Random Musings

India’s leading magazine, India Today, may have a great reputation on the content side, but they are a perfect fraud with regards to their promises on the subscriptions front.

I must share a rather pathetic experience that I have had.

At the time of subscription purchase, there are a lot of lures. Free gifts and the like. I went ahead and subscribed. An email of confirmation came sometime later. Interestingly it was from an email id that was called “WE CARE”. That must be the biggest irony. The more appropriate one should have been “WE DO NOT CARE”!!

It was at the point of receiving this email that I discovered that the ‘free gift’ with the subscription will only come 12-14 weeks later!! Can you imagine? In this world of e-commerce, courier delivery etc., they need 12 to 14 WEEKS to deliver the gift?? What world are they living in?

I realized later that their game was about subscribers forgetting that a gift was ever promised. I mean, how many of us would remember after 12-14 weeks? And in that assumption that people will not remember, is their business model, perhaps!

Well, when I read that long delivery schedule and having a calendar handy (Google Calendar), I put a note for myself. And after the full 14 weeks had gone by, there was no sign of the gift. So I decided to write back to the “WE CARE” (lol) id of India Today. They must have been surprised that someone actually remembered about the gift! Taken by surprise, they kept a polite facade and proposed that it will take another 4-5 weeks to deliver. Okay! 12-14 weeks was obviously not enough. They are not tuned in for “express delivery” it was clear 🙂 So they needed another 4-5 weeks.

I was not happy. I made it amply clear. The oh-so-polite “WE CARE” chap apologised a plenty, and promised that it will reach definitely in 4-5 weeks. So now as I write this post, those 5 weeks are up. And there is certainly no sign of the gift. Looks like someone has seen through their game. They did not have any plan for any gift at all, after all?!

With the holier than thou reputation that the magazine claims to have, we now know the goings on behind the scene. What shocks me is the absolute lack of fredom to act, for their executives. I mean, how many people are likely to take up the case for a gift as strongly as I did? All it took was to find a way to send a gift across to me, even if it was completely out of the system, just to “shut me up”. But that liberty was obviously not given to them.

Clearly an old economy company which does not get the new realities. I read recently a report that quoted Aroon Purie, head of India Today, saying that they do not expect to make more investments into Digital media. Obviously not. They don’t get it!