On chaiwallas, shopkeepers and entrepreneurship

Belagavi Airport

Today was CAT 2019.  The second CAT that I was involved in managing.  And the last.  I would have demitted office as Admissions Chair in March 2020.  It is one of those titles at IIMB that has a nice ring to it, possibly because of the sense of power it suggests. 

That sense of power is not even illusory.  The IIM Admissions systems are so well governed that individual chairs cannot go berserk.  And that is the beauty of the role.  So much for the sense of power.

It is really a sense of joy, of fulfillment, that makes it worth being Admissions Chair.  The realization or awareness of the fact that you are managing a process that is considered to play a large part in sustaining the reputation of the institution itself.

I will step down from the role a year earlier than I had agreed to initially.  And I do so under circumstances that are not entirely happy.  Being a committed bureaucrat and a disciplined institutional citizen I will not talk further about those circumstances in a public post.

So here I am at Belagavi Airport.  It looks a lot like Rajahmundry where I was at the same time of the year, just a day earlier, returning from CAT 2018. 

Both the airports remind me of my early days as an airline passenger, more than 35 years ago.  Flying was magical at that time.  Until a man by the name Captain Gopinathan turned it into a worse than plebian pastime.  Fliers back then were an exotic lot.  Only the rich and the powerful flew.  I have had celebrities from the film world and politicians as fellow passengers.  And I was not even thirty! I had simply lucked out.

The Belagavi airport is compact. It has all of two departure gates at the end of one perennially spruced up waiting hall, a cafeteria that has limited fare that the owner decides you should have.  That reminded one of dirigiste India, devoid of choices.  There were more security personnel than passengers, giving the impression that we were being corralled inside an air force base to be flown out to safety.

It was a throwback for some not so nice reasons too.  The man at the Air India check in counter behaved as if he owned the skies, and not the Maharaja that had adorned the wings of the AI aircraft once upon a time.  That the airline had been unsuccessfully sold for many years by successive aviation ministers of different political hues did not seem to have affected his outlook or attitude in any way.  Or maybe it was precisely that which gave him that attitude - that the airline would not be sold and instead kept afloat till he retired.

As if to round off my reminiscences, all the security personnel started saluting this perfectly bald, middle aged gentleman in a cascading sequence, one after the other.  Clad in khakhi cargoes, a tee with the top buttons thrown open and brown kolhapuri sandals, he exuded the self-assuredness of someone whose authority announced his arrival.

Caught thus in this strange mix of missing the past and anticipating a future where I would miss being a part of managing CAT 2019 I decided to write this post that had been in my head for more than a year now.

The post

The idea for this post came to my mind a few years ago when Mani Shankar Aiyar launched one of his trademark below the belt diatribes on a political opponent, referring to the adversary’s chaiwala past.  When I read about this remark in the newspapers I was reminded of something that my acquaintance Mohanan had told me once almost a quarter of a century back.

Part astrologer, part palmist, part face reader and entirely a typically cynical Malayali, Mohanan was drawing a distinction between the destiny of being a business owner and an employee, as seen from the line on one’s palm.  If one had the lines that indicated one would be an owner one would never work for anyone, he explained.  On the contrary, one would own a business and employ people. 

It could be even a humble tea shop with two lowly employees, paid irregularly, often in kind.  But one was an employer alright.  And in Mohanan’s highly abstracted scheme of things a corporate CEO who was paid several lakhs of rupees in those days was employee as much as the poorly paid chaiwalla’s employees.

Mohanan was very Mallu in his economy of words and metaphor.  To illustrate, at the risk of digressing from the main point, when he wanted to express his keenness to leave Bombay and return to his native Kerala, he said very spontaneously that he just wanted to get away from the world of chapatis and pyjamas.  That pithy remark was a deep reflection on the sociological construct of identity that prevailed in the India of the early eighties.  Food and clothes defined culture, not so much religion and language, as we seem to reimagine in the new India today.

Mohanan’s idea of being owner or self-employed also anticipated many ideas that we teach as part of our course on entrepreneurship at the school where we work.  More importantly it provided a counter view point to the disparagement that Mani Shankar Aiyer seemed to betray in his profound ignorance.

At the end of the day, managing a business, however small can be a lot more challenging, fulfilling and possibly both.  And that is the reason for the current season of celebration of entrepreneurship in our country.

