Bringing up Vasu - by Parul Sharma

I just finished reading "Bringing up Vasu - the first year" by Parul Sharma. For the initial 30 pages or so, I got pretty worked up thinking of what was coming my way. Peapod was a custom made child for me from the dear good lord. She wasn't much trouble, I pretty much slept peacefully and the only sore point was breast feeding, I mean the amount of it. It made me feel like a diary farm at times. Though I have seen my sisters suffer night after night walking half asleep trying to pacify a baby that is crying for no reason as it may seem. I have slept through it all, yeah I have had a good life and its scary..at 34 I am not sure my patience is getting any better. So anyway, after every page or paragraph I was getting on to all kinds of "what-if" scenarios. It took me a good week or more to begin reading it continuously. The book has Parul's humour about life. I could very easily identify with the wanna-be super yummy mom Mira. I mean that is all the spice there is to life at times. I loved all the characters, Anand, Mira's mom, PnX and the two friends. The book is full of funny smart lines and had me laughing once I got over the paranoia of what is coming.

What I would have loved more in the book, is a little more substance in the suspense piece, a few twists and turns that would have me looking forward to how Mira would sort it all out. I love Parul's style of writing and there are times when Mira reminds me of Becky Bloomwood from the Shopaholic series. Its a nice funny read and if you aren't expecting you can enjoy it all at Mira's expense.

Just Gup-Shup

There is no way I am going to be able to complete this blogathon that I declared on myself without much thought. I was on a 1 week leave. At home. Totally rested. Mom's off to kerala to attend the little boy's baptism along with my sister. I and my other sister couldn't make it. But my other sister, the Jellybean's mom is in Pune while mom is away. The peapod and the jellybean are having a great time. Lots of sweet conversations. I wasn't feeling very great and hence took a week off with my sister in town. I was totally rested. Slept mornings and afternoons, only to be woken up for food, tea and some niceties and our general gup-shup. Sisters totally rock and so you should have atleast one ;).

I read Amit Varma's "My Friend Sancho". Its an easy one day read. Since I have been reading him for almost 2 or more years, I think I would just like anything he wrote. While the story is pretty interesting but it kind of ends like many Malayalam movies do, leaving the audience to figure out what could have happened. And like his posts there were a couple of thought worthy lines and scenes.

I started reading "Not without my daughter" and god have I been glued to it. I couldn't put the book down untill after 1am y/d. I do not think I can rest untill I know how she pulled it off. I can only thank God I have been born in India for whatever its flaws are atleast I know I have a right and stand a chance to justice even if it might mean I may have to take to the streets, a signature campaign, a hunger strike, a candle light march, dharna, whatever it takes.

I am really happy the UPA won the elections with good majority. I hope they deliver. I did not have half a hope in any other contesting parties.

Roads are being built-rebuilt all over pune. Specially the one I take. I hope its done in time before the rains. The construction work all around gives a lot of hope that it will adorn a look it really deserves. Suresh Kalmadi has been talking about the metro project for a long time now, its high time to put a proper local transport system in place. The 4-wheelers and 2-wheelers are screwing up the traffic, the roads and the environment. How I wish I had a bus or a metro to take and had 30-mins of reading time to-n-fro. I had a 45 mins bus ride during my last job. It used to be hopelessly crowded but I enjoyed that 45 mins reading even if I was standing on one foot. I hate this driving business, I am just not made for it. Specially city drive.

That is all for now.

Pens, Papers, Books, Reading & Writing

Last week I read an archived article of ITPeople. I cannot seem to find it now. The writer was of the opinion that the current generation of kids do not read or write sufficiently, they browse, skim & scribble. They do not read a prose or article and enjoy the beauty of the written language. The love for books is all lost in browsing and hoping from one link to the other getting distracted often. An another view I came across, which again I cant seem to find was exactly the contrary. It said, the kids these days are exposed to so much, they can read stuff that interests them, to their heart's content. They have access to all kinds of literature at the tip of their fingers. Children at the age of 10 are dealing with sms texting, mails, essays, atleast 2 different chat softwares, all requiring a different style of writing & understanding and they do it with ease moving from one mode to the other effortlessly.

