Bubble On The Line

This comes two days after the news broke about Ratan Tata investing in Urban Ladder. I somehow felt it was a mistake. I had a theory and it actually made a lot of sense when I found some interesting pattern.

Well I was actually whiling away time on another lazy Sunday afternoon when suddenly I thought of working on my dissertation paper for this winter. My topic happens to be in Financial Engineering. I’m trying to create some financial instruments to spot arbitrage opportunity created by the price difference between good sold online to those sold in brick and mortar stores. 

So while I was working with some numbers I found that stuff was generally sold at a much lower price online. Duh big discovery! Of course stuff is sold cheaper online everyone knows this, so what’s the big discovery? 

The big discovery is that they only sell at lower prices online. Selling online means selling at a loss. The mantra of e tailing these days is selling at such low prices that we lure the consumers to our shores and gain maximum market share. OK, what do you plan to do after you’ve lured them? Pull an Amazon? No way, you can do that in the airlines business or the hospitality industry but not online. 

 

Amazon got into heaps of trouble and got called bad names because we found out that it charges more to returning customers. It’s not a sin really, everyone does that. But the problem is you can’t replicate it that easily in the online market place. There’s so many website that I would just move to someone else and buy stuff if he’s selling at a lower price. Come on! Its e business we’re talking, you can’t expect loyalty here. At least not that easily.

 So I realized that this online market is a very competitive place and you just can’t raise your prices. The one who sells at the lowest price gets the customer. So the key to winning is to lose. 

Nice right? But you know the thing about online, people are very comfortable being rude and demotivating. I got this one comment, check it out

 

The thought is kinda natural. There have been many other internet bubbles in the past and any industry growing as fast and big as ecommerce in a short span of time is generally thought to be an inflated bubble waiting to burst. Investment advisors and market gurus alike have expressed concern about this growing ecommerce boom. Their angle however has been about the quantum of capital raised by the ecom giants of India and the ‘creative’ accounting practices employed by these firms. There have been various issues on the valuation front too. There has been a general apprehension on the frequency of the call for capital from the ecom companies and obviously on the pace of their growth. But the focus has essentially been on speculation.

Anyway even got rude, well in my own sarcastic way 

 

 Back to the point. Things will not cost more online. Things will continue to grow costlier offline. Cuz face it, we only have so many natural resources.

Now you may be wondering how I could prove convincingly that it’s not a bubble? Well, there are websites that don’t sell a thing and yet make millions right? That’s it. Now don’t go telling everyone theres no ecommerce bubble. There’s sure is one... and it’s coming to get you! 

Le Me of the Meme

OK I was disappointed in myself for not having written anything in over 3 months, so.. well I had to write something.. but nothing really interesting is coming to my head, anyway so this is a small post, its about the million memes that have been doing rounds.. there doesnt exist a topic, public event or a celebrity who or who's actions havent been made into a meme.. people make memes of their friends, colleagues or even themselves .. here's one of the few that I made at work..

ok that wasnt my best, dont judge me yet.. it was a colleague at work, she wore a lot of rings thats all :D

Now, whats this post about, its about the me and normal people saga of the memes.

here's an example:

hilarious right? here's another

you see a pattern here?
No? ok here's one more.. this till with 1 comment.

You spot it yet? the comment reads "same here"
thats exactly the reaction I had and sometimes even made such comments on the "normal people and me" saga memes.

Theres some more memes like that.. heres a frisky one

I know perv thought.. but come on.. every guy thinks like that once hes hit high school.. or even less nowadays I guess..

OK one last one.. and this had the most "me too" comments

So what I'm trying to say is every damn person is "me" or Derp(the meme guy).. and no one really is the "normal people" So... everyones Derp and think the others are normal (lame and boring basically) so we can say being Derp is the normal thing to be.. every Derp is normal..

here's my meme..

As it Turnsout

I always have an opinion about votes, but I almost always shy away from debates on voting. It’s frankly because till date I haven’t had an opportunity to vote.  (I’ve seem almost 6 to 8 elections pass by btw) You can simply say I’m lazy, I don’t care about electing, or I still don’t feel empowered enough to actually believe that my vote can make a difference. 

