Retail 2: The tail of retail

Time to continue the positivity exhibited in “The Imbalance” and that first blurb on “organized retail“. While the front-end of organized retail might attract controversies around job losses, story should be lot different at the ‘tail of retail’.

Remember those news items around an year ago that said farmers in Kolar were dumping tomatoes on the highway? They were unable to sell, and didn’t have facilities to stock for long. Result? Extreme measure.

Commonly estimated stat for T&D losses (to borrow a term from electricity world) for farm produce in India? 30-35% they say. A third is wasted, got that?

More recently, read what Mukesh Ambani had to say on a similar subject:

Shot on location …

… at Rajah’s Seat, Madikeri, 6 hour drive away from Bengalooru. The making of churumuri, a South Indian cousin of East’s “jhaal moodhi” and North/West’s “bhel puri”.

The workspace:

From a fan

I am no secret fan of O P Nayyar. But it is true that I hadn’t heard of OPN till I was about 14.

I was introduced to his music a few years earlier though. Mom used to start her household work with a 9 o’clock radio program that played, yes, Hindi movie songs. I couldn’t help but listen, and few years of listening told me that there was something that made “Jaaiye aap kahaan jayenge“, “Maang ke saath tumhaara“, “Laakhon hain nigaah mein” and “Huzure-waala” sound very similar. Each of those sounded like a slide to me, sit on one and next thing you know, it is over. No disruptions, smooth, and continuous. But not slow.

Get what you pay for?

Sakkath hot weather. Somewhere in small town North India, I was stuck in a queue inside a barber’s shop. And electricity kept playing hide-n-seek with us. Fan off, Fan on, and off again. An old gentleman started the bitching session with a classic “Ee Sarkar ekdum bekaar” (this govt is useless) line.

Few younger mid-aged folks joined the wise man, and I heard all their complaints. If you were supplied electricity only 12 hours a day, trust me, you’d complain as well. Once they were done with their stories and cribs, this tall Shehari Babu was expected to join in. What did I have to share with them?

Traffic pics again

Oh the Indian traffic, a treasure-trove of inspirations for bloggers on the prowl. Two pics for your pleasure today.

Marathalli. Afternoon jam. This Van driver wasn’t willing to wait it out. So he got down, seeked his helper’s hand to displace some of the boulders that have temporarily been put up as road dividers there. Once the wall was breached, he made his way forward like a king, of course on the ‘other’ side. These are the situations where I wish I had a gun handy to shoot down some tyres.

Dignity is for women

Wont take much of your time. One chhota sa post with two simple questions.

So Ash is going to marry Abhishek. However hard you try, you cant escape all the banter about whether Miss Rai should now quit films or not. I even saw a poll proclaim loudly that 41 percent of respondents felt Ash should ‘maintain’ the ‘dignity’ benchmarks established by Mrs Big B.

Howrah aha!

Time for that detour from regular Bangalore and developmental posts. Enter Howrah, station area. The place seems so orderly from a distance. A nice looking shining bridge. Neatly lined up yellow painted Ambassadors. A postcard worthy historic station building.

The Imbalance

Go read this BusinessWeek article (Outsourcing heads to outskirts), its your usual Amrican media stuff trying to make a mere experiment sound sensational. Days when technology jobs will move to our villages are far away. But before that, tell me how to react to these lines from this article:

Srinivas Ruddireddy makes twice as much money arranging car services online for people in Hyderabad as he does from the two-acre rice plot he tends in the early morning.

Going high tech

Two or three months ago, I noticed my BESCOM bill underwent a dramatic change in appearance. A long and slim strip of paper resembling credit card slips replaced the old fashioned bill. So when my BESCOM friend showed up to read the meter some days ago, I quizzed him.

Come test me

The most traveling I did while growing up was in May-June after my class XII. That was also the time when I wrote the most number of examinations within a month. For that was my time to appear for those so called “entrance exams” – a fancy term for the mad rush to get into quality professional colleges.