system which collects performance data of all the state run cricket associations. sure enough no investor would like to roam from state to state trying to hunt for a suitable investment. just a website that keeps a record of all the vital stats for all cricketers who play under the state banner or the national banner can be an ideal place for any investor to vsit. but i doubt if anyone thought of that.

there are similar such experiences that i've faced, and i've felt that all these anomalies that need to be expolited cant be done by me alone. and i need to make someone else realise that there are these many things and you can exploit them too. creaing value is a highly time consuming job. but if you can also help me out in making life simpler for everyone (and a little more richer for yourself) there's nothing wrong about it.

Oracle.! That ain't my job!

Disclaimer: people with no prior knowledge of Oracle (the ERP solutions software) might find this post equivalent to reading Hebrew or whatever!

It’s been a while since we’ve been haggling with the Oracle implementation in our firm. And the views of everyone around as well as myself are quite varied. But it would be fun to surmise all the feelings into one post.

As a background I’d like to note that we’re the only (read again: the only) organization to have implemented Oracle 12.x version of the ERP software. Now I don’t know how big a deal that is, but since I got a mail from the Central IT dept., I reckon its worth a note! Alright. Enough chit chat. Lets get to the whole analysis thingy.

One of the first things that strikes me, is that essentially any ERP solutions software is supposed to be built around a business model, so that it can enhance the efficiency of business and enable free flow of information and the usual yada yada. But more often than not, it so happens that the business unit starts molding itself around the ERP software. Job responsibilities change, work load shifts from one department to the other; and that inevitably leads to resistance. People who loathe excel sheets and their short comings would prefer sticking to the long list of rows and columns instead of getting the responsibility to enter additional data which either they didn’t use to handle earlier or is inaccessible to them.

And sadly when most Central IT Teams responsible for implementing Oracle announce the changes in the job profile, they’re badgered left and right. “Why should buying dept. define in what size of boxes will the final product be shipped? That’s the job of the Shipping Department!”… “Why should we go to the Finance people to create a Supplier? Isn’t Supplier maintenance a job of a Buyer?”

And the only answer that the IT team can give out is that ‘these are the best industry practices and that’s why we follow them’. Well according to me, what might be the best for the industry might not be the best for my organization! But who listens to me anyways.!

The second problem I see is the cold-war sort of situation between the Central IT team (who implements Oracle) and the other office users. The IT team, a bunch of enthu chaps that they are try to boost up people around by holding meetings and praising how Oracle will change their lives as well as the company’s.

This is one of the times I feel Change Management becomes so crucial. And the reason is simple. Shifting from one style of working to the other will always face resistance. Moreover, in the previous style of working, there always used to be a human being who could be held responsible for any goof-up. But here, if the system goofs-up sadly you cant just go to any desk and start blaming any person for not finishing his/her work.

On the other hand, Orcale does prevent the loss of important information. Call it intellectual property protection or something like that. But essentially what it means to say is that if tomorrow I stand up and say bye-bye to the company, it doesn’t mean that all the supplier level relationships in terms of pricing and other conditions also go out of the window. The new guy who comes in has complete access to the deals I struck and can exploit them for future references. Pretty dainty I would say.

Also, I think what Oracle would (hopefully) do best, is that it’ll give clean data, scrapped off all the anomalies across departments which will be updated faster and will be far more accurate than what it has been till now.

I’m just waiting for things to fall in place and Oracle to start pouring in data. Once that happens, people will immediately transform from self-interested midgets to strategic analysts and all that management enhanced jargons.

Project Shakti and ITC e-choupal

I’ve been wanting to write this since long but I haven’t been able to find a lot of proof about the facts that I’m to pen down right now…

During my graduation I did a rural market survey on FMCG products and stuff like that. It was more like a formality to be completed, but since my group was one excited lot, we went to somewhere close to a thousand different households and asked about their lifestyle and got questionnaires filled. It was like a weeklong trip to the insides of small villages where the population is not more than 2000.

