Somewhere I belong………………..

When this beganI had nothing to say

And I get lost in the nothingness inside of me

I was confused

And I let it all out to find

That I’m not the only person with these things in mind

Inside of me

But all the vacancy the words revealed

Is the only real thing that I’ve got left to feel

Nothing to lose

Just stuck/ hollow and alone

And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I wanna heal, I wanna feel

what I thought was never real

I wanna let go of the pain I’ve held so long

(Erase all the pain till it’s gone)

I wanna heal, I wanna feel

like I’m close to something real

I wanna find something I’ve wanted all along

Somewhere I belong

And I’ve got nothing to say

I can’t believe I didn’t fall right down on my face

I was confused

Looking everywhere only to find

That it’s not the way

I had imagined it all in my mind

So what am I

What do I have but negativity

’Cause I can’t justify the way, everyone is looking at me

Nothing to lose

Nothing to gain/ hollow and alone

And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own

I will never know myself until I do this on my own

And I will never feel anything else,

until my wounds are healed

I will never be anything till I break away from me

I will break away, I'll find myself today

Don’t be surprised, the above poem is not written by me. It’s a song and a very famous one at that by one of my favourite bands LP called somewhere I belong. Well the reason why this song finds a mention in this blog of mine is a special one. It reminds me of something that happened years ago and has been happening ever since.

In the winters of 1999 when I was still in school, my cousins living in US visited us. Their visit was surrounded by the regular brouhaha that normally surrounds such visits from “NRI” relatives.
As soon as they landed at the airport we rushed to meet them and hug them as for us it was a normal reaction because they usually come, say once in five years.
This time my five year old niece who was coming to India for the first time was also there. The moment she got out of the terminal she started jumping and pointing towards the other side and we couldn’t figure out what made this 5 yr old, who was here for the first time, so happy. After much investigation we found out that she was pointing towards a dog who was blissfully asleep right in front of the entrance of the terminal. That’s when her mum explained that you really don’t get to see stray dogs in US and if they want to see animals they have to go to the zoo. That’s why all the firangis who visit India after going back happily declare it to be an open Zoo, one of my cousins commented. I was a little taken aback and hurt at this statement. Welcome to India, I thought.
They stayed here for almost two months, touring many parts of the country including Goa, Kerala, Rajasthan, the usual tourist spots. That’s when I realized how distorted their version of India was or for that matter how distorted version of India, an Indian settled abroad carries.
For two months we laughed at, joked around or felt disgusted with whatever they said or did. I, with all my education and the supposed broad mindedness couldn’t take my cousins behavior when she openly discussed her boyfriends, sex, and other equally taboo things in front of the elders of the family or even the clothes that she wore. I hated their tantrums about not drinking the normal water and eating the regular food. They wanted mineral water at all times and ate Pizzas for breakfast lunch and dinner and I thought you should be ashamed to call yourself an Indian. But so much for my patriotism I forgot that they are not Indians, they are American Born confused Desis, a term very popular among the youngsters and the NRI community today. But back then we were just beginning to register ourselves on the world map as a force to reckon with or India a Super power by 2020 and so we were not that conscious about our own nationalistic pride and individuality as an Indian. And mind you I am talking about a time when we didn’t have Rang De Basanti or Chak De or even the candle lit protests at India Gate. We were still caught in our colonial time warp and everything remotely foreign was better than anything Indian .America was still a dream destination and a degree from any Mickey Mouse institute in US was so much better than even IIMs in India. We still considered the white skin as superior to us and were overjoyed to see Make up kits and cheap perfumes bought from the One Dollar shops in US and gifted to us by the same NRI relatives who pitied us for not being able to experience America and its grandeur.