The first letter I ever wrote, was probably when I was 9-10 yrs, to Dad, when mom and us were vacationing in Kerala and Dad could not join us. Then latter I remember writing a couple of letters to my cousins, grandmom(s), a couple of letters for change of address to different utility departments under the supervision of dad, to my best friend in class V, who moved to a different city, letters to mom & dad when I stayed away at my aunt's place for college (I used to post them without a stamp because I did not have the patience to wait and buy the stamps and stick it on and so my parents always had to pay the fine to pick them) and then to an another friend, when I moved to a different city (with the stamp). In all, approximately around 50 letters in the past 30 years of my life. How many e-mails have I written. Countless. To friends, parents, cousins, strangers, colleagues, different utility departments, banks, agents the list is endless.

About Reading, it was limited to the school library (which had 100s of copies of "King Midas' Touch", I still don't understand why) and the weekly, monthly subscriptions of local children's book & a few walt disney story books from generous friends. During the teens, Nancy drews, hardy boys, Dad's subscription of magazines like Indian Auto, India Today, Competitive Review etc held interest. So coming back to my point, the access to number of books, kind of books was all pretty limited and so reading was all limited by resources. And so I have enough reason to believe, kids today will surely read, write & know much more than we did.

If they will mess with something, that will be 'Handwriting'. If handwriting of people of a few progressive countries are anything to go by, then we will have cursive writings long forgotten. I miss writing so much. All I write these days are MOMs, to-do-list, notes that only I can understand if read the same day else even I can't decipher it, grocery list .... all in all ...scribbles. I miss my ink pen & the ink bottle. I miss my Parker pen. I miss writing while the ink flows continuously onto the fresh white lined book.

SAM WALTON - Made in America

I read "SAM WALTON - Made in America" probably a month ago and have been wanting to write about it since then. I also wrote a review of the book for our company's intranet but that still wasn't done to my taste. The book hits the right cord with you because Sam Walton, started small(he was a paper boy starting at age 11, worked and paid his way through college during the depression delivering papers) and worked his way to own an empire. I do not want to review the book because I am a mere book reader who dreams and preaches how book(s) inspires but do nothing in practical to show how, now that probably is because, good books inspire me differently and that is to buy more, read more & dream more.

I am just here to put down a few anecdotes and quotes from the book and some in my own words as I couldn't get the exact lines while surfing the net, which I loved. The book is full of small stories by Sam himself and his family and colleagues. Some of the quotes & anecdotes strike with you so well that you suddenly feel you understand retail discounting business. After a reading a few quotes here, you can choose if to pick & read.

While talking about how he had to close down his first successful store because he wasn't allowed to renew his lease, he says

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time

.



He owned Walton's Five and a Dime which was a discount store chain, latter he ran Ben Franklin's franchisee before he owned walmart.

Competition that led him to move from being a franchisee to opening up of first Wal-Mart discount store on July 2, 1962, was this barber, Herb Gibson who had started his stores with simple philosophy:

Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap

.

Wal-Mart wouldn't be what it is today without a host of fine competition, most especially Harry Cunningham of Kmart, who really designed the first discount store, and who in my opinion, should be remembered as one of the leading retailers of all time.

He also learnt a lot of tricks of the trade, specially book-keeping of the stores from JCPenny

Trip's Expense should be less than one percent of purchases made.

If you don't want to work weekends, you shouldn't be in retail.

Charlie Baum recalls:

We had a nice big sale, and we put barrels full of stuff all around the floor. Elderly ladies would come and bend way down over into those barrels. I'll never forget this. Sam takes a look, frowns, and says: 'One thing we gotta do, Charlie. We gotta be real strong in lingerie.

The greatest insight into retailing and discounting was told with this story: Selling more panties by pricing them a bit lower than the usual price, and hence still managed to have greater overall profit.

