A tale of two melting pots

India's cities are so different, and yet so similar. While extensive ethnic differences exist across the country, inter-migrations have made our cities melting pots of cultures with growing similarities.

Take Gurgaon and Bangalore. Two cities at the two ends of the country.

Gurgaon, is unarguably one of our dust-bowls. On a normal day, one would be hard-pressed to not get covered with an inch of dust while taking a trip outside. Roads, trees, houses, cars - everything is covered with dust. On 'special' days, dust-storms rule the roost. And yet, beautiful green oases have begun to sprout across the city - the Leisure Valley park and Tao Devi Lal park - to name two.

In contrast, my perception of Bangalore from outside was that of a verdant park, with a few roads thrown in for people to walk and ride bikes. Now I know that's far from the truth. Yes Bangalore has more green cover than any Indian city I have seen, but with all the Metro construction and new buildings coming up, there are many parts of the city which are no less dust-filled than Gurgaon. 

So different, and yet so similar. 

Once upon a time, people used to make fun of Gurgaon as the 'malled' city. Where the cold, impersonal 'mall' was the only measure of the shopping experience. They used to contrast it with other parts of the country where the neighborhood 'kirana' store was the shopping format with a personal experience. 

Today, Gurgaon has mellowed. Regional shopping markets in each area have become preferred everyday shopping areas, with 'kirana' store equivalents present in each apartment complex.

Contrast that with Bangalore. Today the talk is about the new malls which are mushrooming in every part of the city. Malls have become the new crowd pullers. Yes the 'kirana' store format does exist everywhere, but where do you think are all the new stores opening up?

So different, and yet so similar.

Gurgaon is a town of immigrants. People come from all over the country to work in the contact centers, the retail hubs, (now) the e-commerce setups, or to work as maids / helpers. As a result you hear a medley of languages. From the neighborhood UP 'bhaiya', to the Haryanwi 'jat', to the bongs who call me 'Basant' and the smattering of Tams who whistle in the Tamil movies which play in PVR, Gurgaon is India's multi-cultural melting point. 

Now I am surprised to find Bangalore is no different. Everyone here seems to be multi-lingual. Apart from speaking at least all the south Indian languages (and there are 5+ of that), Hindi is increasingly becoming the lingua-franca. The maids, carpentars, auto drivers,... everyone starts conversing in Hindi first. Besides that, of course are the Biharis and the Bongs, who seem omnipresent. 

So different, and yet so similar.

Leaving money on the table

Pricing perfectly is a science, nay an art.

I just realized how difficult it is to price something well and not leave money on the table when I paid my laundryman. The guy charges the lowest prices per piece I have ever seen anywhere in the country (and by extention anywhere in the world). His prices are atleast one-tenth the prices I would pay if I took it a professional shop thats a 10 min drive from here. And the poor guy ends up borrowing money in advance to tide over his expenses during the month.

Clearly, he could easily raise his prices without losing customers.

Or can he? Now, he is one of the two laundrymen who service the apartment complex where I live. And both of them charge the same rates. If he raises his prices, there is a good chance customers could switch.

So whats his way out?

He has two basic options. One - collude with the other laundryman to raise prices. Or Two - start differentiating, for e.g. offer a premium service at a higher price point and attempt to move customers up.

Again, how much could he raise prices?

Pricing theory says one could raise prices all the way to the point till customers see value, capped by prices of comparable alternatives. In this case, if I were a representative customer, he could raise prices almost 10-fold (assuming he could match the professional service shop) or atleast 2-3 fold at his current service level. I'd imagine that the money he's leaving on the table could solve most of his monetary problems. But does he realize it?

One factor in this is the availability of quality information. A lot of pricing that happens in practice (even in large firms) is through benchmarks. For the laundryman, the only comparable is his competitor. And this makes him leave money on my table.

This underpricing is something I've noticed in a lot of the unorganized labor in the place where I live. And this is quite sad for it feels almost exploitive to be keeping back money from people who are more in need.

Finally, it is interesting to look at professional services available in this town. Quite a opposite to the unorganized, they seem to follow the maxim 'when in doubt, price up'. With scarcity on their side, they rule the roost. To cite the contrast again, I've never seen professional services priced so high anywhere else in India.

Gurgaon is an interesting city.