The General Elections of India are probably one of the biggest democratic exercises on the face of earth, and with it comes a lot of drama, games, schemes, garlands, and well... some shoes too. The problem in the Indian electoral system since the earliest times has been the voter turnout. People don’t see it to be worth the effort.   The average voter turnout in the General Elections is around 60% meaning less than two thirds of the people were responsible for deciding whom to elect and assuming two thirds voted for the party(ies) forming the government, only about 40% of the total (voting) population of India chose the ruling party. So about 60% were in no way responsible for the central government! But I’m sure they had their share of complaining on how dysfunctional the government is. (Me included)

Ok here’s little info,

Voter turnout can actually say a lot, they are generally used to send political messages too. The 72% voter turnout in the Assembly election of Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 was hailed by the media and a few voices in India as a message against the Chinese aggressive pursuit of annexing Arunachal Pradesh. Similarly this time around (2014) certain groups... well ok terrorists (I was just trying do a Reuters and not use the word terrorist :D ) put up signs and distributed flyers telling people not to vote, in an attempt to show that Kashmiris don’t feel like voting or participating in the democratic system of India. 

www.mirror.co.uk

Now lemme tell you why I haven’t had a chance to vote yet. When I turned 18 I was sure I could cast my vote in the coming election, I was born in the beginning of the year and by the time the next election came in 2008 I was eager and well, had not yet figured anything in politics but wanted to vote, I was eager and was taken by the ‘right to vote’ thing. But my name was not in the list, disappointment. The next election was in 2009, I tried to register myself, the clerk at the official looking koisk asked me to fill form and took 2 or 3 photos, loksabha election 2009 – ‘sorry your name is absent in the list’, ok. 2010 – Municipal election, the guys came home (supposedly) and we weren’t at home; result – no vote. It’s been so through till now.  In the initial days I wanted a voter ID so that I can have an address proof, (then I got my passport, so lost interest all the more) Oh I forgot, last time I registered online, after everything is done, they want us to take a print of the sheet and goto the election commission office of our district, I got the print, but sadly never found time to do the submitting part. OK enough about me.

Speaking of Democracy itself, I feel it doesn’t work too well with India. I mean, in a country like India, the biggest and most diverse democracy of the world, we need to tailor the idea of democracy. What we currently have is a crude form of democracy that involves participation of everyone at once. How can you actually expect one hundred crore people to actually come out and vote? In fact if the 100 crore came out to vote, I’m not sure we have enough logistics to support that kind of a turn out. What I’m trying to say is this idea of total participative democracy is actually a failure. It doesn’t work. We cant have everyone voting at once... because ‘everyone’ is NOT everyone. Maybe we need stages, maybe increase the levels, cut the power, maybe increase hierarchy... who knows that might have its own problems, but my point is, low voter turnout will remain a problem in this crude form of total participation. Thats it!

Btw facebook pics, all the ‘be responsible’ ads and everything is making voting a glamorous thing, which is good.. might just get the urbans to vote.. but hey.. I still haven’t voted.. not even fashion can me vote.. I wonder how anyone would vote.

Right to Piggy Ride

Amul’s comic snippets are loved by everyone. Marketing teachers are especially fond of them. I’m not sure how the professionals see it and what’s the correlation of those cartoons and sales, but it sure does a hell of a job with the TOMA. 

What Amul does is it releases 1 comic per week and whatever happens that week is generally the theme of the comic. So people read the comic, relate to the news, smile to themselves and remember Amul. It’s ingenious, using news to sell yourself. No one calls them cheap or piggy back riders. Same happens to everyone during cricket season, FIFA world cup season etc etc.

So what caught my attention? The new ad of Hero Hf Deluxe.  The ‘Talent’ theme. Here’s the vid.

