I've been shopping at Flipkart

The entrepreneur bug seems to have bitten too many young Indians of late! We've been seeing entrepreneurship camps, been hearing about seeding (that was a pure biological term in the 90s) and angels (and this was reserved to the Bible) and have been having our own share of college dropouts idolising Bill Gates! For someone who truly believes in the power of potential and will, it's just amazing to see this enormous rush of energy and I am convinced that some of these ventures will take India from being a pure service oriented market to a product oriented one.
It is in this context that I want to write about Flipkart.com. It is an online book store, modeled in the same lines as of Amazon started by two IIT Delhi grads. There isn't anything spectacular about Flipkart, because they are just following the lines of a model started off by Jeff Bezos 15 years ago. But somehow I like Flipkart (as they say it all lies in winning the heart of the customer!) for it's simplicity, for the fact that it's founded by two young Indian lads, for it's excellent share of rare books, for it's excellent price mechanism where the same title is offered at varying prices based on the print, publisher etc, for it's extremely search engine friendly design, for it's easy and flexible payment options, for it's very prompt delivery and excellent packing (the books I ordered came bubbled wrapped and in a cardboard box) and for it's decent customer service (when they could not procure a book I ordered from any of their vendors, they gave me a discount coupon on future purchages and I just got an alert from them saying that a book that I said I was interested in was available with them now). The site has a user friendly design with common features like comments and related books, but considering the fact that they are still growing, these features are not very mature and useful. But overall I will recommend this site for others within India to shop for books - because it does a decent job of delivering books on time, has a solid collection of books and because it's a startup right here at Koramangla, Bangalore!
Pure book portals are a relatively new concept in India and it's an area with huge potential. It is pretty disappointing though that almost all the players are sticking onto the tried and tested ways of retail or online book selling and have not ventured out to try out new avenues. Typically most Indians are not tuned to buying books and most books sold at these outlets are prohibitively expensive for the common man (mango people according to Imtiaz Ali - watch this) - because of this business model most major players are restricted to a very small pie of urban corporate class. There lies a sea of opportunity for these players to reach out to the average Indian - through regional language books, second hand books and networking the many local run libraries in the thousands of small towns and villages of the country.

Branded Puja Kits! What an Idea Sir ji

This idea just blew me away the first time I read about it. Here is a 27 year old who has tapped into may be a true sacred cash 'cow'! Sacred Moments is a startup by Prakash Mundra which provides packaged puja kits which he claims includes all items required to conduct a puja by even a newbie. As per the company's website, the kit for Diwali puja contains around 30 items including Laxmi Ganesha murthy, crafted coconut, ghee, cotton wick, honey, pooja book and even gangajal. I am not sure if there is a number on the worth of the spiritual market of India, but in a society where religion and rituals hold central sway and where a number of people are ignorant about the requisites of a Puja and where to procure the items from, this wonderful idea of Prakash is bound to be a runaway success.

Floating Retail Ideas in the backwaters of Kerala

Nostalgia is the word as I write this piece. My mind meanders to the paddy fields of Neerettupuram, to the narrow kutcha roads where only cycles plied, to our tharavadu on the banks of the Pamba river and to my paternal grandparents (who are no more with us) with whom I spent most of my summer holidays as a kid. The world knows this place (Kuttanad) better as the backwaters of Kerala. More than it's importance as a tourist destination, the intricate system of canals and backwaters in Kerala connect hundreds of villages and is the lifeline of over a million people. Thousands of people commute to work everyday on boats, even today you can't miss seeing farmers transporting their produce to the market on their vallams (Malayalam for boat), political parties use the waterways for campaigns and it is the primary source of irrigation for the predominantly agricultural area.
Was it then surprising that the Kerala State Co-operative Consumers Federation decided to tap into the potential of these internal waterways and take their retail stores to the boat jetties of Kuttanad? The federation has launches catchy bright red and white supermarket boats christened as floating triveni in June 2009. Catch a video on the floating supermarket below:



This is a true bottom of the pyramid venture and is bound to be a roaring success. Most parts of Kuttanad is predominantly rural and has an agrarian population, typically there will be a single town catering to the consumption needs of a number of satellite villages and the villages themselves will have just a few small shops catering to the ration needs of the villagers. Floating Triveni addresses this glaring need of the BOP customer perfectly - here is a product that caters to all your shopping needs, comes to your doorstep and is priced significantly lower than other stores. It's one of those ideas which you look at and say, 'it was so obvious and why didn't anybody think about it before?' - that's the halmark of all simple ideas. A number of FMCGs in India have given lot of thought of the content, packaging and pricing of their products to suite the BOP Indian customer, but very few innovative ideas have sprung up on reaching out to the Indian consumer (we get fixated by the inflated numbers of the great Indian middle class (courtesy Pavan Varma!) that we tend to forget about the billion strong BOP customers of the country!). I can imagine other hard goods jumping into the bandwagon (boat?) soon - like agricultural equipments and fertilisers, but for sure the people of Kuttanad will be thanking the Government for the red and white floating supermarkets now and it will be really interesting to see the numbers of Consumer Fed next quarter as well as the potential clones!!

Why History is boring....

I am disappointed that I was never taught about the history of my own state in school. Blame it on a national syllabus or the bias of the historians - which ever might come out true, I've been the loser! There is a negative societal bias towards history as an academic subject in our country - I wouldn't be wrong to say that not many people make a conscious choice to study history, afterall it's portrayed as boring, unintelligent and insipid. Well, blame it on the methods of teaching and the syllabus and not on the subject alone. We have never been taught the 'why' of history - why do you need to know (I would prefer to use the word 'know' in place of 'learn') 'your' history, we have never been taught to ask any questions about history and most often the history we learn has been disconnected from our immediate surrounding. All of us have a strong innate urge to question, explore and decipher the world around us. That is what makes the study of science and mathematics so fascinating for many. Whatever we study in science helps us directly in understanding the intricacies of the things (natural and synthetic) we see around and equips us with skills to explore and deconstruct them further. This builds an endless fascination of discovery. This is where I believe the teaching of history fails. The study of history is nothing but a journey into deciphering the past, a study of our social, political and economic evolution and fundamental in helping us answer the question of why are we who we are today. Fundamentally, doesn't the social and economic dynamics of our society influence our existence more than any other scientific phenomenon (other than may be biology and medicine)? It is a huge mistake to classify history in a silo and treat it as a separate subject. History can never be understood in it's entirety unless and until we under a host of other subjects like anthropology, archeology, sociology, art symbolism, geography, economics and politics - history is what you get when all these and more amalgamate, it distills into a story of evolution and paves the path to the present. It's a pity that history is not given it's due importance in our country, it's saddening that we are not taught to have an inquisitive mind about our past, to fathom into the times that shaped our today and the men from whom we have been made....May be that's the difference between learning and knowing....