malleswaram – Pertinent Observations

Up North

So it’s exactly a year since I moved to the north. North Bangalore that is. For exactly the last one year, I’ve called a place in Rajajinagar 2nd Stage (not to be confused with Rajajinagar 2nd Block) my home. It’s been a roller-coaster ride, I must say. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I must admit a year in I still haven’t settled in completely, and for the record, I’m already plotting a move back south.

The problem with the area where I live is that it is an area of houses built on 30 feet by 40 feet plots. While that itself is not a problem (with an FSI of 1.5, you can build a 1800 square foot house here, which is pretty massive), the problem is that this area was “built” in the early 1970s. Back then, nobody had cars, and given the economic situation nobody aspired to have a car. This, coupled with the smallish plots meant that people didn’t make a provision in their plots to park cars. Again – given the economic situation when this layout was built, it is a perfectly rational decision.

Now, forty years later, with rapid economic growth in the last 20 odd, everybody has a car. And since there’s no space to park them inside the houses, people park them on the streets. So on every street in my locality, you will find cars parked continuously on both sides of the road. Unfortunately people haven’t figured out a protocol of one-ways, so sometimes that leads to traffic deadlocks when cars approach from both sides of the road. Thankfully we are spared of such deadlocks since we live on a road that leads to a dead end (a real dead end, not a “Bangalore dead end”, which is just a T-junction).

Thinking about it, I find the land use here rather suboptimal. Most plots have two-storeyed houses, and given the size of the plots, the plots are fully built. So there is less than five feet space between my window and my neighbour’s – and on Sunday mornings we get woken up because Neighbour Uncle likes to talk loudly on the phone sitting in his porch (the neighbours reconstructed their house a few years back, so they have a porch to park their car). Essentially there is little privacy.

There is little of other things also – like open spaces and trees, again a function of the plot sizes. I have a solution for this, but it is going to be hard to implement, and I don’t want to be the ones doing that. Yes, everyone has a plot of land to call their own. But they live in houses that aren’t too large and don’t have much privacy or open spaces or gardens.So I think it would be a profitable enterprise for a real estate developer to buy up the entire area (let’s say about two or three roads at least), merge the sites and build a high rise apartment here with all “facilities”. Even if the realtor were to pay above market rates (necessary since a lot of people wouldn’t want to sell) and compensate the incumbents handsomely in terms of houses, there is profit to be made. But then everyone wants their own “piece of land”.

Notwithstanding any of this, where I live is a great area. It is residential and solidly middle-class, and I can buy just about anything I want within a kilometer of my house. I only need to walk about 100m to catch an auto rickshaw, and it isn’t that hard to get an auto home at any time in the day. The biggest problem I find here, though, is infrastructure.

Malleswaram is a pre-car area. It was built in the 1890s to rehabilitate people from the old city (pete) area following an outbreak of plague. Consequently, the roads aren’t particularly wide. Which ever way I want to get out, I’m faced with narrow roads, and that combined with heavy traffic means travel times to the centre of town and beyond are large. And to make matters worse, Dr. Rajkumar Road (one boundary of “mainstream” Rajajinagar) is a highway, with buses leaving for all parts of Karnataka passing through this road.

I have a habit of living in cusps. My last residence was at the trijunction of Jayanagar, Basavanagudi and Banashankari. This one is on the border of Malleswaram and Rajajinagar. Maybe the next time I move, I should think of going into the “middle” of some area.

Sales and marketing

On Saturday evening, I drank a Pepsi.

You might wonder why I’m making such a big deal about it. Because it is a big deal. Because I don’t normally drink pepsi. My preferred choice of cola is Thums Up, and if it’s not available I have a Coke. The only time when I have a pepsi is when both Thums Up and Coke are not available. There are times when I end up at PepsiFoods only stores, and sometimes I even have dew instead of pepsi.

You might think I’m extrapolating based on one data point. But I know more people who swear by thums up. For whom Pepsi is only a third choice cola.

The reason I’m bringing this up now is that Pepsi has spent a bombshell on sponsoring the IPL. Yes, despite being on HD, I managed to see a number of their ads. Pepsi Atom seems cool but they didn’t seem to have had its distribution in place when I wanted to try one. I reverted to my old faithful thums up. Now, I hear news that the India head of Pepsi has been sacked because he was deemed to have over spent on the IPL.

Why someone like Pepsi would spend so much on advertising is beyond me. Yes, they need to be on the top of people’s minds. But considering that everyone they advertise to has tried each of the major colas once, and loyalties to cola brands being rather heavy, I don’t see how they seek to influence sales by advertising. That Shah Rukh Khan drinks pepsi doesn’t alter my opinion one bit – I’m loyal to my thums up. I would think the same to be true to a loyal pepsi fan.

