Brands, what for?
What a better can be of showing your love for your country than quitting on foreign brands.
Popular brands in India have ownership outside the country. We still do not know if it is because of the better quality of the product or some sort of subtle fetish for them because of, well, whatsoever reason. But more then possibilities, lets talk about realities. The reality is that the money you spent for going branded has just paid for someones vacation at the French Riviera or someones Hum-vee or a villa next to the Black Sea. It has just pushed the most ridiculed characteristics of the capitalism one step further, i.e., inequality.
Agree to the part that big brands with the selling part, also have factories in the (host) country which creates employment. But before that lets use some of our common sense. Trust me it wont hurt a bit. How expensive can a best possible white cotton t-shirt, made in India, cost? In any condition not more then 500 rupees after using best of cotton, spinning, weaving and labor. Now how much does the same t-shirt will sell in a showroom with a "tick" on its left chest. 1500 rupees? It is hard to believe that the impingement of these brands over our faculties is strong that we forget that quality cannot be ad infinitum. For the extra 1000 bucks, no further improvement has been there in the product. But contradictorily, most people buy brands for quality, when the same quality is available for a third of its price; what will one call this kind of behavior? The cost of raw material and labor is a fraction of the final price you pay for the "tick". And rest of the money go to those villas and vacation and yes, in advertisement that makes you believe that with a "tick" the Rs 500 thing becomes worth 1500.
Thus, the quality excuse alone is not enough for supporting the brands. But we said they create employment too. However, the ratio of employed compared to the the capital employed is far less in case. A 50 crore high tech plant at the most can employ 75 people. The expensive is the capital, the lower the number employed. And lets compare it agriculture sector where a 50 crore investment can employ no less than a thousand people. Obviously, The money that these branded corporates saved through cutting on employment is the money going to their pocket, the money spent on ostentatious luxuries and the money the money to that country has lost opportunity to. Instead buying a brand for that 1000 extra bucks, had it been spent on local products, it would have created much more employment and the money would have stayed in the country, helping it grow.
Brands thrive on our weakness of trying to be different. no! i wont say that being different is a weakness but yes, trying to show that you are off beat is definitely one. Brands are just inside people's mind, so they say. And they create inequality too, which no one talks about. So whats their use? go unbranded and or for local brands, they create relatively more employment and have huge multiplier effect. And no! they don't leave any corn or put extra strain on your spinal cord and at the end of the day they are worth their price!
PS- Worth reading will be Swadeshi Movement led by MK Gandhi.
Popular brands in India have ownership outside the country. We still do not know if it is because of the better quality of the product or some sort of subtle fetish for them because of, well, whatsoever reason. But more then possibilities, lets talk about realities. The reality is that the money you spent for going branded has just paid for someones vacation at the French Riviera or someones Hum-vee or a villa next to the Black Sea. It has just pushed the most ridiculed characteristics of the capitalism one step further, i.e., inequality.
Agree to the part that big brands with the selling part, also have factories in the (host) country which creates employment. But before that lets use some of our common sense. Trust me it wont hurt a bit. How expensive can a best possible white cotton t-shirt, made in India, cost? In any condition not more then 500 rupees after using best of cotton, spinning, weaving and labor. Now how much does the same t-shirt will sell in a showroom with a "tick" on its left chest. 1500 rupees? It is hard to believe that the impingement of these brands over our faculties is strong that we forget that quality cannot be ad infinitum. For the extra 1000 bucks, no further improvement has been there in the product. But contradictorily, most people buy brands for quality, when the same quality is available for a third of its price; what will one call this kind of behavior? The cost of raw material and labor is a fraction of the final price you pay for the "tick". And rest of the money go to those villas and vacation and yes, in advertisement that makes you believe that with a "tick" the Rs 500 thing becomes worth 1500.
Thus, the quality excuse alone is not enough for supporting the brands. But we said they create employment too. However, the ratio of employed compared to the the capital employed is far less in case. A 50 crore high tech plant at the most can employ 75 people. The expensive is the capital, the lower the number employed. And lets compare it agriculture sector where a 50 crore investment can employ no less than a thousand people. Obviously, The money that these branded corporates saved through cutting on employment is the money going to their pocket, the money spent on ostentatious luxuries and the money the money to that country has lost opportunity to. Instead buying a brand for that 1000 extra bucks, had it been spent on local products, it would have created much more employment and the money would have stayed in the country, helping it grow.
Brands thrive on our weakness of trying to be different. no! i wont say that being different is a weakness but yes, trying to show that you are off beat is definitely one. Brands are just inside people's mind, so they say. And they create inequality too, which no one talks about. So whats their use? go unbranded and or for local brands, they create relatively more employment and have huge multiplier effect. And no! they don't leave any corn or put extra strain on your spinal cord and at the end of the day they are worth their price!
PS- Worth reading will be Swadeshi Movement led by MK Gandhi.
posted by Chetan Negi at
10:33 PM
2 Comments:
sooo true .. from cotton shirts to coffee chains .. total loot ..
Hey chetan...good to see you contributing man...anyway...yeah i know....and agree with what u say......but when u talk of brands and the danger from them, i believe it would be naive to just stop at foreign brands...I mean a Corporation is a corporation, regardless of nationality. So Reliance is as exploitative as Wallmart and Tata as exploitative as Ford or Toyota. The fact that their only motive is to earn ugly, insensitive and irrational profits makes them all the same no matter which country they come from. Now they don't care where they get it from, as long as they get it alright. More on these lines, Indian textile or apparel makers today, are following the same design trends as their multinational counterparts. This is such a dumb submission to cultural imperialism. They would never design ethnic Indian wear on a mass scale. The trends are dictated by the west and they follow it blindly. The corporation is therefore, a highly deterritorialized entity. It exists in the same way regardless of geography; it exists for the same purpose, for the same reason and for the same class of people everywhere.
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