Experience at Big Bazaar

I recently ended up in Food Bazaar at Big Bazaar on a Sunday morning (don’t ask me why I did such a stupid thing). In simple words, the place was a disaster.
There were 8 counters for billing, of which only 3 were operational, that too on a weekend. Needless to say, there were long (at least 20 minute) queues at each counter. One would assume that only 3 counters were operational in such a situation cause of lack of staff. But that didn’t seem to be the reason. There were 3 people at each counter – one for doing the actual work, one for standing and looking at it (I couldn’t make out if that person was a supervisor or a trainee), and one for bagging and locking the bags.
There was a guard at the exit to check our bags and bill to guard against shop lifting. Of course, he did a lousy job like all guards who check bags do. However, his job was not really necessary as the bags were well locked.
What I don’t understand is that why is so much precaution required to ward against shop lifting. As long as you ensure that every person is going through a billing counter, the need to lock bags and then again check them goes away. People going out empty handed can have a separate exit with some form of checking. If you don’t need to lock bags, you can do away with one person kept for bagging / locking. Customers can bag their items themselves (that’s what I saw happening in Italy). I think any customer would be happy to bag their items on their own if it halves their waiting time in the queue!
A short visit to the upper floor on Big Bazaar revealed an equally sorry state. Only one counter open, a 15 minute queue, one additional person sitting idle at the billing counter who could have started folding/bagging earlier than she did. Add to that, lack of proper bar codes leading to further delays.
Shorter queues would prompt more customers. My reason for not going to Big Bazaar is primarily the long waiting time. Of course, if they want to be more innovative they could open one counter for people with less than 4 items. That ways, even people with a smaller shopping list might be willing to shop there. I have often kept down a chocolate at Big Bazaar simply because the queue was too long.

The sorry state of Indian Television

Now that I am home after a long time, the Hindi Television Soap Opera industry is being inflicted on me by not only my grandmother and mom, but also, I am embarrassed to say, my dad! I must admit that it possibly couldn’t get worse.

There seems to be a dearth of TV serials anyways and hence the need for each program to painfully stretch beyond its capacity to years and years of torture. Not only is the length bothersome, the content too lacks variety. There’s usually a simple theme – one unrealistically wicked person and another extremely nice person. Almost always, no one is able to identify the wicked person barring a person here and there, and no one believes this nice person (I don’t know why these serials assume that humans are so bad at judging people). Somehow or the other, the wicked character is able to get away with a lot of troublesome behaviour. As the story progresses, and the serial needs to be extended beyond its tolerable life and the wicked character cannot do more harm, usually a new wicked character is created. It also quite likely that there is a twist and the wicked character all of a sudden becomes really nice!

And one cannot forget the special effects. It started with an alternating zoom in, zoom out sequence with somehow matching strong music. Then there are B&W instances. Then there are the sequential close-ups of all the family members, usually standing in a row, for about 2-3 minutes about twice in every episode. One must not forget that most serials involve filthy rich families, living in unrealistically (am I using this word far too often?) fancy and large homes, with the women dressed in heavy jewellery all the time.

Since there are so few TV serials, each serial is forced to run 5 days a week, unlike the usual once a week scenario previously, which still continues in the US. With the need to shoot so much and limited capacity for each character, they’ve come up with various innovations. Of course, increasing advertisement time in that 30 minute period is just one of them. Add to that – recap of previous episode (very standard), a ‘what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes’ post cap before every ad break and of course, ‘what’s going to happen tomorrow’ post-cap at the end of every episode. With some many recap’s and post-cap’s, I doubt (yet to exactly time it) if each ‘30 minute’ episode has any more than 15 minutes of new shooting.

India continues to copy from the developed world – be it IPL, clothing and what not. I wish they could copy TV serials too and bring about some variety in what is being offered. Bollywood has definitely gone in the right direction. Waiting for Indian Television to do that too. Till then, I shall stick to my laptop and English sitcoms!