December 2014 – Pertinent Observations

Modifying old blog posts

The wife and I have both spent the last day of 2014 consolidating our blogs. I’ve imported my posts from the two other blogs that I’ve been writing for the last couple of years – bespokedata.in and rq.nationalinterest.in. The plan is that rather than having a dispersed voice across blogs, I’ll integrate everything here. As part of that exercise I’ve made some personal blog posts password-protected, and made some others private.

Of course there are some “arbit” posts that are still visible, and when I do end up putting my name on this blog they’ll come to be associated with me. But then I consider them to be part of my character – if you strip away the arbitness from my body of writing then it might as well have been not written by me. Impersonal writing is just not for me.

Anyway so while I’ve been consolidating my blogs and taking some posts private, the wife has been doing something similar. Today she started what she says is her eighth blog – she calls herself a “compulsive blog starter”. As part of the consolidation process, she has imported her posts from her seven previous blogs into this one.

Now, some of these seven blogs are old, really old, and contain posts that she is not currently particularly proud of. And she has spent a considerable amount of time today editing and deleting some of these posts – most of which had been written as far back as in 2006. She says that some of the stuff she had written back then is not consistent with the person that she is today, and hence it is worth deleting. I’m not so sure.

I think a blog is like an online diary. Among other things it’s a record of your thoughts at a particular point in time. Going back a few years to someone’s blogs helps us understand what that person was like at that point in time, and perhaps do a comparative analysis of what they were then to what they are now.

While the wife has been modifying and deleting some ancient blog posts, I’ve also been dealing with some old blog posts, but in a different way. I’ve been reading them. And reading my posts from 2004 and 2005 have helped me understood my thought process in those years, and what my life was like then. These posts help me understand some of the decisions that I had made then which I have subsequently questioned.

Of course there is more than a fair share of cringeworthy posts from that period, but my logic is that while they may not be consistent with the person that I am today, they need not be. By updating those posts to make them consistent with the person that I am today, I’m making them inconsistent with the date tagged to the posts!

Nothing is permanent, and that includes a person’s frame of mind and way of thinking. It is almost a given that one is likely to find one’s old writing (irrespective of how old it is) cringeworthy on some front or the other. That however doesn’t mean that a person goes back in time changing one’s thoughts to make them more contemporary! For doing so destroys information that is embedded in the post as it is!

So I must mention that I’m not particularly in approval of the wife’s updation and deletion of her old blog posts. While I’ve done something like that (taking some posts private) I haven’t destroyed any information nor changed them in an irretrievable fashion. Modifying old blog posts is like rewriting history!

Ashirwad Retail

This is a blog post I had written on 12th June 2007 and for some reason not published! Was cleaning up my drafts today and found this, and thought it would be good to publish just to show how I thought 7 years back!

This evening I accompanied my mother to this store called Ashirwad Departmental Stores in Basavanagudi (near South End Circle). If you would ask me to describe the store I might probably call it a family-owned supermarket. And in my opinion, that store is easily the best department store I’ve seen in terms of customer service. And I believe this particular model might end up being the big success story in Indian retail.

Being a stand-alone store, Ashirwad may not have the supply chain efficiencies that chains such as Big Bazaar claim to have. It may not offer the discounts that say a Subhiksha offers. It may not be airconditioned and have the perfect lighting like yet another of the larger retailers. However, I believe it makes up for all this, and more

What Ashirwad so nicely achieves is in combining the good points of both organized and unorganized retail while trying to eliminate the drawbacks of both. To elaborate, one usually associates family run ‘kirana’ stores with inconvenient formats (you need to ask the shopkeeper for everything you need), lack of facility for bill payment for credit cards (i hear this is changing now), old or non-moving stock, the lack of a “shopping experience” and so forth.

Organized retail usually loses out on factors such as incompetent staff and store managers, ignorance of staff about store layout, bureaucracy, rules and most importantly the “impersonal” feeling. There are also quality issues that people (such as my mother) raise about the store-branded goods (mostly groceries) that are available at the supermarkets.

A family run supermarket tackles them all. The thing with Ashirwad is that the guy at the billing counter (there is just one, and there are no huge queues) is one of the owners of the store, and the store P&L has a direct impact on his life. He reports to no one, and hence has to offer no explanations. This solves a large number of problems – starting from billing time to allowing people to selling without a bill. Also, I noticed one thing that two people do the billing simultaneously (one looks at the items and packs them, while the other keys in the codes) speeds up the billing process by a huge amount.

