Before you can think of the various possible and pleasurable meanings for the dangling ‘it’ in the title let me clarify the noun it is pointing to. It is ‘Marketing Research’. Well, there is nothing to be pissed off about it. Infact the story of my stint with marketing research dates back to day before yesterday.

Lets start at the begining of the whole thing.

When the marketing club selected me to work on a consultancy project for a media gaint i was jumping with joy. After a meet with the company people we got to know what exactly they need from us. As with the case of most of the marketing projects this one also involved the design, execution, analysis of the survey. Without getting into the technicalities of the survey lets talk about what happened when the legend himself did the survey along with 7 others in a city in hindi hinterland.

Due to my dumb luck i was allocated a rural place on the outskirts of indore to perform the survey. Our team had 3 more members. 2 (me and kiran) are from south and 2 (pankaj and shrey) are from delhi. After getting down the gaadi we broke in to 2 small teams each with a well mixture of south and north Indians.

Thus me and shrey marched towards the small shopping area. After asking a couple of people and failing to find the customer of our brand we finally found the first unfortunate member of our little sample. To my luck that person knows English. Thank God, the survey went on in English.

(1)
The troubles started when i suggested that we interview the cycle shop worker. Shrey wasnt very receptive to this idea and he asked me to go ahead with the poor worker. With a great difficulty i approached him and shot my first firearm towards the language barrier.

Me: “Bhai saab, kay aap ….. …. hi?”
respondent: “haan”
m: “kya aap paanch minute de sakte hi? mein ….. …. se aa raha hoon, ek survey karne ke liye.”
res: “boliye”
….
….
m: (mutters to myself, ‘how the f%^# i can say does xxx satisfy your needs in Hindi’) “kya, kya, kya ….”
res: (totally confused now) kya?
m: (looks out for shrey, shrey comes in for rescue, me feels totally relieved)

(2)
Soon we entered the residential area of the village. Me went up to a home with weird architecture of 2 fron doors for the same portion and both wide open with no one in the first room. Thankfully i dint enter the house. But soon an young lady came out and asked what the hell i am doing there with her expressions. I said i am there to do a survey with my hindi. She went to the other rooms and fetched a 28ish women in saadi for the interview. Fortunately this women is a consumer of the brand. This time i had a different shock. The women thought i am actually from the company. she started complaining about the product and requesting for an improvement. I felt like running away.

(3)
After sometime shrey suggested that we do the survey from a shop selling saadis. It turned out the owners are again our consumers. It also turned out that they are not from indore. We proceeded with our likert scales and close ended questions just like a cold blooded assassin going through his routine job of slashing heads. finally the survey was over and we said dhanyawaad and started to leave. The owners offerd cha. We declined politely. It then turned out that they are damn rigid about the proposal of tea outing with them. Finally we had to give in and sat there waiting for cha. Then the owner broke in. he said “Tho batayiye” as if we are some long last friends meeting in 25th reunion of kindergarten. Baaah! Finally the tea came. We gave the owner a break from his incessant verbiage and started sipping the tea. As we are finished with the tea and about to leave the owner asked whether we would like to have paan or supadi. I felt like chewing him alive.

(4)
With not much luck on begging people for responces and still not given up, i started towards a house which has 4 women sitting outside it. The congregation has 2 elderly women and one young women and one girl. I approached them and asked if they …… our product (in Hindi). The girl looked at me and then looked at the young one. Then both of them looked at the older ones. Then the oldre ones looked towards sky and resumed with what they were doing before i attacked them. Duh!, Even I Did It.

Tada!

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I have purchased my domain name and some puny webspace yesterday night using the plastic. I started experimenting with moving the blog pages from Blog*spot to this place. Finally the move is complete and now all my future blogs will be available here [http://chandoo.org/blog] only. It is at this point i understood that i need to make some changes inorder to continue blogging on the new url. they are,

- removal of individual post pages and comments. This is to ensure that each of my posts wont suck up the space on my domain. To provide comments i am using a haloscan account now. it is much easier than the earlier one. Talking about the links that are pointing to the earlier posts, well they are pretty much there. and they will continue to work for another 3-4 months. meanwhile i will phaseout all such links and point them to the monthly archives.

- removal of crap from the template to occupy less space. This gives me the freedom to blog that extra bite (for those who are number conscious, given my content size per month i can post 100 months using the existing space :P)

- Blogrolling - this is another move towards the space conservation. Also this will help me in consolidating all my links and updating it every now and then.

