The Ravi C gems series - Part 2

I have taken a course called Logistics management taken by Prof. Ravichandran in the sixth term. Boy! It is the most awesome fun! I have taken some pains to document some of his classic one-liners in class. This blog is a small sample:

a long discussion in class over a point ... same point gets repeated 20 mins later as if the guy is making a fresh point ... Ravi C says "I thought we had already covered this point some 20 mins earlier... Does sound travel so slowly here? "

I don't know why, but RaviC used to mercilessly tease some foreign students who came to IIMA on Exchange and were (un)fortunate enough to choose his courses. Here goes a small sample:

We were discussing a case on the supply chain for Hoechst Pesticides and he gets irritated at the speed the case discussion is progressing"You know you guys should have been able to complete the case discussion in 40 mins if you had thought clearly... now we have spent the better part of 4 classes on it - 9 times as much time.

With a sideward glance at the exchange students, he follows up "With increasing globalisation, the Indian students are also becoming world class..."
[silence for two seconds and a riotous thumping of the benches as the message sunk in..]


Bright student: Sir, this inventory is stocked in the head office whereas the recommendation is to stock it at the regional offices.

Ravi C: " If there are four members in your family and one of them goes abroad, then how many members are there in your family? It doesn't matter where the inventory is stored bhai as long as it is stuck in the system"

On the idea of debating options for transporting goods from factory to markets: to illustrate the idea of buying low value-add items locally the prof said :
"If you are going to transport cowdung, will you transport it by airplane?"

more to follow... :-)

Ranga

Reflections for the new year

I have always been fascinated by the concept of new year resolutions. It is almost like a capsule of all the good intentions that one can have. It is like one of those rare flowers, (I think it is called kurinji in Tamil) which blooms only once in 12 years, only to fade again as quickly as it came.

I have tried to give up the habit of making new year resolutions for quite a while now, but even if I don't declare something formally as my new year resolution, I find myself unconsciously becoming determined that I would achieve something worthwhile or do something better this year and Hey Presto! I have a New Year Resolution even before I know it. Needless to say, not one of those good resolutions has materialised fully till now.

What causes the human brain to make resolutions? Fundamentally, I think we are a dissatisfied lot. The ability of the human mind to reflect analytically and/emotionally on past happenings and dissecting them into some specific cause-effect relationships is no doubt well established. But it is during some landmarks in time such as birthdays or New Years that there is this trigger which prompts reflection much more than during normal times. Again maybe the human mind is fundamentally optimistic? There is always the inclination to believe that the future will be better than the past if one takes the necessary actions... maybe that is what has made our race so successful?

But then, what prevents most resolutions from seeing the light of the day when it comes to action? In my opinion, it is that reflection is generally almost completely internal but action is completely external. And being external, there are a lot of forces in the environment that influence action a lot more than they would influence reflection. The really exceptional people can focus upon their reflections and use them to take the necessary actions to influence the environment in such a way that the reflections bear fruit in terms of actions and results. Will I be one of them? Till date, I haven't been able to achieve even a tenth of what I set out to do, but that will not keep me from trying :-).

The Ravi C Gems series - Part 1

This is a small compilation of some of the wittiest one-liners to have escaped the mouth of Professor Ravichandran (or RaviC as he is known in WIMWI circles), who is one of the sharpest profs I have ever met...He has a great philosophy to his life and work too. The following is a collection by some enthu faccha last year of some of the statements he made in Operations Management class. I will be following up this effort with some of the sparklers I remember from CCCS class this year as well...

On students pretending to go through their material to avoid being cold called:

“You people have a nice way of avoiding me. Whenever I ask a question ... you start looking in your books, as if you are very busy...!”

"Looking away..Like newly married brides"

"This is not your contention but confusion and at best you can have confusion coz it’s your birth right"

“I am stunned by your intellectual inferiority .....”

On the projector being out of focus:
"This is unfocussed...just like the PGP program"

On the Toyota case, workers apathy to the seat problem,

"Here you are jumping up and down like an intoxicated monkey, and you go to the workers and he shrugs and says,' is there a problem?'"

The one in which he explains cycle time:

"Cycle time does not mean that you take three women and expect to have a child in three months, it will still take nine months"

RC: What would you want? Freedom or Air-conditioned Buses?

StratStud Student: Both.

