Talking pictures.

I can’t believe my eyes. Or, my luck at finding it. Here’s this simply written book by a successful practitioner from the retail space with gumption and courage of his conviction. He believes in doing things his own way, His credo is non-elitism, simplicity, thrift, transparency, trust, risk-taking, humility and rewriting the rules to suit the Indian reality. I had heard glowing things about him from my friend, Deep Bisen. Reading his It Happened in India was something else altogether, though. I liked the way the book is 'packaged' with an autobiographical narrative punctuated by "real people" commentary. The most fascinating part of his story is about the use of design thinking in communication. Talking in pictures, in other words. One of the earliest uses of this technique in India was by MK Gandhi. He shed his earlier Western garb to dress himself like the lowest common denominator of India. Believing as he did that India lived in her villages, he chose to dress like the villager. No wonder the aam janata took him to their hearts and followed his lead so readily. (Never mind Winston Churchill's "naked fakir" taunt, boys and girls.) The other interesting stuff I found in Kishore Biyani’s seminal textbook about retailing is his exposition of memetics. Gandhi’s “Quit India” was one powerful meme, for instance. (Meme is ”an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory”. Memetics is “the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes”. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html.) Being the bania that he was, Gandhi is believed to have said the following: "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so." http://quotations.about.com/b/a/029356.htm. [Also cited here: http://www.gandhi.ca/gandhi/quotes/service.php.] Gandhigiri anyone? That’s exactly what Kishore Biyani has been telling us. Indeed, his 2-step test to gauge the suitability of wannabe Pantaloon franchisees is based, chapter and verse, on the Gandhian precept. P.S.: Biyani is a Hindi film buff and has two feature films to his credit. It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened had he been associated with the Munnabhai series. Would he have included the above quote in the script? You may want to read an excerpt (‘Family Values’) here: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article&sectid=5&contentid=20070420024335640e8268c46&pageno=1. Another excerpt (‘Early Life’): http://www.business-standard.com/lifeleisure/storypage.php?leftnm=5&subLeft=6&chklogin=N&autono=282781&tab=r.

Gandhigiri on the silver screen. An earlier sighting.

Aimlessly surfing the TV channel often throws up serendipitous surprises. This morning, for instance, I came across a movie on the Sony Max channel I never knew existed. Called Ranbhoomi (Battlefield), it had a surprisingly young looking cast including Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Shatrughna Sinha, Jeetendra, Gulshan Grover, Shekhar Suman and Neelam doing a passable Basanti imitation. The way they all looked, it seemed like a mid-70s flick – given that Bobby was released in 1973 and Sholay three years later. But when I checked it out at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359876/ I found out that I had missed the target by almost 16 years. The storyline was nothing to write home about. The IMDb website gives it a surprisingly – and suspiciously – high (7/10) rating, though. What was interesting, however, was Bholanath (literally a simpleton) played by Rishi Kapoor doing a Gandhigiri act http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/09/gandhigiris-first-converts.html practically throughout the movie in his bid to end the rivalries between the two gangsters played by Sinha and Jeetendra.

“Bloody Indians.”

Human beings take offence easily. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/whose-reality-what-reality.html. Now there’s a very good reason to take offence for all those who call themselves Indians. The bodyguards of Angelina Jolie whom you met in this blog earlier http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/10/midnight-cowgirl.html called a bunch of Indian parents “Bloody Indians”. And some haughty “foreigner” jumped the queue in a multiplex loo for women and insulted an Indian woman calling her something “extremely offensive” (in Kiran Joneja’s opinion). The Natives struck back pronto arresting the former and extracting an apology from the latter. No more Gandhigiri http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/09/gandhigiris-first-converts.html, we’re proud Indians. Actually, these seem to be the right occasions to use some crafty Gandhigiri, if you ask me. By all of us including the media taking the course of non-cooperation against all these firangs. Let us just ignore them. Let the media ignore them. While they walk among us, let us treat them as invisible aliens. Left alone without attention, even a flower withers.

Gandhigiri’s first converts.

The Ulhasnagar Police Force, would you believe? Or, so claims the Mumbai morninger that used to be an eveninger till not so far ago and still sticks to the monicker that says as much. The credit for spreading the good word goes to a recent movie about two bhais with hearts of gold. How a criminal manages to possess one is beyond me. Come to think of it, though, if they call the Gandhian way ‘Gandhigiri’ – a pejorative derisive label, at best, compare 'dadagiri' (bullying) and 'chamchagiri' (kowtowing) – what they’re preaching (and practicing) may be a parody of what Gandhi preached and practiced. But I could be totally wrong. Maybe their simple-minded reinterpretation of Gandhi – a persuasive repackaging of his thesis laced with humour – is just what was needed to make people look at him anew. And, if Munnabhai could inspire hard core cops to enroll for a course about the Gandhian way and even resolve to practice it in their day-to-day work, that cannot be such a bad thing. Gandhi had a sense of humour. For instance, when a reporter once asked him what he thought of Western civilization, he reportedly answered: “I think it would be a good idea!” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Gandhi.