Surveying the watery Kerala market

As I get up from my forced afternoon nap post a throbbing headache that threatened to split my head inch to inch, I cannot do much but reflect on all that happened yesterday and resulted in my present condition. I am sure that after going through this spine chilling story of my adventures, Dr. Panda's heart will melt and he will give straight As to me and my team.

Since Dr. Panda's name has been mentioned, it follows that the reason for my going out on a very clear and sunny evening was nothing else but marketing. Having chosen Wills Lifestyle as the subject for our marketing project, I and the team (Ravi, Madhu, Surabhi, Vishak, and Pavithra) were out on the streets to figure out what the customers feel about the brand that we are studying. We had divided ourselves into three small teams of two and had decided to cover different parts of the city. Ravi and Surabhi were supposed to go to the railway station, Vishak and Madhu to Wills Lifestyle outlet and other showrooms in the area, I and Pavithra were going to start from ICICI Bank.

We reached ICICI bank with the dusk approaching in the distance. Pavithra got into the act as soon as she got off the bike and went in the search of a bakra. I had this little matter of getting a draft made for my sister, which was what I set my priority on. All the time I sat on the chair in front of a decent-looking lady waiting for my draft to be serviced, I was looking out for future prospects for the survey. I could see Pavithra, through the glass-paneled window, going great guns with the survey...one after the other, she was catching bakras of all hues, sizes and shapes. It just got me thinking about her experience in banking sector and how at-home she might be finding herself here. I am sure that were it a software industry, I would have happily jumped from cubicle to cubicle, taking survey responses from the SEs, PLs, PMs alike.

As the draft got ready and I came out of the bank, still wondering why Pavithra doesn't make a rush for the nearest bank counter with the survey, I saw her doing exactly that. Yes, she did go inside the bank and instead of targeting the bank's customers, she started jumping (rather gleefully too, I thought) from one counter to another, adding many more bakras and bakris in her kitty.

As for me, I was not unlucky either. The very first person I approached (dressed finely in white shirt and blue denim) gave me a nice greeting smile as I told him that I was from IIMK. Having learnt to view nice smiles from the male population in Calicut with a pinch of salt, I was a little cautious (and less smiling than when I had introduced myself) as I gave him an outline of what I wanted him to do...and lo and behold, the very next thing he asks me is the subject for which I am doing this survey. Thinking that the poor chap won't even know the difference between S, T, and P of STP, I told him that it was for our marketing course. Out of the blue, he asks me if it is for the first term Marketing course or for the second term course. To say that I was shocked, would be an understatement. It was only then that he told me (smiling all the time) that he passed out from IIM Calcutta before he started working for ICICI.

Having a good and well completed survey down my belt, I looked around to find a potential target in some other age bracket (Dr. Panda had asked us for a cross section of people). I found one youngish smart-alec just waiting to get on his bike and making a getaway after having withdrawn some money from the ATM. Spoiling all his plans of making quick getaways, I went to him and started off with my introduction and that of the survey. He looked very enthusiastic about the survey and began really well...but as we reached the second or third question, he said that he does not understand English too well (failed in English, probably at school...very mean on my part, I know but yet :-)). Sooner than I had heard it, my sign language came out with a flourish and all that I had learnt as communication lessons in Chennai for a North Indian came to great use as I took the poor guy through from one question to another.

Next in line were a bunch of loafers sitting near the ATM on their bikes. They looked suspiciously similar to the neighbourhood gangs that I have been a part of, just loafing around any public place, waiting for some grace and beauty to come along and treat thier eyesores. Thinking that I just got what I wanted, one of the most fashion conscious segment of the market, I moved ahead confidently with the air of a person who knows what he wants and more than that, knows that what we wants is not too far away from him.

Excuse me...Hello, I am Nitai from Indian Institute of Management
Hello
I am conducting a small survey on cloth market. Can I have five minutes of your time?
English areilla
I said I am conducting a small...
Malayalam???
Malayalam areilla 
giggle...something in Malayalam...giggle
Survey...hand gestures...IIM...jump twice on my left foot...five minutes...point to my watch
Ok..wokei...five minutessaa...yokei
Phew...I like the latest trends and fashions, would you say that you agree to the statement?
smiling...waiting for the question...looking enquiringly
hmm..fashion...latest...huge questioning look
Yess..latest..fashion...yess
good, when you think of branded apparel, what brands come to your mind?
Apparelaa...appalam???
No no, not appalam, Apparel...clothes..brand..which???

So you get the picture, right? By the time I was through with the gang (which I had thought, resembled my own), Pavithra already had nine questionnaires done and I was still struggling with my fifth. This was when we decided to shift our base and move to the Sony showroom nearby to get the responses from the more upmarket segment. And this was when I found out that the bike keys were nowhere to be found...not in my front left pocket, not in my front left, not the back left, neither the back right...not even in my tee-shirt's pocket...suffice to say that the keys were well and truly lost.

