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…