An Education [2009]

This post is simply here because I want everyone of you to realize something. Something that maybe you all know, prolly have understood it much better than me, prolly believe in it more than anything but the question is how much of that is put to practice. The main character of the movie in discussion here is a young school girl who has a goal of getting to oxford. This seems to be more a goal as put in her head by her father. She plays the cello and has some issues in Latin blah blah . Then one fine day she comes in contact with a man double her age and there starts a nice little romance. The hero as expected has a sports car, takes her to performances, classy restaurants and even to Paris. Now the expected change in the girl includes a deep desire to shun all her oxford romance and give in to the pleasure of living life with this knight in shining armor, except that in medieval times he came on a horse these days he comes in a sports car.

An interesting thing here of note is the reaction of her parents throughout the whole episode. From the moment when they laugh at a fellow for the ridiculous idea of taking a year off for “roaming around” to gifting a Latin dictionary to their daughter on her birthday (R u kidding me?). Then they get to know of all the glam sham surrounding the “knight” and they agree to the fact that maybe marriage is not so bad a deal after all and she might as well go and show her back to the oxford dream. Is that all the parents ever wanted? Does this mean that when my dad says that I should do MBA is he only asking me to become a more “marketable” groom?

Well lets not digress into my marriage.. that is a big big story in itself when it plays out. Now for the topic itself, well the whole point of marriage as questioned by the girl is one point of highlight in this whole discussion. And the next one comes at the point when the girl has a encounter with her head mistress. This is what I want to reflect on.

The girl very frankly tells her head mistress of what she thinks of her head mistress’ life. And how she will go enjoy the world, dine at the finest restaurants and enjoy the finest jazz while her head mistress will slug it out there in the same school. Is this what you also think? Is this what the world thinks of me and you? Obviously in this hell hole of a place called the world (read rat race), we tend to sympathize with people like the head mistress, and we say that GOD will bring them to justice. Well said. But in reality the world will always be like this?
Now I will open a pandora’s box. I will ask one question – How many of you deep in your minds think that you deserve the life that the little girl is going to enjoy while you are living out the life of the head mistress. Many of you would have said a yes to that. But then that’s because we all think we all deserve a better life. Come to think of it, is any of us happy with what we are in life, or what we have achieved. Right now you will all say a yes. But how many times have you complained in the last few days? A classic example is one friend of mine who got a convert from IIM B and C, alas he was still unhappy because he did not get iimA. Is this greed of what we don’t have, masked under the name of “ambition”.
God dammit go see how many people in a square km around you are better off than you. The very fact that you are someone who has enough resources to read this blog proves that you definitely have a life which is worth killing for. One common way to cheer up myself when I get down is to repeat the last line. Well its time you also did that and gave your life one more chance rather than complaining about it.

Now get lost and do something more productive J

A country of Consultants

This one comes at 330 in the morning with music blaring outside my room, while people are cheering one fellow to finish an entire bottle of some liquid which people tell me has earned Mr Mallaya a few million dollars. So what is so urgent about this post? Well its simple. I went about my usual trip on the google ride and looking for interesting articles on some topic which was eating my head. These days the topic is education in india and how it can be improved. Obviously it’s a very complex question, probably at the same standards of difficulties as the Kashmir problem. But then we need to think about it and come with some solution. So at this point of time I would like to bring to notice some aspects of this which may be worth noticing. The Rights to Education bill with its whole lot of jargon was passed. And this is where you start seeing the bone of contention. Don’t see it?

Well it was these two economists from varsities in the fabled country of America. The land where all our smart guys go, learn some more smart things and then end up working for smart corporate building/researching smart things. Sincerely. Now these smart people while working on these smart things wrote an article on one of the newspapers in the country where they have mentioned what they understand of the Right to Education Bill and they go on to then propose some improvements according to them.

