The Hindu Business Line : On a happening phenomenon

Two undercurrents sweeping through young India are confidence and courage, writes Kishore Biyani in It Happened in India, from Rupa (www.rupapublications.com) . He sees evidence in TV contests, `the most popular shows on Indian television today'. Look beyond the glitz and glamour, urges Biyani. For, you'd notice then that most of the winners are people from small towns, rather than the metros. "They come with the confidence to win a big title in the city of dreams, Mumbai. The desire to be a part of the get-rich-quick model, the instant-fame route is as popular in small towns as in the metros."

Confidence manifests as self-belief and a total lack of inhibitions to achieve any dream; the willingness to change is the desire to rise above one's origins, explains the author. "My parents were born in a nation that was about to gain independence. I was born in a nation that was experimenting with socialism," he narrates autobiographically.

In contrast, the new generation has grown up in a liberalised economy and has seen India winning in every arena, and emerging as a global powerhouse in business, IT (information technology), sports or beauty shows, says Biyani. "The current generation is simultaneously therefore more proud about being Indian, and more modern when it comes to their lifestyles, than their predecessors. In essence, they are far more confident of their place in the world. This is a generation that feels that everything is within its reach and aspires for it. And this is true for everyone, whether they live in large metros or small towns." In this trend, he discovers the third C: consumption.

Don't take the new Indian consumers for granted; they are different, says the author. They demand ideas and solutions that are uniquely Indian, which in turn demands that business has to `rewrite rules' yet `retain values'. Make things `simple', he advises the biz world. "Selling garments, grocery and household stuff cannot be anything but simple. It is definitely not rocket science. Retailing is a simple act of buying and selling." And the book is about examples of how simple propositions became successful, as in the case of Pantaloons, Big Bazaar and Central. The tales come with Biyani's insightful anecdotes, page and page. For instance, he takes you back to August 1997, to Gariahat, Kolkata, where Pantaloon was converting a marriage hall into a modern 27,000 sq. ft. shopping centre. Hours before opening, the signboard hadn't arrived; electric cables got overloaded and the fuse blew off, and many were already dismissing the idea of the new store as too big to be profitable.

"But the response it got on the first day itself silenced most critics," recounts the author. "At the end of the day, our store manager took the cash to a branch of the State Bank of India located right next to the store. We had an account there, but the bank manager flatly refused to accept the cash. He explained that he didn't have a person who would sit down and count so much money!"

Kolkata of the Nineties was known more for industrial disputes and bandhs, reminisces Biyani. "Many people find it strange that we chose Kolkata to launch our first large store ... Few noticed the fact that the city's population and the size of consumption market was comparable to Mumbai or Delhi." Rents were low and the city offered `a large base of educated and skilled manpower'. More importantly, Biyani felt that Kolkata could be `a good place to field-test' his new retail model, `far away from the scrutiny of investors, competition and the media'. He would thus bring most new formats to Mumbai or Delhi only after perfecting them in a different city. "The first store in Mumbai came up only in August 1999... "

A book about which you can't afford to casually say, "I happened to read `Happened'," because it is about a happening phenomenon!

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D. Murali