Indias Shocking Middle Class Crisis Explained Kushal Lodha 338

TITLE: India’s SHOCKING Middle Class Crisis EXPLAINED! | Kushal Lodha #338 CHANNEL: Kushal Lodha DATE: 2026-06-02 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Consumption has been morally purified for this generation. For my generation, it was a sin.

What do you mean by that? I teach that Ahmedabad. My course is now 27 years old. My class doesn’t read cases anymore. They read GPT summaries. So the last class I told them that guys, I’m going to give you the summary cuz we’re all reading the same thing. What’s the entire middle class crisis that India is facing? Do they have the education? Do they have the predictability? Do they have the method of earning? They’re not. So that is my point. The middle class has many tiers to it and I’m saying the size of middle class debate man everybody’s middle class. I was once asked by a very big brand in the US that when will women in India be ready to spend one and a half lakhs on a handbag and I said after we’ve sent our children to Harvard I was and I’m not going to take a name here but very big now when he joined this company I was on the board of one of the subsidiaries of that company and he walked into the boardroom I had to go and look at him and I said you and he said yes ma’am and I had a vision flashing through my mind of someone in torn jeans and rubber But Chapel is arguing with me about the grade. We are like in the top five when it comes to GDP. How can we improve that particular metric in India? Oh god. India is currently the fastest growing large economy in the world. And if you want to take real benefit of this growth story, investing in Indian businesses and companies is non-negotiable. Whether you’re already investing in markets or just starting your investing journey, Grow is one of the platforms to do it. 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I said now can we look at the first generation collegegoers the uh sort of um below the radar of the beautiful people in the media because everything you read in the media the one thing they forget to tell you is who got interviewed it’s like oh they’re like this they’re like that and I’m like they who because we know that in India there are many different kinds of people and so I said let’s look at where the bulk of these people are and you know what do do and what do they think and where do they come from and you know that’s who I want because when I look at demographic data I find that most of them continue to get married before they’re 25 they’re raising families they’re having children you know they’re doing things like that so like all the people uh that uh hang out at whatever is the latest club and are spending 20,000 rupees at the minimum on a pair of shoes and lacks and lacks on the side. I mean like do they define it? So now the idea of an age cohort is that and I’ve written about this extensively. I would not bore you with the academic detail but the idea of an age cohort is that they have traveled through time together right so their lives are punctuated with the same nation memories with the same cultural input. So for example, my generation has seen the Bangladesh war. It has seen the Pakistan war. It has seen the building of the nation. We’ve seen ration. We’ve seen famine. We’ve seen anti-American sentiment when PL48 came. The first time I went to Russia to Moscow, my god, it was like a goose walked over my grave because it was all so familiar and I realized that we had seen enough of Red Square parades on TV and we had two channels as I have written. One channel had uh the prime minister and one channel had the prime minister’s son and that was pretty much what it was all about. Now similarly I’m saying where are the age cohorts in India? These boomers and all I’m saying that is what happened to America after world war and a whole lot of things happened for that generation. So for us there is midnight’s children give or take 10 years that’s how it works. Then there is a segment that I call midway children who are born around the 70s. And then there’s the whole liberalization children because 1991 is our point of change and liberalization children. So if you were born let’s say around 85 then you will be how old today? Uh so by 2000 you’ll be 15 years old. So you’re now 40 right? So so about 10 years ago the ruling age cohort had switched. uh the entire rise of India on the global stage happened with the Y2K right so we have the Y2K generation and then you can call them whatever you want to call them Gen Z gen alpha but I’m saying what is it in fact we have the Modi generation right there are people who actually don’t know I have never heard of uh what happened um you know when the congress was in power for so many years because they just not been there right so our age cohorts if you understand age cohorting and the idea of an age cohort are a little bit different but I did look at the younger generation call it gen whatever alphabet you want and I said let’s talk about them and uh we found many interesting things but the summary of it is that they’re not not everybody is an entrepreneur the dream is for a government job and in fact I’ve been asking her to do more work on the government job as a metaphor it is a metaphor for stability predictability These are people. This is an entire generation of people who have had a lot of they they exhibit a lot of agency. What is agency? So anthropologists talk about two things. One is agency which is crudely put and individual’s ability to generate choices and there is structure which is the environment’s ability to make a choices happen and support them. So we’re seeing a generation which is fabulously high on agency and I will give you some examples and I think we failed them by structure. So one of our key findings is fueled by agency failed by structure. Okay. Their dream is for a government job. Their dream is for stability. That’s why for years together they’re trying to crack a competitive exam. And consumption to them is not really the holy grail. Of course they’re fond of consumption. Of course, consumption is a new god for us, and we will talk about it. And consumption is a marker of how it’s a story line of how you’re living your life, but what they actually want is a better life. And a better life is not punctuated by the newer cell phone. It’s punctuated by not having to hustle so much. Now, your hustle is a great hustle. The hustle culture that you like because you’ve arrived here, right? But think of so for example I know someone she worked in a beauty parlor then she said you know this is getting very exploitative so I’m going to start moonlighting at home so she comes to people’s homes she’s smart enough to figure out that the doctor is available at the women doctor client is available at 7:30 in the morning and if she goes at 7:30 in the morning she can actually get the price premium then she looks at it and she says okay now I’m quitting that job but I’m actually going to go and do a uh I’m going to do an exam uh which costs me two lakhs for which I have to find two lakhs to get that training but once I clear that exam then I will get a chance to work in Dubai. Look at the amount of pressure she’s under right comes from virtually no parental support. Then she says, “Oh, but if you look at Instagram, uh there is a lot of uh beauty influencers uh and uh but but the beauty influencers are not really Indian and there are a lot of apparel influencers. So maybe I can be the beauty influencer.” Meanwhile, boyfriend is an event management company, so I will work with the event management company. Look at the amount of agency she is demonstrating, right? And all the time she’s got to learn new stuff and she’s got to get ready with new stuff. try and give you example after example after example. Just the day before yesterday, the peanut seller outside my house, his daughter wants to be a nurse. And so now she’s finally got admission. My mother also has a lot of nursing aids who come from this uh company. And they all want to study. They all have a huge amount of money uh that they require. They don’t have money but they require money to achieve that dream. No one is lending them that money. Banks are not giving them educational loans that easily. There is no collateral together. If you have three children, you will not put collateral for your older child because supposeding that child goes rogue. Supposing he gets married to somebody and doesn’t support his sisters, right? But can you see the enormous amount of hustle energy that’s going into a group of people and where are they learning? They’re constantly upskilling, upgrading. For example, we talked a little before this, right? But who listens? It’s everybody who wants to upskill themselves, upgrade themselves. uh they’re they’re they’re learning from whatever it is it’s YouTube University, it’s WhatsApp University and they are constantly doing this. So my entire point has been that can we support them with structure? Every unit of structure you