Saturday, August 05, 2006

Temples - A Corporate Plan

While some of the temples in Kerala are busy purifying the respecive temples's deity because it was touched by women 20 years ago, India's richest temple, Tirupati, has really come out with an innovative idea to decrease the rush at Tirupati. They plan to open a similar temple in Bangalore. When I read this in today's newspaper (which, these days, has been infested by "moles"), I was really delighted at their thinking. But, then I thought, they can do better.

What they can do is, they can select a temple and certify it as meeting Tirupati standards. They can also have an organization called Tirupati Temple Standards Organization (TTSO) to do such certification. This saves them the trouble of acquiring land and building new temple. In such certified temples, everything, starting from the deity to the Prasadam, will be standardized.

Another benefit of such certification to the Tirupati temple group is that they can have temples, not only in Bangalore but across the country very easily.

The other important benefit of having such certification has got something to with the marketing of the certified temple. The certified temples can market themselves as having been certified as TTSO 1000, TTSO 2000, TTSO 5000, TTSO 4568 etc. Higher the ranking, higher the blessings of God.

Now, whenever there is such a healthy competition, the devotee is the beneficiary. He will go to that temple where he can get more blessings and also more ladoos. And here is a sample, albeit homo-erotic, conversation about visit to such a temple.
Raju: Hi, Ram, where had you been?
Ram: I had gone to TTSO 4000. Nice temple.
Now they are going for TTSO 8000. Then I can reduce the frequency of my temple
visit to half becuase I can acquire double the blessings in half the visits. Raju: Very efficient.
Ram: Ya ya.
Raju: Ok, bye. See you in TTSO 4000, next week.

With the implementation of such standards, the temples can also get listed in stock markets. Then we can see ads that tell us something like,
"TTSO 4000, Bangalore is offering shares at Rs 30 each. Hurry, offer closes on 15 August. For more details refer the Sacred Cow prospectus".

With commercialisation of temples happening at such rapid pace, these ideas may soon become a reality. What do you say?

4 comments:

Arjun Sharma said...

He he, ingenious. TTSO X might not go too well with the current zeitgeist, but it's clever. The 'secular' brigade will love it.

You also mentioned something about classifying temples by age, right? When you were telling me about this. So, young people could look at the temple's 'rating' and choose whether they wanted to go to it or not.

Harish said...

Yes. Customer(devotee in this case) is the King. Gottalla?

Anonymous said...

HA HA!! Sakkatagide... Brilliant post... Maybe be we can also include CMM levels to improve quality and customer (devotee) satisfaction.

We are currently going for CMMi. And you don't have it. So, there.

Harish said...

Sandeep, ningen gottu? We might be going for CMMi, or perhaps, CMMx..