In the process of getting questionnaires filled and going from one household to another, I became extremely interested in the rural markets, and the consumer behavior of these people. We used to travel in an SUV that we’d hired for a week. And the very fact that people used to start peeking out of their households when they saw an SUV coming gave us the feeling that their life was so rigidly and extremely simple, that even a car filled with 6 students is enough to generate curiosity amongst the village people.

Many thought that we were there to sell something, and before we opened our mouths they used to tell us, “nahi nahi… kuch nahi chahiye” and rushed to close their front doors. But we had to knock back and tell them that we are here to ask a few questions and not sell anything. And a response to that would usually be a question like… are you from the population survey? After getting all these issues sorted out, we would get down to making them answer the questions in the questionnaires.

And most often than not, if the questionnaire was being answered by the mother or father, they used to call their children to respond to the questions, especially for soaps and shampoos. This again was pretty fascinating since the toddlers popped brand names like crazy. They precisely knew which actress endorsed which brand and how it smelled and all that. Usually the mom would end up saying that she sometimes let the children handle which soap to buy and which shampoo to buy. Sure they had their preferences, but kids were the biggest lot who were open to trying new brands.

So the scene was something like, the elderly male usually remained aloof from all this decision making. Give him a Lifebuoy anyday and he’ll be happy. The elder female made decisions with regards to washing soaps and salt (in fact most women didn’t buy branded salt since they had this myth that since branded salt was whiter than the normal one, it had more harmful chemicals), and many a times, the kids made decisions on which soap to buy.

In fact at some houses there were 2 different soaps being used. The locally made soap was used by the elders and branded ones by the kids. But in all cases, kids were much more receptive to brands, and much better risk-takers than the rest.

Now, moving away from the questionnaire part, we went back and started hunting for previous research to support our research. In the process we came across ‘Project Shakti’ and ‘e-choupal’, two concepts headed by 2 of the biggest consumable marketers of India, HLL or Uniliver and ITC respectively.

But what was even more surprising was that out of all the districts that we went to in the ahmedabad vicinity, no-where did we find an instance of either Project Shakti or ITC’s e-choupal. Maybe because of the fact that we had taken convenience sampling. But I also remember that we used to take permission from every village’s Sarpanch before we went ahead and did our survey. And none of the Sarpanch’s also talked about these 2 initiatives while briefing us.

When I went for my post grad @ SP Jain Dubai | Singapore, I came across cases on ITC e-choupal, and Project Shakti on a frequent basis. CK Prahalad in his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid also talked about ITC e-choupal, and I was pretty impressed about it.

I worked out some costings, and found that even though the installation cost for an e-choupal was considerably high, the returns it gave were able to recover the costs of the installation in just a year’s time. Just a year’s harvesting was all that was required to recover the costs. At that rate, I felt essentially ITC’s e-choupal should be running in full gear and must be getting implemented at various places simultaneously. But I never heard news about its progress. While it’s a pure success in the case studies, it really doesn’t seem to be the case in reality. I couldn’t confirm it completely. But even the supply chain professors who came to teach said that the situation has become more like ‘all fart and no shit’… which only leads us to the point that companies are probably not willing to commit to large amounts of money to an initiative like e-choupal. The technology and the infrastructure might be available, but trust between the corporations and BoP people still doesn’t seem to have been established to make e-choupal a success.

Same applies for Project Shakti. Unilever made a smart move to position Project Shakti as a CSR kinda initiative from the very beginning. So even if the project bombed, it wouldn’t be called as a failure. And the project did bomb. Thus, Project Shakti does still remain very much a CSR initiative.

Sad no?!

Herd Mentality

I read this post on Freakonomics blog that talked about the herd mentality when it came to boarding a bus… if you think about it people usually board the bus from the stop nearest to them. And its quite logical to use a bus stop that’s nearer to you. But when a lot of people start thinking the same, that bus stop becomes overcrowded. And somehow people still don’t realize that if they just go a few yards away to another bus stop that’s less crowded they have better chances of boarding a bus than they had earlier…

Something quite similar I experienced when I went to a mall beside my work place. The thing is this mall has nearby commercial offices. Thus, during lunch hours the food court and lavatories are the 2 places with long lines.

