While many senior executives continue to talk about the "voice of the customer," few demonstrate their commitment to this concept by spending time with customers. Many continue to use their intuition or `golden gut' in their attempt to provide superior customer value. Unfortunately, `senior executive intuition' is rarely attuned to the needs of their customers. While the competitive environment continues to intensify, executives have cut back on the time devoted to customers just when it should be increasing. This article discusses the need for senior executives to spend time with customers and provides examples of the benefits that this approach will provide.

The "postcolonial relevance" of Postcolonialism, in its ideology and methodology, to India is argued in the paper with reference to Arundhati Roy's `critically' much damaged novel, The God of Small Things. Postcolonialists, after successfully deconstructing the Western constructions of India, should now dismantle India's constructions of itselfits past Varnashramite stratification of Indian humanity. Arundhati Roy's novel has this indigenous postcolonial project at its heart. Her temporal-spatial dramatization of the cause and consequence of the bio-ideological mix of the `untouchable' Velutha and the `touchable' Ammu in the novel, is seen against this backdrop of the remote Indian Hindu history rather than its immediate Syrian Christian/Marxian background with a view to neutralizing the hysterical `erotic' cat calls against it.

Postcolonialism, in spite of its ideological make-up, remains a methodological weapon in dismantling the western binary constructions of the east/orient. Using `race' as a category of analysis, it has exposed the arbitrary priority given to one race over the other, locating the dormitory of Imperialism in none other than the human mind, divided into western and eastern hemispheres. What underlies the aggression of one country over the other in multiple manifestationscommercial, political, religious etc.,is fear. It entails the dialectics of the power's fear of the powerless and the powerless's fear of the power. Fear underlines and undermines the politics of power and the power of politics in global relationships. Postcolonialism has unearthed the western fear of the east to prove its constructions as its defense mechanism against the power of the `powerless east'. It is here its postmodern methodology blurs with its postcolonial ideology. After freeing the east from the prison-house of the western constructions, what is left to postcolonialists is a blind alley. To escape from this, they should endeavor to free the east from the clutches of its own constructions, thereby intensifying their ideological and social responsibility.

The postcolonial exposure of the Western constructions of the Orient has, no doubt, its cultural/civilizational remedies, but the side effects it has created have gone either unnoticed or ignored. For, it has excited rather than caused the Eastern spondylitic-complacency that the East has already constructed itself better/truer than the West. The first generation postcolonialists have stopped with their project of decentring the Eurocentric relational, but not relative, merits of the East, read, here afterwards, India. It is here that postcolonialism serves as an extension counter of postmodernism, which, while puncturing the Western constructions of itself left the Western constructions of the East untouched. The Third World Academicians surviving in the First World academies have got hold of such a construction and are christening themselves as postcolonialists.

Heart of Indian History: Postcolonial Relevance of Arundhati Roy s The God of Small Things, ideology and methodology, Postcolonialists, temporal-spatial dramatization, multiple manifestationscommercial, western constructions, postmodern methodology.