Million vs billion paradox

Sun, Nov 1 01:19 AM

I've often visited India accompanying different Western client CEOs who want to understand the Indian market climate. In 1993, Victor Sherer, the CEO of Grand Metropolitan Corporation where I was engaged in a global project, had come with me to check out opportunities post India's economic reforms.

Accustomed to everything being linear in Europe, Sherer was fascinated by India's haphazard, colourful ways. The bargaining practice thrilled him. When I warned that it's difficult to get hard discounts in the bonafide stores on his left, but very possible with hawkers on his right, he was effusive: "Such vibrancy within just 10 metres!" Neither did he understand Kolkata Gariahat's potholes, and invariably fell into them. "Give up your Parisian style of ogling at beautiful women who expose exuberantly or doing window shopping," I'd say, but he continued to be watchful.

"Poor people wear colourful clothes to overshadow their poverty," was Victor Sherer's exotic eye on India. His conclusion that colour hides poverty continued to intrigue me. It took almost 10 years for me to get the answer while working on a few projects that addressed very low income people. On my consumer interactions through home visits and roadside meetings, people said colour means that some extra work has been done to make it worthwhile, even when the price is low. In the psyche of India's masses, colour brightness is the pay off.

In 1995, Jacques Vincent, the outstanding CEO who transformed Danone into a global dairy leader, asked me to help him evaluate business potential in India. Having worked to create and renovate 175 brands of the Danone portfolio in multiple countries throughout the world, I was eager to showcase my own country's real picture. I arrived in advance from Paris to organise visits to urban rural markets and consumer homes.

Jacques met me at Kolkata airport at 11 pm, skimmed over the five-day agenda, and before going to his hotel immediately chose his first dinner option to be Bengali food my mother had cooked at home. After dinner we went to Keoratala crematorium at 1 am. This prelude to his next day's business schedule was to show him how life ends for 8 million Indians who are cremated every year. The activities connected to death made a huge impact on a Catholic European where death is a silent ceremony. From electric incineration to the wooden burning ghat, Jacques was hallucinated experiencing reality play out. He exceeded my planned 30 minutes there by staying up to 4.30 am: "Death also has an angle of festivity," he commented.

At a marriage ceremony a few days later, the tuberose garlands took him by surprise as he'd seen tuberose at the crematorium too. That our culture allows the use of the same flower in marriage as in death is totally alien to Catholic society.

Being absent from India since 1973, I started to see the country with a new eye developed by French and European culture. On the way to the refugee colony I spent my childhood in, I felt shocked at people hanging on open doors of high speed suburban trains. My father reminded me that I had travelled exactly this way when going to art college. I immediately recalled how people sometimes hit the electric bar outside and die. In fact, as per Mumbai statistics, 824 people fall off trains every year, and every day four people die and four are injured in railway track accidents.

Working for a French industrial design consultancy in 1979-80, I got involved with some very advanced design for SNCF, the French national railways company, and learnt that electric train doors cannot be kept open when in running condition. Electric trains first started in India in 1925, and later for new technology, there was SNCF collaboration. It dawned on me that it may not have occurred to Western companies, habituated as they are to the mores of a sparsely populated nation, to deliver products to overpopulated countries as per the recipient's culture, discipline, habit, population or respecting their value of human life. I've heard that India's electric train doors did close initially. But closing doors would limit passengers to 250 instead of the required 500 passengers at peak period. So the mindset of servicing a billion people is not to reduce passengers per train, but open the doors for ventilation. This, of course, is a totally wrong solution.

From this example I knew that to work for my native country with my European skills, I had to first address our myriad cultural skews that are not comparable to any other country in the world. China may have a billion people but we have multiple nuances among our billion people. The stark paradox of million versus billon people countries came alive to me here.

For developmental projects in different industries, India often takes professional expertise from developed countries. Their execution may be sophisticated, but their relevance to the Indian masses may fail to register. Take a look at our several new airports with world-class aesthetics; see how the narrow security system can still detain flights. Toilet doors are so small when people have no patience at that time that it's always a push to get in, blocking people inside from coming out. For the sake of the haphazard billions, wouldn't two doors, one for entry and the other for exit, solve the problem? New airports have no space problem, but five years down the line they can become obsolete or congested if future space planning has not been done.

In today's sophisticated housing layouts, children are growing up in a protected, Swiss atmosphere that defies relevance to reality that's visible just 100 metres outside this cocoon. This closed environment may be good for expatriates to keep their families from intermingling with the unknown, but how will these Indian children adjust in later life? While making such layouts private, is it not possible to induce some real Indian cultural elements, like hygienic versions of Chowpatty, Daryaganj, Chikpet or Gariahat-like open environments inside to change its clinical ambience?

In aspirational areas our thinking process is overly influenced by the culture of the Western millions. We proudly showcase Indianness with tri-colour on the face in cricket matches, but neglect to build on the charm of being a haphazard billion people country. Innovative designs that respect this culture can create a benchmark for the world.

While being in the system of a billion people with diverse culture, religion, language and habits, it may be difficult to transform or modernise every public area with sophisticated hygiene. In all our designs we need to inject lots of functional usage advantages that emphasize the requirements of a billion people. That way we get an aspirational global look, yet become radically different from the million mindset frame.

Shombit Sengupta is an international Creative Business Strategy consultant to top management. Reach shombit@shininguniverse.com

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