Then, there is the format itself. It is a supermarket “help yourself” format, but there are staff all around (and they really know the store) in order to help you out if you can’t locate something. The level of intrusion, in my opinion, is just right. In fact, there are enough staff in the store so if you can’t, or don’t want to, go around the store to fetch things for yourself, the staff will do it for you, converting the store into a regular kirana. And you can browse all day if you want, and the staff won’t bother you, and it becomes a supermarket!

The most important thing that sets Ashirwad apart from the other supermarkets is that “personal” feeling. It being a family-run store, the staff are also fairly permanent (this perhaps explains their knowledge of the store layout – something sorely lacking in current “organized retail”) and if you visit the store a couple of times you become a “regular customer” and get the associated benefits. The same staff being there always also helps in case you want to return defective goods (another major hassle at supermarkets) or go to claim some unclaimed discount. Oh, and by the way, Ashirwad delivers.

The most important thing that sets Ashirwad apart from the other family run stores is it’s size and format. The shopping experience is sorely missing in the kiranas, and the fact that you need a shopkeeper to serve you also increases service time. They accept both credit card and meal pass coupons without a fuss, and most of the stock looks fresh. The in-store brands (in groceries) are also supposed to be of good quality.

However, what really struck me about Ashirwad, and I see that as a clear sign of financial strength, is the range of inventory. One way stores like Subhiksha save on expenses is by stocking only the really fast moving of FMCGs, thus saving on inventory carrying costs. Which means that every visit to a Subhiksha has to be followed by a visit to some other store to get what you didn’t get at Subhiksha (which is a lot). The range of goods (talkign about biscuits and tea and cosmetics here) I saw at Subhiksha seemed much larger than that I’ve seen at Food World, or maybe even Big Bazaar. I’m really impressed.

Now that I’ve praised the Ashirwad model so much, the question is regarding its scalability. Is it possible for me to open a thousand Ashirwads, and hope to give the Big Bazaars and Reliance Retails a run for their money? The answer, I think, is no and yes.

One of the key things that make Ashirwad what it is is that it is a standalone store, and it is a family that runs it. As I talked earlier, a large number of benefits of kirana stores are also seen in Ashirwad purely because the guy at the cash counter owns a share of the P & L, and that he has full control of the store. I opening a thousand such stores would imply employing store managers, and staff, and doing everything top down. Doesn’t fit into the concept at all.

So is there some hope in this? What if I can link up with a thousand such kiranas and make money out of that? I need not open a thousand Ashirwads myself. What I need to do is to convert a thousand existing kiranas into Ashirwads. And get a share of their profits (or maybe a fixed fee) while they function like a thousand independent Ashirwads – with all the associated benefits, and owning their own P&Ls.

Now if this format is such a clear winner, why is it not being replicated? Why are there not already a thousand Ashirwads out there? Looking at the various players, the people best placed to convert to this format are the kirana owners. Why are they not doing it, when it is such a winner? I believe the main, and maybe only, reason is that they don’t NEED TO. They don’t see any benefits in remodeling their store, and offering things they are not offering right now, and are hence not spending in this direction. They believe they are making enough money in the present format and there is no need ot change.

In the introduction to this piece, I actually mentioned a couple of drawbacks that Ashirwad suffers vis-a-vis organized retail. I mentioned reduction in supply chain costs. And I also mentioned discounts. Is there a way in which we could work with say fifty Ashirwad-like stores in a large city such as Bangalore and help them save costs? Is there something we can do that can save costs for all these guys (and significnatly so that a part of it can be passed on to the customer) and also make a profit for ourselves?

What kind of model can we use for this? How can we save the costs for the stores? What revenue sharing model do we use, and how do we make money? Who invests in teh store remodeling, us or them? Why will the stores partner us? Will their revenues increase so much by joining with us that they can pay us a part of that? All these questions still need to be answered. And once I do that, I need to approach someone with loads of money in order ot implement it.

2014: Year in review

2014 was a big year in terms of changes in personal life, with two big events that might both end up being investments in potential bubbles.

In April this year, we completed the purchase of an apartment in Jayanagar, Bangalore. We had expressed our interest to buy it back in 2012, when the construction of the building started, but it took until 2014 for the building to get completed.

The first few months of the years thus went primarily into overseeing the final stages of construction of the house, getting the interiors done, and getting a bank loan to fund the purchase (which turned out to be harder than I expected). Finally, after what seemed like an eternity we moved into the apartment towards the end of May.