support them with they’re that much more settled. So let’s look at this India and say there is this India as well. There is this India that is marching to a slightly different beat as compared to the arrived India in the context of agency and structure. If you’re really rich, structure doesn’t matter. You can get around it. Uh if you’re somewhere uh in the middle, uh you still have parental support and you have grown up with structure. Structure in the form of schools, colleges, or even advice. I noticed that when you give people a little bit of advice, this is how you got to do things. Uh that is a little bit of structural help they get, they can take it and they can run with it. So that’s really the other India that I’m seeing. and and and I think that uh also if you are super smart you can find a way to get around structure. So all the success stories we hear which are really fabulous of people who had no particular college education, no particular background but they have the smarts. There is for example my daughter’s yoga teacher during co she uh said that she was uh going to charge double because she had to give individual classes and she went online kaki. My yoga teacher took a long time to decide to go online. Did not have earnings, could not support children’s uh fees had already gone under. The electrician who lives next door, he figured that he was the only guy who was going to be able to serve everybody’s electrical failures during lockdown. All he had to do was pay the cops. And you know, if you had that extra agency, he does very well indeed. So that’s the the new gen that I’m seeing. So any specific habits or any specific observations of these genzies that have changed in the recent past? Okay. So now I’m also teaching a bunch of people. I teach them Ahmedabad and I have seen them over my course is now 27 years old. So I’m seeing them over 27 years. Uh I think that they are a lot less secure because their world is tougher. Uh we were completely arrogant. We came out of college thinking we could conquer the world. We knew the best. You know this. But I joke and say that they are insecure overachievers because you want to achieve. You’re constantly feedback. Uh uh so so I sometimes want to say hey it’s okay. You know the world will adjust. Don’t worry about getting everything right. So yeah I feel that they’re in a much harder place. They’re in a much harder place because they have to work harder. They’ve got to uh they have less security. they have perhaps more competition but on the other hand they also have more tools by which to make it happen and my class doesn’t read cases anymore they read chat GPT summaries so the last class I told them that guys I’m going to give you the summary cuz we’re all reading the same thing and now let’s start from where I end so um so yeah so every generation responds to what it is I mean consumption has been morally purified for this generation for my generation it was a sin What do you mean by that? Can you elaborate? Um, my generation, every budget day, you got whacked on the knuckles by a budget that said lipstick is a luxury, shampoo is a luxury, an air conditioner is a luxury, this is a luxury, that’s a luxury, right? So, you didn’t know what you would get whacked with. This generation doesn’t from after 1991 when we embrace the market economy and I have written in my book, we’re like that only. The finance minister one day in the mid ’90s went on and said please spend we need the economy to grow. Now just look at the difference between being punished for spending and being told that you can spend right and this generation has had uh the quality of everything going up and the prices of everything coming down and then we had the China then we had e-commerce now we have the quick commerce. So I think you’re just seeing more and more and more uh consumption coming your way and I say it’s morally purified because we’re saying good please consume there’s a new god in the Indian pantheon it’s called consumption it’s fine and so we will march to the tune of our own drama the beat of our own drama as they call it so you said that we are like in the top five when it comes to GDP but GDP per capita we rank almost like 132 depending on exchange rates and everything yes So like GDP per capita. So do you think that is a correct metric in order to like benchmark and how can we improve that particular metric in India? That’s a very important metric I think because uh one is how large you are and the other is how rich you are how rich the average person is and inequality is the third metric but that doesn’t bother me so much as long as the bottom keeps rising right so yes it is per capita and I am more and more coming to the conclusion that we just have to educate skill empower people to earn more I ambition to you don’t have to teach. See that’s the thing I remember many many years ago Swaminatan Ayel had written the journalist had written a piece where he quote at that time he said Indians win India loses and it stuck in my head that Indians always win whichever environment you put us in we always win right otherwise we wouldn’t have been where we are so I think uh that if you enable people to earn more if you enable people to get more skilled if you enable people to be able to do the kind of work they want to do. uh I think that that will just unleash the entire energy of all these people who are today sort of you know spring and this there’s a lot of the physics word and I’m a student of physics in my undergrad is entropy there’s a lot of entropy in the system you just have to um channelize it so the reason like the GDP per capita like we’re so low on that it shows that India as a country it’s of course large but it’s not rich as compared to other nations which are And then this is also primarily because of the large number of middle class and large number of people who are in that segment where they are not earning a lot. So let’s spend some time on that category as well. You say that the Indian middle class is teared and tired and the population is moving from aspirational to exhausted. So can you elaborate on this? I think it relates to what I was telling you earlier that the amount of hustle for lack of a better word agency is more polite word. demand of agency you show to fight a structure. Even if you take for example uh and you know middle class that reminds me a little bit like those Maggie Wton ads right middle class but we’ll come to that discussion a bit but I think the if you look at let’s say even people who work in your house the maids who come and so on cost them 100 rupees a day you have to take trains buses auto shas in order to get to where you want to get to they’re coming from Nala Supara they’re coming from Guir they’re coming from everywhere because wages are higher if they live here um when I ask mine that will you stay the night with the dog because I’m traveling she can’t right so you want so we are as the economic times ran a headline once that said that we’re a 21st century economy with a 17th century society and we a 17th century infrastructure now infrastructure is improving every unit of improve Improvement of infrastructure is connecting people and making it easier but not always. My mate was telling me the other day that AC bus it’s about productivity right GDP is linked to individual productivity. So whatever productivity gain you have in the bus or being air conditioned you lose walking in the heat from ped road. Yeah. But you know the coastal road has made life so much easier for us but uh so had the the ceiling but I was shocked to realize and I should have realized it but a lot of my staff have never been on the ceiling because two wheelers are not allowed on the ceiling and the cabs you will not as it is taking a cab is a luxury you won’t pay another 100 rupees or 75 rupees for the the ticket and so a lot of them are actually not experienced it so I think we have to uh but every time you find rural roads are connected it just that driver if he’s got comfort for those four hours or 3 hours or 2 hours he’s driven there without a single you have to be careful he’s good to go to make a return trip immediately That’s productivity right so I I think we should uh should should should be improving so the challenges are quite severe and I think every unit or for example an architect friend of mine says that everywhere in Japan and all upstairs of railway stations you have doaries and so if you are a labor that’s coming for short periods you have some fashionable word gig work if you have gig work I’m saying right now you have nowhere to live and stay and you can’t do a lot of this stuff right today you if I want to take uh a driver from here to there and he has to stay over and you know all that kind of stuff he’s just not in a fit state to come back the next day so these are things that actually which is why I say a lot of my work is the people view of the economy you know that it’s the economy is not made of magic numbers GDP autopilot magic numbers and when people say consumption