It's too good [06.04.2011]

I know this love affair can’t continue. Things are so obviously in the romantic stages at the moment and I can’t be seeing reality. All the signs are there. Wonder at everyday things like birds and flowers and cows. Ridiculous feeling of importance when doing routine things. A sense that you’ve been friends for ever when it’s been three days. An inability to see anything wrong with the other (apart from the chaotic driving). An absolute enchantment with the different flavours that she brings. Beautiful flowing garments that you can’t take your eyes off. Yes, I’m talking about a women and her name is Maharajah India.

It can’t be love, it’s only been three days. It must be some sort of strange enchantment that can only end in tears. It will end in burn-out, or some sense of perspective, surely. Maybe. But boy, I’m enjoying the ride so far.

This morning, our meeting on the organizational structure of GreenOil had to be slightly postponed, and was ‘transferred’ to another location. This mysterious location involved us creeping along the freeway at 10 kph while we looked for the “secret spot”. An emerging bum held some promise, but that wasn’t where we were meant to go. We simple reversed up the freeway and did a U-turn, finally pulling over in the emergency stopping lane behind some others who had just taken their dogs for a walk and were trying to shove the unwilling mutts back into their car. We locked ours and headed into a completely deserted park that I’m sure I would have felt weird going into on my own. Actually, “park” is a little too simple. It was more like a nature reserve, in that you walked a fair way and could see nothing but trees, even though the freeway was right next to it. While Dananjay explained the temple of some Indian deity or other to me (there are about 1000 for every day of the year, so I am told), our CEO appeared with a flip chart and a rug. We made our way to the main area of the park and as the only people there, had our pick of the available patches of grass to begin our “meeting”. Organizational Management has never been so picturesque.

That afternoon we convened at a local coffee shop with one of GreenOil’s advisers, Rajeev, and tried to trash out GreenOil’s marketing strategy for their fertilizer around Jaipur. Great process, interesting ideas and I learned a heap about things I may never understand, but I’ll be there soon enough (tomorrow, in fact!! yes, things are moving pretty quickly- you guessed that yet?). So let me break it down for you. We had to find the most reliable place where farmers in a village congregate. Our only reliable suggestion was the temple. It’s on a top of a hill and most of the farmers need to follow one of two routes to get there. Temples, however, need money to buy things to enable people to worship the deity. So we would look to sponsor the temple’s celebration primarily the Pradash (offerings) and flowers. Then we needed to work out how the message of our product could be integrated into this method. What better than hymns interspersed with ads for our fertilizer? What better indeed! Somehow we have to “close the buying loop” though- that was a trickier one. When they came down from their deity worship, how would we get them to follow-up with our product? Does it sound crass? This is India, boyo! And don’t you try and come between us- we’re in love.