RC: You cannot get both. That would be like having a mistress and a wife. One in Manila and one in vanilla (some other place actually). Or one in Chennai and one in Delhi. That will be like Blitz Company. There will be special orders and large orders...

StratStud Student: That's a philosophical question.

RC: There is nothing philosophical about it. It is very materialistic.

On Foreign Students

"... They are real engineers....unlike the Indians!" (Referring to foreigners
In context of the exchange students I guess...)

On self:

"I am a sadistic monkey, u know"

" when my son was 3 years old... yes he actually once was even though he thinks he was born at 15"

“Have taken the responsibility of getting 2 sons into this world...Not that it takes much of an effort..... With some people it might be a problem. But with me.. It didn’t take much effort....... its not very difficult. Provided you get the chance”

In a session on scheduling:

RC: so what should blitz do to correct its schedule?

Student: Sir, it should improve its scheduling policy.

RC: You know, now that’s like going to a doctor and telling him "I'm not well" and asking him what should I do and the joker says "Get well".

On being distracted by a student chewing on his gold chain:
"You are the bottleneck of my attention.....You take my attention away from the class....I should really do something about this"

On a nervous student dropping things from his/her desk and not daring to move a muscle to avoid attracting attention:

“That’s why housekeeping is important in JIT. If your workspace is organized and things are running smoothly you don’t attract any attention..”

On feeding a bottleneck:

“like a pregnant woman constantly craving for something to eat before having a baby??”

Height of cold call: A poor classroom theatre attendant coming in to serve tea in the wrong CR:

RC: “Arre yeh kya humarey liye hai”?

RC helping himself to a cup of tea: “See that’s what happens when you outsource without proper information sharing.”

On averages/mean as a performance measure:

Student : Sir, the queue length is 2.25 people.

RC: 2.25 people? Doesn’t make sense does it?

Student : err…ummm…

RC: That’s like the census of India saying that the average family size is 3.2 people. That means a woman in the family is almost perpetually pregnant. Correct?

On asymptotes:

Student : “The function gradually approaches 0…”

RC: “that’s like saying that asymptotically we all die…”

“Isko koi samjhao bhai”

On a student missing from class and the class rep unable to locate him in the dorm:

“So what should we do now??.. Let’s organise a party with band-baaja and go find him…

…That’s ok, I’ll lead the party since I have nothing better to do. So who’s coming with me??

On the same AWOL student:

RC: “…WIP gone missing”

On scheduling conflicts:

Student: “It arises because of shared resources.”

RC: “You mean like Princess Diana or Draupadi..?”

On asking a student for an example and him/her giving an inappropriate one:

RC: "Which is your favorite LP problem?"

Student : "Adani Wilmar"

RC: "Adani Wilmar?!?!? Was it an LP problem or a transportation problem??"

Student: "sir there we had to find the optimal route from the ports to the factories by an LP formulation"

RC: "it's like I ask you for your favorite bird and u say mosquito....it has wings and it can fly....so it's technically correct!!!”

Dunno the context:

”Vishwamitra had zero WIP...he had compressed cycle time a long time back”

Ranga

Confluence of emotions...

Confluence 2005 the event is over. Done. Finished. Khallas. Khatam...whatever.

For me, being involved in an event of this scale and complexity was a first. It has taught me many lessons, brought me closer to many people and probably taught me more about management than the entire first year course. It has been a great journey so far and for me, as financial controller of Confluence 2005, a lot more work remains. But as of now, it is time to celebrate.

Confluence 2005 has also caused a few reflections in the muddied pools of my mind and played with a wide basket of emotions. I plan to put them on blogosphere later. But the most important takeaway from the event, I feel has been the extent of pride I have taken in my job as head of Finances and the co-coordinator of Corporate communications. This I believe will stand me in good stead wherever I go and whatever I take up.

Lesson for me: "Take pride in excellence and you will go a long way towards achieving it"

Ranga

Update

Not good, not bad. We did a decent job in our presentation today but probably failed to get the insights into the case that our prof would have liked us to have had. But still, I rest easy on the comfort that I had given a lot of thought to the case and was very thorough with the case facts.

Still, today's experience made me realise that there might be a lot of hard work that goes into some task but finally, the quality of the presentation may not have anything to do with the hours of work that goes behind its making. Our presentation reflected genuine effort, but probably clarity in terms of the course learning could have been better.

