I am assuming all of you have heard and followed the Forbes story
on Flipkart. Flipkart has executed amazingly well and has absolutely
excelled in customer service. Perhaps
the first company of its size to embrace customer service as an
obsession and deliver on it. If nothing else happens from here, even
then, Flipkart has reserved its place in the pantheon
of good (perhaps not yet great) companies out of India.

The culture within Flipkart seems to be one of the big issues
raised in the article, and refuted by Sachin Bansal here, and
responded to by the editor of Forbes India.  And the main
allegation is there is an IIT Delhi culture and others find it hard
to break in to this. Well, all I can say is they have done very well
so far with this culture and if the management is smart they
will figure out how to adapt their culture (if required) to maximize
the shareholders value. It may also turn out that they can continue to
be successful for some more time to come with the current culture
(what ever that is).  Lastly, there is always a chance, cultural
issues are hampering their growth and they may not fix it. They
deserve a much longer rope though!

The point of this article is simple:  Amusement parks are there
for a reason — high levels of acceleration (velocity changes both in
speed and direction) thrill. Final two minutes of a NBA game thrill.
T20 thrills. It seems to me we should get thrilled at these places and
leave companies to execute rather than predicting their meteoric rise
and shameful fall  - execution is repetitive, boring, and requires a
lot of grinding over long periods of time. The press can not report on
execution (as one spiritual guru said there is no one waiting to
report on this meditation camp – some one wearing a very different
dress or going out with another girl friend/boy friend is far more
interesting). Building a company is like a form of meditation. People
within flipkart should not carried away by any glowing tributes in the
media and
ignore such negative reports (except calmly pick up any real issues
they agree with and fix those).

Here is hoping we see flipkart come out stronger out of this and
see many more success stories. We badly need good companies (to me
flipkart is one at least as one of its loyal customers) in India and
we need many such companies – to create relevant and valuable
services/products for the people of India, to become role models for
the huge population of youngsters in the country and goad them to
build a strong, vibrant country.

Have you realized all the thamasha you need to hear, while trying to catch your favorite songs on Bengaluru’s radio waves? I am not referring to the unending advertisements or complaining about the not-so-funny RJs trying to make you laugh!! It’s beyond such logical nonsense!

For starters, at prime-time (5 to 9pm) on 94.3 Radio One, Bollywood celebrities (at half-hour intervals) introduce themselves and also remind you that you are in fact listening to MJ Pavitra! I wonder why we need this reminder because RJ Pavitra is old-timer and a hot favorite amongst Bangaloreans! Yesterday, it was the turn of non-Bollywood, master chef, Sanjeev Kapoor to sweetly introduce himself and also announce “YOU ARE LISTENING TO MJ PAVITRA”.

At such instances, I wonder if MJ Pavitra (and her celeb gang) assume that most Bangaloreans have the fading memory of Aamir Khan in Ghajini??? It is likely to be the case! Hence, she considers it to be her social responsibility to keep our fading memories refreshed – it won’t do to assume that she is Shakira, or pakkadhamane Bhaagyamma, or even Shoba Karandlaje!!!

If from 5 to 9, we have to bear “YOU ARE LISTENING TO MJ PAVITRA”, at 10pm it’s the turn of RJ Rubina of Fever 104! Just when she is playing the right, old, Bollywood, songs that make you forget the bitterness of the day; she interjects your peace with “FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE”! This surprise segment makes you verify if you have indeed tuned into an Indian channel in Bengaluru or not!! In this approx. 10 min segment, a Hindi-speaking RJ tells you all about Russia’s economic policies, social upheavals, tourist attractions, etc, etc!!! In a time when most Bangaloreans are unaware of the recent updates of Bengaluru itself, why should we know about “dhoor desh Russia”?

These are a few unbelievable but true audio bits I know of. What surprises or frustrates you about the radio? Come on, write it – hopefully the RJs will stop talking and start reading some feedback !!

I spent four days recently in Delhi with family and friends – there were 16 of us totally in our group – 8 children ranging from 5 to 17 years and 8 adults. We spent the entire time travelling to various places in Delhi by Metro. In my books, Sreedharan and his team that has built Metro over the last fourteen years deserves to get the highest award for what it has done to the city. The Delhi Metro is a world class product and arguably one of the best (if not the best) in the world. To pull this off in India increases the degree of difficulty of this task ten fold.

What is truly amazing is how squeakily clean the metro stations are — including the Chandni Chowk station which is right in the heart of Old Delhi and its old wholesale market. I hear it was not easy to enforce this discipline initially but they have pulled it off. Close to two million commuters use the Delhi metro daily and yet the trains are on time, the crowds at the entrance and the exit are orderly. Further, there was no one trying to jump the turnstiles and thus save on a few rupees while ticketless travel is rampant elsewhere.