Of course the fact that they have such a impressive profiles means that most of the people who tend to read these things start reading the article with the assumption that they are right, that the research they have done is correct (@Chazz and sathya – note) , that the recommendations which are given in the article are perfect solutions to India’s problems. So after reading the article some of the recommendations seem good. Actually, it’s too good to be true.
Now after so so so long a reading, I will bring you to the main point. We are a country of consultants. We probably were the ones who wrote the bible of Mckinsey and BCG. Am sure you don’t even need to be told why I have made this comment. There are quite a few among you who are right now thinking –

“This guy does not know exactly what to write, I should tell him what he should do” It’s just in our blood. Your mom will tell you what medicine to take, dad will say what bike to buy, girlfriend will tell you what hair style to sport and the list goes on irrespective of whether we have any knowledge or not. My hypotheses is that the lesser you know on the topic the more fascinating are you “advises”. On topics as unimportant as dresses and bikes even I am ready to hear you out. But when people start discussing politics, oh the best example for this is that group of 40-60 year olds who meet up in arbit locations like trains compartments, parks, office corridors etc and start “discussing” what is “wrong” with the country. I mean come on man gimme a break. What is the point if you tell all is wrong with the country’s politician and law&order and then try to bribe the ticket collector because you forgot to buy the ticket?

All that I expected in the article was some solution at some concrete stage man. What was the point of suggesting “we should punish non-performing schools and incentivize the ones performing well” Even the kid in that school will tell you that is a good solution. If to make that solution in the first place you needed a B.Tech degree from IIT and then a MS in some US varsity followed by a PhD then lets compare your efficiency compared to that kids efficiency. He outscores you a million times over. So obviously the correct way to prove the argument wrong is to allow the scholar to go on and present a more concrete solution which has some practical feasibility.

Now that I have vented some anger of mine at the sheer callousness with which our smart people are taking up these opinion spaces in newspapers, I know that the guns are now trained towards me. You say – So Ravi, you also have some of these degrees so why don’t you propose some solution. And the answer to that is – well I have not spent the appropriate time on this and now that me and my few friends are working on this in a concrete manner we plan to come with a working model soon. I assure you there wont be much consultancy in that post.

As always, please feel free to comment on the post and make this a healthy discussion. J

MARKETING RESEARCH – Techniques and details

This is a post I am writing because its something I have done some research on lately. I am NOT an expert at this neither am I a person you should look up to as a born-marketer. Lets see what all i can recall from the last few hrs.

So the first few terms which you will come across at the time of beginning your market research would be qualitative and quantitative research. So obviously the next thing you want to know is which one suits your needs.

The thing you want to look for here is to first analyze what are the needs of the research. Is the problem clearly known? Are we trying to find a solution or are we trying to prove a hypothesis of ours?

Quantitative Research :

This is a objective approach to research and includes a plethora statistical analysis tools. Some of the more popular ones include a survey which could be a pen paper survey or the recent trend of email surveys.

So obviously the most important part here is to design the survey as objectively as possible. Also to consider while designing the survey is what kind of people will be surveyed.

These approaches tend to have a error which comes in various forms – random error, sampling error, interviewer error or respondent errors. The other error which the engineers in the crowd know is the alpha and beta (Type I and Type II)

Qualitative Research :

This one is a more complex one to explain. Qualitative research will be subjective, rich and ambiguous due to its inherent manner. I will focus on two most used approaches in qualitative research –

Focus Group – This is one of the most used approaches and tends to involve a group of 6-8 people who tend to sit in a room with a moderator taking care of the entire decision. The details of what care should be taken before a

Depth Interview – You do this when you are going to scrape through the surface and try to understand what the reason was for the kind of response/feelings that a respondent goes through. The skills of the interviewer again comes under scrutiny because of the importance of his skills. All the more because there is not structure and he needs to understand which nerve to tickle and which one to leave untouched.

Projective Techniques – Well this one has many more sub categories like word association, sentence completion, images etc. These mostly appeal to the non conscious part of the brain which might reveal some data which the respondent might not know himself.

This should get you started on what you want to start with. Any more details can be found in some marketing book else the mother of all information – the Internet.

Hope you benefitted from this. Please feel free to leave comments to improve the article.