If the following doesn’t sound like Get Magic Now, it probably sounds like  marketing copy for an exclusive residential tower for the globe-hopping elite. Who wrote it and When?

The inhabitant of ****** could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

as well as

The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.

This was from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by Keynes about the period before World War I.

Some other cute stuff by the great man at http://stuffkeynessaid.tumblr.com/

Harrod’s has the motto “All Things for All People, Everywhere”

The story goes that a Punter decided to test this by ordering an elephant sandwich. The assistant went to check and came back with “Sir, you will have to wait a bit as we have run out of bread.”

For those who have marvelled at the request made to Magic to bring someone a tiger, it would be interesting to note that Harrod’s used to have till 2014 a Pet Kingdom on the fourth floor where they had an assorted menagerie of animals including elephants, alligators and tigers for sale. Ronald Reagan did buy a baby elephant at Harrod’s in 1970. Noel Coward was said to have bought an alligator.

Another interesting story is that the first escalator in the world was tested here in 1898. Customers were offered brandy at the top to revive them after their ordeal.

The safety of the escalator at a railway station (Earls Court) installed much later was demonstrated by a one-legged man riding it up and down all day long. Why the sight of a one-legged man was thought to be compelling proof of safety can only be speculated upon – the public was probably much more trusting and unskeptical then. The campaign also owes its success to the absence of Twitter and the absence of LOLfaces as a concept.

We can provide anything from a pin to an elephant — William Whiteley, owner of Whiteley’s, an “Everything Store” from the 19th century.

The Finnish Baby box is a box of essentials that is given to expectant mothers by the state. BBC says,

For 75 years, Finland’s expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It’s like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.

It’s a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it’s designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they’re from, an equal start in life.

There is now even a tradition to use the box as a crib!

[Source: Wikipedia]

[Source: Milla Kontkanen via BBC]

When we became parents for the first time in Delhi, there were many problems that we found solutions for after weeks or months mostly because we couldn’t articulate the problem or saw a friend using the solutions only later. All of these get things done much more simply, quickly, cleanly or cheaply than the way we did it. Our second child’s first year were a doddle compared to the first because we knew of these. [Disclaimer: My wife might disagree].

When you are invited to a baby shower, you now know what to take. Or order for delivery – baby paraphernelia can be surprisingly bulky. Which remind’s me of Gludo’s law of parenting. Just like Parkinson posited that Work expands to fill all available time and medieval physicists discovered that Gases expand to fill all available space, we at Gludo have discovered that baby stuff fills all available space. Add unavailable space too… by means of pushing out parents’ junk to eBay, Qikr and Gone.

But, asides aside, here is Gludo’s product version of the Finnish baby box.

Diaper Genie

[Source: http://ctworkingmoms.com]

Wikipedia says “this is a baby diaper disposal system … seals diapers individually in a scented film to protect against germs and odors. … a soiled diaper may be inserted into the “mouth” of the container. After inserting the diaper, the lid is replaced and twisted 3 full rotations to seal the diaper inside. After the container is filled with dirty diapers, it can be emptied [at] the bottom … where the diapers fall out still individually sealed [in what is] colloquially known as a “diaper sausage”.

We found out about this only now, now that our second is toilet trained, but it sure would have been a lifesaver if we had known. It is a bit frustrating that even the category specialist sites in India don’t carry the Diaper Genie… hopefully soon.

Baby bottle steriliser

We still find friends boiling and drying bottles (when they can again become contaminated) and it is a wonder why you would do this when you have a compact, all-in-one sterilizer and storage system that can process 6-12 bottles, teats and caps all at once.

Safety door

Babies are the anti-Houdini. Houdini could get OUT of anywhere for example after being thrown into the sea bound in chains. Babies, on the other hand, can get INTO anywhere. And in a bit of similarity with Houdini, they have an instinct and attraction for what is most dangerous. We have found our own in the kitchen closely examining the kettle, in the bathroom inspecting a filled bucket, inside the clothes closet and inside drawers amongst other places. The only thing that can keep them out is the child barrier – a simple device that installs fairly quickly and is very hard to open until they are 3 after which there is probably nothing that can stop them.

