Bangalore Weekender

Bangalore features as "Best place to Live" in every possible ranking in the world. If you took the base Excel sheets made by those journos and chose to un-hide Rows between the title and number one ranked city you'll find Bangalore in there.

Let me take you through a typical weekend trip to a movie and dinner and you'll probably quit your job, sell off your family properties, board the next flight and come to Bangalore.

1. Autowalas

In geometry my teacher taught me that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. What he forgot to add was that the longest distance between any two points is what a Bangalore Autowala will show you. And to add salt to injury after they take you round and round the city, they round off the fare to the next multiple to 10 !

Imagine a Mahabharat-era setting, you the noble prince command your sarathi to take you to the nearing kingdom and he tells you "Meter se Rs. 20 extra lagega" ! Guaranteed WTF.

They follow a very flexible timing policy. The One and half starts hours before the actual stipulated time and end hours after the actual stipulated time.

2. Unique riding experience

Bangalore offers a riding experience like no other city. They offer the best of all worlds - Mumbai's refreshing congestion, Delhi's musical expletives, Kolkata's magic dust and rural India's energizing potholes.

Those potholes especially are legendary. They are inspired from the ruins of Babylon. The future vision is to host bungee jumping at the 2020 Olympics when wrestling gets the boot. People don't have to travel to far off lands burning hard-earned cash for it. The reason why BMC hasn't approved flying cars in Banaglore is because they haven't figured out how to introduce potholes in the sky.

The roads around Bangalore were probably designed by one of the guys laid off by a Supermarket. It makes you go through unnecessary areas through a careful and well-designed series of one-ways or prohibited turns.

3. Multiplexes

Pirates of the modern era. They use three absolutely convenient slabs for Ticket prices - 'Goodbye Salary', 'Hello highway robbery' and 'Time to sell my Kidney'.

And then they take a deposit for the 3D glasses inconveniencing everyone for change. I mean what good is their security for if people can easily escape the cinemas without returning the glasses. Its equivalent to a fine-dining restaurant taking deposit from you for eating in their cutlery.

For their in-cinema meals rather than putting up all of those MRPs they can simple point a gun and ask the consumer to handover all that he has got. 180 bucks for a burger ! Is Gold dust used for seasoning? And making a bucket load of margin on something as essential as water is plain cruelty.

To top it off they bombard you with so many commercials you need a Interval between commercials and not between the the actual Movie. Maybe someday I have to pay for the commercials and the movie will be free.

4. Restaurants

If the multiplexes didn't cavity search you and take all you got then the Restaurants will. They insist on Reservations even if you were the last two people on the planet. Gone are the days when you could walk into a restaurant. Now it looks the Doctor's office where everybody has an appointment and are waiting their turns.

If they want to fleece you, all they have do is add some designer cut carrots and some beans along with potato mash to a regular meal. From a two digit price menu it got transformed to three digit and four digit price menu.

Well that's only the tip of the iceberg. Now I pay more in taxes than for the blessed meal itself. And who the hell invented Service charge? Have the waiters stopped getting salaries and now live off this Service charge ? Is there a self-service option?

Imagine one goes through all this and the higher mortals still ask why are there two Bharats !  

Keep it Simple Dude !

Human beings pride on bring the smartest beings on the planet though history will time and again prove that our 'smartness' has done more damage than good to mother nature.

In Bangalore the law mandates for stores NOT to provide free plastic bags. Now we have to pay from Rs. 1 to Rs. 5 depending on size for a plastic bag or bring our own.  At first sight it seems like a good move. Junta will stop treating plastic like free stuff and use it with a bit more responsibility and make mother nature stronger in its big fight to survive human onslaught.

But like all human moves this too has a catch - not visible to the naked eye when viewed in isloation. Now let me to put  this move in context to my trips to the local supermarket store Aushan (pronounced O-Shan). 

First thing, the very first thing, after I walk into the store I realize that I didn't bring my reusable bags (again!). This makes me feel like a dumbo !

Then I start looking for milk, only to discover that some genius in the store thinks that milk should be placed in over a number of different locations throughout the store. You have your regular milk here, your tetrapack milk there, your slim milk somewhere else, and so on. There is no logic that I could conjure up to justify this. Five minutes into my shopping, I am filled with rage and I feel manipulated. I assume someone at Aushan's marketing department decided that inconveniencing me would somehow make me buy more shit because I end up walking down every goddamn aisle in the store looking for milk. It's not the inconvenience that bugs me so much as the feeling of manipulation. After-all I am an MBA-Engineer, if anything I should be manipulating others and not the other way around.

After this I look for the shortest checkout line. The 10 Items or Less line looks good, but I'm never confident in how they do that calculation. Is a '3 pack bundle' one item or three? What about multiples of the same product for which only one needs to be scanned and the cashier can just punch the exact number in the qty column of his billing software? Will the lady behind me feel I just cheated? Will the cashier give me a disgusted look and mentally abuse me? Will he kick me out of the line ? What exactly is the process for dealing with junta who cheat in 10 items of Less lines? 