I’m and income is dependent on see that’s the thing. So what’s the entire middle class crisis that India is facing and what exactly is the meaning of middle class? So, so that’s why we’ve built all this hype. We shouldn’t be smoking our own dope without adding a few more ingredients to the dope, right? So, if you define middle class, I mean, and we’ve all done it to be fair. So, fashion middle class is between income X and income Y. X and Y definitions between 5,000 and 25,000 between 20,000 and 60,000 per month income middle class financial times and that’s okay. But what is a genuine middle class in all sociological uh literature is that the middle class is a group of people who have stable incomes, predictability of how much they earn. They have at least a 30% surplus where 30 is not sacrosan but enough surplus income to plow back into their lives to improve their lives, improve their children to invest in a better living and they have resilience. So I’ve actually shown in my book lioot land a lot of people just collapsed right but the top 20% did extremely well because construction work from home you will make a lot of money you have less expenses right or if you can pick up because as we say if you have a real skill if you have something then you can see it’s a picture of stability so middle classes are about stability for both society and economy and resilience is very important. So by this criterion and I have shown this a lot of our so-called middle class may so yes are all the let’s say delivery boys middle class yes if you have drones will they go away probably yes are they truly middle class uh do they have the education do they have the predictability do they have the method of earning they’re not so that is my point that the middle class has many tiers to it and I’m saying size of middle class debate Everybody’s middle class in India. Like I tell my class, everybody’s getting an A. So now can we get the grades out of the way and then we just work right? So I’m saying let’s assume now everybody’s middle class. There is a genuine middle class which fits all my criteria and there is a middle class that falls off when there’s a crisis. It will come back on petrol prices. yoga teacher will not be able to afford his bike to come from Kandi to Kuff Parade and he’s going to drop income and he has no resilience and when prices come back down again by then he’s lost his customers. So that is my my point about the middle class. So I’m saying call it what you will. Let’s not get bogged down but let’s try and create as much of a genuine middle class as we can so that we have a stable economy. So I’ll reference to one of your uh previous books which was called as we are like that only understanding the logic of consumer India and there you had debunked the myth of the 250 to 300 million sleeping beauty middle class and that was sold to like M andC’s in the early 1990s. So what was that myth exactly and what it’s the same thing that the middle class at that time we said there was a middle class that was ready to consume and I say sleeping beauty that when the prince charming in the form of supply comes and kisses you then suddenly you will wake up. I think at that time what we did not say did not know did not want to say since I was also party to all that we said uh I’m not sure why and how but the middle class that we have if you take the if you take the middle class in America if you take the middle class in Europe if you take the middle class here our middle class is actually so much lower in income than everybody else’s middle class it is India’s middle class but we assumed that they would behave like somebody else’s middle class. Why would they? Right? And that’s my point that our middle class in fact if you look our upper class for a long time was below the poverty line of America because America defines it you know just look at bap income pit punchy andabad. So at that time we said there’s this great middle class and then there was lots of capacity that was invested and I remember one was a TV brand I forget it name but we built so much capacity and then they started uh selling they started saying you’ll get this free if you buy this and we used to joke TV flat free because he’s sitting on so much on so much capacity right and then we learned that the middle class actually in those days had even less income term and the prices of things were not crashed that much for them to be able to buy it. But now they can to buy whatever. It could be a TV. It could be to buy anything. To buy a TV, to go out and eat, to buy clothes for your children, to do this, to do that, to travel abroad. Where was the money? Now things are cheaper. Right now TV penetration is complete. Productivity tools are selling. A refrigerator is a productivity tool because you can do the masalas on the weekend and you can make your husband’s daba and your son’s dubbas in the day so they don’t eat out and you can get to work, right? Uh washing machine is a productivity tool except it needs water which you don’t have. But uh that’s the the uh so so now the if you take the middle class is just people with income in the middle that is not what we think the middle class is right so I say that our middle class is actually the upper class are stable people who fulfill all the criteria I’m talking about uh even if you look I put in my new book that the number of households that have a car uh a PC or a laptop or something and a microwave is like 4% of something. But on the other hand, people who have a two-wheeler and a color TV and a refrigerator is actually much larger. So it’s a certain kind of middle class but middle class difference I mean you know one is like orbiting the moon and one is sort of stuck in the middle of the earth. So so that’s that’s really one thing. So in my book where like that only I say consultants consultants per capita income a tax consumption of everything under the sun. So you say as our per capita income grows we will consume cola like others we will consume something else like others we don’t. We’re not consuming breakfast cereal like America consumes at that income because consumption is a very very culture specific thing and income specific you know where you spend your money. I was once asked by a very big brand in the US that when will women in India be ready to spend one and a half lakhs on a handbag and I said after we’ve sent our children to Harvard. Right? So look at where we choose to spend. It is about choices and of course there are people who spend 20 lakhs on a handbag but uh by and large it’s after you send your children to Harvard after you pay capation fees after you save data miz right influencers so that’s where we do spend our money and make our choices So you also divide um the India India’s population into five segments L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 and if I can just take a Q1 quintile. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I can just take a minute and you can correct me if I’m wrong. These are the segments that you have. So L5 is affluent where the annual household spend is rupees 11.24 lakhs and these are 25 million people. This is called as the Lamborghini trap which you say that only 100 Lamborghinis are sold in India in one year. chasing this is a niche strategy not a mass strategy. The second is L4 which is resilient where the annual spend is 5.4 to 7 lakhs and these are 71 million people. The third is L3 which is real middle like I think this is real middle people. So 3.8 to 5.4 lakh is the annual household spend and these are 200 million people. L2 is trained mass annual household spend is 2.2 to 3.8 lakh and these are 432 million people. And now L1 which is the highest volume which is annual spend is only 1.1 to 2.2 on two lakhs and these are 7 77 million people which is the vulnerables. Mhm. So now my question is how do a brand like how can a brand interpret all these categories and if I am a business I’m starting a business how do I decide which kind of category I should cater to L1 L2 L3 L4 or L5 right most fundamentally uh yeah and I’ll just explain the L just a little bit you know I’ve said I’m saying labels we have no idea why those labels They’re just cute labels and different people use different labelsh 308 million 300 million divide this is the top 20% the next 20 the next 20 by way of income then they called what stats calls quintiles I put L must have meant level I don’t know so quentile five to quentile one so it is the very rich to the not so rich so now your question is that should I target the rich or the not so rich there are two things you should look at. One is attractiveness and the other is your ability to compete. Now if you the the as you go down the income levels the total market size is very large which I’ve also shown up lower incomes go low and you see the number of people it’s a lot of people with a little income each that adds up to a lot. This is India’s great number trick. 