This also taught me another important lesson. Trying to second-guess questions might be a good defensive strategy but it will not help me achieve excellence. The true happiness from doing things well will arise when it is a path of self discovery. No amount of external teaching or argument will help me get the joy I derive from self learning.

Ranga

My day of shame...

I am feeling terrible today. One of our group work reports got trashed by the very professor who I regard as my role model for his philosophy regarding his life and work.

It is simply eating me up. But then, that is why I am writing this blog. I am not a student of IIMA for nothing. I have taken the pains to work hard to come into the best b-school in the country. I have pride in my work and that is the way it will stay.

I am reminded of a famous incident in Hindu mythology where Sage Vishwamitra persevered and persevered in his spiritual pursuits till Sage Vasishtha himself hailed him as "Brahmarishi" (Vasishtha was the sage who humiliated King Kaushika by proving that the might of the King's army is nothing before a sage's spiritual powers - for more details refer this link)- it is up to me to figure out how I am going to impress the professor again, but figure out I will.

Ranga

Of influences and writing styles

I recently got to know that one of my friends had started a blog. Now, this guy is one of the most well read people on campus and is the coordinator of the LSD (our literary activities club) as well. I came back to my room and immediately started going through this blog. It was amazingly crisp and coherent. Just reading it made me ponder over what I sought to achieve when I started off this blog.

My blog has seen varied phases - from severely emotional to contemplative to descriptive alternating in no particular order. But there was something about Shubhang's writing style that touched a chord in me. It made me get goosebumps all over. More importantly, it set me thinking...

There are a lot of things happening around us. It is up to us to assimilate their effects and use them for self improvement. The first step in that however, is reflection; reflection on what has shaped our lives so far and how each day is shaping our lives further. Reflection needs to be, but often is not, followed by resolution - resolution to make a difference to our lives and the lives of those around us. Often we are in a state of inertia, content with our humdrum daily lives unless something drastic happens to us. Resolution is something which has an unbelievable capability to stir us into action. What made me admire his blog the most was the way he managed to connect various incidents to some deep reflections he had been having or was spurred to have. It was also apparent that for him, the link between reflection and resolution was very clear.

Resolution is one thing, action is another. Neither can exist on a sustained basis without each other. Where I and many people fail is in converting resolution to action. Action generates consequences which tests resolution to the fullest and in turn, leads to further reflection. It is a fitting tribute to one's character if one manages this cycle with regularity throughout one's life and makes a difference to the lives of those around.

I could clearly see the seeds of such a character in Shubhang's blog. Time will prove me right or wrong I guess, but whatever happens, I continue to read on and admire...

Ranga

Festival of lights - Part 3

In response to a request for Vix's rocket pics, here they are. A few more added too...

Heaven is green in colour - Part IV

It has been a very very long time since I updated my Blog with something written.... my previous post and the current post being two halves of the same literary effort - a direct result of the suppressed writer in me bursting at the seams, so here goes...

The Madgaon station was a modern station and was very elegantly designed - not like your usual early 1900's, about-to-collapse-at-any-time kind of station but large and imposing and most importantly, clean! We halted for nearly half an hour there but yours truly was disappointed to find that they sold absolutely no newspaper worth reading (for someone who has been brought up reading the Hindu, the TOI doesn't even remotely come into that category - I can write more about this but the transgression would be unwarranted).

Soon we were off again, chugging into the western ghats with only the grey of the clouds above and the green of the valleys and plains below to give the train company. Outside, not a soul could be seen for miles and miles. Not that we were looking out all the time though. We spent almost the whole of the morning, afternoon and evening playing cards, cards and more cards.

Ah the Game of Cards! There is an interesting topic if ever there was one... what is so fundamentally attractive about manipulating your fortunes against the laws of probability is something I am unable to figure out. Of course, not being good at playing any of these card games makes me unfit to comment on the charms of finding that one have a full hand or can go trumps or whatever. So I will leave that to the judgement of people more suited to the kind of mental make up that card games require.

I remember playing a game called 'Donkey' which required me to keep track of how many cards in each suit have been played. Shashu, our resident playing card expert and Suhas, another of our experts, could keep track of it with the most amazing ease... But I dont know why it was so difficult for me to have an abacus kind of setup in my mind that would increment the cards played of each suit as and when dealt with. Hmm...something worth pondering about. I need to have a more 'shoe-box' kind of mind that can compartmentalise information simultaneously and process them in parallel.

