To our relief, there are some ways to reduce and minimalize the harm from these gadgets and make our homes safer, it is studied that the phone shouldn't be used for more than six minutes in an hour, says Pranav Poddar"Home is where the heart is" defines perfectly, the amount warmth we feel, we think about those cosy rooms. For any person, home is the perfect comfort where he can relax and unwind. And to create that perfect comfortable atmosphere companies in today's world are offering so many technological solutions, from an electric massage chair to a mobile controlled Air-conditioner. Houses today are incomplete without gadgets, even if it means a simple Wi-Fi router. Technology today plays suchan integral part of our lives that it is almost impossible to think of comfort without it, but, do we know the harm caused by these so called comforting gadgets.We let our kids play on our tablets, smartphones and all we are concerned about are their eyes. We make sure, they turn down the brightness, put advanced screen guards that do not harm their eyesight and get their eyes checked regularly. But, the only thing we are unaware of is the harmful radiations which these gadgets emit. The only reasonwe are unsuspecting is because their effect is unseen and unfelt. So, what are these radiations? How harmful are they?Pranav PoddarBy definition, Radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or through a material medium. Cell phones, PC's, TV, radio and various other electronic gadgets transmit Electromagnetic Radiations (often abbreviated as E-M radiation or EMR). These radiations may not be seen or felt, but they may impact our health in the long run.The waves which connect the wireless devices (tower to phone, Bluetooth hands free, Wi-Fi) are constant, whereas the waves in our body are random, thus the waves from these devices interfere in the frequency of our body and cause stress. This stress leads to various diseases, increase in cataract and has a huge effect on the reproductive health.Homes are perceived to be the safest place, but that's quite untrue, as our homes are full of devices that emit these harmful radiations. From PCs to WIFI, tablets to phones these gadgets are a main concern, many studies have proven that their usage causes a lot of diseases. Numerous scientists from across the world have demonstrated that electromagnetic radiation has significant impact on human wellbeing, especially when they are in close proximity to their electronic gadgets. This effect was acknowledged by a French court and many schools in France have banned the use of Wi-Fi.Scientists and researchers demonstrated various biological and neurotic impacts of electromagnetic radiation. The World Health Organization (WHO) and International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic (cancer causing substance) to humans. But every news can't be so negative.To our relief, there are some ways to reduce and minimalize the harm from these gadgets and make our homes safer, it is studied that the phone shouldn't be used for more than six minutes in an hour. Wired earphones are preferable over wireless ones. Try not keeping the phones in the shirt or the pant pockets as radiation is known to reduce the sperm count in men. Many devices and chips have also been introduced in the market which are proven and certified to help us overcome these radiations.The author is director of Syenergy Environics Limited
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Gender diversity initiatives are among the top priorities of leading organizations, writes Dr Niru Kumar Twelve years back I began my journey of studying gender differences under the mentorship of Dr John Gray, author of Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Right after being trained by John Gray and being certified as a Mars Venus coach I started feeling like a celebrity of sorts. As soon as people would get to know about my Mars Venus connection I would have their wholehearted attention. At parties I found myself getting a lot of limelight. TV channels wanted me to appear on their shows. All this because I might be more approachable than Dr John Gray himself and I may have some answers to their tough luck with the opposite gender! People would laugh and cry at the same time when I spoke about the differences. Things like how women shift from one topic to another to another all in the span of 10 minutes, which have the men totally confused and frustrated and how women hate men for quick unwanted solutions when all they wanted to do was just share.Everybody has gender challenges!Dr Niru KumarHowever, I got this fantastic attention only in personal forums. Organizations were not ready for this conversation. It was labelled as “soft skills" and took lot of convincing to make a few start thinking about the business case. Today however it is a different story. Gender diversity initiatives are among the top priorities of leading organizations. All are in the race of whose moving faster and doing more in this arena. Liberal budgets are allocated, top trainers are handpicked, trainings are made mandatory, online forums are buzzing, street plays and lots more. Then what is still pulling it down? Is it leaders, or men or women themselves? Perhaps all three. So here I was doing a workshop with a CEO of company and his direct reports. Only one lady was participating among 15 men which itself was a clear reflection on the actual situation. A short while down the training day we were assessing the concerned company’s present standing on the gender diversity front. Everybody voiced their views and eventually I gave my subjective evaluation which was a 2.5/5 whilst theirs was averaging a 4/5. Expressions were not to happy when I share my rating. One person in a slightly annoyed tone said, “We have reached a 20% isn’t that all right?" I then asked them to reflect on senior leadership ratios, which turned out to be a bare 3%.The “isn’t that all right” question in that senior a team reflected the thought process of many. Five years back many men, women and leaders were forthright in their disagreement on the “big deal” on gender diversity. Today it is embarrassing to say it out but has the internal mindset changed? Perhaps not if we think 20% is all right. Here are some gravitational factors, which are still pulling the gender breakthrough projects down: Fear of stereotypingInherent competitive nature of menLack of women speaking up out of fear of sounding complainingNot enough male sponsorsLack of mentors and trainers who can help organizations take a deep dive into the actual nuancesMaking it a numbers game only and not paying enough attention to gender intelligence Gender intelligence is an intelligence that understands the science in the brain and behavioural differences in men and women. It goes beyond treated both genders as equal. It is understanding, respecting and leveraging those differences for greater personal and professional success. To keep up with the pace of the Market Leaders Gender Intelligence has to be deeply studied and authentically practiced with a sense of urgency.
