More press

A stimulating lecture on Indian Perspectives in International Branding was delivered to us by Prof K. Balakrishnan. The majority of the lecture was spent on the branding and selling of Indian Paint Company and how they market their products. The movie clips were very interesting from the fact that the houses that were shown in the clips looked very close to the houses that we have in the USA, none of which I have seen while we are here.

The last portion at SDM-IMD was spent with reporters firing questions at us and the students of the SDM. Other then the typical questions of how has your time been here, what have you experienced, there were some specific head belligerent questions asked.

For a report to ask the question, do you think that the Indian students are as smart as US students are a BS questions to ask. What was he expecting us to say?

Other questions they asked were what do you think of the class room process vs. the US? Since we did not spent 1 minute in the class room with the other students, how could that is answered.

The one question that chapped my ass was “what is the cause of the US recession and do you think the US will emerge from it? My response was that there are varying opinion if the country is in a recession but if we were, the country would emerge. I mentioned that the housing market correction, and sub-prime mortgage market have attributed to the demist on the economy. It was also mentioned by some one in the group that the American people have been living far outside their means and have over extended themselves and that was the major cause of the issue. Regardless of our answers the reporter was pompous enough to blow off our answers and say, and I quote “Don’t you think that if the US corporations out sources to India sooner that the recession would not have happened”? There is a general consensus in India that the people of India and the businesses drive the world economy, which is hard to respond to with out bursting their bubbles.


I spent the afternoon working on MTM email, blogs and a nap, followed by a trip with Karl to FabCity for an extra bag to bring back the purchases that we had made.

Our supper was spent at Subway where there were 5 of us salivating over a good meal. It took about an hour for all of us to get our sandwiches. They are so slow here at customer service. It was not that there was a lack of staff, as there were 5 of them, but their processes are mess up. I would not call them the quick, efficient sandwich artists that we see at home but relate it more to watching concrete curing or grass growing. They are very fortunate that labor is cheap!