Bottom line is that I was absolutely hopeless at it and it was the most remarkable piece of luck that I was able to manage to avoid becoming Donkey all the time. To add to my already extant confusion, I was constantly distracted by the mind-numbing scenery that was whistling past my window pane - green here, green there, green everywhere; the only places on the ground that were not green were a muddy-red-brown -- pools or streams of water caused by the incessantly glorious rains that accompanied us throughout the journey.

Of course, the ghat section was another treat to the eyes. It was either raining or had just recently rained throughout the section. We were faced with majestically rising rock faces on one side coloured a deep, glistening grey and an undulating slope dying away into a river or a stream on the other... stunning to say the least. Of course there was the added attraction of seeing the train screech into a tunnel every few minutes.

There is something fascinating about trains entering and exiting tunnels which I am unable to put into words. I remember reading many Enid Blyton books in my childhood where she describes trains whistling and screeching their way through tunnels and, predictably enough, describing situations where kids get into and the most amazing tight spots imaginable! At the end of it all, I was thrilled every time we entered a tunnel and even more thrilled to look back and see the last bogies of the train trail us as we exited. I had taken a couple of pictures of the train coming out of the tunnel (posted them sometime back) and the pics looked ethereal to say the least!

Well, time progressed and we kept playing, eating and admiring the scenery over and over again. soon it was becoming dark and we finally broke off cards for the day, had dinner and settled down for a lazy night. Again, yours truly started nodding off by around 10 PM, much to the amusement of Kela and Shashu, who were actually talking to me about my phenomenal capacity to sleep off at a particular time irrespective of what was happening around me. There have been incidents of that sort in my first year here so far. But second year seems to have taken its toll on me. I find that I am able to stay awake easily till 12 -12.30 AM nowadays. After that it is a bit of a fight though :)

Again a strange thing regarding my sleep patterns is that I find it much easier to stay awake when I am amongst friends, chatting away on arbit things in life. I also find it easier to stay awake when there is a team deadline near at hand and I have to work under severe time pressure. There is an adrenaline rush to be had from trying to structure your thoughts quickly to meet the deadline! Nothing like having your favourite music playing in the background at that point of time either!

The next day dawned bright and fine and we were nearing dear old Amdavad...we still had two plus hours of waking time to be spent inside the train and I will give you four options as to what we might have done
a) play cards
b) play cards
c) play cards
d) play cards

:D

Finally, we landed up at the station and after an uneventful but bone jarring journey in a mass of metal that the owner has the gall to call an 'autorickshaw' we made it in one piece to the campus and life in the fifth term was about to start in full swing for us...

I wrote something about wanting to avoid commenting more on the TOI for it being an unwarranted transgression....but as it panned out, the entire blog entry has been a series of such deviations. Can't help it though. I simply had to let myself go today....

Blogging off,
Ranga

Heaven is green in colour - Part III

This time round, my journey was well provided for in terms of home food. So was Kela's. Mothers are so optimistic about their children's eating capabilities! As a result, we knew that we did not have to worry about food till we reached Ahmedabad, a day and a half later.

Our train was supposed to start from Shoranur at 10.15 pm or so. Wonder of wonders, it managed to start from the station at 10.30! My first surprise came from knowing that a couple of our batchmates were also travelling in the same coach. The next day, I also came to know that the train was choc-a-bloc with my Mallu batchmates. Still, we sojourners in AS1 stuck together like glue for the rest of the journey.

As expected, there was no significant activity till next morning and yours truly had a dreamy night, filled with banana leaves, floating teacups and oddly enough, cell phones. The four of us got up next morning and decided we would pass time by playing cards. Now, I suck at card games but gamely decided to give them a try, for want of a better way of spending group time. Soon I realised that my self awareness was 100% accurate, as I kept dropping count of the cards that had done the rounds. Some memory trick is desperately needed, I think.

My concentration on the game in hand was no way helped by the stunning scenery that was on show through the window. Often, I used to let my jaw drop at the greenery outside and lost the trend even more easily. It was highly exasperating for my fellow players, but I could not help it. I was like a man in the desert who had just sighted an oasis. This was literally true in my case, with Trichy experiencing a tough couple of years monsoon-wise. The greenery was nothing new for my Mallu friends, but then, a fish doesn't know the value of water unless it is actually out of it!