A while after Aiyer had launched his verbal assault I caught up with a long lost cousin for whom I have had nothing but the fondest of feelings, coupled with an envy laden admiration for her knowledge of English literature, her vocabulary and most of all acuity of mind. 

As with most catch up sessions very quickly we quickly turned to pouring vitriol on common relatives.  And that is when – let us refer to this cousin as just G – said, “You know what Giri, I saw S a few years ago.  She was dressed in black pants and white shirts.  And she said she dressed so because she is now a lawyer.  And do you know S married this shell of a man who is just a good-looking shopkeeper?”

That sounded like the extremely feudalistic old saying that is varyingly attributed to the Bonaparte and Adam Smith, that dismissed our one time lords and masters as a nation of shopkeepers.  My mind raced back to Aiyer, Mohanan and the man who sold tea who would one day rewrite the history of the nation. 

Now, such spectacular rise of seemingly ordinary folks to destiny crafting roles is not entirely new to India.  We have had a hair-dresser going on to become a history defining ruler, a stable keeper ejecting the powerful Mughals from the throne of Delhi and laying down a revenue administration system that is followed five centuries on and a courtesan’s son seizing power before he was ousted with the help of India’s own Machiavellian craftiness.

With one swift turn of phrase both Aiyer and cousin were, for different reasons, dismissing the challenges in succeeding in entrepreneurship, the industry and intelligence it calls for and its importance. 

Running a shop, no matter whether it sells tea or ceramic ware, calls for an intimate understanding of what one is selling and even more importantly of the mind of the buyer.  And then there is a significant place for the occasional hustle and bluster which Americans in their own style have whitewashed by calling it street-smartness.

It calls for identifying an opportunity.  Planning.    Juggling finances.  Significant sacrifices in one’s own life as well as on the part of one’s family.  Risk taking ability.  The willingness to accept that businesses do fail more often than not.  And above all, a high degree of self-interestedness, not always in a bad way.

I am no admirer of Aiyer.  But I am a big fan of my cousin, apart from having preserved my affection for her for many decades.  Given her refinement, I would not ever wish to weigh her on the same scale as Aiyer.  My disagreement is merely with their serendipitously similar attempt to deny entrepreneurship its rightful place in society and nation. 

What do we know about the humble tea and its vendors after all?  It is quite perhaps the good fortune of 1.40 billion people that an acumen that would have gone on to build a tea to battle tank empire got diverted into leading the nation into a brave new world, to borrow a phrase from Aldous Huxley.  After all it cannot be just coincidence that another man who started vending the same humble beverage is also now ruling the most important Dravidian state in the country.

Nanni….Namaskaaram…

Thoughts on Turning Sixty

Thoughts on Turning Sixty…..I

According to the Hindu Almanac that we follow as a family I turned sixty yesterday.  According to Hindu tradition that is a landmark in a person’s life.  It is particularly so in the life of a male, given the patriarchal society that most Hindu communities have.

So it is celebrated with a fair bit of fanfare in most of South India.  The Tamil Brahmins whip up the most amount of frenzy and brouhaha about a man turning sixty.  The inevitable purohits are summoned.  Homas are performed, not just for the welfare of the man and his spouse but also for his progeny.  

The function is called Sashtiabdapoorthy, a Sanskrit term that literally translates into the completion of sixty years of age.  As with most things Brahmin, when stated in Sanskrit, every idea has this extra added layer of legitimacy because it is after all the deva-bhasha or the language of the gods.

Prayers are offered for the man’s sublimation in his life thereafter, as indeed he would now be expected to think of a world beyond family and material achievements.  His sins until then are sought to be expiated through the many sacrificial offerings and acts of charity so that he may start his life all over again with an unblemished slate.

Needless to state, these engagements with the Divine are performed in full public glare.  The size of the audience is merely limited by his social stature and his ability and willingness to spend.   

The social aspect of the occasion can end up often overwhelming the spiritual though.  And for good reason, many argue.  It is an occasion for long lost relatives to reassemble.  This is particularly valuable in this day and age, notwithstanding the recent power of Whatsapp in reuniting clans scattered across the globe, all the way from Alaska to Alleppey.  For those who have started their family cycle fairly early and have their progeny well settled in life by the time they turn sixty, this is also an occasion for the progeny to display their reciprocation for their parents’ affection.  The preening and public display of pelf that happens is of course never acknowledged as a motive.

