Fiscal Deficit and The Diesel Price

Fiscal deficit and the diesel price. What is the connection? Simple - Both burn a hole in our pocket. What is the difference, one burns the hole visibly, and the other stealthy! The funny thing is, the stealth hole is much bigger and deeper, but most of us don't care about it! Why? Are we idiots? Don't we know what is right and what is wrong? No, none of that.

The diesel hole is direct, visible, pinches immediately and is understood by 99% of us. The fiscal deficit hole is much bigger, deeper, indirect, comes with a lag and is  understood by 1% of us. I love percentages, they change the game completely!

Our politicians, all seasoned politicians, have access to best of the economists, have been in public life for many decades, have interacted with best brains, clearly understand both the economics of diesel and fiscal deficit. But more than the economics they understand the percentages, the percentage of electorate who know or don't know the difference!

And that is where the character matters, character of these politicians, which determines how they use the information that they have.  They can be true leaders, go to the masses, teach them why letting diesel prices float and allowing it to burn small hole in our pocket, for now, will help us ward off fire to our trouser! or they can be, guess what, politicians(!) and tell people that they are the ones keeping the lid on the diesel prices, who cares about fiscal deficit!

Socially Yours

Love it or hate it,  but you can't ignore it. Social networking is here to stay. To some, social networking is antisocial, making people not mingle in person, to some, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Most of the educated humanity, with means, seems to have congregated on it already. Whosoever has not, is increasingly feeling isolated and under tremendous social pressure to jump on the bandwagon.

Businesses can not afford to ignore this congregation. However, the rules of this congregation are very different from any that the business has ever dealt with in the past.

Traditional marketing techniques don't apply.  New rules have to be learned, new techniques have to be mastered. However interesting thing is the new rules and techniques are not clear either.

There are so many of these sites, what to do? Which circle to use what face to spite? On which site to put up the official business page? How much to tweet? How much to share?  How to track who is saying what about the business? How to respond to good or bad comments? How to know and track the influencers and influence them? How to know what your competition is doing? How to track and measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy?

There are answers to all the above questions, however, the interesting part is that the answers have a shelf life. Today's correct answers won't necessarily be correct tomorrow. The landscape is not just changing, it is getting created, at a rapid pace. Hence, the techniques used to address this congregation of people in the virtual world today, would not work tomorrow, that is almost a certainty.


As a first step, businesses would do themselves a favor if they recognize the importance of social networks and virtual communities.

Stay tuned for more....