100 people earning 10 rupees each and 10 people earning 100 rupees each will be exactly the same. Right now in business what it means is that as you go down the income group you will run a small margin high volume business. So you will lose money the more you sell. This is the reason why the multinationals and the big businesses in India do not like serving the mass market. market because the multinationals are interested in that market. So if you see which is why I’m calling it Lily all the small companies supermarket you will not find a single big uh with great difficulty you will find a single big brand of food and masalas and this and that a lot of small small small guys. So if you can do a high volume, a high large, but the trouble is that if you’re a small person and you have small margin and you can’t scale and you have small volume, you will not make a lot of money. But if you go up the income ladder, they have lots of choices, they have lots of money, you have to be really good to compete, so they are attractive, but your ability to compete is poor. So based on that, you make a choices and business is about making choices, right? So for example uh there is an Uber for cars and there is an Uber for auto fixures and there will be an Uber for uh pillion riding and uh you know each of them comes with different marginal volume equations and your own dream of what you want to do. If you have something that is a winner that you sure has a winner if you uh actually get us a chapati maker that works then you can by all means uh go all the way up the ladder and give us perfect chapati. But if you can’t make that work then if you’re selling ready made chapati you can only sell it in your neighborhood catchment area. That’s how you make business choices. So I always used to feel that if I wanted to start a business I should just cater to the most premium crowd and sell the most premium service to them. So if I have access to all the billionaires of India or like all the top.1% of Indians, I should just make something which is premium like in the sense I am the best person to solve that problem for them and I’ll be able to scale that and I’ll be able to make more money because the ticket size can be much higher there as compared to giving it to someone else where the ticket size is low but the volume is high. This used to be my thinking and that’s why whenever I’ve started any business I’ve just always focused on this because sometimes I feel that it’s easier less operational in the sense that less people you have to cater to but low ticket size but high sorry low volume but high ticket size that used to be my mindset but do you think this is no so it’s what uh uh I call the gain and pain of uh any business gain and pain of consumer India if you can find something that you can sell to Mr. Amani who really wants it where you have a competitive advantage and if you can take care of all your aspirations for how big you’re going to be by all means do it. If you can start a private helicopter service that is ensured to never crash I think you will have a huge market but you’ll have to invest in the private helicopter service first. You have to make sure they never crash which means you have to spend much more on maintenance. And I’m quite sure that the the next upper class bride and bridegroom gift and all the planes were grounded private charter planes bride and bridegroom wedding cancel cost more money than chartering a plane. So if I had the ability to do it I would. I mean we’ve had this debate in a lot of companies. I call it uh why kiss the frog in the hope that the frog becomes a prince when you can kiss the prince directly but if you’re capable of kissing the prince directly that’s fine and you have to make sure that tomorrow somebody else doesn’t do the same thing right which is why uh there are lots of opportunities I mean I’m reading that urban company now has an insta service so today if you have a party at home and suddenly your cook hasn’t come they will give you a party cook I mean great if you have that ability to be able to manage this and do it seamlessly, you can command your price premiums. But on the other hand, if you have a whole opportunity that is sitting there which is wanting things, which is what you know when whatever it might be, if you can really get affordable housing going, you can really make it affordable, I mean, my god, you’ll be a zillionaire many times over, then you can sell them the house, then you can sell them cheap furniture, then you can sell them maintenance, etc. Which is a brand or company you think understands its consumers the best? Oh uh different guys seem to understand it differently. I used to think that Hindustan Liva understood its consumers the best. I think Maruti understood its consumers very well. I’m a big fan of Asian paints. I think they understood consumers very well. Increasingly I am seeing that and I have always maintained and I will continue to maintain that the small Indian business and the small Indian chaiala local entrepreneur understands consumers a lot better than any big business tea with sugar 5 rupees without sugar 8 rupees because if you’re not having sugar you are more desperate to not have sugar. Oh yeah. And you get your margins right then I saw on uh and if you look at the kind of uh and and there lots of these I mean the millions of them the whole standup pa the the standup uh or those actually came out of small businesses right they never came out of the big guys. Okay. uh I have a colleague uh NIMAD professor Anil Gupta he’s written a book called grassroot uh um grassroot innovation and it’s just brilliant because while the big companies will only make tractors that work on big farms when all of India’s small farms the small Indian businessman the small Indian entrepreneur or the small Indian person is creating tilting bulock carts toy tree climbers uh there is a chap who ran a business where He invested in the solar panel and people would come and bring their gadgets to him and we would charge them and we would return them. So he had basically variableized the cost of a solar panel right so many Instagram uh it says she said I went to the gym and I saw this woman I saw women constantly tugging their t-shirts uh down. Now I can empathize with it. I think it’s true insight because you have to go to the gym. you don’t want to wear your salvar kabies and go to the gym. You have to be fashionably dressed but you’re not comfortable. You got body problems, you’ve got conservatives and problems. So she said we make so available. The longer t-shirts are 100% organic blah blah blah blah blah. And I thought oh that’s interesting. Similarly you see a lot of the the a lot of the innovations that you see they all coming from smaller companies. So the customer intimacy is there. Even the chap who comes to do your uh your stitch your upholstery and brakes and blinds he will he’s always up to date. Have you noticed and I’m like and he says he brings a tattered book and he says what they tell you right I asked my vegetable vendor the other day I said so he explained to me I said so he said the cook that was sent from the big house to buy celery he asked him and he’s selling it to me So I think consumer insight and intimacy is actually sitting at the grassroots. It’s incredible. It’s incredible how they move with the times, how they give you the stuff that they want. It’s the the the that’s where the action is. Yeah. Actually, no, you’re right. like when I was studying for my CA finals classes. So that time like lot of like that idli so he used to he started making jen idlies a lot because as compared to that non separate veg separate. So that is something which we prefer as compared to the other one. So with that he just ensured separate gen and then that used to like work a lot because almost like 50% of the students in those classes where I used to go were gen students and we figured it out. The guy who stands with Nibupani outside Brahmanandra Park in Hyderabad where all the jungles go. I mean anti-inflammatory concoction he’s moving with the times. Yeah. And I think that’s why the whole uh Insta, Facebook, uh OMBC are the platforms in which you can sell have democratized it so fabulously. Yeah. So you mentioned three companies names. So Asian Paint, Maruti and HL. You say that these companies understand their consumers quite well. Can you give an example of all these three companies? Why do you say they understand their consumers well? Or what was the consumer insight they had which their competitors didn’t? uh it’s not just one insight I think it is the discipline it is the discipline of saying where is the consumer in this so you will uh so whether it is um you know if you’re making tea whether in your advertising as well if you are whether you’re selling tea or you’re selling detergent or you’re selling something else it is uh or even take someone like Nidmar right when Nidmar woman started in a particular particular way and then over a period of time you see the advertising she graduated with the malati car started looking different so they understood up on mobility but