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!

Waiting for people?

Why do people not give proper time estimates?

I’ve faced this problem with a lot of people. They say they’ll take 15 minutes when they actually take 45. They say they’ve left the house and will be there in 5 minutes when they are just going to go for a bath. This is not something you can give a benefit of doubt for - these time estimates are completely off the mark!

The question is – why do people do this. I can think of 3 broad reasons.

1. They think the other person is stupid and would not be able to figure out that they were lying. In which case they are stupid to discount other people so much.
2. They really have no sense of time and hence absolutely no clue as to how long will they actually take. In which case again I think they are a little light in the head and should try to look at the watch more frequently to get an estimate of how long they actually take. For e.g. how long do they actually take from thinking about taking to bath to reaching their friends place. Then they’ll be able to make better time estimates.
3. Or, they are too scared to admit right away that they are damn late and hence try to postpone admitting that. Again, doesn’t say very highly about them.

For some people, everything will take 2-5 minutes. People should realize the difference between 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 30 minutes. It would help them in the long run.

New experiences

I recently had the opportunity to interact extensively with a new kind of people. The kind of people who, till now, I was easily able to avoid till now.

The kind which I didn’t like as they were not straight forward. This kind is unable to say anything directly and clearly. They will put up the most fake face in front of you. They’ll be all nice to you, but its not hard to see that things are not as they look. They cannot say anything directly. Everything will go in a round-about way.

What is interesting is that they are not even that good at putting up masks. You’d think that if they did it all the time, they would at least be good at it. But obviously they aren’t.

What is worse is that interacting with such people can make you bad too. You don’t feel like talking straight to them and giving it that easy. You intentionally want to twist it around for them – probably they love to twist as that is the way they would like it too!

I realized that I’d been able to conveniently avoid such people as I always had the choice to choose the people I want to make friends with/ live with. But in a foreign country that choice is often limited.

The truth about bitching

The truth is very simple – bitching is therapeutic, stress relieving, entertaining and relaxing. It’s everything which one can want from a conversation at times (not always definitely), when you want to lighten your mood and not really rack your brains and think. The reason why people view bitching in such a negative light is simply cause they don’t understand the therapeutic value of bitching, either cause they’ve never experienced it or cause guilt gets the better of them and prevents them from experiencing it. If people can simply take bitching for what it is – something frivolous and entertaining, and not something which you believe in seriously, or care about, or some truth of this world, they would be able to rid themselves of any guilt feeling associated, and truly enjoy its benefits!

Recognizing Globe

I know this is getting too much on the MBA front, but I can’t help it - I am doing an MBA. Hence, you would have to deal with some more MBA articles over the next 1 year.

We all know, or think, that MBA’s are really good at ‘Globing’. Now, while I can say those capabilities are slowly improving (not sure if MBA is the reason – maybe I was anyways going to get at it) I have learnt another thing – ‘recognizing globe’. While earlier, some speaker might have seemed impressive simply cause of his smoothness, I am now able to look beyond the smoothness into the content of what he’s talking and recognize whether it’s ‘globe’ or not.

P.S.: I am not sure if this is a great thing. The pressure to label anything as globe is so high, that everything anyone says is by default globe. Only if the speaker says something really impressive is he labeled as non-globe. Discounting everyone’s views for globe is probably not that good a thing.

P.P.S. : If you think this is globe, that is ok. Like I said, I am getting better at it!

Credits : This article’s foundations were laid during a conversation with friends, who I shall call ‘AB’.

Something I didn’t expect an MBA would teach me..

Learning to not be punctual
Working in teams here and calling team meetings every now and then has actually taught me the lesson of what everyone refers to as ‘IST’ very well… Much better than whatever I had learnt about it all my life. It’s possibly because one doesn’t expect it to be like that here. For a one hour meeting, there is no way that every team member would be present within 10 minutes of the official meeting start. Why does this happen? The lack of time makes people want to optimize their time utilization. Since everyone has learnt, like me, the prevalence of IST, they try to be the smart one, by coming late, thereby saving their time. It’s like a game theory – everyone wants to be the last one to reach to minimize their time wastage. What happens because of this? First you come 2 minutes late, but someone else came 3 minutes late. Next time you come 4 minutes late and the cycle continues, and very soon, IST comes into play. Sadly enough, I too have started playing this game theory, though I am not so good at it - even after all my calculations, I am rarely the last one!
Or maybe it’s cause I dislike the last one’s so much that I don’t want to be one myself!