So yeah I hated them for being so ignorant about Indian Values and Culture and being so insensitive towards our feelings. I mean imagine the ladies of the house spent hours in the kitchen dishing out their best delicacies for them and all they ate would be a bite or two and would want to go to Domino’s all the time and say things like “you don’t even have Subway here. That’s such a surprise”. So what you culturally ignorant American Indians, so what if we don’t have Subway we have our mothers who cook the best in the world, something you will never get to experience as you live in America, I would say to myself.
With all this hating and loathing two months passed away and my American cousins went back to their “homeland” and I was so relieved that I would not have to watch my family showering their dedicated attention to them and taking care of their every little thing. I grumbled a lot, so much that today nine years later I find it so funny. I asked my mum do we throw such tantrums when we go to our grandma’s place in Jaipur. We don’t crib about the food and water even though we think it tastes bad and we don’t crib about food even though in Jaipur they use Cows milk which tastes like water most of the time. My mum simply said why are you acting so foolishly, you know in US they slog so hard, they work and they go to school and have to do all their stuff by themselves instead of acting stupid thank your god you were born in India.
Sometime later another of my cousin visited India. This time she had come with her husband who was a gora as my grandmother referred to him. He was a Canadian native in love with India. He had his dinner not on the dinning table but sitting cross legged on the floor, ate Daal chawal and the extremely spicy Besan Gatte which made his face go red and eyes water but he didn’t complain. He would ask me to apply the red tilak every day on his forehead. Once I told him that we don’t really apply it everyday but only on festivals and auspicious occasions and he replied everyday in India is a festival. His response left me amused, emotional and confused not necessarily in the same order.
As I grew up and became more open to other cultures and different ways of life, I realized how lost a second generation Indian born in US feels. They were born in a country of enormous wealth and freedom but they belonged to a community which was culturally rich but every bit conservative by American standards. They went to school and grew up among the Americans kids who probably laughed at the color of their skin and the funny accents their parents spoke with. With time they adopted everything American. Disliked Indian food, lived on coke, and couldn’t take it when their parents nagged about the kind of clothes they wore. They just didn’t understand why their Indian cousins always discussed about boyfriends, puberty and sex in such hushed tones. Their parents gave them a list of Dos and Donts every time they visited India.
So protective were the parents of these children that they taught their kids the Indian way of life which included everything they themselves learnt while growing up even if it meant that now that Indian way of life was old fashioned even for children living in India. So obviously they adopted the Indian way as well and became what we called Confused Desis.
I cant begin to imagine the their feeling of being totally lost in a foreign land which is now their adopted mother land. Their frustration on being ridiculed by their peers for being different, funny and Indian and on being reprimanded by parents for acting like spoilt American brats. That’s when they started questioning about who they actually are and where do they actually belong.
I was content to believe that this happens only with the NRIs till I found out the opposite till last year. In June 2007 I joined an IT company as a management trainee after finishing my MBA and had to go to Chennai for a month long induction programme. Now I have already said a lot about my experiences there and its not really about me but a friend of mine with whom I was sharing the room in the guest house. A Tamilian by origin who was brought up in Delhi for most part of her life. She was much like me, wanted to eat the same stuff that I liked and dressed up how a girl raised in Delhi would. Away from her southern roots pretty happy being who she was. (for anonymity’s sake lets call her Angel). It never occurred to her that her being a South Indian would ever be a source of any emotional trauma to her that too in Chennai. We were actually staying in a dorm where apart from us other girls were also staying. Most of us were from the North so, often the food, the way the people dressed and a lot of other things about the Chennai city were the topic of our discussions. More often than not our discussions always bordered on criticism not because we hated Chennai but because most of us where there for the first time. So the experience of being in a Southern state where everything was very different from what we are used to was a little unnerving. During one such conversation someone passed a derogatory comment about South Indian people in general. It was politically incorrect as we had a couple of friends in the room who were as also from South including my friend Angel who was a taken aback at the comment. This kind of thing never happened in Delhi and it never occurred to her that there was such a huge gap between the North and the South. That night she couldn’t sleep and kept wondering. Next day being a Sunday she went to meet her childhood friends. Since morning she was very happy that she would be meeting her friends after almost 18 years. So I was glad that the last night’s conversation was out of her mind but when she came back in the evening she was almost on the verge of tears and went straight to bed. Next morning I asked her how did her meeting go and she said Garima I have been away for too long my friends, my cousins even my family here don’t seem to connect with me anymore. They think I m a spoilt North Indian now and her comment shook me to the core.