More than the 40K bike, I was worried about the 1K room key that had gone with the ring. Half an hour of searching in and out the bank, one bank staff politely (oh, they are all so poilte, aren't they...grr) asks me if I am looking for something in particular. I wanted to say that I was not looking for anything in particular, and that I had just opened a new detective firm ala Karamchand and was just pacing the floor with my magnifying glass in order to impress the bank staff so that next time they have a bank robbery, the second number they dial after the police would be that of Karamchand jasoos. However, I just managed to say yes before my eyes popped out of their sockets and started staring at the bunch of keys he was dangling in the air. ICICI zindabad and all ICICI staff amar rahein.

Dropping Pavithra off at the Sony showroom, I went on to send the courier to my sister. Calicut is a great place but could have been better if there were more courier shops around...at least, that is what I felt yesterday as I roamed about for nearly half an hour before I found a small place (which I had already missed during my three earlier trips down the road in the past five minutes) that promised to send the stuff (the promise was not that believable, though!). Surabhi called up while I was there to ask when we are meeting for dinner. I told her that we can meet at Mezbaan at 8:30 because by that time, all six of us would have something to show for our efforts...wishful thinking...

Coming back to Sony showroom after driving across yet another of the one way streets of Calicut, I found Pavithra all bored and ready to wring my neck. As she was about to say something, a prolonged sorry from me stopped her for a while and when I made my next move, asking her if the number of surveys had already reached fifteen, the matter was amicably settled. At the mention of the survey, she lost track and went off to talk to another bakra as I spotted an elderly couple walking out of the showroom and going to their car.

They were really a sweet couple and answered all my questions with patience as I stood on the road, surveying a rather improbable set of subjects with the GentleMan dressed in a shirt and mundu and the lady wearing her gajra with a flourish. This was when I knew how true Dr. Panda was when he said that the women were the decision makers in the buying behavior of the Indian middle class. The lady, though keeping quiet for the most of it, pitched in between when she felt that her husband was forgetting something like their visit to the Wills Lifestyle outlet in Dehradun or when she thought that his answer was not complete like when she added that the ambience in the Wills outlet was not that good and it actually was suffocating. She was the one who knew and remembered all the brands that the GentleMan wore and more than her husband, she actually put in the effor to recall and recount all that I had been asking them for.

Next stop was Mezbaan, the restaurant where we found many more subjects for the survey. The other four were already there, waiting for us to order. I thought that this was a very good opportunity to grab some prospects in a situation they couldn't easily wriggle out of. And so it turned out to be as our survey questionnaire found its way on almost all the tables and at times, even overshadowed the menu cards kept there...so much so that the waiters started looking askance at our table whenever one of us stood up with a pen in one hand and some pages in the other. I suggested to the others that we could probably offer them surveys to pacify them and their curiosity but the others rejected the idea outright...oh come on, if I could survey those gang guys, I could have surveyed any one...I was feeling it in my bones last night...and moreover, didn't Dr. Panda mention somewhere about the cross section? :-)

The best thing that came out of this survey was that it re-affirmed my thought that the elderly of this country are really a cultured, sincere and well meaning lot. Apart from the couple I met outside the Sony showroom, there was another elderly couple we surveyed in the restaurant. They were so good that they spent nearly an hour going through each and every question oh-so-meticulously. The Gentle Man was good enough to not just fill up his own questionnaire but also help out the lady with the questions that she was not clear about. They actually waited in the restaurant for about half an hour after having paid their bills, only to complete our questionnaire...that was so sweet, really.

Things were already getting heady and we were all very exhausted. When we couldn't even run up to the latest entrants to the restaurants, we knew that it was time to call it a day and leave. That's what we did and this is where the best part of the day's experience came in. I had been cursing my luck for the whole evening for a varety of reasons but I never knew what was in store for me. It was rain, and rain like nothing I had seen before. It not only seemed to flash all pictures of floods in my mind, but must also have increased the water percentage in my body from a mere 70% to about 170%.

It was not just raining but pouring like crazy. It was as if the rain gods had gone mad and were just venting all thier anguish and fury on us poor earthlings. The visibility was hardly ten centimetres, as we struggled on our bikes to see through the sheet of water that blocked all that was ahead. Already drenched beyond hope, we still had to stop every half a kilometre because it was literally impossible to go ahead all blind folded. We did stop at some very interesting places, though. The road, not very busy normally, was entirely deserted at that time of the night and stopping at weird places brought up weird topics. Ravi, Surabhi, Pavithra and I were having a whale of a time, all drenched...discussing the possibility of Bhoot taking the pains to come and haunt us, despite the rains...discussing how our bikes could be taken away by the flash floods which looked like a very real possibility...how there appeared to be a telephone booth everywhere we stopped and how all these telephone booths had no attendants, prompting us to break the lock and make calls to our hearts' satisfaction...how the girls could not leave us stranded and take a lift from some car, showing a bit of their charms (it is Calicut, remember...we guys stood a better chance)...how Ravi, in his white shirt should entertain us with the typical white sari/shirt rain song of Hindi movies (ala tip tip barsa pani)