One way to celebrate the first anniversary of a feverish FM radio station is to host a music concert after turning eardrums sore with minute-to-minute voice announcements. Another is to invite its foreign partner?s top boss over to wow everyone?if it happens to be Richard Branson of the UK?s Virgin group. A Delhi-based station was lucky enough to do both. But the company?s marketing folks and spin doctors (Virgin started as a record label) were taken aback to find that the media personnel in attendance were interested less in talking about the station, and more about Sir Branson?s aviation and telecom plans, word of which was out. This meant that the spin doctors had to do a Hillary (Clinton, not Duff), and start raising their own hands to ask their own boss big questions on the station?s new initiatives and plans for more talk and less music?wait, wasn?t it supposed to be the other way round?
Inner voice
At CII?s India Health Summit, almost every hospital chain was represented, from Apollo and Fortis to Max and others. The agenda: the gaping holes in the fulfillment of India?s ?healthcare for all? vision. There were statistics, speeches, statistics and suggestions. But faces lit up once the talk veered round to medical tourism. This is a dollar revenue earner with its potential rising faster than the queues of patients outside hospitals in rich countries. Since Indian hospitals spend millions of dollars to get accreditation from some foreign medical association or the other, someone said, it?s natural that recouping this investment is top priority.