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SAAS and bahu have been the popular characters in many serials and stories, as much as Tom and Jerry are among kids. Pitching the MIL and DIL as the key players, Sudha Murty wrote sometime back Dollar Sose in Kannada and it went on to become a textbook for degree courses in Mysore University, a TV programme on Zee, and was translated to Hindi, Telugu and Tamil. Now comes the English version, Dollar Bahu. The back cover talks about the price that people pay for a life in the US. "Lovers are separated, friends become strangers, and the spell of the dollar has the power to disrupt the harmony in the middle class families left back home." And yet people get to the "promised land", even by cheating employers, living away from the near and dear for long periods to get a green card, or getting hurriedly arranged marriages with green card holders whom they barely know. More:

Priests are imported from India. They usually come on a five-year visa. The Indian gods looked even more beautiful under the sparkle of American cleanliness. In one corner, a white girl was getting married to a Tamil boy in a traditional Hindu ceremony. One part of the temple was taken up for an "Upnayan" ceremony being conducted in English due to the inability of the boy to repeat Sanskrit shlokas.

One does not have too many relatives to fall back on in faraway countries. A family can flourish here only if the husband adjusts with his wife and vice-versa. That is the only way to solve the problem of loneliness and foster peace and companionship. A husband and wife formed essential support systems for each other.

Chandru sent a cheque of $300 along with a letter in which he wrote: "Anyone can help in the form of money. But one should not forget those who help with their physical presence and their very real care. Anyone can earn money. But treasures like love and trust cannot be bought." He letter was thrown in the wastebasket and the cheque was put in the bank.

There were the ISRO employees who had come to the US for training and then never returned to India. They had practised `skipping' — taken employment in an American company.

The skippers had signed bonds before they left for America for training, promising to return to India and work for minimum of five years in the organisation. Non-fulfilment of the bond was an invitation for imposition of penalties.

But those who skip have insouciant disregard for such petty matters. The general attitude was, "Let them penalise first. Then we will see what to do."

Chandru, this is a damn funny country. Like a colourful web spun by a spider. You can work here, the best of technology is available and you are able to earn a lot of dollars. We get attracted by these wonders, come here and find that we have got trapped in a spider's web. We can't go back, the conditions in our country are not exactly the kind you would want to go back to. In India there are plenty of windows to throw us out, force us to run away, but not a single door to call us back, to welcome us home.

Get to know the dollar bahu and the rupee maamiyar.

Melts in your mouth

When somebody stretches a chocolate before you, it is difficult to resist the temptation, even if it meant discarding what your diabetologist advised you. "It produces the same chemicals in your brain as when you fall in love," says the blurb of Paul Richardson's book Indulgence, which is about going round the world in search of chocolate. Excerpts:

The best chocolate, which the Aztecs called tlaquetzalli (precious thing), had a good thick head of it. Poor man's cacahuatl was really pinolli - the pinole of modern Mexico - a drink of ground toasted maize and water with only a little cacao added.

Chocolate has become central to our psychic geography, taking its place among the `base flavours', the primary colours of our sense of taste. Like oranges, bread, and olive oil, it tastes only of itself — `chocolatey'.

The Spanish monopoly on cacao put the brakes on its expansion through Europe, and for a century or more the custom of chocolate-drinking remained an exotic Spanish specialty.

When Dutch pirates ambushed a Spanish galleon headed for Europe in 1585, they tipped overboard its valuable cargo of cacao beans, believing them to be sheep droppings.

In 1690 the Parisian newspaper Le Libre Conmode advertised a portable chocolatiere which, it was said, would fit into any pocket. Seventeenth-century pockets must have been more commodious than ours, since the device in question came with a cooker, a set of cups and saucers, spoons, alcohol for burning and enough chocolate and sugar for three servings.

One in four Ghanaians still earn their living directly from cacao cultivation, which covers around a half of all the available agricultural land and constitutes a vital source of foreign exchange. The greatest boom zone of all has been the Ivory Coast. 600,000 farms are worked by a million people — more than 15 per cent of the rural population — producing more than a million tons a year, or 42 per cent of the world production of cacao.

If only the book were printed on chocolate paper, it would have melted in your mouth.

(Books courtesy: Fountainhead)

Management math

Lack of mathematical knowledge among most management professionals is an age-old problem. Peter Weiglin provides a simple solution in his book Basic Math for Management Professionals - a survivor's guide. Presented in `irreverent, conversational style', the book talks about underlying mathematical concepts in management, price sensitivity, product distribution and so on. A sampler:

Regardless of the law, the real difficulty for you in a situation involving questionable accounting or fudging the numbers is this: If and when the situation blows up, no one will know whether you were one of the good guys, one of the miscreants, or one of the clueless.

There is much mumbo jumbo on pricing. The most pervasive pricing problem faced by every marketing manager in every organisation is this: You will get more help than you need, from everyone around you. Everyone has a theory, a formula, or a feeling, a gut instinct, or divine inspiration about what the price should be. In fact, pricing is the single element in the marketing mix that everyone, in every discipline, feels themselves qualified to address.

The customers who will purchase the next additional widgets are customers who have not bought already. These are likely to be customers who did not feel the value was there at a higher price. This condition trips up the financial people who use average revenue as the basis for their calculations, because the actual revenue almost always turns out to be less than what they predicted it would be.

A good stockturn rate varies from industry to industry and from product to product. A boutique store or boat dealer may be doing well at an annual stockturn rate of 1 or 2 times, whereas a grocery store might expect 10 to 12 turns for pet food and detergents and 60 to 180 stockturns for fresh fruits and vegetables (that is, every 2 to 6 days). Obviously, the boutique charges a higher price to cover the costs of its larger and slower-moving inventory.

Average collection period = accounts receivable/(total sales / 365). If normal payment terms are 30 days, a result much higher than 30 could indicate credit or collection problems. A change for the worse could forecast troubles, because customers in trouble will usually begin taking longer to pay. Managers who don't understand math run the risk of becoming a statistic.

(Book courtesy: Sage Publications; www.indiasage.com)

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Tailpiece

"And the chap who knocked the quarantine door in the dead of night was wearing a mask."

"He must have been the doc, coming in for a routine check to prevent any SARS outbreake."

"That's what everybody thought, but he was a burglar."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

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