The Great Indian Bargain

Two reasons why the Indian sales department will never do well enough...
1> the 'take-it-or-leave-it' attitude...
2> creating special offers that never encourages a customer to come back...

Something that has always ('always' not as in throughout my life… hmmm… but yeah… somewhat close to that…) left me wondering is whether the Indian salesmen are the best, or the worst, in the world… now, salesman could be anybody… the guy at the car sales showroom… the guy serving you chicken at KFC (grrrr…)… or even the milkman who leaves a pack of milk outside your doorstep everyday (in India!)… they know it… we don’t… all Indian customers are stupid… no matter how much they manage to bargain and how much they know about the product… sales outlets come up with offers like ‘Buy 2 Get 1 Free’ or ‘Win a Trip to (blah blah)’ or ‘50% off’ and the customer gets easily suckered in… the offers look very attractive and decent on the outside… but a deeper look into it would reveal the cheap and dark side of the ‘offer’… think about it… you shop for 5000 bucks’ worth and then ask about the free trip to Sri Lanka, they tell you the offer is valid only on Tuesdays… you get into an Adidas showroom which offers you a 50% discount, but you can’t find a single item which comes with a 50% discount simply because they are short on stock of items which actually have the discount on them… the fault lies with the Indian customer… the ‘we-came-all-the-way-now-we-gotta-buy-something’ attitude… unless we learn to walk out of the store, if we don’t find what we’re looking for, things are never going to improve…

Bet you’re wondering why the utterly senseless post, out of the blue (??)!!! (not that all my other posts made much sense, but still…)… yep!... I got punk’d too!... as recently as yesterday… I was having a dull day (certainly not the first instance)… and was a little under the weather… weirdly, I felt having some chicken might make me feel better… and off I went to ChicKing… one of the many local equivalents of KFC… since I’d got an e-mail about the ‘offer’ two days back, I was very sure about what I wanted to buy… it was the ‘FIFA offer’ (FIFA offer… like duh!... in a country whose football team has never even qualified for the qualifiers!! (or have they??)… and that too in a state from where a certain ‘mentally challenged’ cricketer is the only person to make it to an international sports arena!)… you buy two wraps and you get two mini-burgers free… (perhaps I missed the ‘oh-here’s-another-FIFA-offer-dumass’ smirk on the face of the guy at the reception)… it was only when I reached home and opened my package that I realized the horrors of horrors!... the wrap was barely thicker than my middle finger… the burger was worse… at a distance of about 15cm, the brown-colored fillet seemed non-existent, and the brown color that I saw here and there made me think it was because the lettuce was wilting!!... sigh… yet another stupid Indian customer… sometimes I do think that Russell Peters was perhaps right (though I still maintain that he’s a ree-tarrrd) when he called Indians ‘Cheap Stinkin’ Bastards’…..

PS: for those who missed it, I've uploaded the Munnar video in the previous blog... since both Chowder and me have the reputation of not having a 'crystal-clear' speech, I've added subtitles as well!!!... how caring of me!!...

The Two Big R's

I guess by now we are familiar with the only two big R's that have any significance in this blog - Road trip and Random thoughts (!!!)...

Yep... road trip...  with Chowder...
My friendship with Chowder goes a long way back... close to fifteen years... back in the days when he was called Prijo... the days when we made the television for our annual science exhibition in the fifth grade, and watched the TV getting flung across the class (by Leena Rajiv, our social science teacher) two days before the exhibition!... sigh... those were some days...




Anyways, off we were.. to Munnar... in Chowder's brand new Fortuner...

The drive up was quiet steep, with Chowder expertly maneuvering the vehicle...

it does get pretty tiring after a while, one wrong move and you could end up falling off the cliff and tumbling down the hill (just as Ajo 'predicted')...

once we reached the top...

we went for a little mountain climbing...

...and then we got back to the hotel, and set about doing what we are good at!...

The weather was quiet pleasant... though it wasn't really good... guess Munnar isn't the right place to visit at this time of the year... but surprisingly, I began shivering at night... the temperature: 18 degrees!!!... i guess i'm getting a little too used to the average 40 degrees temperature, that anything below 20 degrees has the capability to freeze my ass!!!...

That's pretty much about it about the road trip... my ability to describe events has begun wearing off... that's why i don't remember much... and it's been ten days anyways!...






Now comes my favorite part of the blog!!!... the Random Stuff!!!... i love this section because whatever i write in here doesn't necessarily have to make any sense!... the name itself implies it's senseless!... bah...

• the other day i was talking to Ajo... oh i talk to him everyday!!... (we are that deprived of 'work and company'... or let me rephrase it... 'enjoyable work and enjoyable company'...)... and now, if talking to him at night weren't enough, he calls me during lunch as well!... he was telling me about his roommate... named 'Dhanpal' (which did get a certain close friend of ours very excited till Ajo began regretting telling the name!)... we were discussing the mindset of Tamil parents when they go in to name their kids... stark examples: Karuppusamy, Neil Armstrong (yeah!.. that was the name of a professor in my college!), Lingasamy and so on... but the name that did get us thinking was "Kuppasamy"... hell! that's equivalent to naming your kid "Shitlord"!!!... how cool is that?????!!!!!.... what do these people call their children at home??... "Kuppa" (Garbage!!!)????????.....

• on a weekend i was traveling from Trivandrum to Cochin... and there was this guy sitting next to me, who apparently had a very very strong head, literally!... the guy was sleeping the entire time, with his head resting on the bar behind the seat in front... every three minutes, due to inertia (bah! scientific ol' me!) he would slowly move backwards (in his sleep), and then, (due to Newton's some law of force/motion... ok ok... i'm not that smart!) he would come back to the bar with full force and.... THUDDDDDDD/CRUNCHCHCHCHCHCHHHHHHHHH!.... his head would crash on the bar... every time he did that, i expected his head to crack open, and his brain to start leaking out (due to some pre-conception, i consider the brain to be made of a slimey semi-solid material... such that, if a hole is made in the head, it would start leaking out)... but it didn't!!!... it did remind me of my own college days!!... back in those days, if i sat in a particular spot for more than two minutes, i'd immediately fall asleep (except at nights... when i could stay awake for all i wanted)... so the same used to happen in college buses as well... i used to fall asleep... and every three minutes, i'd be briefly woken up by a skull-cracking THUD (caused by my own head hitting against the bar)... perhaps that did contribute a little to my becoming retarded!... :P

• oh... another bus story.... again i was traveling from Trivandrum to Cochin (guess that's pretty much the only traveling i do these days!)... and i came across this lab, that tests your, errr, stuff... and right outside the lab, a board read, in bold, 

               "********** LABORATORY
                  WE TEST YOUR PHLEGM, STOOL, URINE, BLOOD"
  
i thought that was really, really gross to write something like that in a public place... won't people understand if they just mentioned that it were a testing lab????!!!!!!.......

anyways... i'm off for now... got a few good things lined up for me to happen... if those things don't happen, boy, "somebody gonna get a-hurt real bad!".... ciao!....