Sweet Child of Nine

There are certain things you like and there are certain things you don’t like. Sometimes you end up confusing fear with dislike. It must have happened to you as well. One fine day, Sharad Varshney, Head Strategic Planning at Linterland, a dashing personality, came to ‘Discuss’ at Northpoint and showed me the difference.

Linterland is the Rural Marketing division of Lintas IMAG. It was the last division at IMAG that we interned at and we did rural cconsumer research. The whole concept attracted all my attention the moment Sharad conducted a mock research interview in typical rural circumstances.

I had never been as scared as I was that very moment when I went up there. Suddenly, making sentences was so difficult. My grammar went for a toss! Fear I sensed, which translated into dislike in my head. Another problem was, the way our questions got framed, they attracted answers that were leading us away from our main objective. Our approach had to be different – it’s not for nothing that the terms Urban and Rural were created. But the consolation came sooner than I had thought; a few others faced the problem I had. Then we were taught a little secret. Now this secret is something that helped me gain courage to go into little villages and come back with all the answers I needed to. That's when I knew this would become my favourite stint here at IMAG, just after getting over my fear!

If you want to know the secret, read the title of this article again. Decipher the four words.




I have been visiting villages ever since my childhood, but never had to interact with people of different ages and have to ask them absurd questions such as ‘how do they brush their teeth’…! This time we had an objective. What I found was to talking to the younger generation helped make in-roads into the family from there. Turns out I was just scared of talking to people I was culturally different from; not that I disliked it.

To quote Mukesh, a smart teenager at Neendar gaon near Jaipur. “…Yeh bacche choti umr se hi sab samajhte hain. Inhe sab practical hi sikhaya jaata hai. Agar yeh koi istahar dekhte hai to inhe pata lag jaata hain kitna sach hai aur kitna exaggeration hai...” Pretty insightful huh! I thought so too.

Several times to understand the habits of a household or few households put together, speaking to a kid [9 – 15 yrs] would be enough. In other cases, the kid with his genuine intentions to help, would take us to the right person in his family, who in turn would give us all the information we needed.

The confidence that I gained as my teammates and I spoke to the child helped me to ease myself out. Confidence ultimately helped me in asking our questions in a logical flow and receive the right perspective! Smooth.

No wonder, all the quotes that I remember even a week after the trip to the villages were from kids!

Deepika