Educating the Natives

Nearly 15 years ago, a lady representing a famous US-based breakfast foods company, landed in India and swore to change the breakfast habits of Indians. It didn’t quite work out that way. Indians continue to eat their idlis and parathas, even ‘dim paurotis’ (egg & bread). The lady, who had come riding the tiger, went back leaving the smile on the face of the tiger. More recently another lady landed on Indian shores and talked about the relative lack of maturity in the market which had prevented the locals from consuming more gallons of sugared sodas. Now her company is busy pushing old Indian favourites like ‘nimbu pani’ in the same immature market.
I do understand the need for these and many such business heads to talk up the sales of whatever products they are paid to sell. But running down your potential customer seems like a particularly odd way of going about your business. Cereals are great. Hell, my favourite street dog will eat nothing else. And flavoured sodas can be fun I admit. But I am not sure consuming these confers any great maturity or indicates the evolution of a country from barbarism to civilization.
I am reminded of these two instances every time a self-appointed wealth manager from one of the two multinationals I bank with calls me threatening to make my money work for me. One of them promised to prove that my policy of not using leverage to invest in various market instruments was leaving me poorer each year by what I was earning. Luckily I don’t have to struggle for an answer any more when confronted with such jaw-dropping numbers. A simple question stops the marketing pitch mid-path: How much did your bank lose last quarter? The small matter of $8.4 billion of credit losses in the quarter doesn’t exactly inspire confidence does it?
I have no problems with guys who come in and say look at your roads, your sanitation, your trains, your hospitals. God knows we don’t have a clue about running those and could use all the help we can get. But let’s not fix what ain’t broke.

Slumdogs

I see them every few days. Maimed beyond recognition, their eyes gouged out, their hands spread out in supplication, are the only active parts of their anatomy. They are children, a little boy and a little girl. Humans, yet so cruelly carved up by a butcher’s knife they defy the definition of humanity. From time to time I drop some packets of food into their hands. Their unseeing eyes register nothing. Often they pass the packets to the man seated next to them. Is he their father or their trader? He looks equally disfigured but I can’t help the surge of anger against him for not protecting the children or worse, forcing them into such a life. Appropriately they live their doomed lives on a street corner that intersects the quintessential government colony of Delhi on the one side and a tony South Delhi district on the other. Occupants of the first let them down with their corruption and inefficiency; the second merely by their apathy. What’s their only hope: an early merciful death?