Obvious but not apparent

“Many things, they may be obvious for us but not apparent enough to take any action”!

I go to “Ragam” stores at least once a day to buy a few items or other. It is a typical small Kirana store in my neighbourhood which stocks up essential grocery items. I still believe these types of stores have a significant role to play even in urban areas in India irrespective of the much talked about FDI in retail happens or not. There is a huge population still prefer to do these types of small purchases as needs arise. If you go to a super market, many a times you end up in buying many more things than you originally planned. Those guys have been doing enough study to arrange the stores in such a way that it encourages you to buy more. For example you would find tea strainers of different sizes and shapes hanging on by the side of the shelves where those packages of tea of different colours are kept - to tempt you to buy a new strainer to replace the one which you have been using and can be used for several more months. The day is not far when they would stack up digestive tablets (if not toilet tissue paper rolls!) next to those non-moving “ready to eat” sachets which have almost lived their “shelf lives” with no takers.

Raghavan, the owner of Ragam stores does not have time or money to do such studies. I don’t think he has any plans to convert his store into a super market either, he would continue to run this type of store which he is good at. Fair enough. But there is one obvious requirement for running these types of shops – which is to give proper attention to customers when they stand across the counter without having a clue as what all is there inside. I am pretty sure Raghavan knows about this, he and his shop would not have survived for 20+ years with no major changes, unless he took good care of his customers. But, in due course of time, being well established with good number of captive customers, he started taking it a bit lightly. He started delegating responsibility of customer care to his boys. Once I bought a pack of biscuits from the shop given by one of his boys while Raghavan was happily chatting outside with his friend. For me only to return in 10 minutes time to return that packet which should have been consumed or destroyed otherwise one year back as per the date stamp on it, while Raghavan continued chatting thence also -  this time with a cigarette in his hand. Things became apparent to him once a new mini-super market opened nearby his store and his sales had come down drastically. Now Raghavan is there for me to greet with a smile, help his boys in picking up things, even to suggest alternatives to me if he does not have in stock something which I want to buy ! So, external factors play an important role in making people do the obvious.

We had metal-cutting class that too first thing in Friday afternoons, after a stupendous special lunch at the hostel. This class was taken by none other than Prof Ram Iyer.  He used to smell metal, breathe metal even eat metal throughout his life, that made his face so hard, his lecture very rigid. Needless to say the class was so boring most of us used to sleep in that class hearing his voice, though “metallic” - the tasty, high-calorie lunch was more than an appetizer for our sleep ! Somehow, our state of affairs made it apparent for him that the obvious choice was not to have his class in the afternoon. So he got his class swapped with Prof Uppal, who used to take material science in the mornings, he had a PhD in “advanced plastics” which had made him more flexible in citing examples from other  “materialistic” but interesting worlds like movies, sports even politics! The story didn’t end there. The hostel decided to provide a mini lunch on Fridays and all the delicacies were shifted to dinner so that they could bring down the DB level in the Friday nights by a few notches, as most of us started to retire to bed much earlier!!

As usual this write up will not apparently end without some incident from my personal life! I used to sit in front of computer screen for hours together with very less body movement. I used to move  a bit only when I had to eat a lot. Obviously the body had to rebel! The more I concentrated on my work, the more fat concentrated on my belly. It became more and more apparent. People started pointing it out to me. I had to look for tailors with specialised skills to get my trousers stitched with totally out of proportion, aspect ratio was too skewed.  Final blow came for me to do the obvious, once I got my health check-up report with full of cholesterol! I started moving my body a bit here and there!!

Please do not be under the impression that we tend to ignore the obvious only in the area of food/diet as all my examples are related to that. I just picked up somethings which can digest!

One obvious thing you can surely do. When the monthly salary gets credited into your account in the beginning of each month, make a list of obvious items that you are postponing to act upon, some might need good amount of funds!. Those very items, which you have been waiting for long to become more and more apparent. You may use a spread-sheet or a pen and piece of paper to list them down. If you don’t like to use any of the tools, you can make that list in your mind.  There must be enough unused space in your vast brain to store that titbit information. Then pick one or two items from the list, act upon them to make sure that they do not appear in the list, when you update it next time. Do not think that you will ever run out of items, human behavior is such - it never disappoints you.