For the love of books

I just came across this article “In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation” in New York Times and could not help but agree with most of the points mentioned there. Many articles have been written before on this subject, where they compare our investor environment with that of the Silicon Valley. However, most of them miss out on one crucial aspect. It is not just the change of the environment with more incubators for startups that is required or the need for the Government to make bureaucracy less tiresome but it is our mindset that has to change.

We, Indians, are highly risk-averse people. Right from our childhood our upbringing is such that parents encourage us to dream of becoming doctors and engineers so that our life is set. You may eventually branch out to some other field but it is so. Further, our educational system is oriented more towards rote-learning, and testing us on facts rather than on concepts, and forget the whole  personality development part of it.

Even in IITs and IIMs exams are such that if you do not study the whole semester but on the last day, you can get through. Very few professors actually test you on your clarity of concepts, who encourage you to apply yourself. Further, so much importance is paid to hard-core numerical subjects that softer skill-based courses are so often ignored. Just go to any IIM and you can see for yourself – students toiling under the burden of 8-9 finance electives in their second year just to get that “one” course, which will be instrumental in making or breaking their future in an I-bank.

And what do they miss out on? Courses like Strategic Business Negotiation, Advanced Oral Communication, and Entrepreneurship, etc. I would say these were probably the best courses I had taken during my MBA. It is these HR courses that eventually help you in your professional and personal life.

As a community, we Indians generally get married latest by 28-29 years of age. And with marriage comes responsibility and pressure to be earning well enough to support our family. This trend is something totally missing in the West.

In Israel, which is a great hub for entrepreneurship – the second-largest after the US in LifeSciences, people are drafted into the army and when they are released they have a whole world of opportunity lying out there in open. In the US, it is not uncommon for people to do MBBS after their engineering just because they had a change of heart.

In India, is it even imaginable? We are urged to finish off our education in one go. School –> College —> MBA —> Job. Why not an year or two of job before MBA? If I enroll myself in an MBA school in the US now, I  probably would belong to the youngest bracket of my class. Why is it that if someone fails CAT, his life is ruined because his friend has made through and will be earning his 24 lacs for one extra year?

Take our own example, when we, Rajat and I, had wanted to chuck our calls, we were under pressure to reconsider and do our MBA first. The reasoning was that a diploma from IIMs is a safety net in case we failed. Only one or two thought about mentioning the fact that it might help us better understand business nuances. It just reflects the mindset of people around us.

So all I am saying is that it is not just the investor and regulatory environment, which is to be blamed here. We ourselves are a part of the problem. India once had a flourishing trade and was one of the richest countries in the world. Over 150 years of foreign rule has culled our spirit of entrepreneurship, which was followed by the so-called “Hindu” rate of growth. It is the 21st century now, and we have come a long way. We are roaring to go forward.

Let us not replace the Civil Services and Government jobs of erstwhile India with private high-paying safety nets. Let us instead shape our destiny with our own hands and bring a change from within before we lament the lack of innovation in India.

So the next time if someone compares you to Amazon and says – “You are the Amazon of India”, then your answer should better be “Patience my friend, you have seen nothing yet!”

Chandler: Hey, I just came across this really cool site LeBooks.in, which offers great discounts on books and also free shipping!

Ross: I also know of this other site, some Indie… Wait did you say FREE shipping??

~~

Consumers love free shipping, we all do. In fact who doesn’t?

Consider this:- Site A offers free shipping on all orders worth more than Rs. 150 while site B charges Rs. 10 per book and yet another site C charges a flat Rs. 30 per order. Which of the three sites do you think would be more popular?

My bet is site A. Simply because despite different discount structures, there is one thing constant, which Ross will always remember and that is site A ships for free. Site A has created a great marketing tool. Besides, by offering free shipping, site A is telling Ross upfront how much a book will cost even before he adds it to the cart and this enriches his customer experience. He need not undergo the hassle of adding a book to the cart and checking out till the end to know the final amount!! So even if Site A is at times not matching the discount by Site B or site C, the former is still expected to fare better, ceteris paribus.

In the Indian context, there is another factor. For some reason, as much as we Indians love free shipping we also hate paying for it. Better give us lower discounts but don’t ask us to pay for shipping. Why is it so?

Maybe it’s because we have been conditioned to think so from the early heydeys of e-commerce in India when ebay.in was still Baazee.

I remember sellers luring buyers by offering outrageous discounts and then in turn outraging them by levying ludicrous shipping charges to cover their costs.

In the West it is a well-established practice to pay for shipping. Even Amazon, which any Indian swears e-commerce by, charges for shipping unless the order amount is more than $25. In our case it would have translated to orders worth more than Rs. 750. Free shipping over there is used to incentivize the customers to buy in bulk; in fact there is a free shipping day. So why do we not also follow their practice rather than make a habit out of it here?

I would someday really like to explore this psychology of ours because when we were contemplating our own shipping policy for LeBooks.in, I myself was vociferous that we not charge anything!