It’s just cricket

Perhaps the billion prayers worked. For India won the semi-final against Pakistan in this year’s Cricket World Cup. And then again, perhaps prayer had no role to play. Perhaps it was just that the team that played better and held its nerve on the day won.

But was it war at Mohali?  Was it a life and death battle? One that determined the fate of the world? Not quite.

Will yesterday’s match, its result and the accompanying ‘cricket diplomacy’ solve all the puzzles that divide India and Pakistan? I would like to be optimistic and say ‘yes’, but I’m not so sure.

As Prem Panicker writes in this piece on Yahoo! - “The problems that confront us are too serious; their roots, nourished with the blood of so many innocents on both sides, go down too deep, for a mere game to set it all to rights — and those that pretend otherwise, including the holders of the highest offices in the land, do us all a disservice by trivializing these problems when they should be working to find lasting solutions for them.”

But in a world where hype often masquerades as reality, the spin machine forges ahead regardless; reality be dammed. So it will be enlightening to see how the spinmeisters position Saturday’s World Cup final between India and Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile, let’s try to remember that it’s just another match. Yes, it is the final of the cricketing world’s showpiece event, but it’s still just another match.

Coming home to stay

A few days ago, I took part in a discussion on tourism at the Alliance Francaise de Trivandrum. It was a small, eclectic group, and almost everyone who turned up ended up participating in the discussion.

Much was discussed, but what struck me most was a comment by Josette Rey, a Frenchwoman who lives in Fort Kochi and dabbles in tourism. The homestays that are sprouting across Kerala, she said, end up disappointing many French tourists. The French tourist tends to opt for homestays believing that they offer an immersive experience in the local culture. The tourist, she explained, believes that a homestay will offer them a slice of daily life in Kerala; an opportunity to be part of the family, to eat with the family and learn from the family. Instead the tourist most often ends up getting the equivalent of a hotel room without the amenities that normally come with a room in a hotel, she added.

Josette has a point. Over the past few years, both Kerala Tourism and India Tourism have been gung-ho about homestays — India Tourism also calls them bed and breakfasts (b&bs) which is kind of misleading as a b&b can be rather different from a homestay. Both tourism boards have even crafted elaborate systems to classify homestays based on the facilities they offer.

What none of these classification schemes has been able to certify though is the emotional ambience of the homestay. By emotional ambience, I mean things like how involved the hosts are in the operation of the homestay, how much time and effort they put into interactions with their guests and so on. Little things at first glance, but actually vital ingredients of the homestay mix.

For running a good homestay involves striking a very fine balance between giving guests a taste of local life and giving them the space and privacy they want. A balance that needs to be reworked for each set of guests.

There is, I guess, no standard formula for this and it is arguably more of an art than a science. But there are homestays in Kerala that seem to have perfected the art of personalised inn-keeping — Philipkutty’s Farm, Tranquil, Gramam and others.

In the long term though, market forces will work on homestays as much as they do on any other sector. The good ones — that meet the needs of tourists — will thrive, while the others will either limp along or disappear altogether. Meanwhile, Kerala’s homestays could perhaps pick up a lesson or two from their more successful brethren, especially on how to bring more of the ‘home’ into the ‘stay’.

Another gold…

This time it’s in Berlin. Your Moment is Waiting, Kerala Tourism’s new ad film, has won a Das goldene Stadttor or The Golden City Gate award at this year’s ITB Berlin. The awards, which are exclusively for the tourism industry, are given out every year at ITB Berlin arguably the world’s largest tourism and travel fair.

Your Moment is Waiting won the Das goldene Stadttor award in the ‘TV Cinema Spot’ category. The recognition at ITB Berlin comes just a few weeks after the film won 3 PATA Gold Awards.

More accolades, I suspect, will come the film’s way before the year is over. 

Pic courtesy Kerala Tourism

Consumer rant #2: Mind your language

Beats me, some of the ‘customer friendly’ things companies do.

My bank, for instance, has a language option on its customer care telephone helpline in Kerala. You can choose to speak to the bank’s customer care team in English or Malayalam. A useful option, I’d say.