- Template modification - this is done to match the new domain url and ambience. Onething i have firmly understood while doing these changes is that i dont have enough time to change my blog everynow and then. Actually i do it very frequently because the tech in me is still alive. Somehow i started feeling that the good ol’ software engineer in me slowly dying :D. Also thanks largely to the concentration camp i am in. The schedule is leaving little time for things like this. So, i am hoping to stick to the current template for next couple of months (atleast till summers). Please post your views about the template in comments. If you have any small suggestions may be i can incorporate sometime next week

Last but not least please change the urls in your blogrolls or listings to the new one. Even though i have pointed http://modusindoramus.blogspot.com to this place i am not very sure how long blog*spot will keep the domain active.

Happy Reading

Y! Status says: Welcome to Chandoo.org !

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I have moved my blog to my own domain (http://chandoo.org). Wish me goodluck and bear with the changes.

More on this later.

Tada!

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Thus came the results of first five marketing quizzes. Being an intuitive marketer that i am, i never consulted the kotler for furthering my marketing gyaan. so when the grades came i was neither interested in my positioning in the class nor i am hurrying towards the board. but there are few things in life which you cannot avoid. for ex. lazy software engineers, annoying hr managers, notice boards displaying marks.

To my surpirse my grades looked like this. a,b,c,d,f not exactly in the same order. :d

Barring the odd marketing stuff, life is moving in a pretty much relaxed way now. end terms are zooming fast. another 20 days and i will be free with vacation.

Today i got fed up wearing the same pair of jeans for something like 20 days and decided to empty the wardrobe full of dirty clothes. to my surpise i had something like 1.5 washing machines full of clothes to wash. thankfully it is done now.

These days i am thinking alot about registering a domain for myself and hosting my blog and personal pages there. some priliminary research showed me that it costs Rs. 1000 an year to maintain that. Not very costly. not cheap either. I have made up my mind that i will go for it. You can expect the change in the coming weeks.

chalo den. Gotta prepare for a quiz now.

goodnight.

Y! Status says: A dummy’s guide to understanding dummy’s guide

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Well, upon looking at the three words Marcovian Queues, Arranged Marriage and Forefathers any sane person (Aah!, that excluded all the managers in the world :D) would say that they are totally unconnected. Today, i am here to prove that indeed they have a strong relationship among themselves. So much so that, the relationship is stronger than the bond between irrational decision making and adult managers.

(Warning: If you happen to be one of those rare readers with queer tastes and strong urge to scratch the head, i would suggest that you read it throughly, who knows, you may discover a new interest in GOD knows what. Others please continue reading)

* Scene 1 *

Not so long ago there is a person named Subrahmanya Uma Chenna Kesava Rao. All his friends used to call him SUCK-R or simply sucker. despite the fact that he doesnt know how to suck and he had never been to a b school in his entire life people persisted on calling him that. Nevertheless our topic today is neither his name nor his management style. As with most of the corrupted adults in a certain state in our country, our dear sucker also finished his engineering from a college named TITS (The Institute of Technology and Science). By dumbluck and mere fact that his name is longer than most of his classmates in the tits he got into a welknown software company called Huggies.

Several years sped past while our sucker was typing a cublicle for 12 hours a day 6 days a week 4 weeks a month and 13 months an year.

On a certain day in a certain year our dear sucker went to his home to visit his parents (names are not given due to constraints on maximum word limit of posts). By gods grace and bank balance they are still alive and kicking. After one day at home, the mom got this cruel idea. During the days dinner the family discussed about it. Sucker was initially reluctant to the whole damn thing. Later on the parents tried to convince him. Soon it became apparant to sucker that MARRIAGE is an unavoidable thing in life and everybody has to succumb one day or other. He told his parents to start looking for the girl.

* Scene 2 *

Not so long ago there is a person named Anuj (the name itself has got no connection what so ever with all the Anuj’s in this world :D). All his friends used to call him Anuj only. The anuj in the case also never been to a b school. But since our topic today is not whether a certain anuj has been to b school or not lets proceed with what we have to. Anuj was always fascinated by computers. He learned BASIC and LOGO during his schooling from a certain Public School. At the same time he got fascinated by the fairer sex in his class too. During the IX class he proposed to a certain Priya in his class. They were close to each other till class X when Priya had to move on with her life and say good bye to the certain A in her class.
the heartbroken anuj after spending several sleepless nights joined in a co-education college to continue the class 11 and 12 studies. after a brief break of 48 hours from the love life, anuj started fascinating about the college beauty ramya. This time around, since ramya being the college beauty and already having a couple of boy friends has to say NO to our dear anuj. After spending 18 worthless months trying to coax the R, our A started worrying about the graduation options. So he took a break from the adventures and concentrated on studies.
After 4 years and 8 girlfriends and dumbluck and rollnumber based selection, Anuj got into his dream company Huggies as a coder.
Armed with his new CBZ and debit card anuj started actively looking for the eligible females in his office space. during the first three months he moved with a certain Payal. Then he had to give up her becuase she is a money guzzler. Then he loved another girl. had to leave her because she doesnt know how to dance. then another one. left her because she is an engineer and lacks social skills. then another one.
Like this several years passed by…

