India Fakes Its Way To The Top

When the Moon is in the seventh house, 
And Jupiter aligns with Mars 
Then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars 
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius 
The age of Aquarius
    — From the musical Hair 

The past few months have been probably India's best time since Independence. Praise, hope, adulation, honorary designations (superpower, et al) and an invitation to sup at the global high table have all been heaped upon the country by a world that's watching the resurgence of an ancient civilisation. Probably, with a mix of grudging admiration and a dash of envy. So, has India's time finally come?

Before we get around to answering that question, here's the central point: India has been trailing China in almost every development parameter by about 10 years. The only exceptions are probably IT and foreign portfolio investments where India has the lead. But, in almost everything else, India is playing catch-up — reforms, infrastructure, trade and foreign direct investment. The betting is that it will take India another 10 years to reach China's current level of prosperity and state of infrastructure, unless, of course, India resolutely decides to crunch the gap.

The list also includes one rather unsavoury attribute: faking it! India trails China even in the counterfeit and fake products race, but looks set to draw level pretty soon. Sooner than even the 10-year standard in other areas. Take a look at the list of India's dubious distinctions in this field. The one example topping the list is counterfeit pharma products. Assuming that the Indian pharma market is worth Rs 50,000 crore, the private sector feels that the bogus segment is as large as Rs 15,000 crore, while the government feels it's only about Rs 250 crore! Only five years ago, the industry had estimated the fake pharma market to be around Rs 10,000 crore. According to a European Union study, based on customs data, 30% of all seized fake medicines in Europe during 2006 originated in India. According to another paper, India tops the world's counterfeit pharma production, with close to 35% of the world's supply originating here.

The counterfeit market does not exist in pharma products only. In 2004, Mattel Toys got the Mumbai police to raid various hole-in-thewall manufacturing units across the city and seized Barbie stickers, Tshirts, printing screens and swatches. These swatches would have been used to sell a wide variety of goods — such as, bags and stationery — bearing the Barbie logo and trade mark. Earlier in the same year, Gillette had got the Mumbai police to raid and flush out large quantities of shaving products bearing a counterfeit Gillette brand. The haul was said to be quite handsome and included not only fake Gillette products but smuggled ones as well. According to various surveys, over 35% of the automotive parts sold in India are fake. The value of counterfeit and pirated software is believed to be over $1.5 billion. In all, the total value of the sham market is believed to be around $5 billion.

This has a direct impact on not only government revenues but can have dire consequences for the consumer as well, especially in the case of pharma products. It also has a bearing on India's position in the global market and the trust that customers repose in products bearing the legend 'Made In India'. Already China has shown its resolve to the world: a bureaucrat was recently sentenced to death for his complicity in allowing shady units to manufacture sub-standard drugs.

Given the average Indian's incredible and indomitable entrepreneurial spirit, it was only natural that a section would seize on this opportunity - as long as the market perceives the premium on a product to be high, IPR or no IPR, there will be an incentive to create an assembly line of fake products. Walk down any street in a big Chinese city and you can buy cheap knock-off versions of Mont Blanc pens, Louis Vuitton bags and anything else that positions itself as a premium, luxury product. But, different entrepreneurs see different prospects differently, some of which does not necessarily mean walking on the dark side. Here's an example of that. A detective agency has been set up in Delhi to tackle the counterfeit problem. Its website reads: “XYZ is an exclusive agency which provides complete solutions relating to all the Intellectual Property Right matters. We have been working for many prominent manufacturers of different branded items and have organised successful raids across the country.”

Innovative ideas anybody?

You’ve Not Heard The Last Word Yet

SCOTSMAN James Murray, a member of the Philological Society and a teacher at London’s Mill Hill School, embarked on a fateful journey in 1879 that’s reaping dividends for all of us even today. No, he did not discover any new continent. He was the chief editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which could be completed only by 1920, five years after Murray had passed away, and was issued in 10 volumes. The dictionary today is available in 20 volumes, on CD-ROM and online as well. 


That’s part of the inimitable quality of the OED, as it is popularly known. Its ability to assimilate and grow, in step with the changing times and evolving linguistic trends, has become its distinguishing feature. The dictionary, which is updated every quarter, has been including many new words — from different languages and from street patois — over time. For instance, the June 2007 update includes the new words “mahurat” and “mahasabha”! It also includes the word “chill pill”, which is a derivative of another slang term “chill”. 