That night I was again reminded of my American cousins and their dilemma about who they actually were. How different was Angel from them. Not at all, I thought. She was caught in North South tangle. Back in Delhi it was much easier for her to roam around and be what she was or rather what she had grown up to be. But then if we look deeper she felt more accepted there probably because she acted and behaved like any of us but the same behavior or attitude alienated her from her own people.
This thought haunts me even today after a year later. Is it so difficult to accept people as they are? It is I guess. Even with all the modern education which takes us places we still want to remain connected to our roots. We want to belong to a place of our own and when we are not sure where that place is we feel lonely and hollow from the inside. I guess this feeling of connectedness is what brings people back to their birth place, like so many times I hear people saying, I don’t care where I live but I want die where I was born…that’s where I belong………………….

How different are we-Conversing across cultures.

A few years ago a fighter aircraft crashed near Canton, China and everyone onboard that plane died. When the Chinese Air force investigated the crash, they were stumped to find the cause. An audio clip extracted from the cockpit wreckage revealed that there was a major miscommunication between the pilot and the controller at the control tower, which was the reason for crash. The aircraft was a US make and was under a trial run by the air force. The pilot was Chinese, however the controller at the tower was an American, who was trying to warn the pilot that he was flying dangerously low because of which a problem had occurred and he needed to land immediately so he kept on shouting “pull up”. The pilot however thought he was being asked to fly higher so he “pulled the aircraft up”.
The incident clearly indicates that no matter how much we may be convinced that the world is becoming a global village and getting smaller, we cannot deny the fact that across different cultures, countries and continents, how people express themselves verbally, non verbally, through body language, and even in ways in which they interpret certain gestures or colors is very different. For example the flower chrysanthemum which is admired for its beauty world over is a symbol of death in Spain European(Poland. France) and Asian (Korea, Japan) countries. So we can expect some horrified looks if we present a white chrysanthemum bouquet to a French guy even though we may be totally unaware of the symbolism attached with that flower. Or for that matter in one particular case the ad campaign for a detergent brand failed miserably in the Middle East while it was a huge success everywhere else in the world. The ad agency was baffled about the possible cause of this disaster. On researching the whole issue they realized that the ads placed through billboards were interpreted incorrectly by the audience. In Islamic society people read from right to left unlike the rest of the world which reads from left to right. So they actually looked at the billboards from the section which was the last part. Viewing that billboard from left to right meant that a dirty shirt dipped in a bucket of that detergent was clean when taken out, but their interpretation was a clean shirt dipped in that detergent came out dirty. The ad agency’s lack of research and their assumption that people all over the world are essentially the same became the reason for the failure of an ad campaign which was a runaway success in other countries.

Many more such examples can be sighted which will testify this fact that communication becomes the key ingredient in the success or failure of any possible business deal, ad campaign or any other interaction which involves people of diverse backgrounds, culturally or even geographically. And this is become increasingly important in today’s business scenario which requires us to relocate to different geographical locations, interact with people of different cultures or simply working with a multiethnic workforce.
Which is why, companies across the globe today lay a very strong emphasis on designing neutral communication inside the organization. Talking about United States, today American companies have more women employees than ever before, a higher number of blacks and Mexicans, and a very large percentage of Asians which include Chinese, Japanese and Indians among others. So we can imagine that any message from the senior management to be cascaded down to the employees has to be designed in such a way that it doesn’t hurt the sensibilities of any particular community, religion or race.
Organizations are always trying to fill the gaps that arise out of communication or rather miscommunication due to misinterpretation. These gaps are more pronounced when we talk about interactions between East and West or native English speakers and non English speakers. It is very important for native English speakers to be sensitive to the fact that English is a foreign language for many of their counterparts around the world, and the extent to which it is understood and spoken may vary widely. For example, in some countries such as Japan, English is generally studied in junior high and high school, but the method of instruction emphasizes reading and grammar. Therefore, many Japanese may be more familiar with written English than spoken English. The Japanese are also very shy and hesitate to speak for fear of making a mistake. However, never make the assumption that a person does not understand English – it can cause embarrassing situations.Another factor to consider is that non-native English speakers around the world may be more familiar with British English than American English, or vice versa. The degree to which your colleagues speak English may also vary by region, occupation, educational background, amount of international exposure, etc. Native/bilingual English speakers should to learn to adjust the way that they speak when interacting with those who are less fluent in order to facilitate successful communication and prevent or minimize communication breakdowns.
Similarly when talking about the East West gap, Americans are less likely to pay attention to indirectness or hidden expressions and implied meanings often conveyed through body language, at work than in non-work envoirnments, these trends will not be apparent in East Asian contexts leading to a greater East–West cultural divide in work settings.

