I dont remember having wished so many people Happy Diwali ever in my life. I mean, I always had a lot of friends.. but wishing Happy Diwali was never such a big deal. You just met friends, family, relatives, acquaintances, new people. You ate a lot of good food/sweets, burst a lot of crackers, and had a good deal of fun. This explicit expression of Diwali bringing great joy, happiness, prosperity and a whole lot of other things was never soooo important. It "used to" go without saying that you mean well!
All this- before I got a mobile phone, and my friend living across the street got a mobile phone, and the friend living in the other city, and my aunty, and my servant, and my grocery store guy, and the tailor, and the barber and everyone else that I knew decided to get a mobile phone. Before 70% of my office folks got my cell number. and before all of them decided to send a Diwali message to all the people in their extended phonebook (thats a selling proposition - 500 numbers on phone memory and another 300 on the SIM! With the latest N series and x series and extendible memory blah, you dont need to worry!)
Simple maths - I wished more than 120 people today, some of them living overseas. I spent, thus, more than 60-70 bucks on wishing people. And i used orkut friend list to wish some 300 people or so! I have received more than a 100 message during the day. Thats 7-8k telecom revenue in the vicinity of my near and dear ones! And I am not even the most popular person around! I would always wonder how many messages the babe living down the street got!! With every company claiming to have a few million subscribers, I wonder what the daily revenue looks like for these companies. Several millions/billions? On such "simply" important days as new year, diwali, holi and "extremely" important days like Friendship Day/Women's Day/ Mother's day!!
On a separate note, before the age of media glorifying the ritual of simple love, I always thought that everyday was Mother's day and Friendship day! And being a little unbiased when it comes to gender, every day is Men's day and Women's day as well!!
I wont be surprised if a couple of years from now, people start sending "Gandhigiri" messages on 2nd October, and "Republican/Long Live Democracy" kinda messages on 26th Jan/15th August.
This is my explicitly spoken apology to all those who feel happy/get bugged with the continuously ringing/beeping cellphones carrying the same "May the goddess of light..." messages from n different people. Some call back to say - Thanks for remembering. Some message back with another deepawali forward that they got from someone else. Some choose to ignore. Some feel important.
2 comments:
check out bharti's results at http://www.bhartiairtel.in - that should answer your question about how much the companies earn ;-)
you wont leave a chance to promote you company, would you? :)
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