Hero piggy back rode the elections. Make the buyer of Hf Deluxe look great, intelligent, rational, responsible and so damn patriotic. Oh btw Hero Honda took a dig at being patriotic a million years ago. Ok 8-10 years ago, Remember ‘desh ki dhadkan’ ??  Back when CBZ was new, I think I was in highschool. Bajaj was already famous for its Hamara Bajaj and came up with a new Hamara Bajaj for the new times, beautiful ad, you gotta watch it. Here,

 So, now we have political parties taking it to the tv, online media and stuff, so why not use the elections as a USP? You know play a little with the Consumer’s head, Idea cellular also did that, the new ‘no ullu banao-ing’ thing, ofcouse, Idea has a history of making videos of showing idea users  to be righteous and awesome but this thing about using elections to sell yourself is awesome! TATA tea started with the ‘Jagore’ program almost 6 to 7 years back. 

It’s as the guy says says in the new Hf Deluxe ad, the elections are India’s biggest talent show. How can anyone refrain from making a buck, right?

AAP Bhi Aadmi Ho

Arvind Kejriwal was sworn in as the 7^th Chief Minister of Delhi about 15 days ago. It was a big day in the politics and democracy of India. I wasn’t really happy about the Aam Aadmi Party taking Congress support to form the government in Delhi. The day when the news broke that AAP will form the government in Delhi  with Congress aid, I made a sad facebook post. Here’s the pic:

Yeah, call me a sadist, and heres a comment by one of my high school teachers

And another friend of mine said:

Ofcouse I only had this to say:

And then the status died away.. and 5 days later Arvind Kejriwal was sworn in as the CM and he made quite a decent speech that day. 

I made a status:

I realized that I was missing something and this congress alliance may not prove that damaging and AAP would still be able to play a dominating role and provide the people of Delhi some good governance.

The days that followed saw a lot of changes and decisions like the transfer of DJB higher management, 700 liters of free water per day and maybe a few more that I don’t remember. But all the while and media, other political parties and sympathizers and supporters of the NaMo Movement started posting pictures, excerpts and quotes of how Kejriwal and the AAP were switching sides, changing tunes etc etc.. the 3 biggest things that the people have found hardest to forget and forgive are:

1.       Kejriwal won’t fight an election – He contested and became CM

2.       Kejriwal won’t take VIP security or government facilities (car, house etc) – Well he did that

And the worst

3.       Kejriwal swore on his children that there would be no support taken from BJP or Congress – Well, we all know what happened.

Now, ofcourse I’m writing this post to well somewhat justify his statements, now these three have not risen from different sources. The one reason is, he’s green, that’s it.

Being a.. well talkative person I know that sometimes you go overboard, get carried away and say something of paramount proportion when you don’t know the complete picture. Haven’t we all seen people who are ‘confidently wrong’? That’s what happened here, it’s practically impossible to have a CM walking the streets without security. I’m not talking about the CM, the people would swarm the place and hurt one another.. its so with any celebrity and he or any celebrity has no control over it.. so this was an innocent ‘confidently wrong’ statement. How can he say something and we take his word for something that isn’t in his control?

Speaking of the swearing on children part, the same goes here, he was ‘confidently wrong’ because of his innocence, as I said, he’s still a little green, now what do we do of an innocent first timer? Do we show some consideration or we scrutinize and criticize his every move? Expect him to be perfect from day 1? That’s just too much expectation from us, the media and other politicians. Given time, maybe he’ll learn his limitations and learn that every word is counted.

To be a little neutral here, I really am concerned about the ‘370 pages of evidence against Shiela Dixit’ statement. Ofcouse, thinking realistically, there’s no such thing as ‘unconditional’ support. Lets leave it as that.

Finally, why did he enter politics, contest and become CM? well, We must think of why AAP was formed in the first place, there was no option left, right? No Lok Pal Bill would be passed with all the Anshans and people were simple getting bored and eventually fizz out. 

This was a right decision, but sadly, we have a perception that nothing can be changed or that people who get down in the pit to clean also end up smelling like shit.. or people have no hopes of ever having a clean political system. Maybe.. but the one line I remember from The Shawshank Redumption is “No one can ever take away hope” So I’m gonna hope, hope that change is possible, change will happen and I will do my part. (by making blogs and fb posts? Sure why not)