After having said so many times that I’m a loyal Thums Up customer, you might want to know why I drank Pepsi on Saturday. Because that little shop in Malleswaram I went to stocked only pepsi products. And he didn’t have dew. Faced with the choice of Pepsi or Mirinda or 7Up, I opted for the first. It was that exclusive agreement that PepsiCo had with that shopkeeper that made me consume their product.

Pepsi should invest more in this. Give higher margins to retailers who are willing to stock only pepsi products. Cola is something in which people have loyalties, but those loyalties are typically not so strong that the shop tends to lose business if the customer’s favourite brand is not available. Given lack of choice, customers will switch.

But then I guess the problem is that Pepsi is a “marketing-driven” rather than “sales-driven” company (we used to hear a lot about this distinction during recruitment time at business school). And the thing with marketing everywhere is that they are not measured. Like this friend who markets phones once gleefully told me that an advertisement he put out had a million likes on facebook. I asked him how many extra phones his company sold as a function of that ad. He had no answer. Marketing is like that everywhere. It is not judged based on real tangible numbers. And I hear that marketers like to keep it that way!

The last time I was in this guru mode I had commented that Nokia’s strategy of promoting Lumia by the strength of its camera was doomed to fail – for people don’t buy phones because they want a camera. Nokia seems to have learnt. The latest ad for the 520 talks about the apps that are available. This time they seem to have got it right.

Vidyarthi Bhavan

Ok I give this one to North Bangalore. The best masala dosa in town is found at CTR in Malleswaram (ok I’m going by one data point, haven’t been there more often). The thing that goes by the name of masala dosa in Vidyarthi Bhavan is a completely different animal. It is thick, it is literally deep fried, and tasty, yes. But it’s not a masala dosa.

The problem with restaurants having “flagship dishes” (like the masala dosa at either CTR or Vidyarthi Bhavan) is that you are usually loathe to try out their other dishes which could be quite tasty as well. For example, the idli-vada at Vidyarthi Bhavan is quite good, and I’m told that the rava vada is awesome (unfortunately I went there on a weekday morning when they don’t make rava vada). And I don’t know if it’s good business practice for restaurants to have a “flagship dish”.

Coming back to “real” masala dosa and Gandhi Bazaar, you should definitely go to this quaint old little place called Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room on DVG Road, between Gandhi Bazaar circle and North Road. It’s a fairly old-fashioned place, doesn’t serve sambar with masala dosa (only chutney), happily serves one-by-two masala dosa and is generally not very crowded.

It is one of those places with a wooden door, with a wooden shelf in the corner which has pepsi, mirinda, etc. The service is quick and efficient and the food is tasty.

Of late I’m not too impressed by the masala dosa at Adigas, which not so long ago I used to absolutely crave (for example, when I returned to Bangalore after a 10-week trip to London 5 years ago, I went to an Adigas for masala dosa straight from the airport. Now it doesn’t seem to be all that worth it). Or maybe I’m biased in my opinion because the Adigas I most frequent is the one at Embassy Golf Links, where my office is located.

Oh and I need to mention here that I absolutely loathe the Madras masala dosa, the thing that is white and not very crisp, with soggy palya and served with some three varieties of chutney, and flat sambar.

CTR

Ok this is a post that has been delayed by about a couple of weeks. One of those things that has been in my head now for a while so writing it. So some two or three Sundays back (more likely to be two) I went to the famous CTR in Malleswaram for breakfast. For the first time ever. Yeah I now it’s supposed to be a classic place and all that but it’s only now that I’m getting acquainted with north/west parts of Bangalore so had completely missed out on this so far.

So as per what several people had told me at various points of time in life, the Masala Dosa at CTR was brilliant. Unparalleled. The difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan is that the former makes masala dosa just the way that other restaurants do, but only much better and tastier. The dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan is a different animal altogether and am told the has very different composition to what is made in other restaurants.

There is another important difference between CTR and Vidyarthi Bhavan and thats in terms of service and crowd management. Vidyarthi Bhavan does an excellent job in this regard, striving to “rotate table covers” as quickly as possible. Within moments of you taking your seat, your order gets taken, the dosa arrives, as does the bill and a look from the waiter asking you what the fuck you are doing there considering you have finished your tiffin. Extremely efficient from the point of view of the restaurant (in terms of maximizing capacity) and for customers looking for a quick dosa, but not so from the point of view of people who want to linger for a while and chat.

