I need a pensieve..

Feels like my brain is getting clogged with too many things... it would be great to borrow Dumbledore's pensieve for a week. Some questions that have been haunting me...

1. Why do I cry at the drop of a hat these days?

2. Why can't I stop making a fool of myself - my temper is just simmering below the surface these days!

3. Why do I miss my friends?

4. What can I do to forget the past?

5. How to accept people for what they are?

6. How to let go of what people did to me?

7. What is it that I want to do with my life?

8. Why don't I feel excited about stepping out of bed and going to work?

9. Why have I become so lazy?

10. Why can't I stop watching "Friends"?

I wish someone lent me their ears for 2 hours and stopped judging me....

Daddy cool

Apparently Jun 21st is Fathers' Day it seems.. the first piece of information that I came across this morning. It sucks already not being able to celebrate parents' silver jubilee anniversary now the world is celebrating Fathers' Day on my late dad's birthday. Brilliant.. just what I wanted... one more reason to sulk!

I know I shouldn't feel bad cuz of other people's happiness but hey.. that's just what I feel. I want to have my dad back.. when I see someone getting dropped by their father, when my friend talks about going on a trip with her dad, when my cousins celebrate their parents' wedding day... it is so so so grossly unfair :(

I wish I had known him better, I wish I could complain to him when things get too hard, I wish he was there at my graduation wearing my top hat, I wish I cried a bit more when he passed away, I wish I told him what a great dad he would have been... it probably would make me feel better today!

I hate the Hallmarks and Archies of the world for inventing these "days"...! You suck, guys!

Chennai-88

Came home after a long time.. it feels like everything has changed in a very short period of time. I am finding it hard to cope with the very people with whom I have spent 20 years of my life. Is it part of the growing up process?

When I used to visit home on weekends, I felt more close to my family. But in the last one yr I hardly came here... traveling and vacations were luxuries that I couldn't afford given the ISB schedule. I donno whether the year that I spent almost alone has changed me or my absence changed them. I wish it is just a passing cloud and things will be the same soon...

Whatever said and done, nothing like being at home sweet home :)

IE8 RC1 released

..and it is super-fast compared to IE7!! Here is finally a product from Microsoft that might actually give Google Chrome a run for its money. I switched to Chrome 3 days after it was released and have not touched IE ever since except when I had to login to some Java enabled sites that simply won't work on Chrome. And I was of the opinion that IE lost me forever. But looks like v8 might actually succeed in winning my respect back. (A bit of history here - I was virtually married to IE all my life and had never used any other browser till Chrome came along.)

IE8 has bundled some cool features like Web slicing, suggested sites, InPrivate browsing (like Incognito mode in Chrome) but the true difference is in the speed. As someone who has used IE long enough to crib, I must say that it doesn't feel like IE at all, if you know what I mean:)!
However, I am really not sure about the timing... what is microsoft gonna do to reclaim its lost share in the browser market? More marketing? More bundling with the operating system? Or does M$ even care that it lost a few hundred thousand users to other browsers? Probably not. That said, I can't decide whether I will switch back to IE8 after becoming so accustomed to Chrome's speed, omnibox and quick find. For one, there is a strong association of IE with "slow" in my mind - just like many others who have moved away from IE.

But if Microsoft is to meet the competition that is popping from unprecedented avenues, it cannot go on ignoring lost customers. The world is moving online and if MS is losing its share in the very browser market that enables the world move online, it is a serious issue to be considered. IE may not be a money maker but it completes the vision of "seamless experiences that combine...software with..internet across a world of devices" (More info here). With Firefox, Safari and Chrome at 22%, 8% and 1% shares respectively (Source: NetApps), MS must work harder to retain its two-thirds of the pie. If it doesn't, it is probably digging the first feet of its own grave.

20 days to go...

It's a hot summer evening and am in one of those unusually stock-still state of mind. Just realized that starting today, I have exactly 20 more days left at ISB. Boy.. that was one quick year that just zapped by! It feels like yesterday when I was standing in the endless queue for getting my educational loan approved and scurrying around the main building of my would-be alma mater doing the different things that were required to be done before I could officially get started at the school.

Now, here I am in the last term and all mails of graduation, vacating and packers n movers have started flowing in. At some level I feel extremely nostalgic - not just bcuz I am leaving ISB but I am gonna leave the city which has been my home for the past 4+ yrs. It wouldn't be a far cry if I said that life at Hyderabad has made me the person I am. This is the place where I started afresh n learnt to deal with things on my own, where I lived away from my lovely family, where I made great friends, where I laughed, cried and learnt some hard lessons. 

These four years have taught me the alphabets of being an individual and am sure I will remember those wherever I go from here. I do not know my destination but I know where I am starting - this journey forward will definitely be worth my while or so I hope! 

