Agencies, please get your act together

What talent crunch? Despite all teh hype, there’s no talent crunch in the Indian online industry.

I get such sloppily put together documents and presentations from people at top online media buying agencies that it makes me too ashamed to even sign my name to them. In general, no one pays attention to grammer & punctuation. I get documents which look as if people were sending text sms’ to their friends.

Folks, please get your act together! It’s shameful to send out such work  and it’s a huge waste of my time, not to mention a turn-off, to see/read such documents.

How do you measure your internet traffic?

Fons Tuinstra, one of my favourite China-based bloggers, has a good post on problems with traffic measurement packages. He uses AWStats and Google Analytics and both give him pretty different results.

This issue is an important one because in the online advertising industry, the traffic on a site often determines its heft. All things being equal, an advertiser will always prefer to advertise on a site with more traffic than less.

But Fons’ post raises the important issue of how do you actually know your true traffic figure. I’m curious to know what has been the experience of other users while using different traffic measurement packages. Write in.

Chinese temple in Bombay

Following a tip from this blog, I visited a Chinese temple near the Dockyard Rd Station today. It was appropriate timing too since the Chinese new year has just passed!

I had no idea that Bombay has, or rather — had, a Chinese community. They originally came here as sailors and traders many years back, and some, like Mr. Leung, the caretaker of this temple, came here to flee the 2nd world war and the subsequent political mess in China.

Mr. Leung is from Guangdong, and his wife Dorothy is a second-generation Chinese who he met here in Bombay many moons ago. It was bizarre meeting them because neither one speaks Chinese. Mr. Leung is a Cantonese speaker and even he admits that what he takes for Cantonese today is most probably very different from what it actually is — that’s how infrequently he speaks it.

The temple itself is in a residential building sandwiched among many others in a Muslim area. The Leungs have maintained it very well — for a place that hardly gets any visitors nowadays, it is still very neat and looks well put-together. I know it takes discipline to maintain a place like that so my kudos to the Leungs.

The temple is dedicated to Kuang Kun — and my next job is to figure out who he is! My guess is it’s a warrior general, but I’ll have to check on it.

Growth of online advertising in India

Anurag Gupta’s blog has an informative post on the state of online advertising in India. I’m surprised that search accounts for only 24% of online advertising spend in the Indian context. Given Indian advertisers focus on performance advertising, I would have thought that search would have taken a larger share.

While advertising in the online medium is still a much younger cousin of print, TV and radio, the growth figures are astonishing. According to industry sources, these are YoY growth rates of advertising spend:

TV: 12%

Print: 5%

Outdoor: 3%

Radio: 15%

Online: 100%

That’s right, online spend is growing at 100% YoY. Incredible. In absolute amounts, it is still just a tiny fraction of spend on TV, but at these rates, spend on online advertising should equal spend on TV advertising in ? years.

Howard French on China’s soft power

Howard French, a NY Times writer based in China, has written an excellent post on China’s rising soft power vis-a-vis USA’s. In one especially powerful paragraph, he writes:

“… For a rich, free and culturally powerful country such as the US to lose a soft power contest with China seems all but impossible. It would be like losing a boxing match with a one-armed man. But in the global battle for hearts and minds, China does have one distinct advantage. It has not started any wars lately (emphasis added).”

The article also provides a good overview of the Beijing Consensus, an alternative to the doctrinaire Washington Consensus that a number in countries in the developing world find difficult to swallow.

Gulmarg ski trip

I can now say that I’ve skiied in 2/3rds of India’s ski resorts.

Sounds like a lot but India has just 3 ski resorts! Auli in Uttaranchal, Solan valley in Himachal and Gulmarg in Kashmir.

I just got back from a trip to Gulmarg and Srinagar with my brother Gaurav and three of his UNICEF colleagues. It was a good trip, more so for the great company, clean air and break from urban surroundings than for the skiing itself. We had two full skiing days in Gulmarg but it took me the better part of the first day to rediscover my ski legs and it was snowing really hard on the second day.

The amazing thing about the beginner’s ski slopes in Gulmarg is that they are actually a golf course from spring to the onset of winters. It’s a pretty good idea to use the space for both purposes!

We barely managed to get out of Gulmarg in near blizzard-like conditions on Saturday evening. Srinagar was fantastic — we stayed in a gorgeous houseboat in the Dal Lake. Frankly, we were all expecting something pretty dingy — after living in India, you get used to being cynical about everything and particularly of pimps who promise tourists the moon — but we were astonished by the beauty of the boat and the graciousness of the host.

The boat is called the Golden Apple. If you’re going to Srinagar for a visit, I strongly recommend at least a night on this boat. The prices are fairly reasonable — we paid Rs 4000 total among the five of us for one night’s stay, but I imagine that prices for a single person or even a couple will be much higher per person.

Security forces are everywhere in Srinagar, Gulmarg and en-route. Media reports say that Kashmir has become much safer in the past year and many locals endorsed the view. It seems like the induction of the CRPF in place of the army and BSF has made a significant difference, as have elections in the past two years.

One of my unforgettable memories from Gulmarg is a policeman with an AK-47 rifle posted at the top of every ski slope! Gulmarg is very safe though — there are more foreign tourists there than Indians, and most of them are there for serious off-piste skiing and snowboarding. Gulmarg is still a relatively undeveloped ski resort and I guess a lot of serious skiers and snowboarders are drawn to it for precisely that reason.

Carlotta and Alistair, thanks for organizing the trip! It was good fun — we should do this again.

Photos from this trip are available on my Flickr photostream.

Information on skiing in Gulmarg is available at kashmiralpine.com.

孟买

现在我在飞机上回去新德里. 累死了!
我太高兴离开孟买. 今天刚好会一个月我住在孟买. 我觉得孟买的生活没有什么意思. 我很想新德里和昆明的绿色环境.
星期五我要飞到克什米尔去滑雪. 我的弟弟和他的四个同事也要去.我应该从新德里带一点酒. 为什么?因为克什米尔是伊斯兰教地方

Caste consciousness in Bombay

Something peculiar about Mumbai is people’s insistence on inquiring about one’s religion and community. It’s only been 2 weeks since I got here but all the real estate agents I met with, my landloard and my neighbours have asked me already about my religion (Hindu) and community (Marwari). I dont particularly care to answer these questions but in the face of persistant questioning, one has no choice.

One of my neighbours has even suggested that I get in touch with the ‘other Marwari’ living 3 floors above. He probably thinks that we’re identical in every sense of the word.

For all the talk about Mumbai being a melting pot of communities, I think this place is still very provincial. Sure, there probably are more communities here than in any other Indian city, but the sense I get is they stick to themselves and conveniently ignore others.

When I inquired from a couple of brokers about the need to know my religion, they mentioned that many Hindu landlords would just not rent their properties to a Muslim. That’s just crazy. This would not happen in Delhi, and I think it’s deplorable that it happens here.