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The family, fed up with instant coffee and yearning for that addictive aroma of pure, ground coffee at the breakfast table, decided to buy a coffee machine. The young ones did their search and investigation; and one day a Flipkart delivery boy trundled up to the doorstep with a sleek looking ‘Oster’ machine for Rs 10,000. It was a steal! The machine carried a MRP of Rs 15,000, and the best high street retailers like Vijay Sales wouldn’t part with a similar piece for less than Rs 13,000.This coffee machine buy is a small part of the big eTailing success story. Millions of urbanites buy their day-to-day products via these online sites. The eTailing giants — Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon — in a short span have ballooned into a huge Rs 40,000-crore industry, weaning away customers from traditional retailers like Big Bazaar, and the mom-and-pop kirana shops.Their mantra is simple and logical — they deliver goods at 20-30 per cent cheaper than their high street counterparts. The eTailers, on the other hand, save on expensive rentals. The model is built on an ‘endless’ and galloping acquisition of the ‘consumer’ as real estate. Discounted pricing brings in waves of new converts, and the investors queue up to pump in money at mind-boggling valuations. These investments are based not on current P&L figures, but on the customer base of these companies. The game, therefore, is to acquire customers at any cost.Yes, it’s all about cash burn, and investors are willing to back them up to burn more to acquire more customers and to build an ecosystem that someday they hope will make profits. But when will that day come? Will the desi eTailers be able to pull out of discounting as long as Amazon with its deep pockets hounds them with better discounts? How long will the investors continue to support this model? Or, will they sell to another set of investors, who are willing to take longer bets, and who will then become victims of a Ponzi cycle? Organised retail had burnt its fingers in the last decade, pumping in over Rs 30,000 crore and chasing the chimera of the 400-million middle-class market. We have short memories — those 400-million purchasers never existed!We must make a distinction. E-commerce, or electronic trading of which eTailing is a small part, is here to stay. It is a $22 billion booming structure and galloping at over 30 per cent every year. The principles of e-commerce — first hooking the customer with great prices and the ease of trading and then slowly upping the prices to ensure decent margins — have been working well. MakeMyTrip for travel and BookMyShow for cinema and entertainment have done well to bring in their commissions once the customer is ensnared. Significantly, the barriers are breaking down too. Brick-and-mortar retailers are creating e-commerce models, while the e-commerce guys are tying up to create touch-and-feel stores.It’s all evolving. But for the eTailers, the last leg of the marathon has gone wrong. Read all about where they are all headed in our cover story authored by senior writers Vishal Krishna and Abraham C. Mathews, who worked over a month searching the marketplace and the lawyers’ corridors.There is interesting variety too in the issue. India has also suffered a long, hot summer and hopefully now the rains will bring some respite. It was a summer that saw for the first time consumption of power go down in rural India, and tractor and FMCG sales fall in villages. Well known writer Paranjoy Guha Thakurta analyses what the crisis of falling purchasing power of agricultural India means for the country’s economy.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 13-07-2015)
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When he visited India for the first time in March this year, I thought Twitter CEO Dick Costolo looked none too happy — for a former comedian. The “Digital Samvad” initiative with the government and the acquisition of ZipDial to encourage non-active users to get tweets with a missed call had their fifteen minutes of fame and then evaporated to leave Twitter stewing in its own troubles.What troubles, many Indians may well ask, because if you’ve ever watched television in India, you won’t be able to escape hearing what Twitter thinks about every piece of news. Anchors switch between television screens and tweets as they announce their stories are now trending at #1 on the social network. Our current government and Prime Minister, of course, took to Twitter like fish freshly introduced to water — so ironic when you look back to how much fun was had by politicians at the expense of the first tweeting minister, Shashi Tharoor. Twitter has, more than anything else online, been a lifeline during disasters