more than that I think it is the discipline of putting the customer thread into everything that you do so for example you say idea fantastic understanding your customer is asking the question why should anybody buy me what right do I have to exist what do I do for you mission statements what I do is this I’m the latest. I am customer obsessed. I am uh fabulous at uh I’m the bank that never sleeps. I don’t. But what is it where you are showing me what you do for the other guy? I think Asian Paints has run from the lower end to the higher end. They have an entire portfolio in a range which means they’re playing the whole market. So I just find and I think that they have consistently tried to make life easier for me in the challenge of painting. What is the challenge of painting? I buy the painted wall, the company sells paint. Nobody’s in charge in the middle. Right? So I think it’s also understanding that you know you can say oh walls paint is low involvement category. That’s such a load of rubbish because I have to look at that wall for the next 3 years right. So I think different people understand different aspects of consumer insight. I think they understand the go to market extremely well. That’s Asian Paints. I think Hundustan Lea are the people who changed our habits as a country from the start right I think uh Maruti brought in that Maruti 800 which basically revolutionized the entry-level cars so I think little people but I think all these are people at least who ask the question why should consumers buy me why do I believe I have a really good brand what’s happening that’s new in the consumer environment you know I remember the strategy guru CK Praad. uh so uh this was something in uh Hindustan could chalata some future planning session in those days and he suddenly turned around and said why do people vote for Laludra Sabad we don’t know he said how can you claim to have consumer insight in this country if you don’t know why so many crude people work for him and the other uh ide thing he said was that have you noticed that his son-in-law is an IT guy not a doctor. So you can see what’s changing right? So now even if you’re selling pharmaceuticals, you must know what is happening to the doctor, how much capitation fee is he paid, you know, why does he want to become a doctor? I’m looking at matrimonial ads where they’re saying wanted anesthetist girl, tall, fair, beautiful. And I’m thinking family that’s what you’re recruiting for. Tells you a lot, doesn’t it? So I think these are companies who at least worry about what the other guy is thinking. It’s not a It’s not a silver bullet one shot. It’s fantastic consumer. That’s what it is. Yeah. So an aesthetic like that. That’s just too specific kind like that kind of a requirement. Ads all the time. It tells you what’s changing. So once upon a time it was working women need not apply. Now they want working women. Oh, right. They want a revenue stream. Mhm. They want the long revenue stream. uh they will nowadays young men will also tell you she’s also got to work or the wife has a government job the husband will adjust you know he will move wherever she has to move so it’s uh it’s quite interesting the matt lads have been online but it’s the same old stuff no m tall fair good-looking homely hotel working woman Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. I think um joint income is something that people are preferring. Yeah. And as a student of mine once told me, he said, uh it’s harder to get divorced today because where do you aortion the debt? De merger of a company, where do you aortion the debt? It’s a really good point, right? Where do you aortion the debt? So they have to stay together. Otherwise, if you both taken a joint em uh joint loan to buy a huge house and then you separate, neither of you can individually afford the EMI, nor can you afford to buy the other person out. Yeah. Yeah. So any specific insight on the average age of marriage in India? How is that changing? Did you observe something there? Yeah, I’ve been reading also uh the government had put out some data the other day that says uh the average age of women is definitely growing up. The average age of getting married for women is definitely growing up because I think the girls are studying that much more. Plus they are earning a little bit before they get married. Uh I also think the divorce rate is going up across the board. That’s a trend that’s non-income specific. Yeah. Yeah. I think um divorce rates like I think that that also trend which I read in an article where that is also going up and uh I mean even from a finance perspective like a lot of demand for these divorced lawyers and people who help in settling the cases that was going up. Yeah. I was also reading yesterday that women are now saying I want to manage my money more carefully because I think the spectre of having to be alone at some point is important. So yeah so but you know change in India as I often say we wait for tipping point it’s a creeping trend you know if physics we say force is equal to mass into acceleration India’s a large mass moving with a small acceleration mega trend yeah how can we increase that acceleration do we need to I’m saying we’re a large we need to we’re a large mass mna A is equal to the same force of change. No. Mhm. And maybe that is the the equilibrium of the system. I think we have to recognize that you know so we keep looking at in fact this is another thing CK Palav used to say that India morphs morphs meaning it changes from within its molecular structure changes from within. It’s a little bit like an amoeba. Everything that it eats uh it changes shape a little bit and it’s a whole new shape. But we want to see molting change. Molting change is when the snake changes its skin. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Immediately steps out of its old skin, the skin is wrapped around a tree and it gets a new skin. We want that kind of change. But that’s not the way we change. So if you’re not wearing the right glasses to look at change, you will miss that whole change that’s happening. That’s that’s the point. So you have to also know how India changes to be able to see the change. Right. H I really like one of your quotes in the book where you had said consumption like maternity is a certainty income like paternity is merely a matter of opinion of influence. Yes. Yeah. So what like how how do you interpret that? How how do you come up with this quote? Uh because everybody argues over income India’s income. I mean if you see some of the income statistics that I get shown at board meetings I’m thinking because if you multiply all the incomes according to you of how many people have that income you you end up with many times the size of uh GDP forget about the size of national income. So basically everyone’s smoking do the open income but like when I say do you have how many households have a PC a color TV and a car and if the answer is 4 million out of 300 million you know they have it so I’m saying it’s a certainty so don’t argue so I’m saying that instead of arguing about uh income argue about how how many of you have a three-bedroom house a two-bedroom house or onebedroom house a pka house what inside the That’s the certainty, right? So that’s that’s the mic. So you’re saying that like a lot of boards they used to talk about income and that was something which was superficial in nature. No, I’m saying it’s uh incorrect and I’m not saying boards talk about it. I’m saying presentations made to both acetone or even if you look at uh data that is uh put out in the media selectively a lot of the data they say oh Indian households our target market is Indian households between 40 to 50 lakhs a month I’m saying oh there’s Lamborghini sales are increasing and increasing and increasing and I’m saying you know globally they sell whatever number 1100 and in India selling 100 I mean that’s fine but is that India so a of the income data that we see. I think we we like to believe that we are richer than we are. But actually we’re not. Every time I put out income data, people say but if you multiply that income by the number of people who have the income, you will end up with the same number of national income which comes out of GDP or uh uh private disposable income, personal disposable income or household. Now you want the GDP number but you don’t want the low number on income. So that’s the battle I wage often saying that you know let’s let’s tell ourselves the truth. Income is not what you’d like it to be. It is what it is. It is true also that if your income uh if if you grow at 7 if your income grows at 7% a year you will double your income in 10 years. Fair enough. So it’s the mega size that if India grows at 7% a year, we will add another India to India in 10 in 10 years. That’s like stupendous. But then don’t quibble and and say that we are richer than we are or say that everybody in India is eating out every other day in a fancy restaurant. You know, it’s not happening. Is there any specific case study or a