The battalion on Mount Road - Part I

I was driving on Mount Road on a weekday afternoon at 2 o clock. I was quite surprised to see a battalion of police on the road.The road was choking with traffic.Men were dancing infront of buses and vans in full "tasmac" mode. Women were taking Molaipari (முளைப்பாரி) on mount road. For starters, molaipari is a function/ritual done during village festivals. All crowd were leading to thevar statue on the mount road. 
     It was a normal traffic day for Chennai. But not for the people in South Tamilnadu. Oct 30 was the birthday of Pasumpom Muthuramalinga thevar. When i asked about thevar to few people, they don't have any clue who this man is. We can't blame those guys for this.


         Oct 30 is purely a terror day for south TN.People from all over the state will throng Pasumpom, a very small village in Ramnad district to pay respects to him.
I think it was around the year 2003.We had shifted our house from Tuticorin to Kovilpatti. The local people had constructed a 10 feet statue of thevar right in front of our house. The statue served as bus stop for local mini bus. Every time, somebody gets down from the mini bus, they will go and worship infront of this statue. It was quite amusing for me to see this.

The government had installed huge grills around this statue and had locked it. Around election time, every local leader has to pay garlands to this statue and talk few words about him.I remember even Vaiko did it once. During pongal , people will fix mike-sets and blare thevar songs all day. 
You will be surprised to know that there are many songs in tamil movies in praise of him. Almost all masala movies portraying violence in Madurai are loosely connected to this particular caste. Kamal too added his tribute by thevar magan.However, nobody wants to listen to the final message of the movie.I really forgot how many times i have heard this song in mike sets outside my house.

If any guy beheads the statue or hangs slipper on the statue, that's it. It is the end of the world. Violence will continue for days and hence the government decided to protect the statues by grilling them. Quite funny for outsiders when they see grilled statues everywhere!

I recently met a friend who was in the know-how of these celebrations at Pasumpon and i was really shocked to hear them. More on that tomorrow.

IPL vs Champions League

The above is twitter map of CLT20  vs IPL2013 . As we can see, IPL generated 7 times more tweets than CLT20.  However, we have to take into account the fact that IPL was played well close to 2 months while Champions League T20 was played over only 20 days

In addition, CLT20 featured 23 matches while IPL has close to 76 matches.




The average tweets per match in IPL was almost double that of CLT20. On an average, IPL attracted close to 50k tweets per match while CLT20 had close to 25k tweets.

UK watched IPL with immense interest while it almost forgot CLT20. Two reasons can be attributed to this. One is lack of interest in CLT20 among Indian population and another is lack of English teams in CLT20

The most convenient thing in this comparison is both IPL and CLT20 happened in same time zone and hence, one more less problem to worry about when handling this data.

A big thanks to @vm1689 for pulling out all the data. A similar article on IPL was published in Sportstar magazine. You can read that here

Vijayadasami Spl: Playschool

It's vijaya dasami time and almost all parents are rushing to join their kids in school . A couple of months back, i happened to meet a friend.  We were discussing how a new play school opened in our area was running successfully. I came to know that the play school was run by his friend. It seems from rough calculations the recovery cost was just 1 year or even less.


 
Particularly, for play schools which don't require much approvals, the cost is even less.
Rental cost of individual house per year is around 4 lakhs. Put funny paints and quotes on the walls, hire around 5-10 people at 10-15k per month, your total cost per year including electricity for fully air conditioned rooms come to around 25-30 lakhs.  Collect 7-10k for a kid per month and if you can manage 30 kids, you can break-even in first year .

Of course, it needs heavy investment and some skills to manage such schools, but consider the fact how many businesses break-even in 1-2 years.  You consider all my calculations completely wrong and call me stupid-armchair-critic who don't know the nuances,struggles and profitability of a business model.A famous playschool invites franchisees in areas around chennai and their website declares their break-even time is one year.


Of course, there are other such businesses which are also fool-proof such as the asharam babu consulting group and the Nithi-Morgan Chase Group. :)

Sachin Tendulkar #BornToPlayCricket

Sachin Tendulkar has announced his retirement from Test Cricket. His 200th Test will be his last. #BornToPlayCricket #SaluteTheLegend
— BCCI (@BCCI) October 10, 2013

Sachin Tendulkar has announced his retirement from Test Cricket. I am not sure how many of you would have noticed this. BCCI has announced his retirement via Twitter and not through any media conference or press conference or any press release. This indicates a paradigm shift in media relations, meaning organisations are more ready to talk to people directly through social media instead of print and digital media. Remember the retirement news of Rahul dravid and others came via press conferences. 





Here are the top tweets till now out of 80,000+ tweets in Twitter.Check out our timeline map tomorrow to see how the world reacted to his retirement.