One day, instead of waiting in the line, I took the escalator to the next floor’s lavatory. It took me precisely 47 seconds to move up to floor 1 and find the men’s room there. And it was completely empty. Not a soul was there, and since no one used it, it was far cleaner than the one on the ground floor which probably was being rummaged by a lot of people at that time.

This is where herd mentality gets to you. Same goes for checkout counters in supermarkets. The checkout lines to the extreme end are more or less empty, while the checkout lines towards the middle are heavily crowded. Why? I mean, isn’t that common sense to move towards a line that’s not too crowded so that everyone can checkout faster!? Herd mentality again!

The World is Flat

Currently I'm undergoing a training on the Oracle E-business suite; a complete business ERP solution for enterprises and all that stuff. While the instructor was taking us through the process of item ordering and merchandise planning something just struck me...

The scene was like this... An Indian Company (Wipro) created a software on a platform developed in the US (Oracle) for a company in the Middle East (KOJ) which has employees from all across the world (India, Philippines, UAE, Lebanon, UK) and sources materials from countries like China, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, North Korea... another awesome testimony to the fact that the world is flat!

Make hay while the country messages

Throw your head a few months back… there was this ‘new 7 wonders of the world program’ that had hit the scene in India asking every single Indian citizen to vote for the Taj Mahal. Every galli ka kutta with the slightest iota of patriotism was asked to vote for his nation. Every single liner on the ‘motherland’ and ‘bhaarat maata’ was being hurled by the radio, news channels, and the likes. The media was in a rampage with all the TV channels giving consistent flashy ‘ticker ads’ to vote for the Taj Mahal literally begging us to save our ‘heritage’. All you had to do was to type in a message and send it to those 4 digit numbers so that even you could be a part of ‘making history’…

And thus began probably one of the biggest agglomerated marketing effort by the media houses of India. Now before I go ahead and make you realize how we were duped by the media houses and how we quite stupidly helped them make money while we satisfied our conscience by voting for the Taj, let me give you some background on some technicalities of the voting system.

Firstly, the voting system was majorly accepted through sms and an online voting system. There was unlimited number of votes that any person could cast. Thus scientifically the voting system is void completely. Also, the voting system has large dependencies on access to cell phone service or the internet. And lastly, the decision HAD to be skewed since every country doesn’t have the same population size. Surely you don’t expect Indians to vote for the Christ Redeemer in Brazil…! I mean this one is a no brainier… we’re the second largest population in the world; we had to win! Even if 1/10^th of the Indian population cast a vote it would be equivalent to the entire population of Brazil! And given the amount of cell phone proliferation that has happened in the recent times, I don’t think India was at a disadvantage by having a very low internet penetration. And lastly, the entire campaign of the new 7 wonders was a complete private initiative without any international organization backing. In fact, UNESCO issued a statement saying that they were not involved in any way in the ‘new 7 wonders’ campaign.

However, the media houses took this opportunity and turned it completely into a business opportunity. Here’s how. Every news channel has a dedicated sms number for all its services. For instance Star TV has its own private number, 7827. So when Star News urges to cast a vote for the Taj, it would give the number 7827. CNN-IBN might have its own, Zee News its own etc. etc… Each of these 4 digit numbers are provided by cellular service providers like Bharti-Airtel and BSNL to the media houses. So whenever you send a message to these 4-digit numbers you’re charged Rs.3 per message. Out of the 3 rupees, 1 rupee goes to the service provider and the remainder 2 rupees to the owner of the number (the media houses in this case).

Imagine a country with a population of more than 1.1 billion with a high cell phone penetration rate casting votes on these 4 digit numbers. Just think of the revenues the media houses might have raked in just by urging bumbling nitwits like us to cast votes using their numbers.

Was it really a question of preserving the ‘heritage’ and maintaining integrity and all that sentimental crap or was it a pure business opportunity? Your take…

Of potatoes and air conditioners

Everybody, or lets say almost everybody is loving the retail boom in India. I agree that its high time the retailers started giving a shopping experience that the mom and pop stores fail to provide.

And quite obviously one of the major attractions of the retail boom is the cost effectiveness being passed on to the customer. This holds true especially for daily household items and perishable goods like vegetables and regular grocery.