and has played no small part in making and unmaking governments. It’s also taught businesses a thing or two about who really owns companies.But none of this has helped Twitter grow enough or fast enough to satisfy its inventers and the company is trading lower than its stock price at IPO in 2013. Shares jumped about 7 per cent when Costolo announced he was stepping down from July 1 with Jack Dorsey taking over as interim CEO. As Twitter searches for a new CEO, there are speculations of whether it could be Adam Bain, Twitter’s current president of global revenue, or even co-founder Jack Dorsey himself. Whoever it will be, he’s got a job ahead of him because everyone agrees about one thing — Twitter doesn’t have enough users to be attractive to advertisers.In the years since Twitter started in 2006 as a “microblogging” site, social media has become a game for numbers. Twitter has 320 million active users, but the more staggering figure, said to be about a billion, is the people who signed up, took one look, and fled. If you were to look around you, you’ll find that while journalists, politicians, activists, and of course businesses and social media marketers, are comfortable on Twitter, young people are not. They flock to their Snapchats and other messengers and it doesn’t help that Twitter has finally now tried to become a bit of a messenger by removing its 140 character limit from direct messages. By now, there are too many other options. The incentive for young people to be on Twitter is low. It’s like a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone and they’re all talking rubbish at the same time anyway. “It’s too many opinions and topics and very tedious to keep abreast of everything that’s flying around,” said one young girl I asked. An active user said she loved Twitter because so many odd and bizarre ideas could be shared freely, “You can talk as much as you like about your interests and no one cares,” she said. But obviously she is in the minority and the greater number consists of those who find Twitter too chaotic and the onboarding so difficult that it makes them feel like they’re the only ones too dumb to follow conversation. The intimidating trolls, the speed with which content randomly streams past is just too overwhelming to keep users involved — which is just what Twitter needs.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 13-07-2015)
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Rahul Narvekar, former co-founder of Fashionandyou, talks about the NDTV-backed Indian fashion portal Indianroots, his new venture. He tells BW Businessworld what it takes to make the e-commerce site profitable. What was the rationale behind starting another e-commerce portal on fashion out of India?We observed an Indian lady would be willing to pay a couple of lakhs or more for a handcrafted bag from Italy but would not pay Rs 26,000 for a hand-painted sari from India. This is because the Italian government has made their products flauntable. We haven't done that yet. Our aim is to make Indian fashion a premium product and sell it like a luxury. Another reason is the profit margins in fashion are very high, almost 50 per cent. In the first year itself we did revenue of Rs 5 crore and next year it jumped to Rs 61 crore. In fact, we created history by selling one of the most expensive shawl worth Rs 19 lakh on an ecommerce website. It was a restored heirloom piece by designer Pranavi Kapoor. Why Indianroots targets Indian diaspora as its customer when the Indian market is itself huge?We were targeting the market outside India initially because of the huge marketing cost required for customer acquisition. NDTV, who is a majority shareholder, gave us a media inventory of 36 crore on dot-com and television outside India. This amount of money wasn't enough to compete with companies like Flipkart and Jabong. So, we decided to target the market outside India because it is largely unexplored and there is a huge demand for Indian fashion. The plan was to enter India after two years when we would have made substantial revenue. But after one year itself we realised we are getting 33 per cent of our traffic from India from organic word-of-mouth. That has made us divert our attention now to India which will be our main focus for this year. What are your future plans apart from focusing on IndiaWe have 100 designers and 700-plus brands on our portal. We are now dropping the ethnic tag and extending the category to Indian fashion - fusion stuff and a lot more of westernised clothes with Indian sensibilities. We will add more categories, regional brands, and bring in more affordable products. The idea is to bring down our average order value from Rs 17,000-Rs 25,000, which is maximum in Indian fashion space, to Rs 6,000-7,000.
