Its funny how when theory is translated into personal behavior, it suddenly makes complete sense The cliché marketing adage of "Adapt or Perish", adorning multiple HBR articles, always seemed like what Indian MBA students will learn as rote to pass tomorrow’s exam. It does not leave too much of an impact because, intuitively, we know it to be true – like Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’...

Many of us would have been highly amused at the recent and on-going war of ads between the two newspapers – the venerable “The Hindu” and the king of media – “Times of India”. Times of India has been trying to penetrate the bastion of “The Hindu” in Tamil Nadu. The marketing and brand manager would have done his 4P exercises and realized that Hindu has an image of being somewhat cerebral and therefore deemed dense by...

I remember a childhood story that i remember affected me profoundly. The story was of the Koh-i-noor diamond and how we lost it to the Britishers. The Brits were the ‘bad guys’ who looted the best things that this country had to offer and how they obscenely display the Koh-i-noor, something that they stole from us. It was a story told with much pain, a pain which I could articulate later as born out of impotent helplessness. At that...

Ah well…all good things must come to an end, especially if you don't want to own the good thing anymore!!! Bajaj will, from now on, manufacture only motorcycles, finally bowing to market tastes. With that decision, a product that signified India for decades will pass easily into history pages – the “Hamara Bajaj”, the Chetak. The scooter that was the beast of burden for the common man carrying whole families on...

On 14th April, a news piece came that told about an incident that should be told and retold as an example of why inspite of everything being stacked against us, India’s democracy still pulls through… The first lines reported in the article, written by an obviously moved reporter, suffices as the best introduction to this soon to be forgotten heroic incident… “ For 10 hours, a band of 22 CISF jawans battled more than 200 heavily...