When it comes to the case of vegetables, Reliance Fresh is quite popular. And the fact that Reliance Fresh is more popular as compared to the other mandi fellows isn’t surprising. With air-conditioned environments and the likes it does become a favored place for people to shop for vegetables than the mandi with all its flies and cow-dung infested market space.

But someone tell me, is the core business proposition of Reliance Fresh – to sell fruits and vegetables (which however has been altered in recent times thanks to some unfortunate circumstances) a really profitable and more importantly a sustainable one? The basic problem with the service delivery is not the product, but the costs attached to it, and unlike in developed countries where these costs do not form a larger part of the expense-pie, it sadly does as far as India goes.

I mean, lets take an example of a Reliance Fresh store in Ahmedabad. An average Reliance store would have around 8 split air conditioners with 1.5 ton capacity. The commercial electricity rate for Ahmedabad is 4.85 rupees per unit. And assuming a typical reliance outlet operates for 12 hours a day, the total energy consumption of just 8 air-conditioners for 12 hours a day for a month comes to 3240 units = Rs.15,714 just for the air conditioning alone. The racks with cold storage which keeps the vegetables cool consumes almost twice or thrice as much as the power consumed by the A/Cs to keep the vegetables fresh, and thus twice or thrice as much increase in expenses. And we’ve still not taken the illumination and labour charges into account and not even the rent for the place which, by itself would also be equally high.

Now, spending almost a half a lakh on just illumination and cooling, plus an equitable sum on the rent for the place is quite a lot for just selling vegetables of which the largest selling commodities are tomatoes and potatoes which virtually have negligible margins. I do understand that there are some exotic SKUs like broccoli and things like that which give higher margins, but clearly it’s the potatoes and the tomatoes and other similar vegetables for which the customer comes to Reliance Fresh in the first place.

Lower margins and freaky expenses… it just doesn’t add up at least to me! And I still haven’t taken into account a lot of things… the supply chain expenses, the management fees, the cold storage expenses and most importantly the markdowns that happen everyday since vegetables are a perishable commodity.

I just don’t see where the money is coming… its just going out! If Reliance really wants to be in the market of vegetables for long, the current system at least doesn’t approve of it… can’t say about the future.

Your take…

Linkin Park Live in Singapore

This is one of those moments in life which you've been waiting for since a long long time. After being a hard-core fan of Linkin Park for about 5 years, I finally got to see them… Live! I wouldn't attempt to write about how I felt and what was I feeling. But all I can say is after waiting in the line for about 4 hours, when they came on stage, sang 21 songs back to back, they blew my wits out for those 1.5 hours. You guys are awesome.!

Videocon ≠ Shah Rukh Khan

This is perhaps one of the lousiest cases in branding that I've come across. There was this aged prof who came to talk about marketing plans. The fellow seems to have worked with a lot of Pharma companies and consumer durables of which one is Videocon. Interestingly he seemed to brag about this example while I found it a complete nut-case. In fact its an eye opener to the fact that using brand ambassadors is perhaps the easiest route to supposedly 'enhancing' a brand's image, but does that really work well is a matter of question.

Anyways, the case was about the why's and how's of Videocon roping in Shah Rukh Khan as a brand ambassador for itself. According to the professor, Videocon was perceived to be as a 'middle-class' brand and was looking at upgrading its image to an 'upper middle-class' brand. And the best way to deal with this situation was to rope in Shah Rukh Khan!

There weren't many drastic changes in the product line, there wasn't a change much in the pricing patterns either. Just plug in a celebrity and you're done! How sick can you get?!

Also a brand ambassador works on the rationale that there's some connect between the brand and the endorser. Here there's none! Also the rationale for taking SRK is a funny one. Videocon wanted to project itself as a 'truly multinational' brand or something. Bottom-line it wanted to project itself as a multinational, and to prove that it took SRK. Why SRK? That has an interesting answer.

Now according to the professor, SRK is very popular amongst Indians outside India (repeat… 'Indians' outside India). Thus, if the company wanted to project itself as a multinational SRK was the best choice.

Hmmm. One question… no… make that two… Do 'Indians', or for that matter anyone outside India buy Videocon? Nope.
And do Indians in India really care about the fact that SRK is famous globally as well? Nope.