And barely two months later the wife moved out. In August she left for Barcelona to do an MBA at IESE Business School. She has completed one term and so far seems to be enjoying it. I’m back to a bachelorly life here in Jayanagar and so far I’ve been coping reasonably well.

I stopped making coffee at home in order to cut down my caffeine consumption. Now I walk 10 minutes to Maiya’s in Jayanagar 4th Block to get my caffeine fix. It costs eighteen rupees plus about five minutes spent standing in queue, but it’s really awesome and well worth it!

On the professional front, things have been quieter than I had imagined. My consulting continues, and I ventured into a new sector this year. I still need to up my business development, though, and that is going to be the focus in the new year. There have also been a couple of interesting opportunities for a change in line that have come up towards the end of the year but it now looks like I’ll continue what I’ve been doing.

There has been one exciting development on the professional front though – I started teaching at IIMB earlier this month. I’m an “adjunct faculty” and will be there for the length of one term. The classes started a bit slowly (in terms of student participation) but now I think I quite like the lot. And so far I’ve been enjoying teaching. I hope I can continue doing this going forward.

Another feature of my life this year is my constant in-and-out in my use of social media, primarily facebook and twitter. I was off twitter for all of January, August, September and October, and part of December. I was off Facebook for most of this time (all except January). The break helped and my blogging has picked up significantly. So much so that the hosting provider had to twice increase my bandwidth quota!

My plan for next year on the professional front is to ramp up on business development and hopefully expand my business. I want to write a book. I’d set a rather aggressive target for that but now it looks unlikely and I need to possibly extend it. And then I plan to see a little more of Europe (based in Barcelona – helps that Vueling has its hub there), and hopefully do a bike trip. Of course one can’t plan for everything!

Wishing all of you a happy new year 2015 and a great year ahead!

Natural monopoly in package delivery

I’ve never got a call from a postman asking for the route to my home. I’m assuming none of you have, either. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that anyone even writes the recipient’s phone numbers on any letter or package that is being sent by ordinary post. It is assumed that the address uniquely identifies your house and the postman knows how to get there.

However, every time I get a courier or any other package delivered I’m faced with a constant barrage of calls from the delivery person. And this after living in Jayanagar, which apart from a few dead ends and diagonal roads is like Manhattan in that mains and crosses can be easily used to identify approximate locations of addresses beyond which door numbers uniquely identify houses. The problem is that most delivery persons of “private” courier companies have as their domains areas much larger than Jayanagar, because of which they have little domain knowledge of Jayanagar.

The reason why delivery persons of “private” courier companies have large domain areas is the number of packages that these companies deliver – the market is generally quite fragmented and so the number of packages that a single company has to deliver in a particular area is low, because of which the area assigned to each delivery person is large, because of which the delivery person is unable to “figure out” his complete area, which makes the entire delivery process inefficient.

Package delivery can hence be considered to be a “natural monopoly“, in that it is more efficient for one provider to deliver packages in a particular area than for several providers to deliver in the same area. A single provider delivering packages in an area can have delivery persons who are knowledgeable about the area and can hence deliver with low transaction cost.

Hence there is scope for setting up a company that specialises in last mile delivery of packages, with delivery persons with intimate knowledge of small areas delivering packages in that area. This company can then take over the responsibility for delivery in that area from a large number of courier companies, e-commece companies which have their own logistics, etc. But then that will completely defeat the purpose of a “courier service”!

If only India Post increases reliability to a level where e-commerce players start using it rather than their own delivery services.

(Companies such as Uber, which sends you a different cab each time you call for one and thus has no way to exploit this “natural monopoly”, solve the problem by providing their drivers with GPS and turn by turn navigation. Perhaps courier companies can learn from this?)

The trigger for this post was this Amazon delivery person who kept calling me every two minutes asking me to provide him directions to my house. As if I don’t have any better job. I told him that figuring out addresses is a part of his job and he can’t outsource it to me. I’m not at home so I don’t know if he’s even delivered the package.

Segmenting leisure hotels

The original idea for this pertinent observation comes from the wife. However, since she’s on an extended vacation and hence unlikely to blog this soon, I’m blogging it.

Hotels are traditionally classified into “business” and “leisure” hotels. As the names suggest, the former mostly cater to business travellers and the latter to vacationers. The lines can be a little blur, though, since business and leisure travels have complementary seasonality, thanks to which hotels practice “revenue management” by using their capacity for both business and leisure.