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You can keep off statins as well as protect your heart by following a few simple dietary and lifestyle changes, says Rachna ChhachhiWe’ve all heard and read about how high cholesterol is bad for you and how statins have severe side-effects. So how can we ensure that we don’t get high cholesterol to avoid medication and keep our hearts healthy?Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance that the body needs to function normally and is naturally present in the body. It performs three main functions: Helps make the outer coating of cells, makes up the bile acids that work to digest food in the intestine and allows the body to make vitamin D and hormones, like estrogen in women and testosterone in men. Without cholesterol, none of these functions would take place, and without these functions, human beings wouldn’t exist. But, it takes only a small amount of cholesterol in the blood to meet these needs.If a person has too much cholesterol in the bloodstream, excess is deposited in arteries in the heart, brain and legs. Blockage to the leg arteries causes claudication (pain with walking) due to peripheral artery disease. Carotid (brain) artery blockage may cause stroke, and blockage of the coronary arteries leads to angina (chest pain) and heart attack.High cholesterol levels are due to a variety of factors including heredity, diet, and lifestyle. Less commonly, underlying illnesses affecting the liver, thyroid, or kidney may affect blood cholesterol levels.If a person has high lipoproteins and thus high cholesterol, you need to drastically change your diet and lifestyle to reduce cholesterol and become heart friendly. Follow these simple but very effective steps to get rid of high cholesterol and protect your heart.Increase good fats and reduce bad ones. Reduce your intake of cooked and saturated fats, and increase intake of good fats at room temperature like cold compressed extra virgin olive oil, flaxseed oil, oily fish like tuna, salmon, sardines, trout, rawas, nuts and seeds like almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, and avocados, which are high in mono unsaturated fats. Good fats lower LDL (the bad cholesterol) and raise HDL (the good cholesterol that protects the heart). Total calories from fat should be 20 per cent, 15 per cent out of which should come from good fats. Vegetarians should take fish oil capsules.Eliminate milk and milk products. Many vegetarians wonder why they get high cholesterol. It’s because of milk, ghee, butter, paneer, etc. Cholesterol is caused by animal fat, and milk is animal fat.Reduce coffee to two cups a day. Regular heavy coffee consumption can raise cholesterol so reduce it to two cups a day.Swallow garlic. Garlic is a natural antibiotic and cleanser. Countries that use a lot of garlic in their diets have a naturally low incidence of heart disease, like Japan, Thailand and China. Garlic reduces blood pressure and prevents our arteries from getting deposits since it reduces the lipids in blood.Increase fibre intake. It is essential to wash away bad cholesterol, bad fats from our blood, and a higher intake of fibre does this action of washing away these. Fibre is present in raw fruits and vegetables that are very effective in flushing bad lipids out of your blood.Munch on red grapes. These contain antioxidants that protect our hearts by lowering bad cholesterol and reducing blood pressure and blood clots. In fact, red wine is good for the heart for this reason only. The action of crushing and fermenting the grapes releases a higher quantity of resveratrol and catechins in red wine, hence one unit of red wine (150 ml) 3-4 times a week is even better than eating grapes or drinking grape juice.Follow these, get off statins and reduce your risk of heart disease. Such a simple remedy to avoid spending lakhs of rupees on surgery, right? (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 13-07-2015)
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The quest for fresh value from new markets, new consumers or even new offerings are all risks to running performance, says Ramesh Jude ThomasMomofukus started as a single noodlebar in New York, arguably the toughest food and beverages (F&B) market on the planet. When they opened their doors for business in August 2004, Manhattan already had over 13,000 places to eat. But Momofukus obviously found their niche quite quickly with a reputation that went far beyond New York City. With that they later expanded to locations as far away as Sidney. It is a testament to their obsessive commitment and standards that their 37-year-old founder, David Chang, is the only Asian chef to make it to TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.Many businesses have limited locations and a finite set of clients. But a few of them choose to subscribe to exacting standards far above the norm for their business. These could be in design, manufacturing, packaging or customer experience. One or more of these will be of a level far above the demands of the limited catchment that they service.And at times this could be a virtue. Theobroma in Mumbai is a fine example of a small but rapidly growing bakery business that is obsessed with maintaining its impeccable product and innovation standards. As a result, I suspect, they have a fervently loyal set of regulars who are driving growth through thoroughly well-deserved advocacy. It’s very difficult to play catch up with an obsession like that.On the flip-side, there are any number of businesses which have achieved international footprint by a combination of scaling and acquisition. We know through hard experience that many of these “global businesses” trade in standards in exchange for market presence. Or at least fail to keep pace with the increasing demands of an expanded play in their rush to conquer new territory. I dare say, the undoing of two of the biggest handset brands had less to do with the advent of Apple or Samsung than a comfortable sense of numbness about what they were serving up each year.Last fortnight, we explored the cross-border ambitions of Indian aspirants. An increasing number of players, in an ever widening number of categories from metals to automobiles and even consumer goods, are planting their flags on foreign shores. There is an unfathomable urgency amongst these worthies to get going as soon as they land. A ringside view will reveal the need to convince an impatient shareholder that it was indeed worth the investment.Many of them come apart quite quickly. And this happens primarily for two reasons: either there is little understanding of what it takes to play in more complex environments, or worse, there is a substantial dilution of already existing standards in their anxiety to cover new ground. For example, domestic leadership in Indian telecom doesn’t necessarily equip you for the African market!Most well-meaning firms struggle with the ability to retain (or build) the exacting standards that are absolutely essential to retain the essential character of their businesses. The quest for fresh value from new markets, new consumers or even new offerings, are all risks to running performance. It is only the firms that can scale the standards that can overcome the pangs of expanding globally.The reason why so many of the Fortune 500 still come from a clutch of Western nations is not hard to find. They set high bars. They are relentless about raising that bar and they usually are uncompromising (with the entire ecosystem) about adhering to these in letter and spirit.Going worldwide is not the same as becoming world-class. There’s a world of difference.The author is president and CKO, EQUiTOR Value Advisory(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 13-07-2015)
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Significant gains have been made during Modi’s visit to Bangladesh, yet there are impeding issues to be addressed, says Kanwal Sibal
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