Then where's the connect? Indians in India don't care a damn about what SRK means to the foreign world and the foreign people don't care a damn about what Videocon is selling to the Indians.

Then why SRK? Or an even more fundamental question, why project to be a multinational?

The answer is simple. This is the easier way out.

P.S. In reality Videocon is much larger than what its image really is. It is the world's 3^rd largest picture tube manufacturer, and has a huge stake in Oil and Gas exploration with one of the lowest operating costs in the Oil and Gas exploration field. And SRK just doesn't do the job really well.

Crop Forecasting - 2

A few posts back I had written about how value is eroded at all levels in the agriculture industry for the simple reason that nobody's aware how much crop production's gonna happen in the country in any given season. The value chain of ITC e-choupal occurs after the crop is harvested and sold in the market. But the point still remains who will tell how much production has actually happened in the country? Be it for a particular crop or for all the crops taken together, no one has the faintest idea about this. An interesting thing that CII does is that it holds national level conferences and calls all big traders in the agricultural business and asks their expert opinion about the crop production. Though it might seem cocky but it works to an extent.

HLL however, goes through a completely different channel. It does its own crop forecasting. Basically, HLL's many FMCG products especially soap are also dependent upon agriculture. For the simple reason that soap manufacturing requires oil, and oil comes from oil seeds. About 40% of the revenue of soaps is spent in buying oil and oil seeds. So when HLL spends 40% of its revenue on a single line of agricultural produce, one can imagine that it's no small deal. Also, crop forecasting gives HLL better insights into what should be its purchasing pattern, when should it buy, when would the stock arrive, how much would it be necessary to stock, will there be a shortage or excess supply of oil seeds etc etc.

So during harvest time, a team of HLL's investigators go around the country in a car, talking to the farmers who's got farms along the roadside, and take first hand info about the crops in that vicinity. They stop by every 5-10 miles and ask the farmer which crop is he growing and what his expected output per hectare is.

In fact the entire crop forecasting by HLL happens in 3 phases. Phase one occurs in July, during the start of the sowing season. The main objective is to gain an idea about the type of crops being grown in the region. Phase two happens in September during the middle of the crop season to ascertain how the crop is growing and also to know about the adequacy of rainfall and the effects of insects/pests if any. And finally when the harvesting has just started, the Phase three of investigation happens and that's when HLL can forecast with enough clarity the total crop production in the country.

The entire process takes about 65 man days to complete one round of investigation, and usually 4-5 investigators are given a route to survey which makes it possible to complete one entire round within a fortnight.

This is how India's largest FMCG manufacturer is ahead of the game, from the very start!

In Economics, there’s no free lunch… but Linux is!

A batch mate of mine went through a revelation about Linux yesterday. He had come to get some codec installed on his lappy since he couldn't view video files.

And while we were downloading a codec pack off the internet, he's like, "How come these guys can give all these things for free?!" It came as a shock to me at first though; considering the fact that I've been a freelance page designer since long enough, and most of my projects have been done for free (yes free), I couldn't understand how to make him understand the concept of open source.

So I began with Linux, and said that a codec pack is virtually nothing, and that there are OS's that are also available for free. Initially he was quite surprised and like most people who've been using Microsoft product since ages, also thought that the OS must be substandard in its working. First of all I had to make him understand what actually the concept of 'free' meant as far as Linux was concerned. Free didn't mean that the software didn't cost a thing. More than that, a free OS meant freedom; freedom to modify it, change it, label the changes under your name, and even re-distribute it to the masses so that others too can benefit from it.

Come to think of it, Linux, is more like knowledge, which grows when shared. While windows is like an online tutorial, where you pay to get something, Linux is like a forum, where one just needs to register and the knowledge is shared freely on message boards.

The fellow still had the persistent question as to, "How do these guys make money?"

I stopped trying to make the fellow understand that it wasn't about money, but it was more about the passion and the irreverence towards the concept of 'closed source'.

Instead I just told him that Linux is a brand, and the fellow didn't ask for more. Sometimes when you try to derive syllogisms for a phenomenon people just don't get it, but when one uses jargons, they just seem to understand the whole thing in a split second. Weird I tell you!