brand that we should take inspiration from? maybe say let’s say from the western world or the US who has understood the consumer insight very well many of them I mean from Sweden if you look at IKEA I mean IKEA was fantastic at what IKEA did right in their days the Cokes and the Pepsis were fantastic at what they did uh so I think that uh KitKat I’m told is a 100 year old brand in Sweden and still relevant okay so I think there are lots of uh of of great brands I think again as I keep saying a brand is not created out of magic. It’s created out of a lot of painful observations. If you look at a Nike, if you look at a lot of them, it’s it’s uh if you look at a Phillips, if you look at a G, if you look at a City Bank in its time, I think it’s born out of a lot of respect for the world of consumers. And as I often tell my class profit and loss statement top line, it is the product of consumer choices. Doesn’t come under magic fingers. When you say I’m going to grow my top line by 30%, what are you saying? You’re saying I want more people to consume more to spend more or I want to increase my ticket size or I want to do something. So without consumer cooperation, revenue growth, your cost line is the cost of delivering to the consumer what the consumer wants to buy so that you can get your revenue growth. Your overhead is the cost of managing this whole drama. And your profit is just one minus the other. Your market share is an arithmetic number. my sales divided by the sales of whatever you can say I have an 80% market share of a cure for baldness which is guaranteed to work so maybe that market is I don’t know five draws and you can have 80% of it that’s okay but but I think it is it is it is about having it is about understanding that every line of your P&L is linked to consumer cooperation That’s the main point. I think that’s what makes great consumer centered companies, right? 3M was a fabulous consumer- centered company, but their culture more than consumer insight, it came from a culture that said ask for forgiveness, not permission. But again, when they came into India, they did not do that much innovation for us. That’s a different story. What do you think worked well for IKEA? I think just they created they just look at the look at the products they created look at the whole idea look at the whole concept right I mean they do it exactly right in India I’ve been saying forever online please you know nobody wants to go all these long distances and buy all this stuff but a lot of people do but uh I think with IKEA the the they paid a lot of attention to what kind of and it’s been written about forever right what kind of what kind of products do people need? Corners in the house need to be utilized. Things need to be put together. You know, I bought a small little table that I assembled which is very simple for my laptop, but it enables me to shove it all the way underneath the sofa so that it sits there. I bought three tables so that I could have them one in every balcony. So, I it’s just just the the way you think about solving a problem. Consumer insight is eventually about solving a problem. There’s a brilliant article by uh someone that I absolutely worship. His name is Kenny Chiomay. It’s called getting back to strategy. He wrote a very nice book also called the mind of the strategist. And there he talks about it. He says he says the heart of strategy is not about beating the competitor but adding value to the consumer. So if you go to Japanese houses and kitchens, he says the first thing that should strike you is that they have no space. You’re a durable manufacturer. What you do with that insight is for you to figure out. But mostly if you start with saying I want to sell a refrigerator then you’re missing the whole point of space. And I’m saying that most of us also even if you look at u air conditioners and all other than hotels which freeze you and offices that freezes you most people put the ACs at 24 and 25 in India because we don’t want to be frozen cold. So why do I have to buy an AC whose particular strength is to give me 18°? This is now it’s 26 right now. Now it’s 26 right I put mine at 24 25 and uh that’s the comfort level and no one is complaining. If you ask people you want interesting cold water, hot water, cold water, they say normal water, normal water, room temperature, right? So now the question is that do you do you just can you do a cold ladder? Can you do it cheaper? You know fridge basmally think should go into a fridge. So why would you not have a different kind of fridge? And I think that’s what consumer insight does. It makes you ask why not. I mean many years ago I did a study on u bed bed bed sheets and it was they wanted to do something like bed bath and beyond and every time we talk to consumers they would say bedrooms because my friends should come into my bedroom cuz I don’t want my mother-in-law listening to the conversation and after a long time it occurred to me that when Indian attitudes to sex change that’s when you will start selling super luxurious bed sheets but until then it’s a place which is the den which is a hideway where you want the air conditioner and you want the tiles and the big TV before you want the silk bed sheets so that’s the way we think the stories when when did when did you do this a long time back but at that time the main question I asked was this must have been a long time 15 20 years uh maybe 20. Um but I think at that time the question that I asked was that if every other part of the household uh has gone premium, why have bed sheets not gone premium? M and often consumer insight is about asking why and why not you know or for example why is it that in a country that makes a trillion chapati a year do we have so much trouble getting good quality readym made chapati to eat and I often say that making chapati for your children is positive labor making it for your mother-in-law is negative labor even for your husband right maybe I don’t know it depends depends on which gen you are and which income group you are, right? So, but if you go down south, you get perfectly good ready to eat chapati. Just heat and eat. Because in the south, chapati is a foreign food because we don’t know how to make it. We don’t know how to cook it. Oh, because they’re rice eaters. And that’s why when I go up north, I eat chapati and I think why can’t we make chapati like that? But it’s because they handle wheat differently. Tell me more on this. How are South Indians different from North Indians? Oh, I think there’s really a divide. I think as I often joke with my friends, we’re going to, you know, secede very soon. South of the India, north of the India. Partly it’s biases in our heads. But again, if you look at the original question of age cohorts or communities, partition is still very live in the north. In the south, most of us have never known partition. Partition was just a concept. So you never got your life which harowed by partition. Never described how you had to come from riches to rags to riches again which shapes a lot of your attitudes consumption consumption behavior and so on and so forth. Uh I think the south is also uh the what what so I once did the study again you’ll ask me how many years ago it was I don’t know time I won’t ask it there but it was a long time ago but uh it was called uh and and and and so we asked people that when prices go up or when incomes are tight what will you save on and what will you not and the north said that I will uh not cut the almond cookies and the biscuits uh that I will get my guess but I may switch or be more careful about the baby products I’m using for my baby. I will not use Johnson’s baby. I will use Master Girl. The South said that I will not change absolutely nothing as far as my child is concerned but I will start maybe making using homemade pickle and homemade vams and stuff like that. So you can see that there is a difference in the north. The paint guys used to tell me that uh the ceiling is painted with just temper but the walls are painted with aculsion because who looks at the ceiling and does that or the drawing room is painted with one color and the bedroom with one quality and the bedrooms are painted in another quality. So sometimes it’s external culture versus internal culture. It’s also much more go-getness. Um also my two wheeler friends tell me that because the build is often different between south of India and north uh I don’t know if that’s a fact but I think if you take averages it might be they said that they want the bigger vehicles as compared to the more practical smaller ones. So so there lots of uh lots of shits and I don’t know why but this is a bias that I have. So I’ve worked with a lot of people from South India and even in my previous organization there used to be a lot of people from South India and for some reason I found them extremely sincere, extremely dedicated and you know like super focused to what they’re doing and little talkative also at times but that was my observation and I discussed this with few