Pick a side. Left or right. Turn. Walk. Keep walking till the next major intersection or till you have crossed 5-6kms. While walking, just soak it all in. Question, but only to observe deeper. Understand. Listen, don't speak.
It is a common practice for me. Walking for hours in a new city. Randomly just picking a street and walking for miles with no specific goal and observing nothing in particular. I like just seeing the place for what it is. The People, their hustle, how they go about their days, the peculiarities of a place, the architecture, the demeanour.
Just being a fly in the wall. Observing the world while going about it unnoticed.
Aurangabad today felt like an apt example of the same. Took a right. Walked for 6 kms. Made some curious observations.
First, the buildings are not cookie cutter blocks but people generally try to make one with a great front facade, some kind of design that would either be modern square architectural design or paying homage to the roots of Aurangabad.
Next, pan seems to be a big thing here. Chai is common but that's in line with rest of Maharastra.
Coming to the behaviour of people. Warm and they do about their business but it is also that they get along nicely. Sadly, I had limited time to observe people and understand their bosy language hence cannot conclude much. Morever, what little I witnessed was a mixed bag. I met an awesome chemist shop owner today who was a pretty nice human being and genuinely cared for the people around him. What was special about the guy was his aura. His presence was enough to get people to fall in line and be better humans. It wasn't that he was working with people of great character. It was his greatness, his charm and his ability to extract greatness from others that made people who would otherwise be at each other's throats to work together. It was a bittersweet feeling to be fair. He was a great guy but what he had single handedly built also meant that he would have a lot of people wanting to take him down the moment they see any weakness. I say this because people with greed only see the empire that the person has created or how he is able to build and grow. They fail to see why it became what it is today and what is holding them together.
I also met a MR who was one of the top sales person in the area. Observing him going about his work, which is no joke, let me tell you, just meant that I was taking notes all along on what he has built for himself, a brand. I always think that being a medical sales practioner ( or MRs as they are called in the industry) is the most cut throat of sales jobs and it gets all the more brutal if you are only a generic drug manufacturer. Being a generics MR makes the job an order of magnitude more difficult because a) you have no key differentiating factor to speak of and b) you have hundred other manufacturers with the same drug offering a better deal than you ever could.
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