Thursday, July 26, 2012

"Women deprived of the company of men pine, men deprived of the company of women become stupid." - Anton Chekhov


putting things in perspective does not necessarily come naturally to us, the social creatures. how-so-ever ironical it may sound though. so when this gentleman mentioned that he has more than 30 years of experience in marketing alone (i never asked if he has any 'other' experience as well!), all i could muster was 'a-huh!' and sadly, it conveyed a picture of 'unimpressed' me and my poker face was not helping either! all this while i was trying to put those 30 years along with my life's timeline. and then it struck me, this guy was 'studying the market' in Zambia when i was still gorging on Cerelac! (not the Apple flavor though! i never developed a favorable taste for that one!)...and my work experience tells me that i must mention that Zambia is a country in Africa (not South Africa!) and no, it's not same as Zimbabwe...

... he then went on narrating experiences from meetings he attended with businessmen across the world in his career... and he was telling about the products and brands and stores that we've never heard of and had Google not been accessible from our terminals we would've never known... in the later half of this (almost one way) conversation he came to 'culture' and it's important role in the lives of International Marketers... this stuff was keeping all of us attentive... till he asked us to note down the problem points westerners have to face very often while dealing with... umm... Indians...

... "wait! what?" was the initial facial expression of the audience and while i tried hard to suppress my silly smile, i realized it was of no use!! in next nano-second everybody started chuckling!!... "actually it's not just about Indians" he quickly tried to clarify... these issues crop-up in most of the dealings of the South Asian businesses with the EU-US bloc...

...the closing 30 minutes of our interaction were spent on identifying and noting down those issues... few points still linger in my mind... philosophy of "everything is negotiable"; saying "no problem" on every concern; suppress the 'bad news'; not being vocal about issues that affect the business/company/society as whole etc etc... it was not any groundbreaking finding that we made... it was plainly listing down the 'known issues'... and while all this was last weekend, i came across a satirical about Oprah's shocking find that we "Injians" *still* eat with our hands!

...reflecting upon the gyan on importance of understanding the culture of the target country by any marketer *before* entering with an offering, that story makes an excellent example...  which btw also reminded me of the statement he made in the first session and i quote "one thing is guranteed in International Marketing and that is failure, it is your job as a Marketing Manager not to make it a routine"...

(originally published in KNOME)

Sunday, July 15, 2012

"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils but cannot wear them plausibly." ~ Jean Cocteau

i've been suffering lately due to the performance anxiety, albeit mildly... and i'm not talking about the one that makes us all blush blush... it's just that sometime back i noticed that i've posted my 299th blog entry... and an idea got herself impregnated in my mind, that the 300th blogpost should be... ummm... more meaningful... and thus i abstained myself from frequenting here, lest i write something impromptu and spoil the occasion of reaching such an important milestone... and so the days lingered and... well... nothing meaningful got written...

... and just like that, i ended up 'wasting' whatever time was left at my disposal after the office and evening lectures... and when i say wasting i mean i regret reading all those news stories, watching movies, 'surfing'... u get the drift... and late last night, when my full bandwidth was restored, i ended up watching even more videos at youtube... it started from a tweet which was linked to a blog post and i found a reference of a stand-up comedian, who made a comic reference of rape (and was later trolled!), i googled his name and one thing led to another and i ended up watching two videos of approx one hour each on US marines' training... and the chirping of birds outside my window made me realised it was 4 in the morning and i've been up all night!

... last time i did something like this was in the month of april, when i was deeply madly passionately 'inclined' towards a girl... and it was happening so fast that even though i could sense something was amiss, i kept going... now, i won't go into the details but that whole experience moved my perceptions slightly... about many things... including the ever so easily ignored question about the purpose of our lives...

... and while i'm dwelling on that topic, u should take some time to ponder as well... or maybe you've already figured it out... in any case, to wrap this teaser article i would like to quote a tweet from someone i follow...

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities"



Tuesday, July 3, 2012

“Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature’s tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.” ~ Louie Schwartzberg

... mornings are a great time to think and reflect and contemplate and introspect... provided u get up early enough to think and reflect and contemplate and introspect... mornings are also very very busy time for your brain to function in a coherent manner... there is way too much of churning going in the brain in the mornings... which doesn't sound as good as it actually is... remember what they say about morning workouts? it's good for the body... well... if it is good for the body then it ought to be good for the brain, no?

... if you are thinking "what a crap!" then probably i've done my job well... your brain is giving the right signals to you... ;-) ... the thing is, i went to bed at around 0100 hrs and yet ended up waking at 0530 hrs! can u believe that? i mean... here i am... well awake and listening to some bird chirping in the neighborhood and no alarms and no 'hangover' and no dizzy dizzy feeling whatsoever... what do i do? i start this blog post... and if u r thinking that i really have no better things to do in life, then perhaps we don't know each other or perhaps you know me quite very well :-)

... anyways, i met Sid in his office yesterday and had a pretty lengthy chit-chat on usual guys' stuff... although we had to keep women and sports away from the conversations... we were in office na!... which essentially means we were restricted to talk on the work related stuff... it was not as boring as it sounds here... he's part of the marketing team focusing on any country except his own... and he's very much interested in honing up his academics, specifically related to the field he is in... and if you are wondering why i'm telling you all this it's because that was exactly the common ground that we hit upon... and we spoke close to two hours on how to go about the professional challenges that we are facing as individuals... in short, it was a good 'touching base' session (i really don't like that jargon, but still)...

... and i just realized it's morning time... time to finally get up and do something more productive! ;-)

Sunday, July 1, 2012

"A man's manners are a mirror in which he shows his likeness to the intelligent observer." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

what am i doing here? what am i doing right now? where am i going? is there a purpose of my life? am i more than a physical being? what or who is igniting these thoughts in my mind? is it me or my subconsciousness? are they different?