I asked @warne888 if he ever sledged Tendulkar . 'Yeah, only once. I said, "So show me how f**ing good you are then mate!" And he did...'
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 10, 2013

Sachin #10dulkar - Undisputed Champion of Cricket! #SachinTheGreat
— Kevin Pietersen (@KP24) October 10, 2013

O no! Suddenly realised the meaning of addiction. Mine was the Master.I am going thru cold turkey. To see cricket without Sachin? Unbearable
— SHAH RUKH KHAN (@iamsrk) October 10, 2013

sachin, i'll say this again : you were a great habit. i'll live every moment of these last two games
— Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) October 10, 2013

 It was 2010.I was travelling in electric train and we were frantically refreshing websites to know whether Sachin has scored the double century. The website stopped working suddenly . We couldn't knew whether he got out or he has scored the double century. Suddenly there was huge uproar and claps in the train. It's evident. The Master Blaster has scored his double century!

Cricinfo later wrote it's servers have crashed thanks to Sachin Tendulkar.

We hope to be ready for the next peak. We have just ordered some Tendulkar servers. - Cricinfo

Andhra - The Burning State

A leadership vacuum and a demand for separate state by a second rung leader. A deadly combination of both has engulfed andhra. The state which was on par with tamilnadu (in growth terms) a couple of years back is now in political turmoil.

             All three leaders of political parties - KCR,Jagan and Naidu have gone fast-unto-deaths to get what they want. They don't want a separate state or a united andhra. They want votes. Almost all legislators in seemandhra are targeted by the United Andhra groups and attacked. 

Almost 70 days of bandh in seemandhra and food prices have jumped like anything. Whatever you want to buy, you have to buy in the 6 - 9 pm timings daily.

The situation has got so worse there and the anger can be best understood in the below report from Times of India - 

 JAC leaders burnt the effigies of the Union ministers at several places and offered 'pinda pradanam,' a ritual where food is offered to the dead souls. In Tirupati, NGOs, teachers and RTC workers JAC held a 'sava yatra' carrying the effigies of local MP Chinta Mohan and Amalapuram MP Harsha Kumar.Outside Rangaraya Medical College in Kakinada, the medical staff including doctors performed a mock-autopsy on the effigies of the Union ministers from Seemandhra and demanded their resignations.

All of these problems happened because of unfortunate death of one man - YS Rajasekara Reddy.  An unexpected political vacuum and all are rushing to catch the space vacated by him.

If you want to solve such agitations , there is only one man in this country who can win over such situations with ease. Guess Who? It's ought to be ex-CM of taminadu, Mr.Karunanidhi. Want proof?  The self-immolation of Muthukumar happened during the height of Eelam war in 2009 and the subsequent protests which rocked tamilnadu were completely put off by him(in some way or other) and to everyone's surprise , his government won the parliamentary elections by securing 27 of 39 seats.

However, at the moment, nobody seems to have answers to the Andhra problem. 

Quality and branding

  Once i went to a shoe show-room and decided to buy a particular sports shoe. I asked the guy in showroom about the life and quality of the shoe.While he told a lot about the quality, he didn't tell anything about its life.After pressing for that question again, he told that life is 1-1.5 years maximum.I remember the cost of shoe was around 3k. As a consumer, i am expected to shell a couple of thousand bucks every year again and again for this shoe.
         While the previous generation wanted to buy things once and use forever , the current generation is injected with the idea of buying things again and again. Even if you don't need it, it is gulped down your throat in the name of brand,quality and marketing. I don't know if there is any economic term for this behaviour. Excessive consumerism is the closest word i can think of.
       The post-liberalization scenario has done many funny things to our life.Some funny examples are the number of  people waiting outside pondy bazaar Saravana Bhavan on any saturday is always higher than the number of beggars in whole of pondy bazaar.On any given day in any of our shops, the number of bottles of Coke sold is always higher than the number of water bottles sold(even include water packets!)

This particular addiction for Brands have developed a new breed of people. This new breed almost always notice the kind-of-branded-dress  you are wearing. They sometimes ask what is the brand you are wearing.Even if you don't wear a branded one, they scorn at you for being a miser. There is a pre-conceived notion that if you earn well, you should wear only branded dresses.
  I am not against any brand or for that matter, wearing branded-items. However, as far as my stupid knowledge is concerned, i don't find any major difference in the quality of 500rs t-shirt vs 2k rs t-shirt.In my dictionary,a good dress should last long and should not fade away and should be of light material such as cotton(for tropical country like ours).Other than this,i didn't find any big enough difference in my 2.7 decades of dress-wearing experience :) The notion that  more money = more quality is simply wrong in most cases.More often than not,quality is a perception created by the industry via marketing and brand building.

      In most cases, you would get the same item in un-branded shops which would be really good and it may last longer most of the times.Most products are priced purely based on the purchasing power of the people.
 Oh! I forgot to tell you about the shoe.I I later went to a shoe manufacturer - Khadims and bought a 800rs shoe which lasted more than 3 years.