I come from a tradition of celebrating Sashtiabdapoorthy to varying degrees of grandeur.  I am part of a family that would be considered “well-knit”, although I have never been sure of what that actually means.  I can say for sure that members of my family believe that they are perfectly justified in influencing decisions such as how these occasions must be celebrated.   Not just justified but they consider it their familial duty to be actively engaged in the planning and execution of such events.

So as the clock started ticking for my sixtieth birthday, suggestions and proposals in this regard started flying about initially in the form of banter.  Banter because of this not so nice reputation that I have for being antithetical to such celebrations.  The banter was a trial balloon of sorts, to gauge how visceral my disapproval of the celebration might be.  Going by the past, these trial balloons also have the effect of slowly paving the ground for more assertive parleys that would follow.

That brings me to this question of why I am so disinclined, if not opposed, to such celebration that most average people look forward to, no matter what their station in life be and no matter how much or whether they believe in the religious and spiritual part of the occasion.

Let me get the first thing out of the way here, because I can guess what you must think after reading all that I have said so far:  My disinclination towards celebration is not because I do not believe in ritual, religion or tradition in general.  Do I believe in the rituals of the Sashtiabdapoorthy?  I wish I knew the answer.  My ignorance or my ambivalent response merely shows how little I know myself.

In general I have been uncomfortable with celebration.  I can trace that to something that my father instilled in me when I was a little boy of seven or eight.  He used to tell me of how millions of other people could not afford the meagre celebrations that we could enjoy in those days.  

Meagre they were, because those were the early decades after independence.  The legacy of poverty that our white lords and masters bequeathed to us Indians, after centuries of shameless pillaging, was further exacerbated by wars that we could ill afford but were forced upon us by our hostile neighbours.  So if we the fortunate middle class felt so impoverished at that time you can imagine about the plight of the less fortunate.

Those early lessons in caring for the less fortunate however had an unintended collateral consequence on me.  I could never celebrate without feeling miserable.  

That problem persists to this date.  Be it the annual Diwali, or a feast in the family or some other social occasion like a wedding.

As I grew older and delved more deeply into my thoughts and feelings I asked myself if that was all there to my disinclination towards celebration.  I began to realise there might be another layer to it, altogether unexplored.  

At first brush it appeared to be a superstitious apprehension of the proverbial evil eye that might be cast upon a celebration by jealous onlookers.  And the fear of unpleasant consequences that might follow.  If you are born into a Tamil Brahmin family you take to these unfounded fears like a duck to water.  It is possible that other communities might foster such irrational thought; but I cannot speak of that with the same authority that I can about my community.

On closer examination I felt that was not all.  There was something even more fundamental.  And that was the fear of impermanence of the occasion and the associated joy.  That the whole thing would not last long.  Once over, it would leave you with just vivid, detailed memories, which may in turn often leave you with wistful recollections.  Painful searing emotions.

This has been my curse in all these years, since those early days of my childhood, dating back to more than half a century now.  A curse that I have silently borne, unable to make anyone understand.  Not even my poor wife who mutely goes along with anything that I say or do.

What made me say it now?  First of all, I feel it is time to put many of these thoughts down, now that according to the Hindu tradition, one is supposed to be riding into the sunset, to use a cliché.  Not that it should or does matter to anyone.  It is just a mechanism of getting things off one’s chest. 

More importantly, I was pained by some developments this evening, details of which I shall not go into.  These developments made me feel obliged to explain that my indifference, or worse disinclination, towards celebrations were not the result of my disrespect for our traditions.  It is a complex web of fears that has ensnared me all these years into leading a quiet and Spartan life.

Thoughts on Turning Sixty….. II

Turning sixty is that time of life when the world of work expects you to step off.  The formal term for this is retirement.  Thanks to modern medicine that manages to repair worn out and defective parts of the human body and lets these less hobbled up subsystems trundle along, however inefficiently, people seem to plod along well beyond retirement.  That is another story.

Cessation of formal working life aside, sixty is a time to recall and reflect.  While the labour market might allow one to earn a few pennies the fact remains that one is past one’s prime.  

That defining moment when one senses that one is past one’s prime only seems to be coming up faster and faster across generations.  In these past years I have been routinely running into forty somethings who meet me with the pious claim that they think it is time to give back.  I interpret that – cynically perhaps - as their saying that they are no longer able to receive.  That they get the sense that they are past their prime.

I am lucky to have a job that allows me to work until sixty five, no matter what the state of my grey and white cells are.   That I have this job is proof that God exists, to borrow a metaphor from J K Galbraith.  That is a thesis that needs a separate treatment in itself.