There’s another place where a thin line exists between slang and jargon. It’s called the modern-day workplace. Industries have routinely thrown up language and new words closely associated with their undertaking and peculiar to their occupation. The software professional, for instance, has the special ability to string technical terms into perfectly comprehensible sentences. In March 2007, OED included the word “virtualize”, it seems, as a passing nod to the growing tribe of software professionals. In the 1980s, the securities firms of Wall Street issued paper with funny “feline” names – LIONS, CATS, TIGRS. These were names of special kind of securities -- CATS stood for Certificates of Accrual on Treasury Securities (invented by Salomon Brothers), TIGRS was shorthand for Treasury Income Growth Receipts (introduced by Merrill Lynch) and LIONS meant Lehman Investment Opportunity Notes. 


Even on Dalal Street, there’s a new, exclusive kind of language being coined by business television channel anchors and equity research analysts employed by securities firms. Interestingly, this same language can now be found creeping into the usage of other professionals. In many ways, this is also how new words find their place in the OED. In any case, here’s a look at just a few words, selected randomly, that seem to have gained considerable currency and velocity: 


    * De-growth: This word does not exist in the dictionary. At least not in the OED, since that’s the point of reference for today’s column. In short, this word has been conjured up by analysts to convey a certain sense which, otherwise, would have used up more than one word. It typically means when growth rate is slowing down – for example, if a company’s sales grew 24% two years ago (over the previous year), 20% last year and 18% this year, then instead of saying decelerating growth (awkward actually), the market has found “degrowth” more convenient. 
    * Going Forward: Simply means ‘in the future’! The reason for the popularity of this phrase is unclear, though one can hazard a guess that ‘going forward’ probably sounds more energetic, summons up a sense of motion and generally sounds more officious. 
    * Space: Usually means ‘sector’ or ‘industry’. When a TV anchor usually asks an equity analyst, “How do you see the engineering space”, what he actually means is: “What are your views about the prospects of companies in the engineering industry? Will their share prices move up?” 
    * Underweight: No, this has nothing to do with the perils of investing in the Indian stock markets. It is an euphemism as well as a clever device employed by equity analysts for indicating that it’s time to sell a particular scrip. By indicating “underweight” in a research report of a company, the analyst is able to achieve two things simultaneously. One, he manages not to upset the company management by avoiding the word “sell”. Also, at the same time, he is able to indicate to his clients that the time to sell has indeed come. 


Verbal communication has evolved over time to include many new words and sounds. In many organisations, the vehicle for communication too has changed over time. Many offices took time to adjust from lengthy letters and inter-departmental memos to emails. Once that happened, instructions through cellphone messages are now slowly gaining acceptance. These new channels have now spawned their unique language. wot nxt?

Communication Is The Key To M&As

Do we have problems of communication? 
There's something I don't know and you can't explain it to me 
Let's talk the secret language of birds    --- The Secret Language of Birds, Jethro Tull

AS COMPANIES conduct cross-border courtships and inter-marry, the one glue needed to hold all the pieces together seems to be missing. Language and communication skills seem to be the one major casualty of the technical education pursued by most managers and coveted by most employers. However successful an organisation, the lack of proper language skills can derail the most audacious merger or turn the most breath-taking innovation into an ordinary process shift. 

That’s probably why Astra-Zeneca, Boeing and Citigroup have all hired well-known poet David Whyte to figure out how to conduct conversations within their organisations. A poet seems to be a strange choice for a corporate coach! The official website of Whyte - who is an associate fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at University of Oxford - claims that he “.is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organisational development, where he works with many American and international companies.In organisational settings, using poetry and thoughtful commentary, he illustrates how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement; qualities needed if we are to respond to today’s call for increased creativity and adaptability in the workplace.” 

Even though judgements about the quality of Whyte’s poetry are best left to individual taste, corporates nevertheless see huge value in hiring him. Apart from the three names mentioned above, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, AT&T, Shell Oil, WPP Group, Merck, Lucent and Motorola are some of his regular clients. In a recent interview to Harvard Business Review (“A Larger Language for Business”, May 2007), poet Whyte is quoted as having said: “A real conversation.can tackle great universal questions, or it can be about your work group’s puzzling lack of respect for you or why a division of your company is refusing to go in a previously agreed-upon direction. At the executive and managerial levels, work is almost always conversation in one form or another, and yet we spend almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines necessary for holding real exchanges. That’s partly because they involve a great deal of selfknowledge and a willingness to study how human beings try to belong - skills we hope our strategic abilities will help us get by without.”
But why poetry? Says Whyte in the same interview: “Poetry is a way of getting at the phenomenology of conversation - that is, what happens along the way when you’re trying to have a real meeting with something other than yourself: a meeting with your customers, with your colleagues, or with a new field of endeavour.Good poets throughout history have looked at almost every stage of the process of creative confrontation.”