The metro is apparently operationally profitable despite being affordable to almost all strata of society – in fact it is perhaps the same cost as a bus while being infinitely more comfortable, way quicker and much more friendly to the environment. This is indeed a boon to India and we must continue to make the Delhi Metro a model undertaking for infrastructure projects all over the country. The best way we can thank Mr. Sreedharan who is retiring the end of the year is by ensuring the legacy continues and is emulated in many other spheres of life in India. He is a great candidate for the Bharat Ratna as my colleague often remarks. Great execution of a world class product over a decade and a half!

A week ago, while in the middle of a meeting, my mobile vibrated, seeking my attention. The meeting was important, but the number was distinctly recognisable. This call just could not be ignored — after all, hope springs eternal in the human breast.

A young, eager voice spoke into my ear. “Good afternoon sir, this is a call from Airtel. I wanted to confirm that you are satisfied with the resolution of the ticket”.

Age and experience have worked relentlessly on a hard problem – they have made remarkable headway. My being has been transformed into a tolerant one. Even so, there is the clear sensation that I was now scouring the bottom of my patience reservoir. I start to enquire which ticket he is referring to. “I do not know, sir. My database does not show me the ticket number”, he replied. “But I do have a notification that your ticket has been resolved, and I wanted to know if you are satisfied. May I please close it?”. My heart sank. Alas, no resolution yet. I dug deep into the Reservoir of Patience. No, I replied, politely, please do not close the ticket. Not that my response mattered.

Repeated requests, nay pleas, have fallen on stoically deaf years. The service has since been disconnected. I continue to receive calls for non-payment of bills. I repeated my woes for the hundredth time to the eager rep that the plan for what we are being billed is not what we applied for. Could they please correct the plan? If they did that, they would realise that we actually have made an advance payment for three months. “We are sorry for the inconvenience caused, sir” comes the plastic response. “Your problem will be resolved by Nov 29^th, 20:13:34 hours”. Meantime, my mobile phone is flooded with SMSes asking my if I was happy with the resolution of the ticket. I am not sure that the rep had any other than marking it as resolved. After all, he had absolutely no idea what he was resolving for me. But he was going to be measured based on whether he had resolved my ticket or not.

Sample this call from Aditya Birla Money.

“Sir, I am calling you to find out why you are not using your demat account with Aditya Birla Money” goes a young lady from Chennai. “Huh?”  What demat account?”, I ask myself. After a few moments of utter blankness, my brain responds to the frantic searching. I tell the rep that I had, once upon a time, a PMS with AB Money. A year ago, I had exited the PMS. Could she please close the demat? The formerly eager, now anxious representative does not know how to respond. There is no data in front of her, and she is certainly not authorized to take any action on the ticket. She merely had in front of her a customer name, and a corresponding demat account that was not being used. She was asked to call, and she had done so. Her charter was to lure me back in. My response did not fit her mandate. She hastily exits the call telling me that she will check with her supervisor, and let me know.

These hapless reps have no databases, no empowerment and, perhaps, no training. I have long learnt not to yell at them. They come in various modulations. Varying accents. Eager, even desperate to get a good response from their customers. They belong to various departments. It could be billing or it could be collections or it could be customer care. One department does not know the details of the interactions of the other department. Thus equipped, they are thrown into the big, bad world of irate customers. The organisations that they represent have often grown too big to listen to their customers. These faceless reps are now the face of the organisation.

My colleague recently made a profound observation on how the too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-care organisations had set up their systems. It was succinct yet unerringly accurate in explaining this malady of mindless calls and ceaseless woes.

For them, the customer is the database.

Experience versus Youth is a topic that rages all the time. Vinod Khosla as a venture investor upped the ante by declaring that people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.In the same article, there are enough instances of older people who have been creative.

I think there are two distinct things – creativity and impact. If creativity is defined as something that is novel then one perhaps has to accept that younger people tend to be more creative — mainly because of lack of experience and exposure to many things. Thus, there are no voices telling them this has been tried and this path is unlikely to succeed. They go with pure intuition and go where older people have not dared to go. On the other hand, if one were to define impact as something that may or may not be novel but has relevance to many people’s lives, then it is my take that older people tend to have a higher hit rate there. Primarily because they are able to eschew some paths that are statistically more improbable.

I want to mention two personal experiences from my two sons who are as different as chalk from cheese. Both of these experiences were when they were around three or four and had a free, uncluttered, view of the world.