The firm of the future

Warning: Idle rambling ahead.

Outsourcing is today, a nascent phenomena, atleast to the general public. Beyond the standard hulla-balloo that is heard in the media on outsourcing and the loss of jobs in the US, most are largely ignorant of its play.

What is interesting about outsourcing is its impact on the structure of the firm. For something that started out as a means to delegate fringe services (non 'core', as they used to be called some time back) to third parties as a cost and headache reduction measure, its interesting to see how widespread its impact is, today. From running entire IT setups to large parts of firms - I've even heard of new firms being setup from scratch in a totally outsourced manner - outsourcing is today an integral part of the structure of the firm.

In effect, outsourcing service providers are turning into service factories - that can take any proven business operation/process and industrialize it to run it faster, better and cheaper.

The only thing that's not yet been ever outsourced is the conceptualization or the ideation of the firm. Entrepreneurs still need to figure out business models and prove their worth - however, once they have done that to a reasonable extent, the operations and management can be very well parcelled out to an outsourcer.

So what will the firm of the future look like? One extreme view is that firms of the future (excluding, of course, the service provider firms themselves) will just consist of the ideators - who will conceptualize, design and initiate service offerings - and a bunch of service managers, who will govern delivery relationships with outsourcers. Therefore, a much leaner and more agile firm.

The other view is that outsourcing service providers will not be able to competitively perform every task that an internal firm environment can; that the marginal costs of outsourcing will someday catch up with its marginal benefits and stop it in its tracks. But nothing we know currently seems to point in this direction - if anything we have a long way to go till we get to that point of equalization.

It would be interesting though to see what ultimately happens - hopefully the options would play out in our lifetime. Or maybe, like the theories of contracting and expanding universes, we would just need to be content with conjectures.

In tall orders we trust

Is our society fundamentally heirarchical? I wonder about this as I work more and more with people from other cultures and am made aware of our subliminal biases ("our" - meaning us as Indians).

Its interesting to notice how we Indians exhibit heirarchies at work so much more than people from other, particularly western, geographies. A laddering of seniorities is almost taken as a given - with a view that somehow, people who are "senior", are greater in some respect. Its noticeable in the body language and the mannerisms, particularly when seen in contrast with the behavior of non-Indians in the same work environment.

You'll even notice it in the behavior of global and Indian arms of the same multinational firm - the global 'big boss' would walk down and shake hands with everyone in a meeting room, while the Indian would hardly ever acknowledge the junior members of his own team. And its weird, for I now notice this pattern over and over again in a number of multi-cultural interactions. (And mind you, this doesn't change much amongst those who return from global stints)

And then maybe, its a culturally inbred thing. Maybe its a remanant of the royalty that ruled our land and its consequent class systems. Maybe its a relic of the brit-raj and their babudom that made some citizens more equal than others. Or just maybe, we Indians do not like shaking hands in meetings :|

In any case, its time we started being a bit more civil to each other (at least in the workplace), its time we got over this false sense of ordained heirarchy and started building flatter organizations, its time we realized that fortunes do exist at the bottom of a pyramid.

Unlearning to drive

It is often required to unlearn old habits, before learning new ones. Driving, is clearly one such area.

The last generation largely grew up driving on narrow one lane roads, sometimes unpaved. Four wheelers were for a fortunate few, and that too in the last decade. We, in this generation, are indeed blessed to be driving more comfortable transport on wider roads. However what we seem to retain, are vestiges of driving skills from an earlier era.

We seem to have been thrust into an era of laned roads, without being taught the associated rules. To look at rear view mirrors, to use indicators while changing lanes, to suit lanes to speed, to wait at signals, to honk with reason... are some traits we've never learnt.

We continue to view four laned roads as a wide one laner with markers that never matter, zigzag as if we drove two wheelers and honk our way to glory, as if we were clinking those cycle bells.

None of this is more apparent anywhere in India than in NCR, a region endowed with awesome infrastructure... and with drivers with archaic driving etiquettes.

Now, I don't blame our forebearers (and us). Its just that change has been so rapid, that some of what we learnt (at times by observation), is now a liability. We have so much to unlearn, and so much to learn.

PS: The above is a hypothesis, based on just three data points, seeking to explain the mystery behind abysmal driving skills in the area where I live