Bharat vs India : My experience

“One should visit places abroad … It opens you up and will be an interesting experience. We are Argumentative Indians … we like to talk a lot, but when it comes to actions.. .everyone shies away. We are very good in strategy and ideas …. What we lack is execution!” The person who had come to deliver a guest lecture as part of IMC course said this to me over coffee today.

I remarked … true probably.

Yesterday we had an interesting experience. We have to create a commercial for a marketing course as part of our curriculum at SP. It is one of the regular assignments. We decided to take an extra step. Most of the surveys we conduct are of people within our campus or friends we know. So we end up having a view as that of a frog in a well.

This time we decided to shoot a real video and hit the Santosh nagar slums near Goregaon. It was a different experience. Watching people live in those teeny weeny houses .. I peeked into a house and saw a little girl trying to do her homework with book toward the light coming through the door. Her mom was cooking in the same room and her little brother was playing nearby! For quite sometime I got habituated to seeing people in malls, reading about shining India and dreaming of owning a Porsche when I see it in the showroom on WE highway! This was a slight kick in the ass.

We probably do not understand the other communities as well as we think we do.

We met a lady in the slums and proposed our idea of promoting quality food in small sachets … not really a brilliant and new idea.. as the sachet revolution is everywhere around you in India. Our intention was to provide the quality food to people who purchase in small quantities.

She replied that .. “it’s the mindset of the people that if they can buy a low quality for 2 rs less, they would do so and probably buy some masala or vegetables with that money.” How can you consume such customers to buy a product based on promise quality? Here we should get closer to the bottom side of Maslow’s pyramid!

In the end our video ditched us in the last moment .. didn’t work. But nevertheless A drive to realities of life in the rains of Mumbai on my favorite bike with my great friend ….. I felt that it was one evening well spent!