So I asked myself as this day seemed to come at me, racing along, despite my remonstrations:  Is it a time to rejoice or recall and reflect?

And so I recalled and I reflected as I prepared to face this day.  I recalled the gift that I seemed to have enjoyed for a brief while in childhood of being able to recall with ease and at will anything that I had seen, heard or read just once, that allowed to ace exams of all kinds with nary a preparation.  That made it appear at one point in time that there was nothing that I could not do if only I chose to do it – sing, write, recite, public-speak, mimic and so on.  That my problem in life was one of what disciplines  I chose to read when I grew up; because I could work with ease through the most abstruse of literature to the most abstract ideas of mathematics and all that lay in between like the sciences and social studies.

Inevitably that led a few in the family, most of all my poor father and later my maternal grandfather, to believe that I should appear for the IAS because I would have it for the mere asking.  

Until it all started crumbling slowly, year on year, till I would be reduced to the most pedestrian of existences that I now lead.  It was like radioactive decay.  An exponential function, to use a mathematical metaphor – ever declining but never reaching zero.

So how did it happen?  Over the years my mind has come up with many hypotheses.  May be it was a freak neurological incident following a surgical procedure?  May be a form of nemesis for all the insouciance, even arrogance, of the early years that had brought upon me an avalanche of wrath of the many people whom I had annoyed?  May be that catch-all cause of all things inexplicable called karma?  May be just a simple biological decay of the brain?  May be that apparent flash of early brilliance was itself just an unsustainable freak?  Or, maybe it was nothing fancy; but just a case of mistaken brilliance, as Somerset Maugham explains so incisively in his autobiographical work The Summing Up?  That last explanation of Maugham looks the most promising candidate among all the possible explanations I can think.  The talent such as I may have had at one point in time was simply highly, highly overrated by a doting family.

As I turned sixty these hypotheses have remained just that – mere hypotheses.  That is the essential nature of these mental processes.  They are swarms of locusts buzzing inside your head, laying to waste what little there is of fecundity.

What is that idea of success that I believe has eluded me till this end of my professional life?  Was it being the Chairman of ICICI that I would have loved to be some day?  Or a successful scientist that I set out to be after I had read CV Raman's biography as a 12 year old sixth grader? Was it being the Chairman of SEBI and leaving an imprint on capital markets in India that I thought was cool after I had read the Narasimham committee report?

Looking back none of them would appear that important.  M J Akbar's line at a foundation day speech at IIMB sums it up nicely:  We would all be significant as a generation if we found a mention in the footnote of the pages of history.

Those unresolved hypotheses and undefined regrets are now joined by many more sundry thoughts and worries.  So what would I do once I retire as I would indeed soon do when I turn 65?  I have trouble convincing my employer that I am doing anything relevant now.  According to the census of India chances are that nearly 96 out of any 100 people I meet on the road, or anywhere else for that matter, would be younger to me.  How long would I have to plod on with repaired and rehabilitated organs in my body?  All these years till about five years ago at the start of every new calendar year and then at the start of every new academic year I would promise that I would utilize the rest of my life to make my life as a whole worthwhile.  Now as I approach that age when most doors for productive work shut on me I will have to come up with a way to accept the inevitable fact that for all practical purposes this life is now finally over.  And that I have to look new ways of remaining meaningful and relevant, the only ways that may be available to a sixty year old man.

I can go on and on with this depressing rant; for it has engaged my mind for many of the waking hours in these past few weeks and months.  May be I will write some more along the same lines on another day.  It is late in the day now.  Tomorrow is Diwali, the festival of lights.  And these are hardly the thoughts to be typed up till the dawn of Diwali.

As I wrap this up I ask myself, what about that the case for rejoicing on turning sixty.  It is a bit of a stretch, on the face of it, that one might rejoice at all.  You might wonder why anyone might rejoice over growing to be as old as sixty.  The concessions for senior citizens might appear to be a good reason, as a few relatives have joked.  That hardly makes up for the rampant ageism in our public life in spite of the great Indian tradition calling upon the young to touch the feet of the elderly.  

Yet it appeared to me that there might be a different case for rejoicing.  And here is that perverse reason.  It marks the beginning of the end of the drag and misery that life has been in all these years.  In an ironic way it comes across as that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.  

Nanni....Namaskaaram...