So I call the bank a few weeks ago and choose the ‘English’ option. I’m connected to a male voice that greets me in Malayalam. Thinking I’ve chosen the wrong option, I ask if it’s the number that connects me to an English speaker. “Yes,” he tells me, and continues to ask how he can help me — all in Malayalam. “Shouldn’t you be speaking to me in English,” I ask and am met with a moment of silence, before he goes on again — in Malayalam — about how he can help me. I give up and continue the conversation in Malayalam.

A few days later I call the bank and go through the same bizarre exercise again. Except this time, it’s a female voice at the other end.

Now I have nothing against Malayalam or any other language. But when you offer the customer the option of speaking to someone in a particular language, shouldn’t you deliver on that, every time?

So why is it that my bank couldn’t get this seemingly simple ‘customer friendly’ measure right? And if it can’t get it right, why doesn’t it scrap it altogether? All possible explanations are welcome.

Reflections on management

I’ve recently been re-acquainting myself with Henry Mintzberg’s work. In the past I’ve found his work interesting, but what strikes me today is how sensible much of it is. And he himself seems to be quite the non-guru, though his ideas make him as worthy of guru-dom as any recent management thinker.

Mintzberg has obsessed for years about one of the pillars of modern management — the MBA. A theme he’s examined in some detail in Managers Not MBAs. He questions conventional MBA programmes, which, he believes, tend to be designed to help graduates get a better job. Instead, management education should be about helping managers do a better job.

What makes Mintzberg different is that he did not stop with questioning the MBA, but went several steps further and helped design a masters programme in management for practising managers — the International Masters Program in Practicing Management at Canada’s McGill University.

Remarkably, he’s now extended this even further with CoachingOurselves, a self-organising management development programme. In CoachingOurselves, groups of managers or prospective managers get together to share their experiences on various management-related issues. Each discussion is anchored to a management topic downloaded from the CoachingOurselves Web site; each topic is authored by someone considered an expert in that particular area. An unfussy and effective way to learn. 

So is the ‘coaching ourselves’ idea selling? It is, says Mintzberg in this interview in Strategy+Business (you’ll need to register to read it). And if you want to read more by this most sensible of management thinkers, check out this page on his Web site. You may not get an MBA, but you sure will get some insights into the practice of management.

For the Goddess

Trivandrum has virtually shut down for most of the day. Not for a hartal or strike, but for the Attukal Bhagavathy temple’s annual pongala festival.

The smoke from thousands of open wood-fed fires rises heavenward, as women cook the pongala — essentially a sweet porridge of rice, jaggery and coconut — in pots of clay and metal as an offering to the Goddess, the presiding deity of the Attukal Bhagavathy temple.

It’s a women-only festival; one that is believed to be the world’s largest religious gathering of women. When I wrote about the Attukal Pongala six years ago, around 1.5 million were estimated to have taken part in the festival. This year, it seems the organisers expect around 3 million women to offer pongala. How reliable this estimate is, of course, another matter.

What is undeniable though is that the festival has grown and changed quite a bit over the past few years. For one, what was essentially a local temple festival has transformed into an event that draws interest from across the globe.

Over the past decade or so, the number of women who offer pongala has, quite simply, exploded. Today, many of them come from across Kerala and, indeed, the world to participate in the Attukal Pongala. This growth has in turn meant an expansion in the geographical spread of the festival — this year, pongala fires have been lit in an approximately 7-kilometer radius of the temple — with the attendant logistical and security nightmares.

The Attukal Pongala’s growing popularity has also given birth to a flourishing ecosystem of festival-related enterprises — from stalls hawking apparel, cosmetics and religious bric-a-brac to those selling pots and ‘pongala kits’ that have everything needed to prepare the pongala.

Some of the growth associated with the pongala though has been less welcome — head-banging music played late into the night at little altars that have sprung up across the city to ‘celebrate’ the pongala and extortion rackets to fund these pongala ‘celebrations’.

And more changes could be in the offing. Just a few weeks ago, the Kerala High Court asked the state government to ensure that roads in Trivandrum are not blocked as part of the festival. It is debatable though whether this directive can be fully implemented. Meanwhile, the state government is working on legislation that will allow it enforce ‘reasonable restrictions on public movement’ on special occasions such as the Attukal Pongala.

It’s hard to say how these moves will shape the Attukal Pongala in the years ahead. But whatever may change, what is clear though is that the Attukal Pongala will continue to be a vibrant, if smoky, celebration of the Goddess. So check out this story I wrote in 2004 to learn more about this very unique celebration of the feminine.