of my friends and they had a similar observation. So I in fact my earlier flatmate who I used to stay with was also from South India and uh he used to be like extremely like focused to the point and very sincere in the working ethics etc and I don’t know why for some reason I found him to be super smart like is is there some change in like upbringing or something that is there but very like smart as compared to other other people. It’s probably uh how much focus you have. It depends also on uh uh I mean for example um in the north I think you also particularly if you look at uh what is traditionally the stereotype of Punjab I think it is work hard play hard I don’t think anybody in the south know what play hard actually means or maybe now you do I mean now I’m looking at Insta I was just looking at uh weddings and wedding receptions and so on and you’ll see the difference there again right it’s uh they they will show you this this new film star with Mar from Andra and pictures of him and his bride going to one temple after another temple after another temple it’s really uh quite boring so it’s probably nurture more than nature I don’t know also there was an entire generation for example that had to move out of uh Tamil Nadu at that time because uh uh they couldn’t get college admissions because reservations had just come in So because of education when your whole family is uprooted, you had better bloody do well. No. Yeah. Yeah. And there are also like three role models that you have you’ve said in one of the previous interviews. You’ve really done your homework. Yeah. So one Pad Bim Jooshi and Picharam. What have you learned from each of them and what do you admire the most about three of them? Uh so this question came up uh when failure in the corporate world. So a friend of mine I didn’t succeed and that’s why I left. I succeeded but I couldn’t make it stick you know I didn’t have the stomach to stay. So a friend of mine uh who uh was an HR person he said make a list of three people who you admire. So I I what I admire about Sikki Praad is that sitting all by himself in his office in wherever in America he also taught me. You end up giving the world the idea of core competence which has shaped business in so many ways. You give the world the idea of competing for the future. He and Gary Han wrote that book which again shaped business in such fundamental ways and every boardroom around the world was discussing it and bottom of the pyramid fortune bottom of the pyramid right here is one man the product of one brain sitting in one office okay did research and all but that’s where it came out of uh I remember he once asked me to do uh he was giving a speech the Lal Badu Shastri memorial lecture and he asked me uh to uh help him with understanding the dabbalas. And I said, “Oh, nobody tells you how the coding system works and so I can’t help you.” And he said to me that I’m very disappointed that you don’t have the intellectual curiosity to want to know. Okay. When he wrote the forward to my book where like that only he said, “You write the book and I’ll write the forward.” And I when I wrote the book, I said, “Can we write the you want me a summary of every paragraph?” And we turned around and of every chapter and we turned around and said I’ve read the whole book and he said chapter 5 and chapter 6 is three paragraphs uh rather repeated please do your editing properly. Oh okay. And this so so but that that that was who he actually was and he had one line in beforeward and I said to myself CK I really wish I had written that I thought of that and it was uh listen to the logic of consumer India from inside of consumer India and that is exactly what I was trying to say. So anyway, so the thing that struck me about him was how sitting all by himself, he gave the world fabulous concepts. Uh Bim Jooshi, I went to hear him on his 75th birthday and he sang brilliantly signed Malva I think and he said he said that I pray to God that the day I can’t sing anymore take me. So it was just the joy of what he was doing and I realized that Biman Jooshi sang for himself. He didn’t sing for the rest of us. He sang for himself. He was not there to entertain ourselves. He was there to seek from within my So you quit your job that time and you started. No, I actually quit for another reason because I was uh I was complaining that I was uh not getting to do the kind of stuff that I wanted to do. And I had a professor friend of mine, Indra Pawik, she was the dean of Amedabad. and she just turned around and said, “There’s a game that only you know how to play.” She said, “Go and create your own playground. Stop complaining that people aren’t playing it.” And so I said, “Okay, fine.” And then I quit my job. I walked away from um lucrative large global consulting firm. I walked away from the that I set up my own consulting practice to do created my own playground to create do the kind of work I wanted. You were at Mckenzie, right? Oh. And when did you quit? Which year? 99 maybe. Okay. So 1999. So from 27 years you’re doing something of your own. Yeah. Oh yeah. And uh then you started your own research uh company. Yeah. I had I started a a thing bank. So I did a lot of things. I had a portfolio of work. So I had uh so people uh the first board I was approached for was I think ecos many years ago again. Uh so I had I started looking at boards. uh I was continuing to teach at Ahmedabad but that’s when I created a new course which is now 26 years old it’s called customer-based business strategy so that it was in sync with what I wanted to do which is also a book that I wrote uh dedicated to my teacher and my students uh I taught with my teacher for that one and then I also had a consulting practice and uh so it was a portfolio and then I was writing and so I and along the way I started doing more and more research into what I called the macro consumer discipline like you have macroeconomics you need macro consumers that you know let’s look at the body of India how do they earn how does India how do Indians earn spend save live think uh access public goods uh just the people view of for business strategy and public policy and so at that context I set up a think tank uh that was called people research on India’s consumer economy uh which I later then handed over to uh uh my co-founder and said you run it uh because it was in fact one of the rounds of money we got to do the study was from Ratan data and the data trust was just amazing uh what was that to do this study it was the ice 360 database which uh so I remember I wrote to him and I said you know you should support us uh because this is important for these reasons and he didn’t say anything to me but then I got a call from data trust saying that can you come and pitch to And it was a hard pitch but uh you know at least we were in the game. What was the study about? What this was? How India earns spend saves. You know where the first income study started coming from that how do Indians how much do they earn? How do you what is your occupation? I mean today I ask you of the 300 million Indian households you know what is the occupation? The answer is probably that you don’t know it because unless you read my book how do you access public goods? uh what you know uh how do you earn spend say live think actual public goods. So we wanted to do that mother alone studies and in a single place look at occupation look at income look at ownership of durables look at maternity look at paternity look at everything and put it together and then after a while I uh handed that over and moved. Why did you resign from Infosys board in 2010? uh because I had already finished uh eight years or nine years and I uh and I think uh I had had I had done eight or nine years at that board. Now the new law has come that says you can’t do more than 10. So maybe I was just ahead of the curve. I had spent eight years and then I just felt I needed to move to move. So I said and it was a good time. It was a transition because you also don’t want to be disruptive. So I think there was a transition of chairman as well. So I said this is a turn around. Yeah. Nothing dramatic. And how many uh companies boards you’ve been a part of till then? Oh plenty. In fact I counted and said now I’m going to stop doing them. Uh it would be if I added the number of years on listed boards it would be uh maybe 180 years combined. Oh wow. Uh so it would be Infosys Access Bank consumer NPCI RCS. A lot of them are financial services a whole bunch of them. Uh mind finance me uh and so on and so forth. So must be what 20 25 companies in total probably. Wow. And at present I think you’re on board of like five six companies. Yes. Uh I’m on the uh I am on uh Apollo Hospital, San Parma, Gulas exports, one other so for listed plus I am Ahmedabad. Okay. And then I’m on the governing council of NASA which is university a couple of other time governing council. Yeah. A lot of people have this silly question if I can ask. So usually like what are the salaries that people get when they are sitting