* Scene 3 *

A queuing system has 2 essential componenets. The people who wants to get served. and the servers. For example is a railway reservation counter. The people buying tickets need the service and the counter serves them. Now the dynamics of queues itself requires a seperate blog and we wont be getting into them.

Now lets look at the entire process of love and selecting life partner as a queueing system.

All the people who will serve love (those who will be loved, all those college beauties, studs, chivalrous men, working women etc. etc.) are our servers. And as we all know these people with lovable qualities are very less.

All those people who will love (anybody and everybody. but for simplicity sake lets assume that those who are serving are not in this set) are in the queue waiting for the servers to get their thirst of passion quenched.

The following picture should give an idea.

Exhibit 1

Now queing theory tells me that the queue length before the servers in the exhibit will keep on growing. Also there is a possibility of a server crashing (here it means commiting with someone!) and thus creating hell lot of disappointment among the desperate waiters.

Inorder to better this situation people have devised a M/M/s system with a variation by pooling all servers together. This will reduce the wait time (here, the time one seeker needs to spend to find his life partner as well as the resources he spends in filtering down)

* Conclusion *

The arranged marriage system works like a pool. All those who are ready to serve love form a server pool (ie approach relatives and matrimonials and purohits :D). Now all those who want love will goto these pools and simply stand in queue. Since all the servers are pooled the waiting time is reduced. look at the following picture.

Exhibit 2

Now what is so great about this? Arent our forefathers wise enough to devise such system which reduces the burden of filtering down the right soulmate and saves hell lot of money/time/sleep/talk time.

* So what happened next? *

Soon after reaching his workplace in a matter of 2 weeks our sucker recieved a letter from his parents informing him that they have finalised his marriage with a certain Subba Lakshmi B Tech(Info.) (for a discerning reader the B. Tech is not part of her name). There are no limits to the happiness of sucker. <after sometime> they lived happily ever after.

Our dear anuj is still filtering. But this time he is using technology. webcams, sms chats, messengers, blind date websites. But tough luck. His waiting list number as of today is 549849859485948935.

THE END

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Looks like my comp is sleeping more than what i do these days.
have a look at the system task manager.

Last time i have logged in (ie restarted) my box was on November 10. Going by the numbers in the above exhibit my comp is sleeping roughly 12 hours a day. While poor me is hardly getting 7 :((

TADA!!!

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Read the Part I here | Read the Part II here

5:30
we have started back to the place called as IIM Indore. This time due to dumb luck i got a seat in the qualis where all the hard core tams are there. I was sitting in the middle of the middle seat. You can imagine my position. All the 5 others were talking in some crazy tamil with only few english words.

6:40
We have stopped at some sweet stall in Pithampur industrial area or may be it is Dhar. After having a cuppa and gulab jamuns we started back. This time i made sure that i am in the right cab.
From there we started shouting aloud and joined our tones to the remix songs being churned out by the audio in the qualis. Venky, who is sitting next to me got totally excited and started dancing inside the cab.

7:30
We are back in the campus. Aah!, wat a day it has been. All in all, the trip is a one hell of fun. I have throughly enjoyed the ride and place. Now back to studies

Some General Info if you are planning to reach this place …
- the distance to the place from indore is 90 km
- you get good places to stay in both Mandwa as well as Indore
- Food , well extrapolating based on the offerings we got at the MPT resthouse, isnt that great. But chalta hi.
- Weather. Sometime in december should be fine. But i guess immediately after rainy season would be just great. That is because all the lakes would be full.
- For more info visit http://www.tourism-of-india.com/mandu.html
- also visit GOVAR’s blog to know stories about this place.

Photos..
due to the heavy size of pics, i havent shown most of them here. But i a promise a visual treat at here as well as here.

All of us on the stairs of the fort wall at delhi gate

We at the lotus swimming pool in the Jahaz Mahal

View from one of the fort gates.

That is all. Hope you enjoyed the posts as much as we enjoyed the trip.

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