It was quite early in the morning when we entered Goa and halted at a station called Madgaon. Very quaint location. I could see a few old buildings and a church as well on the other side. Goa is famous for its multitude of churches and I could see some of that famous charm in this one's architecture too. The best part about the trip was that we were travelling through some parts of the country that were pretty much devoid of even a remotely urban settlement. All we saw on our way were thatched / tiled roofs glistening wet in the drizzle that was our constant companion throughout.

Festival of lights - Part 2

More pics coming soon at a blog near your desktop! Please keep watching this space for more details...

Once again, Vix Rocks!!!!!

Festival of lights - Part 1

The other parts of my Kerala - Konkan - Ahmedabad Trip description are still in the WIP (Work in Process stage). But I simply could not help posting some pics of what has been the best Diwali I have ever celebrated!

The following is a fitting tribute to the festival of lights, celebrated Wimwi Ishtyle...
All Pics courtesy Vix - our resident photographer!

Heaven is green in colour - Part II

It was the 3rd of September and time had come for me to leave Trichy (ahh...dear old Trichy - my hometown! The best part of this visit was that I actually saw WATER flowing over the Cauvery riverbed probably for the second time in 5 years).

I was to board the Trivandrum-Jodhpur express at Shoranur (Kerala), for which I first needed to go to Coimbatore. I took the Jan Shatabdi express, which by the way, is one of the better trains running in Tamil Nadu, if not in India. The seats were extremely comfortable for one of my inconsiderable bulk, though I wonder whether some of my more dimensionally challenged acquaintances would have liked them. Still, the train took off and I was there, curled up with a nice book in hand, lazily reading through and also enjoying the greenery whooshing past me. In fact, a part of the journey was along the banks of the Cauvery and it was a very soothing experience, almost preparing me for the paradise that was about to invade my senses.

Fourand a half hours and a nice home-packed breakfast later, I was in Coimbatore waiting at the railway station waiting for my dormmate Kela (I really don't bother remembering his original name nowadays :-)) to come and pick me up. And come he did, and we zipped off to his home in his Dad's car. I was again treated to a nice lunch there...the pleasures of home-cooked food are beyond description. And, as befits a sumptuous lunch, I dozed off only to wake up an hour later, realising that we were late and had to rush to catch the passenger train from Coimbatore to Shoranur. However, we managed to reach there in time only to find that the all the available seating space was already occupied. We were optimistic about our chances of getting a seat and decided to rough it out initially by standing - not a big deal for people who have been in Mumbai Metros, but still wholly unexpected.

For those who haven't been to that side of the country, Tamil Nadu is by and large an arid region with little rainfall coming its way past the ghats of Kerala. And Kerala (it markets itself as "God's own Country" - I see very little reason to disagree :-)) is like the repository of all the greenery that iss missing in Tamil Nadu. During our train trip, we could literally see the physical disparity between the states materialising before our eyes. There we were, chugging along some plains with half-arid, bushy vegetation one minute and the next minute we were transported to another world where teak forests and eucalyptus trees ruled supreme. We were thinking that the person who drew the boundary sure had a good sense of humour. I think he must have been a Keralite. Even the rain gods seemed to recognise the divide. There was one bridge near which there was a board with the writing "Welcome to Kerala" on one side and "Welcome to Tamil Nadu" on the other. I swear only one side of that board was wet.

The journey into Kerala continued and we were admiring the scenery, and polishing off some groundnuts in the meantime. Finally, some benevolent souls alighted at some station and we managed to squeeze into a luggage rack on top of one of the seating areas. We even managed to get a couple of cups of tea on top. It was an awesome experience to sip tea, chat and chug along. Soon, Shoranur beckoned...

Heaven is green in colour!

I, along with some other batchmates, came back after the fourth term break by rail from Shoranur(in Kerala) to Ahmedababad. The journey was through the Konkan Railways route, which undoubtedly is the most scenic railway route I have had the fortune to travel by so far. I will attempt a description in words in my next post, but first I am posting some pics taken

Mean reversion

My previous two posts have been more like diary entries than anything else. Why did I get this urge to post these entries over the last few days? My feeling is that I needed to find an outlet to my 'misery' (only a comic misery mind you - exams don't really matter in the second year:-p).