Unfortunately the one time I’ve been to CTR (2 sundays back) I was in a bit of a hurry since I had to go attend a quiz. Maybe the intention of the restaurant is to allow customers to sit for a while and chat up, but I don’t know if you can actually do that since at any given point of time (reports might be biased since this was a Sunday morning, 9am) there are four people waiting for you to leave so that they can grab your seat. This large crowd that is in waiting is also I think a result of slow service at the restaurant (simple queuing theory – for a given arrival rate, the slower the service rate, the more the average queue length).

There were some simple tasks in which CTR didn’t do so well. For example, making a customer wait for ten minutes before you take his order is not only ten minutes wasted for him, it is also ten minutes of absolutely unproductive “table time” – something that a fast food place like this can’t really afford. And then the ordered items also took a long time to arrive (again, most people at CTR have the same order – one “masaal” so I do hope the make dosas “to stock”) – but then their kitchen capacity may not match up to the capacity of the seating area (which isn’t too much). You pay bill at the table itself rather than at the counter which means you sit there for even longer. And so forth.

This post is supposed to be a part of this series that I was writing some four years back examining the Supply Chain practices and delivery models at various fast food restaurants in Bangalore. I have only one observation with respect to CTR and based on that I don’t give it very high marks in terms of supply chain and delivery efficiency. However, the dosa there is so awesome that I’m sure that I’ll brave the crowds and go there more often and might be able to make better observations about the process.

Arranged Scissors 14 – Losing Heart

I’ve been in this market for a while now. It was sometime in February that my mother decided that I had utterly failed in my attempts to find myself a long-term gene-propagating female partner, and that she needed to step in and find someone for me. It was sometime in March that I went to this shady photo studio at DLF Galleria in Gurgaon and got a “wedding profile” snap taken. Later in March, I got listed at some shadymax exchange in Malleswaram. And there was the “market visit”.

The last weekend of this March I was in Bangalore, and was taken to this shady-max exchange in Malleswaram for a “market visit”. My uncle had told me that we needed to go sufficiently early, since there were apparently profiles of six hundred girls that I had to inspect that day, and make a shortlist. We had had a hurried breakfast at a Darshini in JP Nagar and then headed out to the exchange. My uncle, aunt and mother took turns to go up to the counter there and fetch the “smartha brides” files one by one. And I would spend about a minute on each file – which had fifty profiles. The six hundred profiles were done in less than a quarter of an hour. Phallus had simply refused to budge.

Aadisht, via his friend Vishakh, came up with this awesome framework of “head, heart, phallus“. The basic funda is that in order for you to enter into a long-term gene-propagating relationship, your head, heart and phallus need to independently like the counterparty (women insert appropriate substitute into the 3rd component). There is nothing earth-shaking about this framework as another of my friends pointed out, but the important thing is that it distinguishes between heart and phallus. Which I think most other explanations of louvvu (including bollywood movies) tend to ignore. And people also ignore it and get confused between heart approval and phallic approval, leading to disaster.

I had taken a long break from this arranged scissors market – a combination of being generally disgusted, poor health and being in between jobs. Recently (with the advent of Navaratri) I’d gotten back, and realize that I’ve lost my heart. Yeah, you might think this sounds funny but it’s not. I’ve truly lost my heart. And the only good that can come out of this is that if a crocodile catches and threatens to eat me, I can tell it the truth.

This whole arranged scissors concept seems to dehumanize the wonderful concept of long-term gene-propagating relationships. You are expected to make your decisions quickly, and you are expected to design “questionnaires” so as to get the maximum amount of info through each meeting. You are expected to browse through files containing six hundred profiles and make a shortlist. And when you are in the process of making the shortlist, you have your mom and aunt peering over your shoulder with helpful comments such as “this girl’s mouth is too wide” or “that girl’s nose is too blunt”.

For a while you resist, and resolve that you won’t get sucked into this mess. You resolve that you are still looking for “true louvvu” (whatever that is) and won’t settle for a common minimum program. You resolve that you’ll use the arranged marriage exchange as a dating agency. And soon it begins getting to you. You begin to see the merits of judging noses as too flat and mouths as too wide. You start breaking a girl down into components, and giving marks to each, and taking a weighted average to see if it is beyond “pass marks” (ok I’m obviously exagggerating here). You agree to meet potential counterparties even if you know that it’s improbable that you’ll like her.

My head, I think, is doing quite fine. So is the phallus. However, I think I’ve lost my heart. It’s been three and a half years since I even hit on someone. My heart seems to have forgotten how to love, and to have a “crush”. I’ve forgotten how my heart used to react during prior blades. In each of those cases, if I remember right, it was the heart that initiated it, and the head and phallus only gave approval later. Now, I have no clue how that used to happen. That seems so improbable.

This whole concept of meeting people with the explicit intention of evaluating them for long-term gene-propagating relationships is seedy. I think it goes against the laws of nature, and completely ruins that wonderful feeling that one usually associates with louvvu. It makes you too judgmental (I’m judgmental otherwise also, but not this judgmental), and you are so busy evaluating her that you don’t enjoy it at all. And how can you trust your judgment when you know that you haven’t liked the process of judgment at all?

Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.

Punjoo Wedding

On Saturday I was in Delhi to attend a Punjoo wedding. Technically, it was a half-Punjoo wedding if you take only the marrying couple into question, but given the overall processes, venue, events, guests, etc. it can be classified as a completely Punjoo wedding. Apart from the groom and a handful of his family members, there were only two things Tam at the wedding – presence of curd rice as part of the dinner buffer, and “appdi pODu” during the “L^2 session”.

The groom was Sriwatsan K from Malleswaram, formerly of Katpadi; also known at various points in time as Free Watsa, Bullet Watsa and Katsa. The bride was his colleague Dipti. The wedding took place in Delhi, at the Hyatt Hotel. And it was the first time that I was attending a Punjoo wedding. I had attended a couple of north indian weddings before but those were of UPites, and I had been told that Punjoo weddings were something else.

The wedding had been scheduled for 8 pm but our kind Punjoo host informed us that most Punjoo weddings start at least two hours late. So reaching there half an hour late would be a good hedge, we were told. Unfortunately the groom, being Tam, had arrived on time and the wedding was already underway. The bride was yet to arrive but Katsa was there, sitting on a low stool and doing some random stuff that the Shastri was advising him to do. And he was fully clothed – if it had been a Tam wedding, he would’ve been topless.

Given that none of us had seen his wife before, someone had come up with the idea that she was a figment of Watsa’s imagination, and that we had all been conned into traveling all the way to Delhi for a non-event. And it didn’t help that when we had arrived at the venue, Watsa was sitting alone in the Mantap. So it was only when Dipti made her way to the mantap and took her place next to Watsa that we were convinced that she existed. “She exists! She exists!”, we shouted. And later on during the reception, to make sure she actually exists, we all made it a point to shake her hand. And I must mention here that she walked to the mantap. If she had been south indian, some uncle would’ve carried her there.

All this took place in a small courtyard in the Hyatt compound. There was a reception hall where the event was being telecast live, and the daaru was flowing freely there. And waiters walked around the place serving starters – all vegetarian. I think that is one thing common all over India – irrespective of the marriage parties’ eating habits, food is always vegetarian. Anyway, given the relative space in the courtyard and the “reception hall”, it was as if we were all there to watch the video of the wedding.

Presently, the couple finished getting married and slowly made their way into the reception hall. It had surprisingly gotten over quite soon – it was only 10 pm. This time, we lined up by the sides of the entrance into the reception hall and shouted “Watsa, Watsa” as he passed us with his new wife. I must say we greeted him like he was a triumphant hero. We definitely had fun. I don’t know and don’t care about the rest of the guests at the wedding.

Surprisingly there was no queue at the reception to wish the couple. In most weddings here, as soon as the couple are seated, a queue builds up all the way to the door of the hall. However, while we waited at the end of the short queue, people (relative types) poured in from the other side. Maybe that’s how things work in Delhi. We wanted to shout “poond, poond” but restricted ourselves to just shoving ourselves on stage and wishing the couple (and making sure the bride exists).

The food was brilliant. Unforunately, of late, the standard of food at Bangalore weddings has ebbed. I don’t konw if it with the cooks taking it easy, or with the flawed incentive system (nature of cooking contracts has changed significantly over the years), but of late it’s just not worth going to a Bangalore wedding for the food. In this context, the food here was doubly brilliant. Hogged like I haven’t hogged at a wedding for a long time.

Two weeks back when I had met Watsa in Bangalore, he had shown me the playlist of songs that were to be played at his wedding. I had cringed back then, for most of them seemed like arbitmax Punjoo songs. And while we were grubbing, the noise had started. Yes, it was noise. Random-max songs, at extremely high decibel. And the speakers were just next to the bar, so you had to really torture yourself if you wanted to go grab a drink. And there were no earplugs in supply.

After a while, though, the music got better and they switched to standard Indian dance-party music. As I had mentioned earlier, they even played a Tam song. Much fun ensued. The demographics of the dancing parties was interesting. If this had happened in a South Indian wedding, at least 95% of the people on the dance floor would’ve been under 30. Here, though, a significant proportion included unclejis and auntyjis and maamas and maamis. Anyways, I think this idea of a dance party attached to a wedding is fairly awesome, and should be replicated at South Indian weddings also (there may not be any thanni but it doesn’t matter).

