Some more perfume ideas..

Flattered by the idea of perfume for innovators our professor asked that how you will find that how many innovators are in the country or how many people are going to innovate in future? Will it be something like you'll sell your perfume to only those who will wear a T shirt with "I'm an Innovator" printed on it? Well, that was one doubt which we were not able to clarify.

Some of the suggestions that came from him were:
Perfume for professors:-> If we can come up with a perfume for innovators then why not a perfume for professors or a perfume for shop-keepers or one for non-teaching staff members.
Offensive perfume;-> Which smells like shit and can keep people away from you.

Well the idea clicked with me and I started thinking about some of the buyer segments for which to positioning this perfume. Well to start with:

Film stars:-> Specially for those stars who keep saying "No Media Please" and who are too shy to brush the public and media gathering aside and be rude. (I am not talking about Salmaan Khan, his biceps and his famed driving skills are good enough to scatter the media person everytime he shouts "No Media Please"). They can now have their say without actually saying anything.

Item girls:-> I think Rakhi Sawant will be a celebrity customer or perhaps not (Some people say that with all that makeup on, she already smells like **** you know what). Well the problem is that when these girls say "no" that means "more". But yeah she would have saved herself a "Mika" by putting on that perfume. But wait! who will invite you to a party then? Well we have an idea of hosting theme parties where only regular users of this perfume are invited. Don't worry we promise who's and who's of film industry and sports world and some top corporates.

Indian Cricket stars:-> Will be another set of regular buyers as it will make the fast bowlers of the opposition team bowl from a longer distance than the regular 22 yards. It is evident that even seniors players like Sachin and Dravid are finding it tough to face the chin music from the even the slowest of the fast bowlers. Well this will keep the bowler 10 yards behind and they will get some more time to watch the ball. It will also keep the fielder's away so no chance of getting caught out. But yeah the problem is that you have to wear a nose filter to stand at the non-striker's end. Okay! we have a solution. We will give away nose filters for free for some time.

Daughter in laws:-> This could be a good gift idea as a daughter in law can give it to her mother in law to make a bold statement " Don't come anywhere close to me or I will start wearing this perfume".

Well, these are my crazy ideas about this offensive perfume. I am dying to hear my friends to critically evaluate my ideas and send in their suggestions. I am still to come up with a brand name for my offensive perfume. Friends! wat do you say??

Crazy, Crazier and Craziest..

Customized toothpaste:-> Buy toothpaste in four different tubes each containing one special ingredient like fluoride, calcium,whitening agent or a dental cream. Buy any number of them by your choice and mix them to get that freshning morning breath. Wait, toothpastes are no longer for morning brushing only.

Toothpaste for diabetics:-> Sugar free or non sweetened toothpaste.

Toothpaste for smokers:-> Which makes them feel score that whatever harm tobacco does on their teeth, there is one toothpaste which is going to take care of that.

Perfume for innovators:-> Wear this perfume and feel like an innovator. decide for yourself what you are going to innovate.

Perfume for achievers:-> To make a statement which expresses your personality and for those who oozes confidence. This will be a perfume for those selected few.

Soap with a hole:-> I don't know exactly what was the basic idea but people are claiming that this soap will be easy to rub and will last longer as very less water can stay on the soap.

Soap with goat milk:-> These soaps are popular in the best but for price conscious Indian customers they are still a distant dream.

Soap for water scarce area:-> Will save water as will give little lather (not convinced by the idea actually.. to save water you always have the option to skip bath. Ask any person who has outlived Punjab's winter he must be knowing how to conserve water.

Seasonal bathing soaps:-> A soap for every season. WEll it's a crazy shot at leveraging the four season advantage of India and selling four different kind of soaps but then how would one know when to switch soaps?

Bollywood fan club calling card:-> Call Amitabh Bachhan and talk to his recorded voice, leave a message. Or sing a birthday song to your favorite actress Aishwarya Rai. You can now live your fantasies with the bollywood calling card.

Calling Card for farmers:-> Send these people the local mandi rates, EMI information and local gossip. Farmers will be very loyal to you if you succeed in doing even a small value addition.

Refrigerator-AC combo:-> Both are almost identical in working. But then the challenge is to integrate the two. You open the door it's refrigerator and when it's closed, its an AC.