However, as we discovered during our vacation last week, leisure hotels can be further segmented into “couple hotels” and “family hotels”. Let me explain using the example of Vythiri Village Spa Resort where we spent most of last week. Based on our reading of the hotel, it was initially built to be a “couple hotel” but perhaps based on the kind of clientele they were getting, they turned it into a “family hotel”.

Now, the difference between couple hotels and family hotels essentially has to do with how child-friendly the place is. Vythiri, for example, had a “kids play area”, the balconies had been shuttered up with windows (creating greenhouses inside the balconies which made them horrible to hang out it, but making them safer for kids), had a pantry area (the balcony had been converted into a pantry – so people wiht babies could bring their electric cookers and cook!) and activities such as “guided nature walks” and “artificial waterfalls”. Even at its deepest the swimming pool was not more than three feet deep (no I didn’t test it).

The reason I say that the hotel was built for couples is to do with the large bathroom which also included the walk-in closet. Given that you might want to multiplex between one person showering and another dressing at the same time, this design made it obvious that it only works for couples, but not for people with kids – most parents are shy about letting their kids see them in various stages of undress.

Then this resort advertised itself as a “spa resort”, and a massage was included in our package. This is again a “couple thing” for people with kids are unlikely to be able to take time off from their kids to visit the spa! So everything about this resort told you that it had been designed for couples, but then changed its positioning to become a “family resort”!

I guess you get the drift. And so whenever the manager would accost us and ask if things were good, the wife would quickly nod him a “yes”, and then privately tell me that we were the wrong target segment for the hotel, and so our feedback didn’t really matter to him!

And so we stayed there, for three nights and a bit, looking at screaming kids every time we hit the restaurant (the buffet spreads were nice, so we didn’t order room service); looking in bemusement at people “going on nature walks”, ignoring the “entertainment” at the “gala Christmas dinner” and so forth.

We had a good time, though, eating, sleeping, talking, hanging about – mostly within the confines of the room. The service was great, the staff extremely friendly and pleasant. Only that we were the wrong target segment for the hotel, and we didn’t realise that while booking!

PS: I tried looking for a “marketing” category to put this post under but realised that none such exists. Goes to show what I’ve not been blogging about!

Consolidating blogs

For the last year and a bit, I’ve maintained two other blogs – one on public policy, and the other on data and pricing and other “work stuff”. The idea was to keep the profound “work stuff” separate from all the nonsense that I write on this blog. Dedicated blogs could have dedicated readers who follow me for dedicated stuff, without being burdened by stuff that they wouldn’t normally care about.

Looking back, the experiment hasn’t gone particularly well. The “work blog” especially hardly gets any hits, and that is not something I’m particularly happy with. More importantly, I think people look at me as a “package” – the reason they follow noenthuda is that they expect to read a variety of stuff here, not my views on a particular kind of stuff. And so it perhaps makes no real sense to separate out my three blogs, thus not presenting readers the full repertoire of my fundaes!

You might have noticed that you don’t find my real name anywhere on this blog. I mean if you were to search for it, you might find it linked to the blog, but I’ve so far taken care to not put my name here. This is to ensure some kind of plausible deniability since I write a lot of possibly politically incorrect stuff on this blog. So the stuff I write on petromaxes and goalkeepers should not appear to anyone who wants to read me for my fundaes on “data strategy”. Keeping my three blogs separate allows me to maintain this plausible deniability while also letting my friends know that all three are written by the same person, etc. (I once did a google search for my full name, and this blog was not found on the first page of results. The other two were).

I’ve been thinking about this, and considering the abysmal readership of my other blogs, I’ve come to the conclusion that I should integrate all three of them, here. So starting the first of January, I will be putting all my blogs here, on this blog. I’ll also be importing all my old posts from my other two blogs here, so that you can find everything in one place. And since the cloak of plausible deniability will then be blown, I’m going to take down some of my old possibly incriminating posts. So make the most of the next four days to read my archives!

Idea types and person-event types

Last night GP, the wife and I were drinking at Brewsky, a nice microbrewery in JP Nagar, Bangalore. We were seated at the bar, and were checking out some other people who were seated elsewhere at the bar. The wife pointed to two of them and independently asked GP and me to assess which of them was potentially more interesting (the independence was achieved thanks to a timely bio break I took). Most of GP and my assessment of these people tallied, but then GP popped up with this really interesting funda that I have to blog about!

