Problem of Plenty

One of the last items on my to do list before I relocated from Chennai to Mumbai was to sell my 'value for money' car. The reason I decided to do this was, to avoid all the hassles of obtaining a NOC from Tamilnadu RTO, re-registering the vehicle in Mumbai, pay a truckload of money as road tax in Mumbai and claim a refund for the same from Tamilnadu RTO. Most importantly, I guess, it was my phobia of dealing with the bureaucratic government machinery (read RTO), which encouraged me to cordially part with my 'Rampyaari' in Chennai. Which is what I did, on the day I left Chennai.

Little did I know that once I reach Mumbai, the search for a new car would be an even bigger headache! Solely because of such a wide variety of products on offer! It is so confusing!

The last few days I have been doing some research on various car brands & models trying to ascertain what is right for me, and my pocket! I have already discounted the Germans, the Czech and the English brands because they are out of my reach. The Japanese, the Koreans, the Americans and last but not the least, our own home grown Indian brands are what I am looking at. To begin with there are so many competing brands. Each brand has a suite of models to cater to each segment of the Indian market. Each model has at least 3-4 variants depending on the features included in the variant! Phew!

Consider this: A Indo-Japanese (now almost fully Japanese) brand has 15 different models of cars. One of the models has 8 different variants! The difference between each of the variant is only the existence / non-existence of one or two features!

Given this landscape, how does one decide which product to buy? And I have not even stepped into a car dealership to look at the actual cars!

The problem of plenty confronts the consumer. We were probably better off a few decades back, when the only choice that one had was between an Ambassador and a Premier Padmini!

Scale Trouble

For any service organisation, the ability to manage scale is a huge advantage. If not managed carefully and adequately, the consequences can be disastrous, resulting in eroding the brand equity, very quickly. This is a no brainer. I am no management guru.

I have been having immense trouble trying to track the status of a high value cheque that I deposited at the ATM of the largest private sector bank in this country, more than 10 days back! I have been told that the only way I can know the fate of my cheque is to know the cheque number. As luck would have it, I did not record the cheque number on the counterfoil of the deposit slip.

I find it quite surprising that a bank of this size and scale does not have a Plan B! Being an operations professional myself, I felt it necessary to comment on the fact that such a huge bank with lakhs of retail clients, does not have adequate processes to track the transactions of its clients. I have been told that multiple agencies internal to the bank like Relationship Management, Service Management and Branch Management are on the job to search this elusive instrument!

I see this as a classic case of too much, too soon. I am sure I am not the only client having trouble with this bank, which has grown its client base as well as the product portfolio so fast. Probably there is little time to worry about servicing those clients & products.

Meanwhile the search still continues.....wish me luck!

National Shame

Cricket is a passion. I love the game. A lot of my close friends and family know this. That is exactly why all these people preferred to steer clear of me today. Wisely so as well, because talking to me today, would not have made for cheerful conversation.

India lost another series to Australia today. This, inspite of we being the most populous nation amonst the test match playing nations. It is shameful that we cannot find 11 talented individuals who can collectively be world beaters in a country of billions.

The sport in India cannot even complain. There is no dearth of funding. More than 70% of revenues generated from the game globally comes from India. The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) is the richest sports body in the country. An association with mainstream cricket, either as a player or as an administrator, is a passport to windfall gains.

The skipper says his team is not mentally strong. I agree. The team, though much stronger willed than the teams of previous decades, is a bunch of weaklings who get exposed when faced with tough and challenging situations.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Apparently, this is not applicable to the Indian cricket team.

Gender Psychology

I have often heard that shopping is a great antidote to depression. Splurging money gives one a sense of power which is much stronger than the incumbent depression.

This, I guess, might only be applicable to the fairer sex. In men, it works the other way round. I am acutely aware of this, because I was the victim today.

Over the last few days, since we relocated to Mumbai, Priya (my better half!) has been cribbing non-stop about the need to buy some furniture / storage space. After doing the usual thing of asking her to make a list of everything that she thinks we want, on a piece of paper and then dilly dallying on the list, we ended up at a Furniture Mall late this evening. And guess what, by the time we got out of there, we had bought everything on that list, leaving a huge hole in my pocket, notwithstanding my earlier protests and insistence of buying only a select and necessary few on that list.

I realised, as the evening progressed, Priya became more and more cheerful and I was getting frustrated and ticked off by even small irritants. Probably the intensity of these outbursts was also a result of the pain points of the entire relocation process itself. But that is a completely different topic altogether and deserves a separate blog for itself.

I think the best solution to get rid of this awful feeling would be to catch a good night's sleep, which I shall now do.

Good night and take care of yourself.

Blogging

It is 5.30 AM and I have just created my first blog site.

You might say that I am quite an early riser, however that assumption would not be entirely correct. The fact of the matter is that I could not get any sleep tonight and hence was trying to catch up on my mails. One thing led to another and I ended up on one of my friend's (Navin) blog site. I have also been quite keenly following the blog sites of two other friends (Venkat & Vijay) for quite sometime now.

Hence this narcissistic extravagance of creating my own blog site can be attributed to a combination of sleep deprived disorientation and a commonplace herd mentality. One could also term the later as being inspired by my friends' creative exploits on their respective blog sites.

I must really catch some sleep now before wifey and kids wake up. Hope to keep this going.

P.S : Is it insomnia or just too much beer on a Friday night?