Learning to love the salesman

Selling stuff to people is not the easiest thing in the world.
As a salesman, you have to smile as the door slams on your face. You have to learn to live with a lack of trust from a constant suspicion that you might sell stuff that is not necessary or is not worth the price you ask for.
But what can explain why the best achievers are all wonderful salespeople in their own right?
People who constantly sell themselves and their ideas to hard nosed men in power who got there the same route stand out from those who want recognition and do nothing about it.

But then the life of a salesman is never easy.

I only had to attend the public lecture at LSE by Prof. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School who happens to be the convenor of the Copenhagen Consensus to find out.
Before I get ahead, the Copenhagen Consensus is a get-together of the 30 best economists in the world, with experts on the biggest problems that the world faces today.
A 'dream-team' of eight (of which four are Nobel laureates in Economics) decide on the problems that have to be prioritized first. These are on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, thus if you had one dollar where would you put it to get the maximum benefit is the question they sought to answer.
To quench your curiosity, the four were
1. HIV/AIDS
2. Water Sanitation
3. Micronutrients ie providing the world's poor with sufficient vitamins and minerals
4. Malaria
Notably missing were Global Warming and lack of education, primary and secondary.

His effort is undoubtedly noteworthy as seen from the popularity the consensus has with mainstream media, including the economist magazine. However, it was a bit of sight as he was pulled apart by the other two on the panel.
Questions from the audience, which included comments on him being more of a statistician, an accountant, a PR guy and a number cruncher did not help the image either. The image of a salesman who just had the door slammed on his face that is.
After all, He was trying to sell his ideas on saving the world and it did not seem he found many buyers at LSE.
Me, on the other hand did find myself a buyer, even if rather reluctant initially.
The whole thing might seem simplistic to those with an intellectual bent of mind - Those who firmly believe no problem can be solved in this world without finding the complex roots of a nth order differential equation, but I beg to differ.
I liked the idea of putting all the world's problems in a simple table with costs in one column and benefits in one column.
Atleast the politicians will know something about it, not having to read through a billion pages of abstract papers and best of all, if they get their act, we will get somewhere in solving some of the world's worst problems. They might not be first four of the world's worst problems but they will be somewhere in the top 10 and that would be four already dealt with.
All because someone decided to do what most consider a rather dreary job of selling these ideas to the most powerful laymen in the world - the leaders of the world. He might fail to sell big when he has to deal with intellectual might of academic institutions that will inevitably be reluctant if anything at all, to buy his ideas. In the end, all that matters is he get the big fish, even if he misses out on the small ones.
Much better than Dr M Singh commissioning a study on what we need to deal with first, when there are problems staring at you in your face - you only have to walk on the road, which he has has probably not done after getting into government.
Twenty one years in India can only make you think- Before our bureaucrats get our act together, the list will probably change only for another PM to commission yet another study and so on it goes.

Snippets - Multiracial London to Tofu in a London Bus

There's seeming so little to write about when you open the editor, and you thought your mind was brimming with ideas only hours earlier.
So here's an attempt to recall and put a few things down in a style unusual to mine. Inevitably, that means it is inspired and thankfully it means shorter sentences and no preaching:)

1. London's amazingly multicultural - going by the number of mixed race couples you see on any given day in the city. Atleast one outdated edition of Lonely planet London claims you see more interracial couples in one day in London than a whole week in New York. Now before I succumb to the 'hey, I am at a better place' feeling, let me move on.

2. The gap in wages between women and men has had many labour economists baffled. Nothing seems to explain the wage gap. One interesting experiment asked a sample of men and women to fold letters in to envelopes. On being asked how much they should be paid - the average woman asked for 20% less wages and did some 20% more work than the average man.
Now who would not want to hire these women?

3. Looking at the news I have been reading, the countries that feature most after India seem to be Netherlands, Belgium, Kazakhstan and Poland. Countries, my life is going to be inexplicably linked with? Odd, very odd indeed. But then, as they say, the only chains are self imposed. A few weak ones might be imposed by your parents too.

4. Telugus have the unusual ability to live in oblivion. For a language spoken by more people in India than any language bar Hindi, it is largely unknown in many parts of the world.
Funnily enough, the only place in the world to get a book that teaches Telugu seems to be Andhra Pradesh - where not many people need it.
Whoever wrote up Google's HR page thought it exotic enough to write 'Googlers speak everything from Turkish to Telugu'
Given that atleast 5o million people speak Turkish, it can be assumed that the writer wanted to suggest geographical reach and diversity of people at Google. Thus, Turkish to Tuvalian might have achieved that objective. But then there are close to 100 million that speak Telugu!

Also worth mentioning is the uncanny ability of their neighbours, the Tamils, to stand out. While those at IIT Madras stood out quite easily for more reasons than one, I took it to be a characteristic of that one particular group.
Alas, it was not to be, there are Tamils in the corner store across the street, Tamils from all over the world at LSE, they are everywhere -A position their neighbours have managed only in the US and the IIT in the Tamils' backyard.

5. All those ideas have made me hungry, rather simplistically for food. That reminds me of that poor bag of groceries which made it to someone else's home when I paid for it. What would you expect if you absent-mindedly leave two carefully picked packs of Tofu1 and Noodles from that rather smelly Chinatown supermarket in a bus? - A nice free meal for two people in some house in South East London.

Well, That finishes my little experiment writing and I have no materials for my experiment in cooking as you now know. So that finishes everything.

NB: 1 Tofu is just soybean curd, or a variant, not deep fried duck legs in green tea - no offence meant to anyone. After all the Telugus fondly stomach explosive red chilli in oil for breakfast, lunch and dinner that can detonate next morning.