Many mergers in corporate history have come asunder because the partners, after exchanging their vows, did not know how to tackle “the process of creative confrontation”. Morgan Stanley chief, Philip Purcell’s dreams of building a financial supermarket after merging with Dean Witter came crashing down and forced him to leave. The Morgan Stanley board, which was initially backing Purcell to the hilt, finally showed him the door after the bank was convulsed by a series of high-profile exits. Take another example: Compaq buying out Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the world’s second largest mainframe/ mini-computer manufacturer at that time. This was clearly a marriage of unequals. DEC was a large and bureaucratic organisation while Compaq was exactly the opposite. In addition, the smaller company had acquired the larger company, leading to inevitable complications. In the end, indigestion from the DEC purchase pulled down Compaq as well. 

These, and many more such painful mergers, could have been turned around with proper communication. But even if we were to ignore mergers for a moment, the ability to use language has immense benefits for any company. For example, any organisation wanting to change its way of working has only one way of making sure that the message goes down the layers effectively: talk, talk and then some more talk! And, to ensure that the wires don’t get crossed and that employees get the right cues, language plays an important role. Many organisations have, therefore, started looking at creative writing workshops to help staff members acquire the correct language.

Interestingly, IIM (Ahmedabad) conducts a leadership course called “Leadership Vision, Meaning and Reality” with the help of classics, which is very popular. In fact, most B-schools do provide some stress on communication skills as part of their curriculum. But quite often it turns out to be limited in scope - either how to make powerpoint presentations or how to use words without meaning anything.

Are Celebrities Worth It?

CELEBRITIES too have timers attached to them. The catch is: it’s not so easily visible. Especially, when they become immensely indispensable to the advertising industry. It takes special skill to realise that every so often, there comes a time, when after a successful run, many celebrities run out of steam. It requires extra-sensory perception to realise that their presence alone is not enough to empty out shop 

Is superstar Amitabh Bachchan facing such a crisis? If you look at the iconic actor’s career graph outside Bollywood, using KBC-1 as the starting point, Mr Bachchan has put his considerable influence behind a number of products — colas, over-thecounter medical products, chocolates, pens, financial institutions, suitings, and so on. But, when he tried his hand at political advertising during the recently concluded UP elections, Mr Bachchan faced a barrage of derision. Besides, probably for the first time in his advertising career, Mr Bachchan’s appearance alone was not enough to ensure the success of an idea, service or a product (Mulayam Singh Yadav in this 

So, should we write off Mr Bachchan or treat this as a one-off debacle? Intuitively, it seems Mr Bachchan will continue to remain at the crease for some more time to come, but a host of lesser celebrities may have to bid farewell to the greasepaint. The current spree of celebrity advertising has refocused attention on an issue that keeps rearing its head time and again: is the advertising industry bereft of ideas and exhibiting over-reliance on the tried and tested? In fact, it is believed that the practice of using famous personalities in advertising started more than a century ago. But, the moot issue here is: has the industry been overdoing it? 


Some of the biggest brands in the world have never used a celebrity. Interestingly though, the models they used became celebrities overnight. For example, the Marlboro man has been subjected to several studies and newspapers have carried detailed stories about his personal life, including whether he is a smoker or not. In simple terms, a myth grew around an ordinary man only because smokers saw him as an aspirational character. Closer home, Surf was able to stave off competition from pesky neophyte Nirma with a little help from Lalitaji, a non-celebrity who came to epitomise the ideal housewife — truckloads of common sense, ability to bargain and, ultimately, an innate idea of how to wrest the best for home and family. The trick in this kind of non-celebrity advertising was selecting a proximate proxy for the demographic profile of the target consumer. 

But then non-celebrity advertising can be of many kinds. Many products, such as Chrysler, even used its chief executive Lee Iococca to endorse the high quality of its products. Interviewing consumers and getting them to endorse the product on screen (think Dove) is another commonly used device as well. 


There have been many other successful non-celebrity icons too, some created especially for a particular brand. For example, Joe Camel became a successful poster-dromedary for Camel brand of cigarettes, Ronald as a kid magnet for McDonald’s, the Dough Boy used by Pillsbury. Fido Dido worked wonders for Pepsico brand 7-Up. An illustration of a naughty boy — called Gattu — by famous cartoonist RK Laxman mysteriously powered the success of Indian paint MNC, Asian Paints, for over 40 years. The boy became an icon, a mnemonic reminder of whatever the brand Asian Paints (and its sub-brands) represented. Then came a time when Asian Paints had to reconfigure itself and its strategy. That entailed a tough decision - Gattu had to be retired. He went gracefully but left behind an interesting thought. 