Some married people in our group had initiated NED soon after dinner, and that had turned into collective NED and we were all back to pavilion (aadisht’s haveli) by midnight. Before we returned we went up to Watsa and told him that he has now become a proper Punjoo.

Bangalore trip update

The recent inactivity on this blog was mainly due to my inability to log on to wordpress from my phone and write a post. I had gone home to Bangalore for an extended weekend (taking Friday and Monday off) and the only source of net access there was my phone, and for some reason I wasn’t able to log on to NED from that. During the trip I had several brilliant insights and brilliant ideas and wanted to blog them and finally such NED happened that I didn’t even twitter them. Deathmax.

The main reason I went to Bangalore was to attend Pradeep (Paddy)’s reception. I think this is an appropriate time to share the funda of his nickname with the world. Before he joined our school in 9th standard, there was this guy two years senior called Pradeep, and for some reason not known to me he was nicknamed Paddy. I vaguely knew him since I used to play basketball with him, and after he graduated there were no more Paddys in school. So when this new guy came from the Gelf, it presented a good opportunity to get back a Paddy into school. It turned out to be such a sticky nickname that not even IIT could change it.

Friday was Ugadi – yet another reason to be home in Bangalore – and was mostly spent visiting relatives. When they heard about my impending market entry, all of them brought up stories of not-so-successful marriages of people they knew well, and put fundaes to me about avoiding certain pitfalls. These fundaes were liberally peppered with stories. Mostly sad ones. Mostly of people who have chosen to continue in their marriages despite them clearly failing. It is amazing about the kind of stuff people I know have gone through, and yet they choose to not run away.

Saturday morning was rexerved for my first ever “market visit”. I was taken to this bureau in Malleswaram and asked to inspect profiles. “There are profiles of hundreds of girls there”, my uncle had told me “so let us go there before ten o’clock so that you have enough time”. The profiles were mostly homogeneous. The number of engineering seats available in Karnataka amazes me. Every single profile I checked out over there had studied a BE, and was working in some IT company. Things were so homogeneous that (I hate to admit this) the only differentiator was looks. Unfortunately I ended up shortlisting none of them.

One of the guys I met during my Bangalore trip is a sales guy who lives in a small temple town without any access to good cinema. So he forced me to accompany him to watch Slumdog (in PVR Gold Class – such an irony) and Dev D. I agree that Slumdog shows India in poor light, but filter that out and it’s a really nice movie. We need to keep in mind that it was a story and not a documentary, and even if it were the latter, I think documentaries are allowed to have narratives and need not be objective. Dev D was simply mindblowing, apart from the end which is a little bit messed up. Somehow I thought that Kashyap wanted to do a little dedic to his unreleased Paanch.

There is this meet-up at Benjarong which is likely to contribute enough material to last six arranged scissors posts. I’ll probably elaborate about the discussions in forthcoming posts but I must mention here that several arranged marriage frameworks were discussed during the dinner. The discussions and frameworks were enough to make both Monkee and I, who are in the market process, and Kodhi who will enter the market shortly to completely give up in life.

One takeaway from Paddy’s reception is that if you can help it, try not to have a “split wedding” (and try not to have a split webbing also) – where different events are held at diferent venues, on disjoint dates. In that case you won’t have people lingering around, and you will lose out on the opportunity to interact with people. Note that there is zero scope for interation during the ceremonies, and the only time you get to talk to people is before, and after, and during. And it is important that there is enough before or after or during time to allow these interactions. In split weddings guests are likely to arrive and leave in the middle of an event and so you’ll hardly get to talk to them.

One policy decision I took was to not have breakfast at home during the length of my stay. I broke this on my last day there since I wouldn’t be having any other meal at home that day, but before that visited Adigas (ashoka pillar), SN (JP nagar) and UD (3rd block). The middle one was fantastic, the first reasonably good except for bad chutney and the last not good at all. Going back from Gurgaon it was amazing that I could have a full breakfast (2 idlis-vada-masala dosa-coffee) for less than 50 bucks. Delhi sorely lacks those kind of “middle class” places – you either eat on the roadside or in fine dining here.

Regular service on this blog should resume soon. My mom has stayed back in Bangalore for the summer so I’m alone here and so have additoinal responsibilities such as cooking and cleaning. However, I think I should be having more time so might be writing more. I can’t promise anything since blog posts are generated by spur-of-the-moment thoughts and I never know when they occur. Speaking of which I should mention that I put elaborate fundaes on studs and fighters theory in my self-appraisal review form last week.