Archive for the 'travel' Category
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
~Mark Twain
I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while. Amul 
is a huge dairy cooperative in India (HUGE!), owned by 2.4 million milk producers in Gujarat. It’s one of the most long-term successful cooperatives world-wide, and is often referenced in the development world as being so. It started in 1946 and spurred India’s so-called “White Revolution,” which has made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. This is an oft-referenced source of pride for Indians (I hear it all the time, especially at public functions). I wondered, if not India, who would be the largest producer of milk products? The only reasonable competition (population-wise) would be from China, but the Chinese don’t use much milk or milk products in their diet. So naturally India would be number one. The US has less than 1/3rd the population of India, but it turns out the US is now only slightly behind India in production, and it actually goes back and forth every year as to who is number one.
Anyway, this is all irrelevant, as I want to talk about marketing. But - here’s my vegan disclaimer (I am a vegan, or have been attempting to be one atleast for the past several years) - MILK AND MILK PRODUCTS ARE BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, FOR YOU, FOR THE ANIMALS, etc. There is some more information about the environment in particular on my Interesting Stuff page, and if you want information on the other stuff leave me a comment or do a google search.
Anyway, Amul is absolutely great at marketing. One of my favorite things to do every week is check the Amul billboard which comes out on Friday. Here’s one from a month ago when I was in Bombay, and Sanjaya was a semifinal in American Idol (No, I don’t watch American Idol or find it entertaining):
Since the 60’s, Amul has been putting out hilarious tongue-in-cheek sketches starring the Amul baby commenting jovially on the latest news or current events. They usually have some pun involving Amul and the loveable Amul baby and her friends. The Amul ads are one of the longest running ads based on the same theme… I’ve read that they are going to be entered into the Guinness book as the longest running ads based on the same theme. I would’ve thought Absolut would win there, but it turns out that campaign only started in 1980.
I don’t follow Indian news as much as I should, but I always know the top story of the week when I see the Amul ads. It’s an amazing timely slice of Indian culture at that time.
Here are some of my favorite recent ones:
This is from when the Bollywood movie Dhoom: 2 came out, which featured a bunch of the leading stars of India (and had the same font):
From when Shakira came to India to perform in Bombay:
When the SENSEX (Bombay Stock Exchange) plummetted last May:
I spent some time in Delhi last week, working with the folks at Drishtee. I had a great time, and met up with a bunch of other folks in the development space, doing very different things from me.
Picture-based overview of my non-work time in Delhi:
Getting driven all around Delhi in Andrew’s scooter. Andrew is the person I’m in contact with most often from a work perspective for Drishtee, and this time I was there over the weekend, so I got to meet up with some of Andrew’s friends, and was surprised to note that me and Andrew’s friends had many other friends in common, so it was one big happy family of people in the development sector. At times we were on the scooter for more than an hour at a time. At other times, we had as many as 4 people on the scooter at the same time (sorry, no pictures of that).
Andrew is brilliant at taking a picture and being in it at the same time:
Playing frisbee. This would seem to be picture worthy, except that if you look closely, we have a mix of several different races and most of the people are white. Also, we’re playing on a neatly manicured lawn with big trees and sidewalk-lamps. It looks a lot like America. It could be Schenley Park, where I occasionally tossed the frisbee during college. But it’s Nehru Park, in the heart of New Delhi, and these are mostly expats doing some sort of development work in India. There are a bunch of them in Delhi, and thanks to Andrew, I got to meet several.
Here is the one big happy family of people (most of whom I’d known for less than 24 hours) in the development sector… we had a great time:
It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness
~Old Chinese Proverb, I recently heard it in a pretty awesome song at our workshop in Panchgani (really wish I had the mp3)
I keep on mentally referring to the past week as a retreat rather than a workshop. It was our 3rd Indicorps workshop of the year, and dramatically different from the past 2. The first one had a Socratic dialogue theme, where we read and discussed a LOT of text to give us a fresh outlook on leadership. The 2nd workshop involved a 4-day long project that we worked on for the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad. Both were jam-packed with lots of work and located in Ahmedabad. This workshops’ theme was “From Micro to Macro.” We did a good deal of sitting down and discussing issues, and one case study, where we analyzed a couple of Government policies (one around mid-day meals for schoolchildren and the other about a sanitation program for slums) and came up with recommendations. The workshop was located in Panchgani, a small hill-station 100kms from Pune. It’s very popular as a weekend retreat from Bombay and Pune, and it’s also very famous for boarding schools (as are most hill-stations in India). Interesting sidenote: Freddie Mercury (the late lead singer of Queen) attended St. Peter’s school in Panchgani, where he learned to play Piano and formed his first band.
The workshop was hosted at a place called Asia Plateau, a conference center at a place called Initiatives of Change, formerly known as Moral Rearmament. It’s run by an intesting group of people. I’m still not exactly sure I understand what they do, but check them out on the web here.