Academicians have categorized cultures into High context cultures and low context cultures for research purposes, but lot of our questions can be answered if we delve deeply into these. In high context cultures the meanings are expressed in physical context of interaction or are internalized in those participating in the interaction. In other words the meanings are often derived from non verbal cues, on the other hand, low context cultures rely more on specific and direct words for expressing.
The difference between high context cultures and low context cultures are many, for instance the importance of verbal messages in low context cultures is really high, secondly people from high context cultures consider the people form low context culture to be less credible, third, people form high context cultures are more skilled in reading non-verbal cues and they do not speak a lot and expect others to be equally skilled at taking non verbal cues.
Researchers have identified different styles of verbal communication across cultures: direct Vs indirect, elaborate Vs succinct etc. The direct style, which is used in western countries, involves use of explicit words and messages which clearly communicate the intentions, needs, wants of the person expressing. On the other hand in indirect styles there is more emphasis on non verbal expressions, implied meanings and hidden cues. This is more prevalent in Asian nations. For example rather than saying a flat no or showing direct disagreement, people in Asian cultures would prefer to say some thing like “I agree to you but we can look at alternative solutions as well”. Therefore two persons belonging to these two styles, conversing with each other might find it very difficult to understand each other or may often be victims of misinterpretations and miscommunication.

The dimension of elaborate succinct style deals with the richness or exactness or succinctness of the verbal expressions. For example many Middle Eastern cultures use the elaborate style. The Arab speakers use what appears to North Americans as exaggerated expressions, over-assertions, and repetitions. An implication for listening is that someone who is not aware of the Arabic verbal style could easily infer an incorrect meaning. In contrast to this Middle Eastern elaborateness the Chinese and Japanese styles are more succinct and crisp. The Japanese talk less and do not rely on expressed thoughts or feelings, considering these to be superficial and insincere. The Chinese verbal style is characterized by conveying a lot less than the actual. They often feel embarrassed when showered with praise and compliments which may affect one’s ability to respond to praise and compliment in a way that is expected in cultures that use the elaborate style.
These verbal styles are learned within cultural contexts of the users and therefore also reflect cultural values.

In essence we can say that even if we may accept a certain language as a universal language we can never truly understand and interpret messages and cues from our counterparts from other cultures which may not seem to be a very big challenge to us in the beginning but it certainly can pose a threat to our business relations and future multiethnic and multicultural collaborations. Hence it is very important to understand the importance of communication and lay strong emphasis on development of neutral communication styles. We should not only take into consideration, the sensibilities of different cultures but also try to avoid the temptation of tuning the message as per our styles and interpretation....