Hackint0sh… Insanely Mac… osX86 project

It has been 3 days since I've been trying to install a Mac OS X on my PC (yes you read it right… I'm trying to do it the other way around)

And sadly I've gone no farther than the setup main page. I've borrowed flash based hard disks, formatted, wipe cleaned my HP DV6000 thrice in 3 days, and the poor thing didn't even squeak; shifted between vista, windows xp and a dash of ubuntu, but no luck!

15 days before the placements begin and I thought this endeavor (which I thought I'll surely scrape through) would cheer me up. Seems its adding to the anxiety. But I'll get a Mac running on my PC before I leave this place… that's a promise…

What's interesting to see is how the Mac OS simply refuses to succumb to our wish and will. Technically it should be detecting a FAT32 partition. But it's not for some weird reason. We used a flash based 8GB hard disk formatted in Mac Journal (the format type which is meant for a Mac) using someone else's MacBook… No luck~!

We used an emulator to run the thing. No luck~!

We used a virtual machine (similar to Parallels on the MacBook to run Windows) called VMWare… No luck~!

And the best part of all, it behaves differently on different machines. We have 2 HP laptops up for this Vista-to-Mac-on-PC experiment, both with same specs, except for the fact that one is an Intel, the other is an AMD. And the darn thing behaves different every time we try to load it up.

Usually computers have a pattern for showing up errors. Once u find that out, you know where the problem lies. Here there's no freakin' pattern! At all!

Its getting on my nerves. Will update if things improve!

Crop Forecasting!

Alright! Now for starters, despite the IT boom (and bust) and the retail boom and stock market boom and other booms that you may think of, the fact still remains that India is an agrarian economy, that is a large part of its income (still) comes from agricultural produce.

So logically farmers should perhaps form the richest cluster in the Indian 'wealth' pyramid no? Well logically yes, but factually that's not the case. One farmer commits suicide in India every 8 hours. Gruesome as it may sound, but a large part of the fault can be attributed to the farmers, who out of sheer lack of information sow anything that are either safe bets like cash crops, or sow something that gave them the highest revenue the last year.

Now when every farmer starts thinking in the same direction, the law of demand & supply comes into the picture. The supply of a particular crop goes up and the prices comes down. The farmers as it is are exploited at the mandi's even during boom time, so when the market is running low, one can hardly expect anything good for the farmer in terms of his returns for his produce. So low prices, low income, and inability to pay off debt puts the farmer in a stressful situation.

Now, let's take the other side of the spectrum; that is the companies who buy the produce. Let's take the example of a 'ready to eat' vegetable mix. Now for a 'ready to eat' packet, the MRP is fixed, the margins to the wholesaler, the retailer, the distribution costs are more or less fixed. So there's little leeway that the manufacturer can work upon as far as the entire chain is concerned. What he can do is he can get the best input price to maximise his margins.

To get the best price for his inputs he needs to know well in advance as to what the output of that crop would be nationwide. Now estimates of any crop production can be either got from the official estimates that the government is supposed to give, or the trade estimates that the traders give over a period of time. Trade estimates work like stock markets do; based on the aggregation of trader's opinions who might be bullish or bearish as per their whims and fancies. Official estimates have a drawback as far as time is concerned. The Central Statistical Organisation, a government body releases the final estimate of the total crop production after 6 months of the harvest and when 70% of the crop produce has already passed the farmer's hands. Such type of data is hardly useful in purchase decisions for any organisation. So if we come back to our 'ready to eat' mix, the crop production estimates from CSO are of no use, and we'll have to do the purchasing without any proper data. In short, we'll never come to know what would be the best price we can get for any produce, and it all would depend on the mandi that a company would go to.

So essentially in crop forecasting, time is of the essence, rather than accuracy or depth of coverage. Sadly people just don't seem to be getting it! There's loss of value at every stage; the farmer loses because he was dumb enough to sow what every other farmer did, the government loses because it releases an estimate value which anyone would hardly use, the companies lose because they don't get to have the best possible price for the raw materials.

Sad isn't it?