Name WalMart was suggested by Bob Bogle, first manager, Walton's Five and a Dime, Bentoville on a flying trip. To start with, his reason was that Walmart has just 7 letters as against earlier 'Ben Franklin' 11 letters. Hence it could save a lot of money in neon letters!! Sam didn't say anything at that time but later when Bob went by the new store's building he saw worker putting up neon signs of W-A-L and was headed up the ladder with an 'M'. He smiled and went on.

Procter & Gamble didn't pay any attention to WalMart until 1987 when WalMart began to "turn a basically adversarial vendor/retailer relationship into one that we think is the wave of the future: a win-win partnership between two big companies trying to serve the same customer." At the time biography was written, WalMart was P&G's biggest single customer!

Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart's growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a 'Save the Small-Town Merchants' deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes or something that has the right to be protected.

Of all the notions I've heard about Wal-Mart, none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are somehow the enemy of small-town America. Nothing could be further from the truth: Wal-Mart has actually kept a quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores.

Initially, most electronic items used to be imported from Japan and Korea alone, and latter as part of the win-win partnership they worked out deals with local American companies to buy x no of pieces every month/quarter and thus cutting down on the cost of electronic goods considerably and invariably giving the local companies a lot of sale.

To promote, Phil Green, who once made the world's largest Tide display at one of the oldest WalMart stores, promised a TV for 22 cents in a promotion to celebrate George Washington's birthday, which was on February 22nd. The only hitch was customers had to find the TV set. It was hidden in the store! The crowd brought the house down! He admitted that "playing hide-and-seek with merchandise was a terrible idea.

He did the Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt hula on Wall Street in 1984. Hula was a result of his losing bet(betting was often an another way to motivate people to do their extra bit) to David Glass that 'we couldn't possibly produce a pretax profit of more than 8 percent'.

Sam Walton wanted to be the BEST retailer and NOT the BIGGEST. According to him " There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. "

To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee

This book was read, reviewed & awarded the Pulitzer even before I was born. It doesn’t require a review by me to be read, but nevertheless 'Yours truly' feels indebted to review it here and let all know what a great book it is. It explores with rich humor and great honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the 1930's. Yes, its about racial discriminations but so well written from a six year old's point of view that you cannot help smile many times at the many many incidents. It provides a very refreshing read with humor & quotes that make you want to go back to many pages & quotes and read it again & again.

Since I had already crossed our budget on books, that month, I insisted Risha to buy this one & lend it to me to read, which she kindly obliged. Now, after reading it, I want to own one copy, stack it up on my shelf, very proudly lend it to someone and then never remember who (thatz the life cycle of most of my books).

Prologue of the book mentioned a courtroom drama over the rape of a white lady by a black guy, calling for justice over racial prejudices. I started reading the book for the intense sad story & mainly the courtroom dramas. I love movies, books that depict court room dramas and have dreamed about being a lawyer for a short time in my childhood, mostly I wanted to be a detective like Nancy drew and famous five. All my skills i.e the skill of arguing & detectivegiri were honed at home with dad & mom. But there is this thing about parents, how much ever you are convinced that you won your argument, they win the case and you aren’t finally allowed to go for parties/movies or whatever it is. Thinking about it, this is after I wanted to be a detective, inspired by Famous five, Nancy drew & Hardy boys. Coming back to the book, the narrator of "To Kill a Mockingbird" as I mentioned, is the 6-year old Jean Louise, 'Scout' who lives with her brother Jem and widower father who is a lawyer in a small town in the US called Maycomb. The court room drama is all from her perspective and there are even gaps during the main proceedings when she goes out of the court to help a friend who is feeling giddy and so we loose track as to what happened in court then.

There are times when Scout makes you smile & laugh with her thoughts about her brother who she thinks tries to put-up a brave act in front of her but otherwise is equally shit-scared like her of the dark. Also her thoughts about their friend Dill, their neighbour Boo, the various old ladies in the neighborhood, the poor boy in school, their teacher, their schooling etc etc.. is all that literally goes on inside a 6-year old's head.

The book is really amazing. And the Title holds the moral of the story, which as Scout's father says “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”. The comparision here is of Mockingbirds as good, innocent people who are destroyed by evil and hence The moral being To protect the vulnerable. The story stands so relevant even today.