Of course, other people are there in campus with whom I can share my experiences, but then during exam time, everyone is busy mugging away and there is a natural urge to cut to size something that is looming large over me. Writing provided a natural outlet for me. Once the exam fever has passed, I am back to wanting to write on things more abstract and not related to mundane day-to-day life. Still, I want to get back to writing on some things that I think about.

Once in a CRI (Careers, roles and identity is the actual expansion, though many people call it "Child Relief and I" :-)) Class, I professed a desire to be a writer of comic fiction a la my idol PG Wodehouse. Of course, any idea of comparison is blasphemous. But the thought that one could give happiness to others by providing them a world of fantasy and escape from the drudgery of life was an appealing one. Others soon asked me whether I really meant it as I often come across a person who is serious and incapable of cracking jokes.

My favourite means of expression is written and spoken english and my attempts at humour generally originate from the use of words in a rather literal sense. Still, people tend to label my attempts as Dry jokes or Poor jokes or, as one would put it concisely in Tamil, "Kadi" jokes. Well, I really can't help it. It makes me happy to keep cracking such jokes :-).

What is it about humour that is so appealing? Is it the escapism that it provides? Maybe yes. But fundamentally, it seems to stem from the need for humans to feel good about something. Also, there is nothing better than bringing smiles to people's faces and making jokes is one way of doing that. So what if my jokes are 'kadi' jokes?

English, by the way, is a language which seems to be ideally suited for comic twisting of ordinary words and situations. Of course, I don't know the nuances of most other languages to say whether they are better or not. Still, it can be very elegantly used to represent many comic ideas.

Anyway, enough on language. Here is a line from one of PGW's books - "Ring for Jeeves", if I am not mistaken, that goes like this...

" It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't."

Can it get better than this?
PG Wodehouse rocks!

Blogging off,
Ranga

God save me!

One end term exam till date and this is without doubt the worst I have ever done inside an exam hall. I mean, this is even worse than some of the utterly miserable performances I put up in drawing class in school (not that I am bad at drawing, by the way. I can draw sketches and cartoons as good as if not better than the next man :-))
...the saddest part is that I can't even say I have learnt something from the course. Still, there are four more exams and three more submissions to go in the next three days. Time to pull up my socks and start fighting again!

After all, I would not have come to this place if I had not fought tooth and nail for the things that mattered to me the most. Guess this is one more time that I have to go to the trenches...

I really wish I were more mathematically oriented though...

Blogging off in a very very sombre mood...

Ranga

PS: I have deliberately omitted to mention the name of the course, though more than 2/3rd of the WIMWIans would know what I am talking about...

When will the term get over?

ugggggghhhhhh!

Life in the fourth term has been one never ending series of submissions. I remember reading somwhere that if one unravels the DNA o f one's body and lays it out end to end, it would be long enough to encircle the world thirty times or something. Well, if I started laying out all the waste paper I have churned out in the name of submissions, I am sure I can do the same thing as well!

Our seniors had warned us that 4th term is not as easy as it seems and that we may have to put in a lot of hard work. But we dismissed them thinking it was all bunkum... we were sadly mistaken.

Still, this term has provided some learning opportunities, for which I am grateful. What I am more grateful for, however is that the term is coming to an end in around 5 days and I will be seeing home sweet home again soon!

I pray to God to give me the strength to last out the last few days of this nightmare term...

Blogging off
Ranga

Infobranding

Time I got back to blogging :)
I have taken up this course called "Seminar on Brand Management" in the fourth term - a very very interesting course. We learn a lot about the core of a brand, positioning of a brand, a product etc. to ensure that it has the mindspace of the customer... I have been meaning to write on this topic ever since the term started, but never got the opportunity to put pen to paper, or, more appropriately, finger to keyboard!

So here goes..

The world around is is dominated by brands. Every item of consumption is branded in some way of another. Branding is an effort by economic agents to ensure that the customer has some way of identifying their products.
I wasnt too good at micro economics in my first term, but anyways, in my opinion, brands survive in an imperfect market. All real world markets are characterised by asymmetries, not only of information, but the ability of people to understand and interpret that information. That is why there is hardly anything like a 'perfect market'. I cannot categorically state that such markets do not exist, but logic tells me that humans are far from attaining 'perfection' :-).

