The Other Side
How did the idea of publishing this book take shape in your mind? How much time it took you to complete the book?
One of the professional hazards of being a market researcher is that one is used to talking a lot all the time. However, the idea of writing a book or a blog never really occurred to me in my entire career of 3 decades. But then, I read a lot. One of the books that always inspired me, is Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s search for meaning’. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and a WW2 holocaust survivor. Based on his own experience and his observations about holocaust survivors in Nazi concentration camps, he founded a new school of psychotherapy called Logotherapy (logos loosely translates as ‘meaning or purpose’ in Greek). In January 2023, over a family dinner, I was talking about the notion of purpose and Frankl’s concept of ‘Paradoxical Intention’ (Note: With me being a market researcher and my wife being a psychiatrist, our dinner table conversations are not usually about saans-bahu serials!!).
In simple terms, paradoxical intention means attempting to do what you fear the most or have never done before. My wife pushed me to lead by example and voila, I decided to be an author. I started my blog (www.random-walk.blog) and my first book (Nonlinear) around the same time. Truth be told, writing was very difficult to start with (though certainly not in the same league as being in a concentration camp), but I got there eventually.
What inspired you to pursue Technology and its impact as a subject matter for your publication?
Deciding to be an author was the easy part, but identifying the topic wasn’t easy at all. I was very clear that I won’t write about market research, though the thought of writing eloquently about 5 different types of regression analyses had (very) briefly crossed my mind! Finally, I zeroed in on technology. I am an amateur tech nerd, usually the early adopter of new gadgets, Marvel movies and technologies. But then, I also belong to a generation that had started their career with paper, pen, calculator and their own brains as the only tools of the trade. Having witnessed the increasing human dependence on technology in the last 20-25 years, I decided to write about technology and its impact of us. Like most things, there is a good side as well as a bad side to technology. My book starts by tracing the history of technology since the early days of humankind, across 4 epochs and then detailing how different technologies have been interacting with us and influencing us over time. Being a strong believer in Mark Twain’s epic quote- History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes; my historian’s perspective about technology is a bit of a unique take on technology. The book then zeroes in on the current epoch highlighted by GenAI which is a totally different ballgame. And finally, I present my DeSIRe framework as a handy aid to using technology as a friend instead of being enslaved by it.
What are your future plans of publishing more books – will it be around the same subject or other topics?
Now that I am an (Ahem!) author, the quest shall continue. I have already started work on my second book, tentatively called ‘Unbiased’, with behavioural science as the underlying topic. Come to think of it- we are already full of biases as human beings and now to top it, technologies such as LLMs or even social media have become extremely good at leveraging these human biases. My new book will focus on explaining the biases and some tricks to control of our own destiny.
After over 3 decades in the service industry, of which almost 28 years were in Market Research, I decided to hang up my boots and chase my own targets...of travel and photography...both of which I inherited from my beloved father.
I purchased my first film camera in 1988, when one earned a princely sum of Rs 5500 per month (equivalent of a Friday night out these days) as a Senior Research Executive at Pathfinders, the research division of Lintas India. Over the years, the photography industry evolved, from film cameras to digital photography. And more recently from the DSLR digital cameras to mirrorless cameras and phone cameras; but MR had taught and prepared me to adapt to any changing scenario, technology or situation.
Surprisingly, the Market Research industry and photography have much in common, revealing multiple transferable skills. In 2000, I bought my first Olympus digital camera, a 2 MP camera (today I shoot on a 60 MP mirrorless and a 48MP cellphone camera), but with time, digital tools kept changing, and I too kept adapting...much like we had seen in our industry when it came to PCs (from 286/386/486 to Pentiums, CRT, flat screen monitors and now laptops) or the cell phone market (brick phones to feature phones to smart phones).
Market research also exposes and forces you to be immersed in new categories and clients before submitting a proposal. This too helped me with photography, when venturing into unfamiliar genres – portrait, landscape, wildlife, architectural, street, and astrophotography. Each genre was like a new research category – different camera settings, different cameras and lenses, varied lighting situations. But if you have worked in MR...you can adapt and learn any new category – be it FMCG, durables, services or photography genres.
The Fujifilm Global site
In May 2024, one of my photographs – a herd of Wildebeest mock charging (attached photo) in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia – was chosen as the cover image for the online iteration of this prestigious institution. In fact, in July, they went on to display yet another of my photographs – centuries old trees, dried and burnt in the arid landscape of Dead Vlei in Namibia.
The picture of the wildebeest was shot on the very first day in the Kalahari. The day was coming to an end and the sun was setting...but spring in the southern hemisphere cast a golden glow on the dust that was being kicked around by the boisterous animals – who were simply mock charging one another. Various species demonstrate similar behaviour, be it the Indian wild asses in the Little Rann of Kutch, the white-water buffalos in Kaziranga in Assam, or zebras in Kenya – yet another skill honed from working in the MR industry...that of cross category learnings.
Finally, another photograph close to my heart focuses on the Howrah Bridge and the classic yellow Ambassador taxis. Faced with an early Kolkata sunrise, at 5am, I stood shooting nearly 50 frames of the yellow cabs, when I noticed a cluster of them driving together. In Market Research, when scanning thousands of tables with millions of numbers before you spot an insightful tr end, here too, I saw this bridge with yellow cabs (and a bus, fortunately, also yellow) only later, while intensely examining the images in search of “interesting trends”.
Hope my journey will inspire some young (and also not so young) market researchers.
Nikhil, a retired market researcher from IMRB International (now Kantar), is a self-described “people watcher”. He loves rock music and cooking and suffers from severe wanderlust. As a photographer, Nikhil won the Millward Brown Global Photography contest (2007), was the ICICI “Camera-derie” runners up in one of the categories (2015), and has exhibited images at Museo Camera, Gurgaon, The Piramal Gallery, NCPA, Mumbai. Most notably, two of his images were displayed on the Fujifilm Global website cover page.