So GP said “the woman sitting across from us looks more of the ‘ideas type’ while the woman seated to the right looks more of the ‘events and people type’ “. And in that one stroke, he had introduced this rather profound method of classifying people. He had created one other dimension of putting people into two categories (and in that instant doubling the number of two by twos along which people can be plotted!). And he had brought back to memory something I had seen in Bishop Cotton’s Boys’ School back in 1996.

The board near the administrative building at Cotton’s said “great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people”. Profound in itself but a three-way classification. Now, three way classifications are not as intuitive as two-way classifications. People generally prefer the latter. And in one shot last evening, GP had reduced this cumbersome three-way classification into a rather interesting two-way classification! To use the Cotton’s framework, he had clubbed the average and small minds!

In the past I’ve blogged about the concept of “who else have you been in touch with“. This is a phrase that pops up, I’ve argued, when you have met after a long time and have nothing else to talk about. A related concept is perhaps “what movie did you see recently?” (though that can occasionally lead to fairly profound discussion on ideas). Now, analysing life from GP’s framework, you will notice that when one of the persons involved in the conversation is an events-people types, it is but obvious that the conversation will quickly devolve to discussing people or events, and the best anchor for devolving into such is to seek stories of common acquaintances!

So are you an “ideas types” or an “events-person types”? Would you think such a classification is context-sensitive (depending on who you are talking to) or context free? Would you get offended if someone were to classify you as a “events-persons types”? What happens when an I-types meets and EP-types – what do they talk about? Is is even possible to talk ideas with EP-types? And what are the odds that a largish group can sustain I-types conversation?

I’ll end this post with an anecdote. Not so long ago I met a few old friends. It was a largish group, and the entire contents of the two-hours-or-so conversation can be classified into two types – discussions on mutual friends and acquaintances and “who else you are in touch with” (standard EP-type stuff), and discussion of concepts discussed on one of my blogs! Maybe I should take credit for pulling conversation in that group to I-type stuff!

Guarantees in meetings

There are some events/meetings which involve strong network effects. People want to attend such events if and only if a certain number of other people are going to attend it. But then they don’t know before hand as to who else is coming, and hence are not sure whether to accept the invitation. These are events such as school reunions, for example, where if only a few people come, there isn’t much value. And it’s hard to coordinate.

In such events it’s always useful to provide a guarantee. For example, a friend from (B) school was in town last week and expressed an interest in meeting other batchmates in Bangalore. A mail thread was promptly started but until the morning of the event, people remained mostly noncommittal. Not many of us knew this guy particularly well, though he is generally well-liked. So none of us really wanted to land up and be among only one or two people along with this guy.

And then there was a guarantee. One other guy sent a mail saying he’d booked a table at a bar, and this sent a strong signal that this guy was going to be there too. Then there were a couple of other very positive replies and the guarantee having been set, some seven or eight people turned up and the meeting can be called a “success”.

Sometimes when you’re trying to organise an event, it makes sense to get unconditional attendance guarantees from a couple of people before you send out the invite to the wider world. So you tell people that “X and Y” (the early guarantors) are definitely coming, and that will pull in more people, and that can be the trigger in making the event a success! In certain circles, X and Y need to be celebrities. In smaller circles, they can be common men (or women), but people whose guarantees of attendance are generally trusted (i.e. people who don’t have a history of standing up people)!

Another small reunion of my B-school batch happened last month and in the run-up to that I realised another thing about RSVPs – yeses should be public and noes private. One guy took initiative and mailed a bunch of us proposing we meet. I hit reply all on purpose to say that it was a great idea and confirm my attendance. Soon there was another public reply confirming attendance and this snowballed to give us a successful event. There were a few invitees we didn’t hear from, who didn’t attend, and I assume they had replied privately to the invite in the negative.

The problem with events on Facebook is that your RSVP is public irrespective of your reply – so even if you say no, everyone knows you’ve said “no”. And so you think it’s rude to say “no”, and say “yes” just out of politeness, even though you have no intentions of attending.

I’ve attended a few events where the hosts estimated attendance based on a Facebook invite and grossly overestimated attendance – too many people had hit “yes” out of sheer politeness.

So the ideal protocol should be “public yes, private no”. Facebook should consider giving this as an option to event creators so that people reveal their true preferences in the RSVP rather than saying “yes” out of sheer politeness.

