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…