Baby Bouncer

No, we are not talking about people who prevent underage clubbers or underage bouncers. This is a simple device that helps babies sleep better by relaxing and helping them burp. It reduces reflux and generally makes for happier babies and calmer parents.

Black window shades in Western India

Having spent most of my life close to the equator, I had never realized the need to get some sleep with the sun blazing outside at 8:30pm. Europeans use black window shades to get the darkness that lulls adults into sleep. For babies, it is even more important because they are ever vigilant against the possibility of falling asleep and letting their parents go have a life and leave the house. They want to be taken along every time and believe “Only the paranoid get to have fun” as well as “Eternal vigilance is the price of a party”.

NOT THIS!

GET THIS

In India, of course, this problem of having to convince the body it is dark while the sun is out doesn’t exist because we are so close to the equator. Except, I am wrong, and this problem does exist in the Western parts of India. Indian Standard Time is set by the meridien passing through Shankargarh fort, Allahabad. So, in Dwarka, Gujarat, the clock can show 8:30 pm, while the “natural” time is only 7:30 pm. [This may also explain why nobody is punctual – most of the country is West of Allahabad and can instinctively feel the clock is ahead of the real time. The reason definitely is not the unpredictable traffic or our lack of belief in the importance of time, who is just the monologue before the main Mahabharata starts.] In summer the clock showing 8:30pm in Dwarka means blazing sun outside. So basically, if you want your kids to sleep, get some shades.

Nasal Aspirator

Babies get colds and it is very concerning to a first time parent to see the baby struggle to breathe. We used to use this to clean our first’s nose but frankly it doesn’t really do the job. If you have read Angela’s Ashes, it is hard to forget anything [and frankly it is very hard to read too], but the misery of the scene where the baby Michael cannot breathe properly due to a cold particularly caught my attention. And the measures listed in the book seem quite reasonable to me. [Ickiness alert]

The baby Michael has a cold. His head is stuffed and he can barely breathe. Mam worries because it’s Sunday and the Dispensary for the poor is closed. If you go to the doctor’s house and the maid sees you’re from the lower classes she tells you go to the Dispensary where you belong. If you tell her the child is dying in your arms she’ll say the doctor is in the country riding his horse. Mam cries because the baby is struggling to get air through his mouth. She tries to clear his nostrils with a bit of rolled up paper but she’s afraid to push it too far up. Dad says, There’s no need for that. You’re not supposed to be pushing things inside a child’s head. It looks like he’s going to kiss the baby. Instead, he has his mouth on the little nose and he’s sucking sucking the bad stuff out of Michael’s head. He spits it into the fire, Michael gives out a loud cry and you can see him drawing the air into his head and kicking his legs and laughing. Mam looks at Dad as if he just came down from heaven and Dad says, That’s what we did in Antrim long before there were doctors riding their horses.

Thankfully then, there is a product that allows you to do this effectively and cleanly though it is a bit annoying that what costs you $7 on Amazon.com costs INR 2400 on Amazon.in – oh well, at least it is there!

This is not a post about actual wars, but about religious wars. No, I don’t mean actual religious wars, which have thankfully tended to end within a few years, but wars between followers of  rival products, brands, characters and celebs that have gone on for decades and generations and consumed hours and hours of “discussion”. As the man wrote

Translated to English, it means greatness consists not in analysis-paralysis, but in a bias to action, the urge to fight at the smallest provocation. We poke fun at the hostility, but the choices in the hot debates and rivalries below do have the potential to shape some parts of our lives and economies. A man is known by the companies he keeps, and the choices deserve some analysis, or at the very least, attention.

Microsoft vs. Apple

and a followup

Murga chaap vs. Mor chaap fireworks

 If you thought animal crackers meant 

Surf vs. Nirma

Surf used to be the dominant detergent but if memory serves, it used to cost INR 30 for a half kg pack. And along came Nirma from some innovator in Gujarat, and it cleaned just as well and cost only INR 7. That’s undeniable value. And both brands are responsible for some memorable characters and concepts.

Personally I cannot recall any ad by Hawkins though my family were loyal customers – I used to think everyone (= we) already knew about them so they didnt need to advertise, but obviously they did.  

