“We cater to the world market!”, err and India?
Yesterday I visited a German Architecture and Furnishing Showroom (cum office) to select hardware for the new house I and my family would be moving to soon. As impressed as I was by the quality of the fixtures, it amazed me how there were few that were ‘really’ manufactured for the Indian market. Häfele Hardware is a world-class architecture fittings company that caters to the world market. Or atleast that’s what the salesman said! While the fixtures for wardrobes and doors can be well-adapted by Indian homes - assuming that most Indians wear western formal as well as casual attire, the kitchen fixtures were not even close to the needs of an Indian housewife. Case in point - my mother whose a housewife and has different storage and utility needs which is quite different from that of a Western kitchen. Inquisitively, I asked the salesman - ‘There is nothing here that can be adapted for an Indian kitchen’. His clumsy answer was ‘We cater to the world market’. At that point of time, I said to myself ‘Damn! These guys got the wrong world map!’. With such a huge consumer market, I personally feel, Indians deserve more than what the western companies have to offer. Somehow, us, Indians just can not adapt to everything western! Surely, the western toilet is a lot more comfortable, but we would still love to eat roti-sabzi (rather than microwavable food) the way we’ve been eating since ages! Thus, we need kitchens that got to have the space we need for the rolling pan! We got to have shelves where we can put spices. We got to have more storage for our attas and pickles. NO! We do not need fully-retractable snack packet holders (which look like wending machines). We still need the shelves for PET bottles which will be filled with branded snacks unpacked from their colorful packing! At least, in terms of our eating habits, even the largest multinational food chains need to adapt! (Mc Donald’s Mc Aloo Tikki).
Interestingly (and incidentally), today I read that Ikea (A Swedish furnishing company) took to some baseless commentary on Indian Retail and how there seems to be no future in it. Reliance, Wal-mart and many others think otherwise - for a good reason: Growing consumer demands for a higher standard of living by the huge Indian population!