Expert Zone
Straight from the Specialists
Why no McDosa?
(The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent those of Reuters)
The whole world now knows that India has arrived. It isn’t just Infosys and TCS. Tata is the largest manufacturer in Britain with Jaguar Land Rover and Corus — not to speak of Tetley. Bajaj exports a significant proportion of its motorcycle output to Africa — and so on. Indian companies are finally starting to make a significant impact on the global scene.
So what about the global High Street? There’s a McDonalds but why is there no McDosa? I know I’ve raised this before in this column — but I simply don’t understand it. The whole world loves Indian food. There’s nowhere you can go in Europe and very few places in the United States where you can’t find a restaurant which purports to be Indian — even if in reality it’s Bangladeshi.
I was in Rheims the other day — a medium-sized French city with a wonderful market and a beautiful cathedral where the French kings were traditionally crowned. Rheims is in the heart of the champagne country; so in every restaurant and cafe the thing is to have a ‘coupe de champagne’. Naturally, right in the middle of all this is a very busy ‘restaurant indien’, complete even with champagne bar, and the locals love it — champagne and tikka kebab — wonderful.
So, if Indian food is so popular and Indian entrepreneurs are so courageous and successful, why is there no Indian worldwide restaurant chain? It isn’t that Indians don’t understand hospitality. Indian hotel chains like Taj and Oberoi are amongst the world’s best — and they are busy expanding internationally too.
It just seems to me there’s a real gap in the market for an Indian worldwide restaurant chain.
India has the food, it has the knowledge, it has the experience, it has the finance. Now Indian entrepreneurs — get on with it.
Family businesses and the brand
(The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent those of Reuters)
I’ve had a lot to do with family businesses, in India of course, but also in Britain, Spain and quite a few other places. In fact, I come from a family business. My father was head of a transport business and all his brothers (my uncles) and, maybe more important, all the brothers’ wives were in it too.
The wives didn’t work in it, of course, not in those days, but they were pretty good at being involved (and sometimes stirring up trouble — ‘he earns more than you’ or even ‘his office is bigger than yours’). The trouble with family businesses is that not every member of the family is suitable material. It isn’t just an issue of intelligence; it also has to do with motivation, temperament, age and a whole variety of other factors.
I had a very good friend who became head of a large family business and he was haunted by the idea of heredity. Would he have been good enough for the job if it hadn’t been for his name, he thought? The business was publicly quoted, the family only had a protected minority interest but, in the end, it was taken over and he left. Thrown out? Not quite; but he wasn’t welcome to stay. Look at the Murdochs today. It seems to be a repetition of the same old story.
Family businesses often split apart. Brothers and cousins take their parts of the business in different directions. Some are successful, others flounder and they often keep the same name or one so similar that it confuses everyone. ‘No, it’s not that Shree Ram, it’s the other one!’
Is that a way to carry on a business? If you are going to break away, make another business, you are going to do things differently then you must have another name and a quite different brand.
You can’t keep pretending that you are the original and that the others are imitations — it just doesn’t make any kind of sense. It’s confusing and, ultimately, self-destructive.
What’s in a name?
(The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent those of Reuters)
So, Mamata Banerjee, the new chief minister of what is currently known as West Bengal, is proposing to change its name.
A couple of weeks ago they were thinking of changing from West Bengal to Bengal, a recommendation which we at Saffron made to the previous Communist government a few months ago. Now it appears that the new government is considering a new name, which is likely to be Paschimbanga, apparently pronounced Poschimbongo. Banerjee’s own preference was said to be for Bangabhumi.
The whole point of this exercise is to make people living in Bengal feel good about their state and also to attract investment. Since a significant proportion of people in Bengal don’t speak Bengali, it doesn’t seem to be very helpful to introduce a name which is, first of all, in Bengali and, secondly, sounds like somewhere quite other.
In addition to all that, Bengal has enough problems attracting direct investment without people being confused about where it is. Haven’t they got enough issues to deal with already?
A few years ago — I can’t recall how many — Bombay changed its name to Mumbai; Madras became Chennai and so on. But I still keep on hearing stories about tourists arriving at Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport in Mumbai and thinking they have come to the wrong place.
Names linger. Old ones don’t go away that easily. You can’t just throw Bombay out of the window. It just won’t go. New names don’t get adopted that easily either. Who talks about Bengaluru? Nobody I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t advise anyone to spend any time in Silicon Valley talking about Bangalore in that way. Nobody will know what they’re talking about.
Well said.. We want McDosas