Chennai..Vada Chennai!

It’s a pleasure welcoming you all to my third ever LinkedIn article and the second part of the series that I had promised you last time around. If you can hear the BGM from the Karthi starrer,Ranjith directorial Madras while reading the title, then cheers welcome to the visual thinkers club. :)

This time it’s about the experiences that I was gifted with during my MBA summers.

It was a paid internship with a leading national automotive and industrial battery maker headquartered from Chowringhee Road, Kolkata. My posting was initially supposed to be at the headquarters at Kolkata but they later shifted it to regional headquarters in Aminjikarai, Chennai.

Since they said “headquarters”, I went with this idea of a menial desk job where I would be doing some paperwork and getting my internship certificate . Well what happened was a 2 month rollercoaster ride around the entire Chennai region. By this I mean,not just the greater metropolis but the suburbs too. By the time I had finished this internship, I knew the in and out of Chennai-every damn arterial road, bypass, overbridge,landmark,water tank, tiny cross street like the back of my weared down hand except for a few spots in VadaChennai which was built like a fortress with their gigantic football grounds and confusing alleys, not to mention the most friendly inhabitants.

The parties who know me know how chill I am. Chill to the point only after being subjected to gather market insights throughout Chennai, I realised I didn’t even have a bike with me at that point of time. So what do i do? I call up my dear friend who is in Coimbatore and has a spare bike in the best possible condition and ask him to put it in a travels bus so that I can pick it up the next day from CMBT. The bike arrives next day through KPN travels, void of fuel as customary for transit and I sign the papers,take it to a fuel station nearby and bang... the relentless journey of nearly 65 days begins. I had together market insights from Chennai South& West headquartered at Poonamallee for 15 days, central Chennai headquartered at Egmore for 15 days and North Chennai from Royapuram for 15 more days. The rest of the days were dedicated to report making, corrections and submission.

In the first three odd days, I had become street smart enough to survive the rest of the gruelling internship. It was not only my MBA summers but also happened to be the Indian scorching summer. An average heat of 40° celsius every single moment you choose to go out.

On some days I used my friend’s pulsar 135 cc bike black coloured and stylish but drank a major portion of my pocket money for its fuel. So I decided to stay on the mileage king Splendor ,the one from Coimbatore as my regular drive for the rest of the internship if I have to save anything from the 12k stipend. 

So as fixed investments, I bought a golden frame cooler pair(which I have with me as memorabilia to this day), a face mask since I throttled down the dirtiest national highways and ditchlanes in and around the city and always had with me an ice chilled water bottle to spare me through the day. I went around retail points-both regular dealers and multi retailers with a printed sheet in my hand indicating some parameters regarding the market stock,from which I can derive my insights later. The only goals in my mind at that point of time were to cover every single regular dealer in my purview & a major chunk of multi brand retailers along with some other brand competitor retailers. 

The reactions from the retailers can be categorised into the following braod buckets:

When I went to

Same brand,accompanying the engineer-treated like royalty

Same brand, without the engineer-treated ok(sometimes unwilling to give data)

Multi branders,on my own-depended on the mood of the dealer(both good and hostile experiences) and 

Lastly Non home brand competitors(treated like s#*t).

Also geographically I could observe a lot of demographical and behavioural change in attitude towards the stranger.

Contrary to my wildest of expectations, every single by passer,commuter,pedestrian or shopkeeper in North Chennai treated me like some comrade,compatriot, friend whatever you call it. Whenever I asked directions that Google maps got confused about, they drew maps in their hands and passionately redirected me towards my intended destination narrating like a film script “Go this way Thala,use the compound as your companion,when the compound ends- turn left, then go straight until a tea shop with a shopkeeper having a white beard and red towel from where you can have tea and turn right or turn right straightaway if you are not interested in having tea now! “ 

Yes this is how excited they were when asked about a simple landmark in the locality. I couldn’t find such passion in the conversations with the so called “regular” Chennaite-the elitist/average Guindy or Velachery guy whose maximum response was “Enaku theryaadhu. Ask someone else! Am new to this area” 

In such places,Google was my only respite along with the “address illaa” street knowing Autorickshaw Annas.

Food was awesome in most of the places even in the most humble of locations. If I have to mention some places of street food and kayyendhi bhavans during this period,it has to be a separate blog or article by itself. Simple example, during the nights while submitting my attendance to the reporting office, it would get as late as 9.15/9.20. If I drove straight to my hostel mess, nothing would be left there for me to eat by that time. So when I had money, I would eat at a Vasantha/Saravana Bhavan at the Ashok Pillar. Else I would have some steaming hot idlies,dosas and chapattis along with spicy omelettes at the Kayyendhi Bhavan near Udhayam theatre where occasionally I hop in for a night flick whenever am too tired to drive further (hostel in OMR) or a good movie simply shows up. I don’t get that kick of seeing movies at 50/60 odd bucks in a pucca mass audience theatre like Udhayam even in the most posh multiplexes where we pay 500 approx per ticket including parking ticket and snacks.

To simply sum it up in a nutshell, I had the most amazing internship experience one could get in a lifetime. A roller coaster ride where I met the most people in a single span of time, clocked nearly 100kms per single day for consistently two odd months, experienced every cuisine possible in Chennai, explored every type of locality by wheels. And the company fellows were very supportive as well especially the service engineers and managers in each locality who helped me develop an understanding of how the market works at the grassroots level.

Though I produced the right numbers and expected a PPO, I was appreciated well for my contributions but the company was not hiring that season. Though I was a little disappointed at that time, these experiences fuelled towards landing multiple jobs at the same time during my end placements where I had 3 jobs in hand at once and accepted the banking one.

In the next parts of the series, if I can muster up the same amount of effort I am doing now, I will talk about other noteworthy experiences in my professional life. Kudos for being the sport that you are and for always appreciating my content endeavours.

Love,

Sakthi.