Wondering what is all this? Well, these are the inputs from the segmentation exercise for our marketing course 1. Morale of the story is: People can go crazy, if given a chance. And they can go crazier if they are marketers.

Tournament Effect..

We often wonder that we were too good in school and then somehow not able to sustain the same level of enthusiasm and energy during the later part of our career. We pile on a bundle of dreams thinking that life will always be like this. I will get the same people to compete with for all my life. After entering a college with student population much bigger than the combined strength of your school you still think that this is almost the same set of people. Competition will be the same. Slowly the feeling sinks in that life has changed and pace of the change requires you to revise your goals. Now you don't want to be the topper and you will feel satiated even if you manage to get the second rank. What happened? Has your competencies changed? The answer is No. Why? well keep reading.

You are in college where you are the okay with academics but excel in extracurricular and especially good with quant and verbal ability (yeah! you know what I am talking about). You read one article in the daily editorial and feel confident that someday you can make it to the CEO level and MBA is the route to it. You feel confident about the pedagogy followed in MBA. Case discussions, presentations, group discussions and group exercises, you relate all this to your college life and you think you have enough substance in you to make it big in MBA. You target the CEO position of a company of your dreams. Well, you enter a MBA course. For the first few days you find the going easy but then you start feeling that something is not right. We call this "WHAT YOU THOUGHT IS NOT WHAT YOU GET" effect. You slow down to analyze yourself and revise your goals. Now you target the CTO,CFO, COO or any other higher level position ( just below the CEO). Well slowly and gradually, after two or three revisions of your goals, during the start of your placement season you will feel happy if you bag an entry level position on Day 1. Well, it seems logical that you should be realistic but then have your competencies really changed? Again a "NO".

What is this which makes us feel smaller and insignificant over a period of time? Well, the answer is "TOURNAMENT EFFECT". The explanation of this effect is that we are so absorbed with ourselves that we never realize that the stage is getting bigger and bigger. And people around you are becoming smarter and smarter. You are sharing your stage with some of the handpicked people who were perhaps the best in their own comfort zone.

For MBA students this effect has really a meaning. To excel in life you need not always look inside you, you have to be an excellent reader of the environment also. You can not take it for granted that if you were good at something in the past it's an advantage. Well it's rather a disadvantage as it will act as a mindblock for you. Continuous improvement of your skill sets is the key. After all, you are not in your comfort zone. Well, the moral of the story is respecting your self for what you are respecting others for what they are and if you have to revise your goals/targets then please don't feel bad. You can always blame this “TOURNAMENT EFFECT".

Mania of 43..

It has been a month…30 and thankfully not “43” days (k…not sure but, it doesn’t hurt to hope can it?) Since I’ve been haunted by number 43 more than once a day, my disbelief in numerology is getting shattered and ubiquitous reappearance of this number in my daily life is making me think about it and dedicate a post to it. A search on google reflected zero results and it did not help much to sideline my worries about the mystery of number 43. I get a phone call; I hang up and see that the call timing is 8 minutes 43 seconds or any number of minutes + 43 seconds. I talk about this to one of my friends and then the next car that passes ahead of us has its number plate marked 20”43”. I look at my computer clock and find it’s exactly 43 minutes past some hour. I check with one of my friend randomly and ask her the time. She says it’s 2:43 now.

Don’t know what the connection between me and 43 is but, it feels wonderful to think that “43” used to be our teen code for “Love you”.

What Ram Jethmalani wants??

This is the question all those people are asking who walked side by side holding candles and demanding Justice for Jessica. I hope this name “ Jessica” is still fresh in our minds. The two slogans which brought India closer this year were “ Youth for equality” and “Justice for Jessica”. While the former was self made the latter was coined by Media as they were falling short of news stories in those un-eventful early summer months.

