Friday 15 June 2007

my first day at agartala....

landing at the agartala airport, the scenery absolutely takes u aback, i mean the place is so ultimately green and small and pretty, for a moment, u feel uve landed in a time warp....

and then the first signal i see on my phone is Grameen Phone - the airport has a stronger reception from Bangladesh than from india - its amazing, i was later told, the other side of the airport boundary wall is basically bangladesh....

on the way here, the atr gave me glimpses of bangladesh - as i said it was flying that low, yes....
the place was totally flooded and green, it was like amazing... and the auto journey to the hotel was absolutely beautiful...

i then landed in a small, nay micro sized hotel called hotel plaza in a densely packed street called masjid street... the hotel had rooms on the first floor and i was booked into a room that cost me a princely sum of Rs 165/- per night, taxes included (please wait a while for the photos).... spent the rest of the evening looking for an atm and then staring at the idiot box...

got up nice and early on moday to go to my distributors' office, found the SO waiting there for me, after a brief 5 minute intro, i was out onto the first beat - Battala...

Battala is short for Bat (sounds exactly like but) - tala (as in the hindi word for lock) is the area around it, and around it was a market that was filled with shops, a total of over 70 counters in a beat lenght of about 2 km max....

went around each store observing what my SO was doing and noting down the orders for the day...

I havent mentioned it before, but its a different thing to be a horlicks company (as gsk-ch is popularly know) sales guy, we're so much more respected than the rest of the world, its absolutely amazing... the level of push sales in this company is probably the least, the products move well and or job is to get the right products at the right place, of course at the right time too, sonds jargonish, but what it means is check the movement of goods in the store, and then decide what to sell, coz its our resposibility if the products dont move from the store, so u see much lesser old/ damaged stock than a lot of other companies... and it means retailers respect u for that...

and so back to our storyline... finished the beat at around 2:00, when the shopkeepers start going back to lunch and a nap.... when it started pouring cats and dogs... hng back in a shed sorts waiting for the rain to abate but no such luck...

caught a closed rickshaw - an agartala special contraption thats fully covered, almost like an autorickshaw, but using leg power... and headed for some lunch - which wasnt brilliant, but expensive nevertheless - there's a huge supply problem here in the northeast...

then came back to the distributor point for a quick tallying of the days work with the other salesmen... and for some reporting to the boss in guwahati...

then headed back to the idiot box...

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