Viral Marketing:Doing it differently

In 1999 a Hollywood movie “The Blair Witch Project” was released. The movie was a smashing hit with the highest cost to profit ratio ever. It is said to have earned approximately $10,000 for every dollar spent and featured in the Guinness Book of Records. This was quite a noteworthy achievement considering the fact that it was made at a total cost of just $35,000, it earned approximately $248 million.
Apart from the creative genius of the directors and the crew, the biggest reason for its success was the manner in which it was marketed. The movie was promoted as based on a true story and after its release the crew clarified that it isnt and is just a work of fiction. But the crew was so successful in placing it in the minds of its viewers in such a way that till date a lot of people still believe it to be true.
The film was marketed heavily via the Internet, and parts of the film were aired on TV as a series, leading to heated speculation on the internet as to whether the film was real or not. The teaser poster and other advertisements for the film were designed to reinforce that it is a documentary based on real footages, leading many people to think the film was an actual documentary, and that the three protagonists really had disappeared in the woods. To reinforce this idea, a TV channel aired a fake documentary, Curse of the Blair Witch,that claimed to investigate the Blair Witch legend before the film's release. It contained interviews with friends and relatives of the missing students, paranormal experts, and local historians (all fabricated). This was done so extensively that the three main actors were listed for a time as "missing, presumed dead" on IMDb website. While attending the Cannes Film Festival, the producers put up missing posters featuring the three stars of the films so that people could believe them to be real students who got lost while working on a project about the “Blair witch” and are now presumed dead. Even today the official website of the movie (http://www.blairwitch.com/) has sections which are dedicated to the story claiming it to be true and has pictures of the three “missing” film students and clips of the footage that was recovered about a year later after they went “missing”.
The producers and directors never expected it to do so well and were actually hoping it would make it as a TV release movie on cable TV.
The movie went on to become a source of a lot of debate and inspiration among the marketing fraternity for the unconventional methods used to promote it. And the reason was mainly that it was only the well thought out marketing strategy which made it the runaway success that it turned out to be. It is needless to say that had it all been done the usual way it would have failed to make a mark. It started a trend which has now become cult of sorts. This trend was the use of internet and other networking techniques to produced desired effects.
More recently the Barack Obama presidential campaign can be a very good example of how viral marketing is turning out to be an effective tool in marketing mainly because of its wide reach and low cost execution. The campaign has a social-networking site with powerful, instant peer-to-peer communication. It has features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group,". Obama HQ provides tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters. It however does not interfere with the communication within these groups and also doesnt dictate the content posted on the site. The chat rooms and events on barackobama.com, such as "Jazz Brunch for Obama Fundraiser," "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club," show the true potential of the viral branding. It can be rightly said that for the first time, the democratic power of the Internet has truly been harnessed in a presidential election campaign. Infact our Indian politicians can take a cue from Obama and take similar initiatives as it is a great way to involve the country's youth.
The term viral marketing used to denote marketing mainly through internet and was coined by a Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey F. Rayport. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use social and often unofficial networks to produce brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through processes, which are very similar to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be done by word-of-mouth or enhanced by the effects of the Internet. Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions can be in the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.
It is a known fact that a satisfied customer tells an average of three people about a product or service he/she likes, and eleven people about a product or service which he/she did not like. The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify such individuals and events which will be able to create messages that appeal to this segment and have a high probability of being passed along. The driving force in any case would be the amount of curiosity that such messages generate. Are they interesting enough for people to go on reading the whole message and even pass it on to their peers is what drives the whole movement of passing it along.
If it works out then it is immensely powerful, usually having 500-1000 times greater impact than what we get from regular advertisements. If truly harnessed, this source can give us access to unlimited number of users in the form of bloggers, readers, viewers etc. And also this tool has an edge over other methods in terms of the cost involved as the cost of posting a viral message over the internet is very low as compared to placing an ad on television or even in magazines in certain cases. Going by that we can say that it is the future of marketing in the times to come as we see an explosion of internet users and mobile phone users and the growing popularity of blogs and social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook.
What is interesting is that more often than not such initiatives become like a movement or a cult with which people begin to associate themselves. For them it becomes more about their personality at times or about a cause close to their heart. Which explains why, after Blair witch project the internet was flooded with blogs about horror movies and real life supernatural events. Needless to say that the curiosity and the sense of association generated with it is mostly enough to take the campaign to the next level. As it brings like minded people together whose collective passion and zeal takes it forward. One person connects with the other and then a group forms and then two groups interact and a bigger group is formed. And all this happens without the company or the person who started this movement spending ridiculous amount of money as it happens in case of the conventional forms of marketing and promotions. It snow balls into something so big that advertisers swear they could never have created such an impact even if they employed their entire advertising arsenal.
Internet can become a powerful tool, not only to create a brand image but also to maintain it through constant feedback obtained in a matter of seconds. As global economics continue to cloud the future of the industry, the meltdown, will drive more money to the Internet—a much cheaper medium and has definitely more measurable reach and results.....

Monologues of an academically challenged marketing enthusiast

well yes you read it right...i m academically challenged or rather i was..hated exams to the core but for some reason the marketing bug never left me...i carried it with form my B-school into an IT company and now i m spilling it all over the blog....