Mystery Shopper Goes to Mumbai

In the piece Kurtis and Cattle in Mumbai, Financial Times's mystery shopper talks about her experience shopping while attending a business conference in Mumbai. Interesting take-aways for me from the article.

1. Prices of clothing at high-end boutiques are very high. She bought a dress for $300, another one for $95, Leggings for $35 and a kurti for $67.
2. All these were designer clothes - and she does give the names of the designers. Most designers of these women's clothing, however, were male. Rohit Gandhi, Rahul Khanna, Manish Arora, Manish Malhotra, Tarun Tahiliani. Yes, there were women too - Anupama, and Ritu Kumar.
   
3. She went shopping to a sari, but never bought one. So, Sari is no longer the symbol of Indian shopping.

"Perhaps they did not hate us after all"

The Financial Times of March 12, 2010 has a piece on Indian Art. Titled Face Values, it describes a current exhibit at National Portrait Gallery in London.

The article is informative and easy to read. What caught my attention, however, are the writer's musings on why there is a string of shows about India. Instead of paraphrasing, and losing part of the meaning, here is her direct quote.

So why, with all these exhibitions pulling in the crowds, do the British have such a taste for Indian art? The obvious answer is the fascination with the colonial past that all ex-colonisers have. Beyond that, we seem to scan these images for echoes, traces of ourselves, and are happy when we find them. Perhaps they didn’t hate us after all? Perhaps the enduring legacy of that time was a rich one? And perhaps this world is knowable, perhaps we can learn to read it, and the people who made it, and live well together in our own times.

Perhaps they didn't hate us after all? Does the current generation in India really hate the British? I don't think so. So, where is this "inferiority complex" coming from? I don't know. In fact, until I read this article, I did not even realize that it existed. The view from the other side of the fence is different, and as in this case, sometimes very different.

There is moss in them thar hills

India recently went through its annual budget exercise. Every year, the Government has the ability to modify tax rates and prices it will charge on products and services from public sector undertakings.This is very different from the US, where tax rates are considered sacred, and changing them is an extra-ordinary process. One populist measure for politicians is run on platforms of not raising taxes.

Both systems - virtually fixed tax-rates, and annually-changing tax rates create behavior patterns. In the case of the India, consumers and businesses may sometimes wait for the next year, hoping that tax rates may become beneficial for them. In the US, businesses build their structures around existing tax rates, and find it difficult to adjust to changing tax rates, or for that matter, to other conditions.

In these days of "Who stole my cheese," and agile development environments, who do we think is better suited for long-term successes - those businesses that are static, or the rolling stones that gather no moss?

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If you would like to read more on the budget process, here are two references.

If you want to understand more details about India's budget, here is a writeup on the philosophy India's Budget Process (in Theory). Rediff.com gives the stages of the budget process.