I can't stand the ambiguity or do I want to risk humiliation at the hands of the cashier so I head for the regular checkout stand and its a longer line. When it's my turn to pay I am faced with the choice of proving I have a loyalty card or paying a penalty if I can't. I don't carry loyalty cards with me because I would need a thela for all of them. The cashier asks me for the phone number the card is registered against. But which phone number was it? Its registered in my wife's name but with our last few years being extremely nomadic I can't remember where and what number she might have used while registering. After a couple of futile and embarrassing attempts I give up. The people behind me have deployed their angry glares at me and my time-wasting hesitation, or at least it feels that way. 

Now I have to decide on Cash vs. Debit vs. Credit. I choose credit because one of my MBA Profs told me that ultimately CASH is reality so I delay parting ways with this cash I surely have. Plus the added rider of my PAYBACK points associated with the credit card, which is another mindfuck of complexity. I get mad just thinking about my points.

Now the cashier asks if I want to donate a Rupee to some worthwhile charity. I approve of the charity, but it pisses me off that they ask me in this particular situation. It's manipulative. I JUST WANT MY DAMN MILK !!!!

Now I have to mentally figure my way out of the plastic bags situation. Cannot carry it in my hands because I have too many items. HOW ?? Because in my search for MILK I stumbled upon Mordor and Middle Earth and I ended up buying stuff I didn't even know I needed. It only got worse as I got hungrier and hungrier over the course of my milk safari. Damn you, Aushan marketing department! Damn you!

The cashier asks, as law requires, whether I want to pay 2 bucks for the plastic bag. I would happily pay the 2 bucks if the cost were factored into the total price, but something about being asked in front of witnesses makes it feel wrong. And I know that if I do buy the bag I will be destroying the planet for future generations. I will feel guilty buying it, guilty taking it into my home, and guilty recycling it later. 

By the time I reach my home I feel frustrated, angry, guilty, stupid, incompetent, belittled, weak, humiliated, ripped off, and inconvenienced. The feeling lasts until my wife says, "That's the wrong milk." That feeling pretty much replaces all the other ones.

My point is that the new plastic bag law is entirely reasonable when viewed in isolation. But we don't live in a highly interconnected world where nothing can exist in isolation. Remember "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt. Aushan and BMC have made the buying Milk so complicated that I'd rather directly milk the cow standing behind the store than endure the pain of shopping inside the store. 

This is an interesting issue because every business decision that causes inconvenience for customers is viewed in isolation. When you take that perspective, eventually the entire process becomes so complicated it is barely competitive with milking the cow.

So the need of the hour is to see things from start to finish. The first complication usually doesn't cause much problem. The tenth complication - no matter how well-meaning - destroys the system. 

Being a part of the FMCG industry where lots of people are trying to solve lots of problems to unlock Sales growth. The reason why most of them haven't accomplished anything is because they over-complicate things trying to cover too many bases. Also they think of solutions from their perspective and NOT from the one facing the problem. The ones who use the problem-facer's perspective are the ones that come up with simple solutions and achieve success and fame.

But here's my real problem with this whole issue. You see, brains are like muscles. They can take only take a limited load. If you lift too many heavy objects, your muscles will tire. Likewise, if you use up all of your brain cycles on nonsense, you have nothing left for the important things in life. 

On a serious note, there is a hidden cost of complexity. Every minute you spend trying to find milk, and trying to pay for it without getting mob-bashed, is time you aren't thinking about solutions to real problems. If this seems like no big deal, you might be wrong. What happens to a world-class engineer or entrepreneur when he or she has to siphon off more brain energy to satisfying Aushan's marketing strategy instead of designing new products? Now multiply that times a hundred because every retailer, website, and business is trying to complicate your life too. Right ?

Creative inputs for Zucky

I feel its been quite sometime since Zuckerberg & Co. have come out with a 'pathbreaking' feature on Facebook. And since the global mantra for quite sometime now has been on localization to reach deeper I thought Zucky could use some of my selfless creative inputs to spice Facebook up for us.

Politicians

To be able to be politically correct always they need a few buttons - "Outside Support Like", "Secular Like", "Liking only to keep communal forces out", "Anticipatory Like" and instead of "Poke" they can have "Vandalize" and instead of "Liking" Pages they should be able to "Defect" to pages. Also instead of educational and work qualifications they should allow them to post Scams and their respective amounts to their profile.

Consultants

They should be able to "Consultize" - where a normal sentence will be converted into so much sophistication that even Oxford dictionary would start shitting bricks to make sense.

For e.g. "Things will never be the same again" would consultize to "History has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end." 

MBAs

In addition to "Like" and "Comment" they should also have a "It Depends" button

Dilli junta

They should have a "Tu jaanta hai main kaun hoon" button

Bangaloreans

They should have a Chill Macha/Chill Maadi button.

Punjabis

Since Punjabis love "Big" in whatever they do, FB should have a "Patiala Like" button. Also all status updates after 9pm should automatically get converted to English.

Gujjus

"Pages you may like" recommendations should be based on American demographics and preferences. Instead of "Sushant Patel and 9 friends Like this" it should be "Greg Stevens and 100 Americans like this"

Bengalis

They should have a "Udi Baba" button and "Pages you might Bhalo bashi"

Stock Brokers

Instead of "Like" and "Comment" they should be able to "Buy" and "Sell"

Fundamentalist feature

Facebook should not let you change your relationship status more than 3 times. After that it should change your status to "Unstable", "Loose" or "Corrupted by Western Culture"

In-built therapist