The Day We Thank Our Tools

Ayudha Puja was performed at my office on 19 Oct. 2026, with my Father leading the rituals, as it has been in our family for decades. Observed on the ninth day of Navratri, it is gratitude to the instruments that give us income, dignity and purpose.

So I wiped my MacBook clean and placed it with my iPad, iPhone, a pen, my notebook, the charging cable and plug, alongside photos and idols of Gods. 

This year brought a new addition: Claude App. I kept its window open on my device as a quiet thank you for its support over the last few months.

For me, the tradition is inseparable from retail. My first tool was an ice-cream scoop at Baskin Robbins, Chennai, in 1997, between classes. It taught me consumer behaviour, because I watched who walked in, what they chose and why.

Later, the tools kept changing. At Foodworld, Benetton and Indian Terrain, it was the shelves that held the SKUs. At Bengaluru International Airport, where I pioneered India's Travel Retail industry, it was every square inch of the passenger areas, because each one fed the business. 

At Cafe Coffee Day and Levista, it was the coffee machine and the stacks of packaged coffee.

Every retail morning begins with a tool being switched on. A billing machine beeps. A packaging line hums. A shutter rolls up. A showroom floor is polished, and a motorcycle is wiped by someone who treats it like family.

Whether it is coffee powder, rice or atta, the journey begins hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away. So the entire supply chain worships its tools. 

Fuel pump owners garland their tanks and mark the nozzles with turmeric or sandal paste. Truck drivers and quick commerce riders pray over their beloved vehicles.

But the person who taught me this never gave a lecture on it.

My Father worked on the factory floor at ITC Ltd for 33 years, and he simply loved his tools. His spanner, pliers, screwdriver, hammer and files were treated like colleagues. He rode one bicycle for over two decades, polished and cleaned every weekend. 

He wore one classic pair of Aviators for three decades, until they finally gave up. And one fine day, 20 years ago, he lost his beloved early 1980s Favre-Leuba watch.

He never taught me how to maintain tools. He simply lived it, and I watched. Today, when someone wonders why my car still looks new, or why my watches do not look 10, 12 or 18 years old, I think of Dad and smile.

Call it genes, if you like. That is how we take care of our tools, because we are nothing without them.

Will “ResTech” Be Retail's Next Big Thing?

Last week, I ordered a coffee on the Starbucks app while sitting right in front of the barista, who was brewing someone else's order. I was there to meet a potential client who was running late, and I didn't want to wait for my caffeine fix. 

One tap on the app, one eye contact with the barista, a nod of acknowledgement, and within seconds my coffee was ready. No queue, no cashier, no friction.

The meeting then moved to a Taj property on OMR. I sat in the lobby with a coffee shop right in front of me, and the staff were nowhere to be seen. I waved at the lady managing the adjacent store, and she fetched the barista for me. 

As my guests and I started chatting, she handed me an A3-size menu spread across finger foods, soups and coffees. We stuck to the basics.

The contrast stayed with me. One experience was seamless because ordering was in my hands. The other depended on spotting a human, waving them down, and waiting for a menu.

What AI is for tech, self-ordering could be for food and beverage, especially in India. Almost every restaurant here has a dozen waiters, each managing a cluster of three to four tables. In peak hours, they run from one table to the next, taking orders, fixing mistakes, fetching water and chasing the kitchen. 

We call it service, but much of it is order-taking.

Imagine a different flow. A guest walks in and opens an aggregator-style app. She orders, chooses takeaway or dine-in, and enters the table number. The kitchen receives the order directly, and the food arrives carried by a waiter, not a robot. 

Hospitality stays human, and only the order-taking is automated.

Is "ResTech" the next big thing? 

I think it could be. Waiters would spend their time on welcoming, recommending and care, instead of scribbling orders. Errors would fall, table turns would speed up, and the kitchen would see demand in real time.

It also changes what restaurants compete on. 

Today, ambience carries the experience. Tomorrow, the ordering process itself could become the experience: how fast, how easy, how personal. That changes the equation completely.

Am I dreaming? Perhaps. But Indians already scan, tap and pay without a second thought. The habit exists. 

The restaurants that blend technology with warmth will own the next decade of dining.

Will this ever happen? I believe it already has begun, one coffee at a time.

Retail in Detail: The Slides Were My Own Scars

When I built the masterclass for the Crescent School of Business, I expected to be teaching. Slide after slide, I found myself checking a deck against my own memory instead.

Take the slide on India's 87 percent unorganised market. I met that number at 19, behind a Baskin Robbins counter in Chennai. 

The slow-moving flavours were not the problem. The way we presented them was. Bundle them into a sundae and they sold. 

The kirana does this by instinct every day, matching what it stocks to who walks in. The organised sector has spent thirty years trying to learn that instinct at scale.

Then came the slide on those who succumbed, with music chains and the early supermarkets on it. I had worked in two of them. At Musicworld and Foodworld, 

India's first organised grocery chain, I saw the stores were not short of shoppers. They were short of answers. When we fixed the layout and began ordering on store-level data, private-label sales grew 150 percent in six months. Today's champions, Vishal Mega Mart and Zudio, run on private labels. 

The idea was right early. The cash and systems arrived late.

The ecosystem slide shows the mall as the landlord layer. I sat on that side of the table at Central, leasing the spaces nobody planned for: coffee, books, game zones and food courts. 

A mall is not a building. It is a tenant mix, and each wrong tenant costs the other shops their footfall. 

That is why, when I tell students that retail leasing rose 20 percent in the first half of 2026, I tell them it is the quietest vote of confidence in stores. 

Mono-brands showed me the next lesson. 

Taking Benetton in the South from one store to six meant appointing franchisees, and the truth was in who we chose, not how many. 

Levi's at 500 stores and Bata crossing 2,000 are the same story, a brand scaled by partners it trusted.

Airports and cafés then pushed the idea further. Bangalore's airport retail taught me that a passenger with time is a different customer, so we tied rents to passenger numbers. 

Opening 140 Café Coffee Day outlets, from stadiums to IITs, taught me the reverse: the same format wins or loses on its address.

My least comfortable slide is quick commerce. In 2015 I launched a hyperlocal delivery platform in Chennai promising groceries in 30 to 300 minutes. 

We were early. There was no UPI habit, no dark-store density and no investor appetite. 

When Blinkit and Zepto reached ten minutes, I knew exactly which ingredient had been missing.

Covid completed the picture at Levista Coffee. Points of sale rose from 27,000 to over 77,000 and e-commerce grew about tenfold, but only because we served the kirana and the app together. 

That is the answer to the question the students asked, why stores keep opening. 

Reliance, Lenskart, Zudio and Titan have understood what I learned at that counter: shoppers do not choose a channel. 

They choose convenience, trust and the person across the counter.

For the careers slide I had no new advice, only the old one. Start where the customer is. 

Every role I listed, from category and stores to leasing, hiring and training, begins with that. 

It is the reason my Strategy Advisory & Consulting Firm Miles2Go offers MBA students, paid internships in market research and data analytics.

India's retail story is still early. The people in that auditorium may well write the next chapter.