In that sense it’s like a Vickery auction whose basic design principle is that people reveal their true willingness to pay and not underbid to avoid the winner’s curse!

Other airlines to bail out Spice Jet?

In a rather bizarre move, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has directed airlines to not charge “exorbitant fares” for passengers stood up upon cancellation of Spice Jet flights. This is a rather bizarre idea and effectively amounts to asking other airlines to partially bail out Spice Jet.

Essentially when an airline is in trouble, passengers are loathe to book tickets on it, for they know that the chances of their flight getting cancelled is high. A cancelled flight usually means either cancelling the trip itself or rebooking on another airline (sometimes airlines have arrangements with each other for taking on passengers on cancelled flights, but currently no other airline in India will give credit to Spice Jet). Either ways, it is a costly affair for the passengers.

By directing airlines to not charge “exorbitant fares”, and assuming that such a directive will be followed (very likely that this directive is meaningless for this is the busy season and other airlines are likely to be booked out), the total cost of booking a ticket on Spice Jet actually comes down, for the charge a customer will have to incur for re booking on another airline for a cancelled Spice Jet flight is likely to be reduced. And thus passengers will not abandon Spice Jet at the rate at which they normally would. And since other airlines are taking a hit on the spot fares they could potentially charge (in the absence of this directive) they are effectively subsidising and “bailing out” Spice Jet!

The other problem is that in the absence of market mechanisms (which the price cap effectively curb), how will other airlines allocate their remaining capacity among all the passengers who have been stood up by Spice Jet? Some arbitrariness is likely to ensue and passengers are likely to be left more disappointed!

The government had started off by handling the Spice Jet case rather well, as Devika Kher has argued here. However, of late, the wheels of the DGCA seem to have come off in his aspect, and there seems to be a concerted attempt to let Spice Jet stay afloat against the wishes of the market. The Airports Authority of India and oil companies have been asked to extend credit for fifteen days.

It seems Devika spoke too soon!

Receiving people and waiting for luggage

This morning was the first time ever that I’ve successfully received someone at the airport. Yes, the “successfully” was purposely inserted there, for I’d once driven up all the way to the Bangalore Airport only to find that the wife, who I had gone to receive, had already left by cab (her flight had landed early and baggage come out quickly). Apart from that one attempt in 2011, I’ve never ever gone to receive anyone at any airport – done a lot of receptions (not that kind of reception, silly) in railway stations, though!

So this morning I was again receiving the wife, who has come to town on vacation having completed one term of her MBA. I took the bus to the airport and reached at 8:30, in anticipation of the 8:50 flight, only to see that the flight from Dubai had “landed”, harbouring visions of the last time I’d (unsuccessfully) gone to receive her! Moreover, there was no way for me to reach her, for her Spain number doesn’t work here, and her India number was in my phone (I have a dual SIM phone!)! And so I stood at the arrival gate and waited, hoping that she had not missed me!

And while I was waiting there I realised that waiting for someone at the airport is like waiting for your luggage once you land. You know the flight has landed (in one of the cases, you actually travelled by it). But you know that the time taken for either your luggage or the person you’re waiting for to come is stochastic! And you hope that you’ve had a good day, and that the person/luggage comes asap!

In the luggage case, for a while the baggage belt is empty, and then bags start appearing. That’s when you start getting hopeful, waiting for your bag to arrive! Till there is baggage on the belt, you are at peace, using the restroom and retying your shoelaces and getting hold of a trolley if necessary! But once the baggage is on the belt you start getting anxious, and start harbouring notions of what if your baggage has not arrived!

Receiving your wife at the airport is also similar. Till you know that people from her flight have started to come out, you are at peace. You go get yourself a cup of coffee (have you noticed that coffee at Hatti Kaapi at the Bangalore arrival gate is much cheaper than that at Maiya’s at the other end of the airport? That’s for another blogpost!). You people watch, you observe the structure of the airport and (if you are a first-time receiver like me) observe what the arrival gate looks like from the outside.

And then people start arriving with Dubai Duty Free shopping bags (the wife flew Emirates) and that is the equivalent of the first bag arriving on the belt! And now you become tense, start wondering if the wife successfully made it to the flight (she was connecting via Dubai), and if her baggage made it to the flight, and why she’s taking so long. And then she arrives. It’s the kind of joy you have when you see your bag on the far end of the carousel and can’t wait for it to get to you! And then it arrives and you pick it up (in case of the wife, not literally) and off you go!