Anyways, the fire slowly died out and what remained is the long procedures of filing papers, court dates, appointment of public prosecutor and then hiring a legal defendant. The story got much bigger this time as the person who is going to defend Manu Sharma’s case is undisputed king among the criminal lawyers. Ram Jethmalani has this knack of being in news for all kind of reasons. When he was in ministry he made it into news several times but then his position in BJP was slowly taken by young and brilliant lawyer Arun jaitley and the frustration out of this made him target leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The move is well calculated now. The fire inside him is slowly dying. The young bunch of Yale and Harvard educated lawyers have this capability of delivering a bigger better show anyday anytime. The magic is fading away and this is his chance to prove that he is the best. To choose to defend Manu Sharma is like making a statement that public was completely wrong and they have no rights to decide the fate of a person in the court of public when the case is lying pending with the court of law. Manu is innocent and Jessica was murdered by some non-existent person or Jessica might have provoked him to shoot her or he was already in a drunken state and he didn’t know what exactly he did in that state. Whatever may be the verdict, at-least I am not going to buy this argument that Jethmalani is doing this for a big fat cheque that Manu’s family is going to write to him at the end of the “FAIR TRIAL”. The only other probability is that he wants to prove this thing to the world that a candle burns brighter just before it dies out. I don't know exactly what motivated Mr. Jethmalani to take up this challenging case but well in the court of public perhaps you will no more be an ideal figure.

Getting started once again..

With placements of the final year batch getting almost over now, for first years, its time to jet, set and go once again. It’s the time to be prepared to meet the hard life ahead. The three day’s discontinuity from studies has given us enough time to sit back and reflect over the past four months that we have spent slogging for grades. I am wondering that I took four months to realize that grades don’t matter at all. What matters most is the flair and penchant for work and the way you integrate your academic knowledge into your action. Most of the students who got placed on day 1 and landed the best jobs are those who had this hunger in their eyes and for some reasons fighting for grades do not excite them all.

Anyways, the three days layoff followed by a busy Friday evening and now a seemingly bitchy week ahead (with shit load of work, case presentations and quizzes), I think it’s the best time to think over that final decision that What I want to be in life. But then my gut feeling is that for a person as confused as me, he has to wait until the need arises to update his resume once again.

"Aloo ka Paratha in Chennai"..

My friend called yesterday night and asked whether she can drop by to have breakfast with me as she had to go to some church in Chetpet with her roomie. Well, we planned to eat a Punjabi breakfast. Nungambakkam is supposed to be one of the most cosmopolitan area of Chennai and with all the famous eating joints located within a radius of 2 kilometers, it sort of try to live upto that reputation. There is Pizza Hut, Pizza Corner, Cafe Coffee day, Barista, Mocha, New Yorker and many others to list including Dhaba Express. Some 20 restaurants are located within 2 kms and I guess that most of their menus have listed "Aloo Paratha". So i was confident that we can easily get Aloo Paratha and would try to revive our taste buds for Punjabi food.

Well, the search started at 9 in the morning. WE went to Raj Bhavan and learnt that they serve parathas only after 1 PM, Sangeetha offered paratha but of different varieties, Most of the restaurants open after 11 so it was like we were walking to each restaurant, asking the first question and then walking out. It continued till 10:30 and we reached Dhaba Express only to find it closed. Finally we returned to Sangeetha and settled for a quick Cheese Sandwich and a cup of coffee. We finally tried one Sambhar Vada and found it really satisfying.

Well, I remembered my CAT preparation days, when I use to leave my hostel at like 5:30 in the morning to travel to Chandigarh which was about 100 Kms from my college. North India is famous for its bitchy cold. The plains of Punjab are famous for enveloping fog which refuses to go before spending three days on the land. Well, even during those months of cold also I use to find a lot of eating joints in Patiala and even in this small town Sangrur (which is closer to my Institute) which serves you hot "Aloo Da paratha" with curd and tea from 7 in the morning. I use to walk in one of my favorite restaurants at 7 as the first customer and in a matter of 15 minutes I use to see all the seats occupied for morning breakfast. I am still wondering that typical south Indian dishes like Idli, Dosa and Vada was also available at 7 in the morning. That was something amazing.

I am not trying to draw any comparison. The early morning crowd in "Sangeetha" was enough to explain that the eating out habbit of North Indians are almost same as that of South Indians who go for heavy and rich breakfast. The only thing is that may be there are not too many takers for the North Indian breakfast here and poor people like me have no option other than to convince our Punjabi friends to eat a Sandwich or to try Sambhar Vada... ANyways, it was fun to go out and hunt for Aloo Ka paratha. We were really looking like two fool out there at the wrong place. But then these small things are what I am going to remember about Chennai... Slowly developing a strong liking for this place..