You just cannot avoid hearing from, about or quoting @pmarca these days. And if you do manage to avoid him in favour of another quotee, the quotee turns out to be someone else from A18Z. Till 2013, I used to find myself reading @benedictevans a lot and I could claim to be sourcing insight and wisdom from outside this magic circle. But in Jan 2014, A18Z hired Ben. One of the quotes repeated recently by @pmarca and by @benedictevans is “You can make money from software in two ways – bundling and unbundling.”

This is attributed to Jim Barksdale, a throwaway uttered during the run up to the Netscape IPO as they faced a last question from a London investment banker on the danger of Microsoft bundling a competing product into its offering. Justin Fox at HBR thought this was an intriguing enough titbit that he tracked down Jim and @pmarca on this and wrote an HBR article on the conversation that followed.

Unbundling is one of the mechanisms that creates the disruptive innovations identified by Christensen. Once unbundling has happened, the resulting solutions and products need to specialize and evolve to serve the particular needs of their niches of users in specific ways.

What got me thinking about this was how many ways there are of boiling water in a typical house. More intriguingly, a large part of the kitchen countertop and floor area seems to be devoted to appliances whose SINGLE function is to boil water. Let’s start at the biggest one. The biggest single appliance in a house is the boiler which provides hot water in the faucets for bathing and washing and in the radiator for heating.

In my days spent in a Well Known Institute of Technology in North India (WITNI), hot water was a luxury available for one short hour in winter evenings. This hour was often taken up by infinitely more important events like egg-catching (yes, raw) competitions between the brightest minds in the country, and so the supply of heating water had to be generated ad hoc using the very directly named heating rod.

The boiler is convenient and safe, but sometimes you want speed, i.e. water boiled immediately to 100° C, like when you are making tea. You can boil it on the electric stove but this takes ages. We actually rented a flat for a long time that had an electric stove and you just cannot get a decent roti made on an electric stove. When we finally moved to a place with a gas stove, one of our greatest joys was that of rediscovering the phulka. A side benefit was that gas stoves seem to boil water faster.

But that speed is not enough in the morning when you need the cup to get you awake in the first place and don’t have 10 minutes to stare spare. Enter the electric kettle.

With all this paraphernalia, we were settled in family routine with one kid before we decided to have the second one after a gap of about 5 years. And she brought a whole new (rather old and forgotten) set of  needs. On day 1, we needed a bottle steriliser, which is essentially a way to boil water and force it through to every surface in a large number of bottles, teats, caps and other vessels safely, frequently and quickly with the minimum overhead.

As she reached weaning age, we got a steamer for peas, corn and other foods she could start to try. While this is specialised, it is actually remarkably similar to a steriliser in the actual implementation of the functionality. I thought about proposing that we use the steriliser for steaming in the 2 days that it took the steamer to arrive, but I realised that some of the foods would leave the steriliser needing frequent washes and I elected to keep the idea to myself.

I was about to press “Publish”, when it occurred to me that I had not ironed my shirts for tomorrow. And a steam press really gets the wrinkles out.

As I finished ironing, my wife called out to me from the dining room, “I have set the table for dinner. The rice is ready in the microwave. Please get it on the way to the table.” And all that it takes to cook rice is to boil it in water. We used to cook rice on the stove in a pressure cooker, but if you make the slightest delay in turning the stove off after the whistle, you end up with a porridge instead of rice and if you don’t wait for the whistle, you get raw, rough rice. The microwave is completely predictable and perfect.

However, it does require you to wait 22 – 25 minutes depending on how you like the rice, so some folks take specialisation to its extreme in the faster rice cooker, which also does a good job of keeping the rice warm.

After we had eaten, it was time to send the kids off to bed. For some reason, possibly pollen and pollution, we all find ourselves with congested noses all the time. So we purchased some humidifiers to keep the rooms humid in the night. Their sole point is to boil water, but additionally cool the resulting steam in a tower so it couldn’t possibly burn, say, an inquisitive child.

What it boils down to is this, there is more than one way to boil water, and that’s better than skinning a cat.