To come back to the topic, brands are convenient and effective ways of exploiting asymmetries of information to make a consumer prefer one competing product/service over another. What is the objective of a brand? I would think it is to create a perception in the mind of the customer about various attributes of the product(s)/service(s) that the brand is representing. It is a symbol, a signal that hopes to either tear away the veil of asymmetry or profitably sustain that asymmetry to the advantage of the brand. Does the second option sound unethical? To my mind, the answer used to be a definite 'yes'. But then, I have come to realise that the value a person derives from consuming a product is actually a function of perception. If that person can be made to feel positive about using a particular brand, the brand should take all efforts to perpetuate that perception. The concept of value based pricing instead of cost plus pricing owes its origins to this sort of thinking in all probability.

Once an association is created in the initial stages of a brand's life, it often tends to get associated with the product being endorsed by the brand. But as time goes by, the brand feels the need to outgrow the product or the category it belongs to. Then the brand managers try to change the public perception of the brand by dissociating it from the product or category to which it was wedded to initially, giving rise to the concept of brand extensions. But the effectiveness of an extension depends substantially on how the new message sought to be communicated is related to the original message. A radical deviation in all probability will bomb in the market place. This also offers interesting insights into how perception can be altered in increments.

Moreover, the kind of communication strategies followed by a brand varies across the life cycle of the brand ( which may be different from the life cycle of a product - in fact, a successful brand outgrows the lifecycle of the product which it started off with). I could start off again on this, but this blog is getting too long already. So, maybe I will keep this for a later post.

Blogging off
Sitan

Birthday Celebrations

Some photos of my birthday, which was on July 13 are attached...this post is going to be on the tradition of birthday celebrations at IIMA. It is one of the most memorable activities for an individual on campus. Traditions are mostly common across dorms, but each dorm has its own unique variation of the birthday tradition.

The common aspects to most of the birthdays are:
1 Birthday bumps
2 Blowing candles on the birthday cake
3 Having a "guest of honour"(from the opposite sex :-)) to smear birthday cake on the face of the birthday boy/girl
4 Shouting "Kat lo, Kat lo" to drive away invitees from other dorms to let the dorm birthday activities continue in secret ;-)
5. Some other activities inside the dorm which would be sacrilege to reveal :D


Our dorm (D 21) banned the concept of birthday bumps last year, after one guy got his posterior kicked black and blue and could not sit comfortably for days on end...
Instead, we have this habit of throwing the birthday boy high into the air three times. The old campus dorms are restrained from doing this because their birthday celebration zones have ceilings :-).
This is followed by the guys lifting the birthday boy bodily, make him spread out a la superman and rush towards the guest of honour...then they take him towards the cake and encourage him to blow the candles from as far off as possible.

Currently, my description is sounding more like an extract from a cookbook recipe, but I really can't find words to describe the feeling of celebrating a birthday here. I mean, how do I describe the feeling when I am thrown into the air? It was as if I had hit orbit and wouldl never see terra firma again :-).
How can I describe the feeling of being wished a happy birthday a hundred times over? Probably satisfies the third level need in Maslow's hierarchy and gives me a positive 'stroke'. It may sound childish, but I like it and that is all that matters :-). Being the centre of attention is something that most of people crave for and this offers ample opportunity for the same...

Enough now... am getting a bit boring.

Btw, My next post is again going to be on information asymmetry, this time in the context of marketing and brand management...

Till then, Bye
Ranga

Come to the Point

I have often been accused of sending the entire class (and sometimes the prof ;-)) to sleep with long CPs (for the uninitiated, CP means class participation). It is almost a natural urge in me to contribute in class, having done that all my student life. At that point of time, however, my contribution was not incentivised in terms of marks/grades being awarded for CP. In fact, it was a welcome relief for most of the class and a valuable learning opportunity for me.

But here, things change. The same activity carried out when there are incentives attracts a different response. Something which represents an intrinsic motivation to learn is sometimes construed as an attempt to gain better CP grades. Which is strange, to say the least. It is amazing how 'economic' incentives to an activity change people's perception of those indulging in it.

Anyways, a lesson I have had to learn from my first year here is to make my communication more precise and structured. Defining my context every time I speak may be useful for a layman, but I find that it is mostly redundant when I address such a bright gang as the one found here...

Whether I have fully achieved that objective is for other people to say, but from my side, the key learning I have had is regarding the "punch" I need to pack into my statements if I want an audience...

One more entry coming up soon :-)