Abhyudaya- Rising Sun, Growing Challenge

Abhyudaya is our annual B School fest and we have taken the responsibilities of organizing the second edition. Back in engineering college we use to have about 30 student committees with 15 members in each who share the burden of the daunting task. Now, here we are only 27 people taking up this seemingly impossible task to rope in sponsors, plan the event, send invitation, arranging the boarding and lodging of the outstation participants and then make this whole event a unique experience for the participants.

In a way, this is going to be the most challenging exercise for us as most of the other B schools have large number of students involved behind organizing activities of the similar magnitude. We don’t have the number advantage but then we have the advantage of working in a closely knit group where each one of us knows the other person inside out. Now, when I look back at my text book, I don’t think that reading about “Customers Experience Management” from Kotler’s marketing manual is going to help us making this event a unique experience. All that it takes for delivering result is a clear vision and holistic efforts towards turning your vision into reality.

Let’s see how far we can go ahead with this. The going is surely tough but when the going gets tough, the tougher gets going. That’s suo-motto.

Between Competition and Complacency..

I think that these two words represent two extremes of characters. You can survive your under-graduation easily being complacent but for a professional post graduation degree, being competitive is the key. Now, again it’s a matter of personal values and attitude which subconsciously moulds your character. First trimester is over and with 2 A- and one B in 3 subjects here I am, feeling the heat for being complacent for all this time.

Studying hard and working like a dog has never been my priority and I think that till now, whatever I have achieved even if it’s not substantial at-least is significant and that is where complacency creeps in. My feeling of satiation with whatever I have achieved or with the pace of my life is the thing which is becoming the matter of concern for me. I see life as a set of priorities. You assign weightage to them and the way a person decides and assigns weightage to their priorities makes them unique in their approach towards life. For some a good salary could be of higher priority then having a family or vice-versa. However, the priorities keep changing depending on the environment. And again the pace of change varies from one individual to another.

In a B-School setup, I think that the change is pre dominant. The pace of this change gives you the competitive edge over others. People have started complaining that I have changed but when I try to see around me I think that they all have changed. The change is everywhere, in their conducts, in their behaviors and in their level of academic commitments. I might have changed too but then I still sleep for 10 hours a day. I tried to think about it but then decided against it as it’s not worth that much of my time. Analyzing people’s behavior and molding my behavior accordingly is now out of my priorities for the next one and half year at-least. “A rough exterior is what you need to protect that softness inside”.

I still remember that during our initial days of confusion and chaos here, one of my friends asked me that what these people are going to do with us to transform us into managers? I was unable to answer this question then but now I think that I have an answer. They will teach us how to get our priorities right. And that’s all.

NO Subject..

One trimester ended, one is about to begin. So here I am sitting at the threshold of one and initiation point of another. On Friday evening we were informed to collect our books and other materials immediately after the exams. The sight of Kotler - Kellers Marketing Management book and the book on corporate finance was just enough to make me week on my knees. I felt numb holding the book as if something is being forced on me and intruding into my peace for the next three nights three days. I don’t want to give myself any credit but I can’t deny that I have tried my level best for the papers except for the economics paper where I was really bamboozled by the paper. The point is that in our Engineering College end of the exam meant a lot of fun for at least a couple of weeks.

Well the speed of the life has changed. Maturity is slowly creeping crawling into our system. Movies are only subject of discussion during weekends, girls are no subject now. Wine and Vodka is now a part of fantasy, Food doesn’t matter anymore. However bad it may be, people will eat and complains are restricted to the dining table only. Sleep is unimportant for most of us (exceptions are there). Sleep deprivation is compulsory. Suddenly any distance above 5 kms sounds too far away and silence seems to be too good.

I remember how we use to drive for like 40 kilometers at early hours in the morning to get something to eat. Here, everything is available on a click of the phone but take the fun, frolic and friendship out of my food, and food has no meaning for me then. MBA has started making sense for me. It’s really about unlearning and relearning. I am unlearning the meaning of fun for me and relearning about how to make this fun into a Business plan. Well, the thing is that I just can’t complain. The pseudo Punjabi factor in me makes me gregarious enough to enjoy whatever I have on my platter. Be it the food, the amount of free time I get, the friends I have here and well also my MBA. Classes from tomorrow, I think I will get enough to pen down.