AvantGarde

Analytics – a word that I didn’t have much idea about a couple of years back. Come today, this is something which interests me and a field in which I would like to pursue my career. So what is so fascinating about Analytics? What is it that makes it the toast of the entire business world today? Be it Marketing, be it Production or be it Sales, one just can’t keep it out of the picture. From politics to entertainment industry, from manufacturing sector to software giants, everybody is stopping by to take a note of the proceedings in the Analytics world.

One can make the data speak and give its users the insights into it which can be used for crucial decision making. But in this data-driven world, I believe that there is too much attention being devoted to numbers. There is a tendency to neglect qualitative data for we increasingly forget its importance when compared to quantitative data. A lot of things can be interpreted from even a piece of text provided it is visualized in an effective manner.

The Prime Ministerial candidate of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) delivered a speech on February 14, 2014 addressing NASSCOM India Leadership Forum (NILF) 2014. A word cloud of that speech is shown below. To bring everyone on the same page, a word cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to visualize free form text to quickly perceive the most prominent terms.

As one can see, the word that was mentioned the most is “people”. A die-hard critic of Mr. Modi may find it strange, but it just shows that unlike Aam Aadmi Party’s leader Mr. Arvind Kejriwal, Mr. Modi has also focused on the people of India, without taking too much credit though. One can easily make out that most of the bigger-in-size words are related to growth & development. Probably this is one of the reasons that many multinational companies’ heads would like to see him in the Prime Minister’s hot seat. Mr. Modi has realized the significance of India’s rapidly increasing youth population, its Information Technology sector which is evident from the word “youth”. A major difference that portrays Mr. Modi as a different and abled leader is the emphasis on the words like “process”, “skills” and not “results”.

His critics may argue that Mr. Modi doesn’t have anything new to offer in his different speeches in contrast to Mr. Rahul Gandhi who is seen as the face of United Progressive Alliance’s political campaign. But it is Mr. Modi’s different approach and stability of thoughts that people are interested in. They trust Mr. Modi to walk his talk, clearly evident from his popularity. Mr. Gandhi has often spoken about changing the system and the way this country is being governed which makes one doubt if he is a vital member of the ruling party.

Can anybody present a cold shoulder to such remarkable piece of data manipulation? Well, I don’t think so. It will be nothing but impossible to stop this Analytics juggernaut considering the enormous amount of data that is being generated every day.

References

1. http://www.narendramodi.in/speeches/

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Varun Sharma
MBA 2013-15