Marketing strategists must know exactly when to reduce their reliance on superstars. These icons can be extremely helpful on occasions, especially when there seems to be some convergence between the brand values and those personified by the star himself. But, they can spell trouble for the brands as well — as Pepsi found to its chagrin with Madonna, Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson. Or, when a cola company found out that while Britney Spears was publicly endorsing their product, in personal life she was consuming the product of a rival company. Or, when the celebrity spreads himself thin over too many brands simultaneously. Those wanting to figure out the right timing could probably keep an eye on the Davie-Brown Index, created by Davie Brown Entertainment, a part of the Omnicom network. The index helps measure a celebrity’s sway over consumers’ buying intention as well as his influence over the brand. But whatever index you use, the message is simple: you must know when it’s time to let go. And, when that time comes, let go you must.

Ageism At The Workplace

JUST when Pierce Brosnan thought he had hit upon the perfect anti-ageing device, it got snatched away from him. As James Bond of the silver screen, he managed to defy all the usual signs that betray old age – wrinkles, thinning hair, sagging muscles and a flagging libido. But then what Hollywood giveth, it can also taketh away. The man with the licence to kill lost his privilege to a younger actor called Daniel Craig. Poor Brosnan, with no Moneypenny shoulders to cry on, opted for Playboy. He apparently told the magazine in an interview that age discrimination – popularly known as ‘ageism’ – had done him 

Here it is then, a new kind of discrimination. After gender, class and race discrimination, now comes prejudice against age. And it cuts both ways – whether the applicant is too young or too old. But then the most virulent form of this is the visible bias in the workplace against those who are perceived ‘old’. In fact, some studies show that intolerance against older men is far higher than gender or race discrimination. 

The term ‘ageism’ was coined by Robert N Butler, a physician who won a Pulitzer for his work on ageing. The International Longevity Center, in a brief biography of Dr Butler on its site, says this: “Dr Butler was a principal investigator of one of the first interdisciplinary, comprehensive, longitudinal studies of healthy community-residing older persons… It was found that much attributed to old age is in fact a function of disease, socialeconomic adversity and even personality. This resulted in a different vision of old age… This earlier research helped establish the fact that senility is not inevitable with aging, but is, instead, a consequence of disease.” 

All organisations probably have, at some point or the other, discriminated against candidates because of their age. It is natural, since without proper research on ageing or the effects of ageing, popular perceptions hold sway. This is a bit like notions in the past, when women were found unfit for a certain kind of job, or a man from a certain race untrustworthy for a certain profession, because of deep-rooted beliefs which had no basis in real life. In fact, ‘affirmative action’ is exactly what was supposed to remove such biases. 

This inequity manifests itself in many ways. There are some jobs which have a mandatory retirement age, where it is felt that the nature of the work – such as airline pilots — requires high level of mental and physical skill, which atrophies with age. There is nothing to prove that yet. Interestingly, it is felt that the concept of a fixed retirement age is an invention of the modern age, corresponding with the implementation of the pension system. In olden days, most people worked till they had a disability or till they died. To be fair to the employers and other job aspirants, with a growing number of younger people queuing outside the office doors for a job or for a promotion, most companies feel that older people should make way for the younger lot. 

In the US, at the federal level, there is legislation to ensure that those over 40 are not overlooked by employers or given a raw deal in the workplace – The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, under which it is “unlawful to discriminate against a person because of his/her age with respect to any term, condition, or privilege of employment — including, but not limited to, hiring, firing, promotion, layoff, compensation, benefits, job assignments, and training.” 

The US, and many other Western economies, probably has to enforce this law because retirement would mean pension and that spells a huge drain on the economy. Many old-time corporate icons have had to perish or sell parts of the organisation because of the mounting pension liabilities. It is well-known that the lumpiness of over-60 in the demographic profile of most Western economies is worrying the hell out of them. According to an UN study, over two billion people – or about 22% of the world’s population — in the world will be over 60 years of age by 2050. 

In India, while companies are waking up to the complexities of gender and race discrimination, there seems to be little awareness about ‘ageism’. One of the reasons could be the army of young people constantly knocking on the doors of companies. A substantial portion (around 50%) of India’s population will be below 35 in a few years. But then, all these guys will also be touching 60 some day. To avoid a crisis then, it might make sense to implement affirmative action against ‘ageism’ today.