Illustrating Internship!!!

Before I write more about South India, I thought to write about my internship. So, I reached Chennai and reported to Mr. Subbaraman who introduced me to his boss Mr. Ashok Kumar. He asked the duration of my internship. Hearing two months, he said, “Okay, we’ve got two projects for you; each for one month. Apart from that if something else comes up, we’ll let you know. One will pertain to shrinkage. Do you’ve any idea about shrinkage?”

‘Shrinkage of stock’ were the words which came out of my mouth. Then I went on explaining that in the course of examining products, (prospective) customers may end up spoiling products. He added not only spoiling; they’ll take the products home which causes a major reduction in stock and consequently a loss for the store. So, you have to analyze the shrinkage-data and give a conclusion. Mr. Ramesh will be your mentor for this project.

“The other project will be about accounts. The stress will be on cost minimization; rather cost optimization. It’s about ‘triggering the trigger before it triggers the Books of Accounts’. Once an entry is made in the books, you cannot do much about it. So some things need to be done before posting the entries in the books. Mr. Subbaraman will be your mentor for this project.”

After that Mr. Ramesh took charge. He explained me the three types of size of Reliance stores and added that 87 stores are there in Chennai and ___ stores are there in Tamil Nadu. He further said that all the stock are first collected in the Distribution Centers and then dispatched to various stores. Certain perishable-prone items are directly distributed to the stores without the need of going through the Distribution Centre like bread etc. I added, “fruits and vegetables”. He said, “No, Distribution Centre acts as a collection centre for umpteen vendors as they can’t go individually to separate vendors.

He further said that ideally the %age of shrinkage should not exceed 0.5%. The moment it crosses 4%-5%; margin gone! I asked what the margin % is. He replied that some things are kept on a high-level.

After the verbal briefings, he opened an excel report sent by one of the stores. There were circa 4800 items and their various details. For the first time I was seeing the handling of such big data. He started using Auto Filter in various respects and bingo! the results started coming. I haven't used Auto Filter till that point of time, so I was trying to observe minutely. By that time I started feeling very sleepy. So, at the end of the day, he squeezed some meaningful insights from the raw data (I didn’t follow much!) and mailed back his questions (based upon the insights) to the store. I saw the professional thing happening.

Next day, Mr. Ramesh has to attend some meeting. So he forwarded two files to me and asked me to attempt them. I was allotted a corner of a cubicle with a decent hp desktop. For the first hour I didn’t have any idea what the files were about. I started reading the contents of the file and slowly understood that the first file is the file which was refined yesterday and the second file is the raw data of another store. Once I understood them, it hardly took 30-40 minutes to sort 50% of the data accordingly. Two terms which I didn’t understand were Zero-Count and No-Cost-SKUs. In the lunch I went to the Mount Road for some other work and had lunch at the Sarvana Bhawan.

Food is almost same in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. I think here they don’t have ‘toran’-a dry ‘sabji’ of every possible edible. Anyways, I liked the food at both the places. After lunch, he explained me both the terms and I sorted the data accordingly.

vacations!!! got nothing to do...

Whenever there is an exam, lagta hai ki jaldi se exam khatm ho. And once the exam ends, there doesn’t seem any work to do. Obviously one can read books, lekin wo mazaa nahi aata jo exam ke ek din pehle aata hai. After the exams, I left Trivandrum on 02.05.09 for Chennai and I left the same on 03.05.09 for Jamshedpur which I will be leaving on 06.05.09 for Lucknow and finally I expect to reach Gorakhpur on 08.05.09. It being such a diverse itinenary and many interesting things happened on the way. 

The relationship between the mood of passing vendors (selling edibles) and that of my stomach initially remains directly proportional, but after a certain limit becomes inversely proportional. At the cost of former becoming cheerful, the latter becomes upset. One such local vendor came selling something shaped like flattened potato with some jelly-sort-of-thing filled inside. After buying 7 of it for ten bucks, I asked its name. He replied ‘Taadi’. I picked one of them, eager to explore the taste and experience, squeezed only to find that the water inside the fruit fell on my jeans. My fellow-passenger (who spent 2 years in Andhra Pradesh) taking pity on me picked another one showing me how to break it apart. This time the water inside it fell on the novel ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ leaving him uttering arey re re... and embarrassed. Now I took the challenge of drinking the water inside it. But despite my efforts only a few drops of the last piece was I able to savor. 

“Nobody writes about me these days” Yakshi complained. “Now, now, sentences like these are my patents. How can you be so alone? I asked, “Where is hp? Go and I’ll ask him to write something about you. He writes so beautifully, I have appreciated all his works and was quite missing his blogs”.

When hp posted my previous blog in our batch’s blog entitled “South Indian life on a North Indian perspective...”, I became a bit excited, as I've got a new issue (South India) to write about. So, my first visit to South India was in July 2007 when I came to Bangalore (via Chennai) to attend the GD and PI of Bharathidasan Institute of Management. 

The moment I entered kind-of-South-India (there’s no clear-cut boundary separating South and North India), I started feeling a bit different. Movie-posters in regional languages having most of the actors with goggles and moustaches, different actresses, people with mundu (dhoti) and tilak on forehead, Women wearing ghazaras etc. all these factors excited me. At that moment I even started to frame the answer of the question (which might be asked in the interview)- What did you find different in South India?

to be contd...