Lessons In Excellence : Power Of Impossible Thinking

07 April 2007

Ranjan Kapoor: And there are lots of companies going into rural India to try and reach the 600,000 villages we have when you have a huge village — mindset sitting in the heart of Mumbai city and you are not tapping that emerging domestic market.

Anuradha Sengupta: So you are the urban market, the rural market, these are perhaps the existing mindsets when it comes to looking at markets but there are other unexplored and you have given Dharavi as an example. Would there be others?

Ranjan Kapoor: I could give you another example. Because we called it a slum so it will always retain the mental image of a slum. I asked somebody the other day "have you been to Dharavi?" "Who wants to go to Dharavi", says he. It is a dirty, filthy place. I said "I think you should go to Dharavi. You will be amazed. It is not a slum as you see it — it's different." But he couldn't cope with that.

Let me give you another example. The fishing villages of Mumbai. Don't we consider them a blot on our landscape? We wish they would go away. They happen to be a part of our heritage but do you realise how they contribute to our economy? What if we did not call them the fishing villages of Mumbai or the machhimaars (fishermen) of Mumbai? And we call them the cultural heritage centres of Mumbai — that is what they are. They are the original inhabitants of this city and we want to shove them away under a carpet of something because they are dirty and it is bedraggled but that is our fault because we do not preserve it and celebrate it — I am giving you a second example.

Anuradha Sengupta: It's completely based on the way we are seeing something.

Ranjan Kapoor: It is because we see them either as a dirty fishing village or we see it as a slum and miss the opportunity.