The plateau is supposedly the 2nd tallest in Asia.
I don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll do a quick wrapup of the workshop by pictures rather than words… There are a lot but they are really low-quality (click on them for bigger versions and higher quality).
Among other fun activities, we:
Hiked the plateau
Played really silly games: In this one, the 3 people were supposed to form a tree, but Anand (right) is forming the ear of an elephant instead of tree-branches, so he loses
Climbed trees
Played Ping-Pong-Tennis… a game on a smaller tennis court with big paddles, using a tennis ball. Really awesome.
Picked Strawberries from the farm of a huge jam manufacturer, Mapro. Apparently their season is over, so they didn’t mind us coming and picking/eating hundreds and hundreds of strawberries. (Radhika, Lisa, and Archana)
Me Prem and Shaila decided that we’d share all of our strawberries, so we had a rotation system so we each got to eat 1/3rd of the strawberries.
Jumped on a trampoline:
Sat around in the library and discussed development-related issues:
Enjoyed beautiful scenery
I’m in Bombay now, will be headed to Delhi in the near future.
Arrogance and self awareness seldom go hand in hand
~M in Casino Royale, which I loved, incidentally
Babysteps…
I’m so far behind in blogging that I’m going to break this up into 2 posts, one about 2 weeks ago and one about this past week, which I’ll post in a couple of days.
March 4th was Holi (click for wikipedia article)…
The day before, we’d bought some holi powder from some street vendors:
I figured that the best celebrations would be in the old-city side of Ahmedabad, so we trekked out there looking for masti to be had. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any, so we had to make our own. We ended up chancing upon a group that was attacking random people with color, so we joined in their fun for a bit. It was fun, but I have to admit that it was nowhere near as fun as the Holi played at Carnegie Mellon Holi, a tradition that we started when I was on campus. I think it has more to do with being in a space where everyone is playing holi and you know a lot more people and can do whatever you want (pick people up and dunk them in a huge barrel full of water, etc)… It’s hard to play with strangers.
Anyway, Me, Shaila, and Bidisha had a good time:
I love this shot for some reason:
Even the puppy got in on a little holi action:
Right after holi, I went on another trip, this time in the north, to Delhi, Dehradun, Lucknow & Kanpur, visiting MFI’s, telling them about Kiva.
In Delhi, I spent all of my time in Noida (a suburb), working in the offces of Drishtee, an organization I’ve blogged about before. They put Internet Kiosks in rural areas, allowing the villagers to get access to a ton of services they didn’t have before. It’s going to be great to partner up with them.
It was pretty lovely all in all… The North of India is still freezing cold (high 40’s Farenheit, but there is no heating, so that’s pretty cold), whereas it’s been 100 farenheit here in Ahmedabad (and I have no aircon).
Dehradun is a hill-station area that is the capital of the newly formed Uttarakhand state. It’s a pretty beautiful place but I didn’t really get to explore any of it. At the recommendation of the MFI I was visiting and some other people who heard about it from Lonely Planet, I decided to check out the Forest Research Institute. It’s this 1200 acre property that does forest research in India… I don’t understand what they do at all. I went to a museum that I thought would explain it, and even got a guide, but it was a very typical developing world museum, with weird stuff and no explanations. The entrance had 2 sample villages that looked like grade school projects - one had a village without trees and the villagers were all working hard and they had terrible housing. The other village had trees and all of a sudden the village was very developed and had perfectly made homes. The guide explained that life is much better when you have trees. OK… a little overly simplistic maybe? He also kept on telling about how trees are good because you can cut them down and use them for paper and firewood… a little odd to me. I was also a little spooked by the number of dead animals in the place - they probably have a taxidermist on hand full-time.
The main building is an impressive greco-roman work of architecture - it looks like a college - in fact, it would feel right at home on Harvard’s campus. When it was built 80 years ago - it cost 40lacs rupees (Lac is 100,000, current exchange rate is 45, no idea what it was then)… Now it costs over 50lacs ($111,000) a year just to maintain the place:
I read somewhere last week that repetition makes for great pictures, and I promised myself I’d try it out:
I saw interesting signs all over the campus - among them - “Pedh Lagaye, Garibi Hataye,” loosely translated into, “Plant Trees, Remove Poverty.” A little simplistic for me. Another one:
If they said Trees are Life, I’d be fine with that. I can even go along with the 1st and 3rd lines. But how does water mean bread? Seems like there are some logic/English issues at play here.
The rest of the trip wasn’t all that eventful - saw a great MFI called NEED in Lucknow, and a few others. I think things are going well from a project standpoint - it’ll be great to have Indian businesses up on Kiva.
Anyway, I’m back in Ahmedabad for a bit, after a crazy last month that included 15 trips on the Indian Railways!
Info about last week coming up in the next post - it was great!