The first one was when I was a proud father and quite impressed at my older son’s ability to distinguish one shape from another. I hurriedly drew squares, rectangles, circles, diamonds etc, and taught him those shapes. In order to test him, I then drew what looked to me like a diamond because one vertex (end) was at the top and the other was at the bottom and two at the sides at the same horizontal level. He confidently announced that this was a square. I was taken aback and a tad disappointed that he was not learning fast enough! Upon closer inspection, I had indeed drawn a square that was rotated with respect to the primary axes. I had been easily misled by the rotation but his keen eye noticed that the sides were perpendicular and that is what he had internalized as a square and for him there was rotational equivalence. Further, all the diamonds I had drawn for him had a much small angle at the top and the bottom and he internalized that.

The next experience was with my younger son who confidently declared that one of the ice creams I was having was non-vegetarian. I was taken aback and enquired how he came to this conclusion. He said there was a red circle which denoted that it was a non-vegetarian dish – indeed the ice cream had eggs and there was a red circle denoting this. He could hardly read at that time but was able to make this observation quite confidently while I was struggling with the notion that ice cream could be non-vegetarian!

You cannot miss the exquisite Breguet watches as you flip through November’s edition of Time magazine. One of them in particular – the Breguet Marie Antoinette Grande Complication (BMAGC) – caught my attention not just for its long name but also for its type! The BMAGC is a pocket watch – the kind that my grandfather strung to a chain and pocketed in his coat – that Breguet claims is “Priceless”!

The name, type, and “priceless” tag to the watch got me thinking. Why would Breguet advertise an almost obsolete watch type in an age where mobiles are threatening the existence of watches? Why would they promote a watch called “Complication” in the current era of simplicity (iPad, Tablet, etc)?

I just had to get more details and googled for Breguet Marie Antoinette Grande Complication, almost sure that there would be very little information available on the Internet! But, I was wrong!

The BMAGC is in fact a reproduction of the original Breguet 160 that was designed specifically for the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette!

The Breguet 160 was designed to incorporate all possible features available in watches at that time! Apparently, the term “complication” conveyed the meaning of “feature” in those days!!

An article in the Telegraph reveals that it consisted of 823 parts and 23 complications!! Again the word “complications” – ah its confusing! I cannot continue to stress myself with the word complication so I direct you to read the article for more on this watch’s 23 complications!!!

The highlight of this masterpiece goes beyond its numerous “complications”, because it was not just a time machine but also an exquisite piece of jewelry! It was encased in 18 carat Gold and every moving part was bejeweled with Sapphire! This masterpiece was sadly stolen from the LA Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem in 1983 only to be returned 25 years later!

The theft triggered Nicolas G. Hayek of Breguet to re-produce this timeless, classic, time machine in 2005. The duplicate was completed in 2007 and strangely coincided with the recovery of the original Marie Antoinette watch!

Yes, this watch is truly Priceless! There is no doubt about that! What a phenomenal watch made with grand plans for the royalty, only to be shrouded in mystery until it was reproduced by Breguet again!

Christmas is just around the corner and everyone is excited about attending Christmas parties and eating hot cakes and warm cookies! The demand for wine, Christmas trees, bells, lights, and similar home accessories has drastically increased!

Like all festivals, Christmas demands certain preparations! While guests get busy deciding what to wear and gift, hosts struggle to get the menu and decor right! With 25th December approaching, the pressure to bake mouth-watering cakes is on the increase! Decisions on the cake – flavor, size, design, etc – need to be taken quickly! The artist and baker in you need to converge to bake a masterpiece! Under such demanding times, a little inspiration goes a long way!

Thankfully, inspiration is available aplenty at Bengaluru’s annual cake show. Starting on 19th December, 2011′s much-awaited cake show will be held at St. Joseph’s school ground (opposite Kanteerava stadium).

The piece de resistance this year is the Gol Gumbaz - the mausoleum of Muhammad Adil Shah – of Bijapur! No pun intended – the bakers at Blue Hills (organizers of the cake show) have a monumental task at hand!

Apart from sourcing tons of baking material and getting the proportions right, they also have to understand the architecture of Gol Gumbaz! In short, Blue Hills’ bakers need to perfect a cube-like main body, a large dome, four seven-tiered towers, and numerous arches! This of course excludes the ornamentation and whispering gallery within the Gol Gumbaz.

In addition to the Gol Gumbaz, several different shapes and flavors of cake will also be on display at the show. So, if you are running out of inspiration, visit the Cake show starting 19th December at St. Joseph’s! Who knows – the Gol Gumbaz might actually be the inspiration behind your unforgettable Christmas cake! Imagine how thrilled your guests will be to eat the dome, pillar, arch, or even the basement of your monumental cake!