THRISSUR: ‘Manthal’-`200, ‘karimeen’-Rs 280, ‘avoli black’-Rs 300, ‘bral’-Rs 200, ‘ayila’-Rs 120, ‘thirutha’-Rs 140’. These are the first words that a select group of 300 city residents get to read every morning.For five years, C I Devassy has been the de facto alarm clock for his customers waking them up at 6.30 am with a daily message containing prices of various varieties of fish for the day. Devassy’s services do not end there. A reply to this message specifying the name of the fish and quantity would be at the customer’s door in half an hour.This system was developed by Devassy more as a necessity than a luxury. “I used to get a lot of queries about prices of different varieties of fish and my entire morning used to be spent answering these calls. It so happened that my service provider introduced free unlimited smses at that time. So I thought of sending them to a select list of regular customers containing all fish prices for the day,” says the 38-year-old Chelakottukara native who studied till pre-degree before plunging into the family business of fish vending 11 years ago.While Devassy’s shop has not budged from the Sakthan fish market for the last 24 years, his popularity has spread across the world. A city-based doctor reminisces as to how Australians were going gaga over Devassy’s marketing method. “I was visiting Adelaide once and I used to receive Devassy’s smses every day. The people there were marveling at the ingenuity of the system,” said Dr TT Paul, a city-based doctor who is one of Devassy’s regular customers.Modest as ever, Devassy, who recently became the first vendor at the Sakthan fish market to introduce computerised billing, says that his only aim is to make life easier for the people. “Right now if one of our regular customers wants chicken or beef, we order it from a nearby shop and send it along with our other orders. Our aim is to create a situation where the customer does not have to come to the market for any kind of meat,” he says.
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