A trifle exhausted with residents and tourists calling us to seek information on train schedule, car hires, hotels, restaurants, we did something drastic. Beginning this month, my partner and I decided to publish fortnightly an information sheet on Santiniketan and the adjoining town of Bolpur.
A modest four pages in A4 size, it contains information on medical facilities, hotels, car hire, courier, train and bus schedules, etc., with a little space for local news and forthcoming events.
It is distributed by placing it at prominent shops and letting potential readers help themselves to a copy. The trouble is that people in small towns are very used to hand bills (little slips of yellow or pink adverts slipped along with the morning paper), but are wary of organised information that comes free.
So, all the shopkeepers who were nice enough to agree to place our little bamboo stands on their counters were very curious about our business model — if we were not charging a cover price and also providing all the information for free, how would we recover costs?
Many readers who had received a copy and appreciated the effort also called us to find out whether they could contribute a little something by way of a cover price. Some even offered to write for us for free. But since we were hoping to avoid any serious intellectual theorising, we had to say a polite no. Some others speculated on whether we had any other ulterior motive for doing such a thing gratis which we were intelligent enough to hide but readers needed to be on the lookout for.
What was amazing was that the simplest money-making tool, an in-house ad that we had boldly put out, was completely missed or misunderstood. In an area inhabited by students, teachers and small businesses, our guess was that there would be a need for classifieds. Renting houses, buying/selling second-hand stuff, announcing businesses conducted from home do not have a forum. And we thought a cheap platform to send any message across within a close community was just the thing that Bolpur and Santiniketan required. We even had a few dummy classifieds put in to make things clear to the meaner intelligence.
Our very first copy got distributed and we actually started getting calls showing interest in our in-house ad. We were thrilled. Our estimate of the market was increasing day by day. But, like Arindam Chaudhuri, we were counting our chickens before they were hatched!
Most of the callers (typically those keen on renting their houses) wanted to know more about “our system”. As soon as we explained that they would have to write their message and hand it over with the money as per the rate and we would publish it in the next issue, their tones changed.
“But do you not offer this service,” they asked. “What service,” we asked. “Our impression was that if we wanted to rent our house, we needed to call you and you would give us names of potential tenants!”
We were so stumped that we were unable to ask them whether they expected such a service for free, how many names would they expect, and if they were willing to pay for that. Because our first thought was to go back to reviewing the in-house ad to check whether there could have been any scope for misinterpretation of such a gross nature.
But like many of the things that travel from the West, perhaps we are just a trifle ahead of our time in the East.