Mokkai Mania

It is been a long time since I watched the afternoon movies on Sun TV.. for one the ISB cable network sucks big time and it requires me to search for the channels almost everytime I wanna watch TV. Anyways.. yest afternoon I was totally vetti (meaning had nothing better to do than to program my TV channels) so I decided to watch any movie on Sun no matter how crappy it was. And it turned out that I got lucky.. I was able to get the signal of K TV (which telecasts movies whole day). And voila.. there was "Neerum Neruppum" going on. So for a while I settled for watching Tamil Nadu's 2 former CMs dance and fight and do a lotta circus in the name of love.

Even then I wasnt very satisfied - first reason being there were way too many ads (My God.. talk about MARKETING) and second I still hadnt figured out which frequency Sun was being telecasted on. So I decided to give JJ and MGR a break and started tuning again. And this time guess what?? It was Chinna Kounder (CK) on Sun TV!!! 

For those who dont understand what I am talking, I suggest u stop reading now. Cuz the remaining blog is gonna be about how mokkai movies can be really entertaining. So, if you didnt understand what mokkai is, better stop it now buddy.. it's really hard to explain everything you see! Alrightie.. so eventually I settled for CK and I must say I really was impressed with the movie. I had watched it many times before but for the first time I really appreciated lotta scenes. Captain can be such a dear - there werent many "left foot down and right foot on the chest" kinda fight nor were there really villainous terrorists whom Captain captures in a 15-minute guerilla attack.

The plot is a very typical hero-worship in a village setting where everyone starts with praising how great CK is and goes on to blame him for everything that goes wrong in the village and finally falls at his feet asking for apology. The interesting thing was that the heroine had a really good role to play too. She was not just the songs-only girl friend but stayed in everything from comedy track to the crucial turning point of the movie. And the whole movie was such a sweet love story. Highlights were the songs that have been playing on a continuous loop on my VLC since yesterday.

There were 2 main comedy scenes that I wanted to bring out here:

1) The one where Manorama and Suganya fight verbally and then laugh about it after Suganya marries CK. The reactions of Koundamani and Senthil as they get stuck in between the 2 bickering ladies was just hilarious. ("Dey.. rendu elumbu kootukku nadoola maatikittom da!!!")

2) This one was not really a comedy scene but I rolled on the floor (technically, the sofa) laughing. CK gets mad at the villain for ruining his life and walks to his house with a foot-long knife to kill him. Just as he enters the villain's house he realizes that his niece's engagement function is on. The villain is his brother-in-law incidentally. So all the vetti mokkaiyans who have gathered there start praising CK for being there uninvited. "CK... CK thaan. Koopidamaye vanthurukkaru paaru", "enna thaan-naalum CK-oda akka ponnachey" etc etc. So CK drops the knife and blesses the girl and returns crying. It was a typical.. "Ippidi yeththi vittu vittey.. odamba puncture aakaranunga" comedy!

Anyways.. so finally.. I wanna conclude by saying that not all afternoon movies are mokkai and some mokkais can also be very enlightening if not entertaining. Have good fun over the weekend! (Switched to "Kannu pada poguthaiyya" on VLC now ;))

Loyalty - A Myth?

Yesterday we had a class on relationship between customer loyalty and profitability. Prof. VK took us through a series of marketing models built upon 8 indicators of whether a loyal customer today is going to be a profitable one in the next few years. It was interesting to see a lots of myths getting busted - a loyal customer is

- costly to serve

- price conscious in some sense

- not always profitable

The moral of the story was firms need to decide when to stop chasing a customer. And the evidence Prof. VK put forth were satisfying both quantitatively and analytically. The more I think about these indicators (which included frequency of buying, returns, focused buying etc), I feel that loyalty is not really a concept to worry about because there are no "loyal" customers in the world. There is only waves of propensity which firms could ride along and make money. When one dies, another one comes up. A smart marketer should only look for the right wave. On an average, the loss of customers gets compensated by new ones.

But one thought still lingers in my mind and it might even be recursive in some sense. Once we stop chasing a customer does that mean he is never going to be a loyal one in the future? I remember an example Prof. Bell used in class about Starbucks. There are 2 people who come n drink Starbucks coffee every day - one spends lot more than the other. But the costs of serving these 2 people are the same. The question Prof. Bell posed was 'should we let go of the second customer who pays less and costs more?'. Almost everyone in the class yelled yes except one student who said he would wait to see if the second customer pays more in the future and would not lose him just because he spends low today. And that indeed was the right answer in that situation. 

Coming back Prof. VK's conclusion, in an ideal world where you acquire customers just by way of innovating in products and services, losing a not-so-profitable customer is not a big deal. But we live in a world of marketers and it costs a fortune to acquire n retain customers. Shouldn't we also be asking the question of "when to start chasing a customer?". The window of opportunity is not between time zero and when a firm stops chasing. It is between the times when the chasing starts and stops. It would be interesting to look at data that captures both these frames. And it might even be true that customer loyalty is cyclical - there are only waves of loyal customers...