Termites can teach you Marketing!

It’s the first semester of college. The year is 2007. Some of us have just set foot in the capital city. Well, that’s not the story I want to tell you. There’s something else. It’s an amazing recollect about times in Delhi when termites actually taught me a bit or two about marketing.

In a nutshell, the first semester was about refreshing new friendships, a slightly different lifestyle, not to mention some eye-opening realities and some not-very-rude cultural shocks. As students of integrated marketing communication (to this day I still have doubts what that means), we were handed the famed Philip Kotler books on ‘brand architecture’. That’s what you call the science of marketing, communication and the sort in common professorial lingo.

Six months down the lane, our first semester exams are due. Tomorrow was our brand architecture paper. So the night before, after having had a sumptuous dinner with finger-licking dal fry and rotis, I decide to settle down to study. No, I’m no genius that I can master marketing in a night’s time. That’s the way we have been trained by our education system. You write exams because you need marks. And you open your books when exams have arrived, and are licking you in the face.

So here we enter the ‘kitchen’ to kick off our all-night-group-discussion (hey that’s only till we start snoring, face down on our oversized books cum pillows). But you might be thinking, why the kitchen? Because that’s where we kept our books away, neatly stacked on the kitchen shelves. Don’t be mistaken but neither was our kitchen a library nor was our library in the kitchen. The space was the prime reason.

The kitchen greets us with the sweet smell of, not dal fry but untouched books (the dal fry was from the hospital canteen nearby). Rows and rows of new books just sitting there and staring at the kitchen walls. You didn’t feel like touching them. They looked so neat, clean and happy because humans had rarely laid hands on them after they had been printed.

The Philip Kotlers were holding their forte at the bottom of the pile where they had been languishing for around 6 months. So the four of us (my roommates and I) fish out these monsters from the heap. And holy mother of shit, our books have been attacked. Attacked by tiny and dirty brown creatures. Termites!!! And they were smiling too (I think they were even burping because it kept making some sort of weird termite sound). They had eaten right through the shelves and even gnawed away at almost all our Kotlers.

Oh what were we to do now? There was no way we could learn a thing that night. To hell with these mean wood-suckers cum book-suckers. You want to kill them but you think they have been learning (I mean eating) marketing for days. Could they teach you a thing or two?

No termites never taught me anything in marketing. But they taught me one important thing, the best way to eradicate them is Rawat’s Bhaago herbal paste. Also very effective against cockroaches and ants at your home.

And two. This lesson was not taught by termites. Rather it was from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. And not until the second semester marketing exams did this small piece of wisdom dawn on me. Get you learning done with while there is still daylight. Because if not the bloody termites, the power will fuck you the night before the exams!