Give and take policy

Those who follow Tamizh movies closely, would fully understand what the give and take policy is all about. For the uninitiated please see this video to understand what I am rambling about.

The point is that I very rarely, if ever, indulge in the whole give and take policy. For many people its a natural skill and an acquired one for many others. I have been observing some people around me use this technique to extract information from others.

On Friday evening, I implemented this on the unsuspecting Ramadurai. You see, while we were returning home from the office, we were chatting as usual and somehow the conversation moved into the realm of gift vouchers and the likes. I saw an opportunity to use the aforementioned give and take policy here.

What I wanted to "take" was this: It was his daughter's ayush homam function on Sunday. And he'd invited many of his friends from office. We were all discussing about what we should get for his daughter. As usual no decision was taken and we all left office without finalising anything on Friday.

That's why, I thought I could check with him about what might interest him. So when the topic about vouchers came up, I mentioned to him that he could use it to get toys in the big stores. He said that he could get the same toys at a lower cost in other shops. I asked him if he could name those other shops and he told me about one near Alwarpet.

I had also somehow managed to get to him to confess that he was planning to buy a tricycle for his baby girl. So armed with this information and also with the list of people in our group whom he had invited, I went directly to that very shop he talked about. The first thing I laid my eyes upon was a tricycle and when the shop-owner approached us (me and Raghu), we practically closed out the deal. I had that guy bring out a couple of related models, but the piece I saw at first was the cleanest and nicely bubble-wrapped one and I took it.

I called Ramadurai right away and asked if he'd bought the cycle that he was talking about. He replied in the negative and so I told him that I'd already bought it and so he needn't buy one. He sounded pleasantly surprised at this and I too felt happy that I was able to buy a gift that someone actually wanted.

So my first conscious attempt in using the give and take policy worked out real well.