Bright was the day and tense the atmosphere­­­­­. It rained from time to time; gusts of wind shook the trees. Between thunderclaps and the moaning of the professor could be heard the eerie laughter of the backbenchers. Flashes of lightning revealed fearsome problems on the greenboard. This was a bit redundant since it was daytime and the tube lights above the board were on.

The usually sanguine professor of Stochastic Calculus at the Wellknown Institute of Management in South India (WIMSI) found himself flustered. He had expected to see the wannabe-quants fumbling their way through the advanced mathematics in the class awkwardly over an hour. But these guys found poetry in the most convoluted of abstractions. The entire material for the lecture had been devoured by the beasts in 30 minutes. To pass the time and curb their spirits, he started to narrate an amusing anecdote (whoa!) he had heard from a Professor of Marketing (gasp!)

“In a distant factory in Polska Zieba,” he began, “a supervisor noticed that washing machine sales were up in India, and he sent an underling to investigate.” The teacher realized he had strung together a complete English sentence without a single symbol or Greek letter and horror spread over his face. He decided to show a video instead.

Turning the projector off, the prof quizzed, “The question to you, dear students, is this. Is this story of Jugaad, which you have heard a million times, just a figment of a creative’s jugaad for HSBC, or an actual phenomenon that inspired the agency? Where did this idea come first – the ad or the kitchen?”

The class was thoroughly confused and remained silent but there were still 15 minutes left. “Speak, O students, for if you  do not speak, your Class Participation points will shatter into nothing.”

Fifty hands went up.

Before anyone else could speak, V, the talkative one burst forth, “First of all, we must collect our references on this matter. I read on this blog about lassiwalas carting along washing machines and selling lassi made in them. This was in the hoary old days when I used to be in high school… 2010. The ad must be more recent than that because I have never seen it before. Not only are they selling lassi, they are advertising the use of the washing machine. See the slogan on top – ‘Wash away your thirst.’ “

The prof gestured at AK, the sleuth of the bunch. “I looked carefully at the ad in front of me, rather than random sources. From the degree of flooding and the progress of construction on the project shown in the background, I date this ad at much older… about 2008 vintage, ” AK brushed her hair as the Prof nodded to confirm. “Definitely before the blog V mentions. It’s simpler to assume the lassi-makers copied from an ad than vice versa.”

DTS, absolute cynic and professional denier, who lived his life by the personal motto of “Tum din ko agar din kaho, raat kahenge” could see that he wasn’t going to be called upon; so he jumped in, “Too strong a focus on data can leave one blind to insights that are otherwise in plain sight. I clearly remember a scene from Mauja hi Mauja in Jab We Met, which showed lassi being prepared in a washing machine. And Jab We Met was released in 2007 i.e. before this ad. Watch at 0m 16s.”

The class hummed appreciatively, prompting the Prof to ask, “Ok, that’s some good discussion. Why don’t we put this to a vote? All those who think Punjabis have been making lassi in washing machines for more than a decade, raise your hands.”

Everyone raised their hands, except AK, but she joined in reluctantly.

“You are right, Sec B.

An article in the ET from 2005 notes that Electrolux and Videocon were pleased to find their machines selling for this use several years earlier.

The usage actually goes even further back. Another ET article notes that this (and the use of table fan motors for lassi-making) was happening in the eighties.”

As a younger sales and marketing professional with Onida in 1986-87, Karwal recalls that while travelling through Punjab he found that dhabas (road-side eateries) were making lassi in semi-automatic washing machines.

Hardeep Singh Sidhu, a retired maintenance engineer with Swaraj Tractors in Mohali, has been interested in how electrical gadgets are modified and used for unintended purposes. He informs that the washing machine doubling up as a lassi maker became the rage in the late eighties, especially with semi-automatic and locally produced washing machines that came quite cheap.

“People would use it for churning milk and then clean it for use in washing clothes as well,” he says. For churning smaller volumes of lassi, say 5-6 litres, washing machines were too large, so someone took a table fan shaft, modified it and added blades to make a portable blender that now comes for Rs 600-700.

“Well done Sec B. And now, the clock chimes twelve and I must fly. Till tomorrow.” and Prof was off.