on the board of listed companies? You can those people can look it up in the annual report because annual report but it varies but if you are joining a board because you’re getting a salary you shouldn’t be on that board because you’re getting a whole lot of risk. You have to either want genuinely to be involved with governance because I think it’s just a question of trusteeship. That’s what it is. No, one time I told another mentor of mine that I didn’t want to be on an academic institution board and I said if they and I meant the government uh if they want and this is again many years ago that if they want uh they can run their institutions and he just turned around and told me that it’s our money that they are holding in trust and if you say you don’t want to be a trustee he said that’s your choice but uh it’s the wrong thing to say that it’s their money let them do what they Yeah, you’ve been teaching at since 27 years, right? No, more. This course is 27 years. Before that, I taught their market research course and I’ve been for good lord that long year. Everything’s fine. So maybe over 35 years probably. But I teach visiting. So I teach one term a year now for a course. Okay. any count on number of students you would have taught so far in your Well, I am proud to say you know they always say that uh the best Guru Dakshina student can give a teacher is to surpass the teacher many times over and when I look at all the guys who have surpassed me many times over I think uh the the the slate is full. So I’ve uh more recently if you look at it everyone from GIF foundation to Sanji Bchandani of Noi to Kalra to a whole lot of other people all the big company CEOs many of them Sudhi Sapati at God they’ve all been students of yeah and it’s very special because many of them have surpassed us many times over so for my teacher who’s a professor Jen aka Jen um who was quite a legend in Amedabad. So I did what is called a fest shift. A fest shift is a German term for uh you do normally a a seminar or conference in honor of the teacher and you get people ideally to publish academic papers but uh in the areas that so he had two passions one was defining the problem problem definition and one was customer centricity. So I got all the students some hours some his to write and I did the book uh and uh the chairman of Nabad the MP from Sikim the founder of Nika the founder of beep wrote Sanvi Bikchandani wrote uh Shikashalma wrote these were all his students over a period of time right so that’s what having uh having students in this kind of setup does yeah so I’ll ask you the toughest question um so far. Who has been your favorite student in the last 35 years and why? I don’t think I don’t think favorites. No. So, who is one student who really like I mean you like you just remember that student for some I remember many people for uh many things. I mean I was and I’m not going to take a name here but uh very big now. M um when he joined this company, I was on the board of one of the subsidiaries of that company and I was told that um this person with this name is going to join the board and I said okay. And he walked into the boardroom. I had to go and look at him and I said you and he said yes ma’am. And I had a vision flashing through my mind of someone in uh torn jeans and rubber chapels arguing with me about engrain. Okay. He now sits on top of one of the largest conglomerates and it is just like amazing. So al so so so I love that. Similarly uh you know it’s also interesting what stories they have. I mean the stories they have of me are also interesting. I uh remember uh Sudish sapati because uh when we had this Kenny article as reading and we were really mad at the class who weren’t reading. So we said okay come back and summarize what you read. So we just had one chart. He had a brick wall and he said, “What they’re saying is don’t bang your head against the brick wall. You just have to go around and that’s what this article says.” And he was like, “Okay.” I had another lot who was really someone else who’s not pleased about the Southwest Airlines case we were doing. So, he just came and he played the video of the Southwest Airlines CEO talking about his strategy and he said, “That’s what you want to know.” And he said, “This is shutting the horse’s mouth.” so mad at them. I couldn’t figure out whether to give him an F for doing this or give him an A for doing this because it was just interesting. So like that I think we’ve had a lot we’ve had a lot of uh men a lot of women who we’ve had a a student who actually was vision impaired and uh did brilliantly after that have a PhD teaching somewhere. So, what’s the most interesting question someone has asked you or what’s the most weirdest question someone has asked you and you remember that in class? Yeah. Don’t know quite weird. We teach you we teach using the case method. So, they only remember us asking the questions. In fact, when anybody says to my teacher that I teach with, they say, “Sci, I have a doubt.” He goes, “So do I. I have many.” We teach. Yeah. Tell him. Yeah. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. I had an amazing time learning a lot from you. Last question that I ask all my guests, it’s a tricky one. If you were in the shoes of Kushal Luda and if you were interviewing Miss Rama Bijapurkar, what is one question you would like to ask her towards the end? One question I should ask you. Oh, you’ve not asked me a single question on gender. I’m deeply impressed with that. Oh, yeah. Actually, one question on that should be there. That’s Yeah, that’s gaping whole, right? You’ve not asked me about uh gender. You’ve not asked me about women in the boardroom. You’ve not asked me about whether I see differences in the workplace as a result of uh uh that have we made progress or have we not made progress. Uh yeah, you not asked me who personally uh inspired a lot of things. You’ve not asked me questions about what drives me and what keeps me going and what I think about life and going not asked me in that space. So let’s let’s discuss all ask me to ask the question and get an answer. No no no no no just one one out of the five. So on the gender and women in the boardroom so how have we progressed on that front and did you ever like face any challenges uh because of this when you entered the boardroom or what was the situation? Long question long question I think all I would say on that is that uh when you have a minority community and the majority community uh the majority community makes the rules for itself. They’re not out to kill the minority community, but the minority community has got to learn to negotiate those rules and to have more even-handed rules that work better for you. And uh I often tell women that uh your job is to perform, not to belong, right? It’s taken me a long time to get to the place that I want to perform and not belong. I think belonging is something we all seek. But uh uh I have a I have a poster in my house which is an elephant with butterfly ears and it says be yourself the world will adjust. Uh so I think that we’ve made uh some progress but uh uh there is still there is a difference there is a difference in orientation and a difference in home situations and a difference in priorities. And I just think that we should have uh we just I think with more and more women in the workplace who are ready to be women in the workplace, not to emulate and play according to everybody else’s rules, the situation changes. And I think we’ve seen a lot of women uh do that. And I often tell uh Gen Z women that hey listen, don’t forget we made the road for you. Oh wow. That that’s very very inspiring. Very touching as well. Thank you so much ma’am for doing this. I had an amazing time shooting this with you and you’ve taught us like in the last two hours like you’ve given so many insights, so many nuggets of wisdom. I’m sure everyone who’s watching this is going to love this episode. Thank you so much once again for doing this and wish you the best for all your books and Lily Land which is like this is the latest one 2024 which you wrote. I mean I’ve heard like you know like I’ve interviewed so many people who have spoken about this book in my podcast. So I thought why not get the author itself on the podcast and today it’s like a dream come true moment. So, thank you so much once again for kind. I had a great time and thank you so much. Thank you very much. All the best. Thank you so much for watching this video till the end. Before we end this video, I’d like to thank Grow for being our title sponsor. With support like this, we can deliver actionable finance content to our audience. So, go ahead and download the Grow app today and tell us in the comment section which guest you want so that we can invite them. Also question we can give you the most value additative content. Thank you so much once again for watching this entire podcast and stay tuned for more amazing episodes of conversation with Kushal. Investment in securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing.