April for the Blues

It is a cool morning in end-April  in this part of our forest and as we walk on the track with prodigious quantities of dried elephant dung, one eye out for the pachyderm if he is somewhere, the trees and bushes draw attention.  Pongamia is everywhere here, yet, as we go in further and rocky outcrops abound, jalaari - Shorea rox - takes over.  This is my favourite tree and the flowering season was over about a month and a half ago, but thousands of light coloured winged seeds - those helicopter ones which twirl and twist as they fall - droop on the branches.

Today, I hope to see a variety of flowers though: Careya in all its beauty or perhaps Firmiana colorata (toes crossed and walking on stilts).  But then we come to a dense crop of these trees with tiny, beautiful blue florets in clusters of deep blue.  Aren’t they utterly beautiful!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the iron wood tree, a small hardwood, called Memecylon something-something in Latin & Greek (I think that suffix is umbellatum, but it could be edule, no matter).  In Malayalam the tree is Kashavu or kannavu and the flower has a lovely euphonious name: kaayampoo

We stop to study the tree and, at a later point, I look it up in my book (Neginhal sir, bless you wherever you are). But it is when I search India Biodiversity Portal later that I see an entirely unexpected connection with a small piece of musical history.

In my collection of old playing records is an EP from the 1969 Malayalam film, Nadhi, with an immensely popular song sung by that maestro, Yesudas.  

Kaayampoo kannil vidarum

Kamaladhalam kavilil vidarum

(The kaayampoo blooms in your eyes

Lotus petals on your cheeks……)

Yours to listen to…

https://open.spotify.com/track/0Go3xe8Sdu27plq98uyxoz

This photo with three flowers: these are Shorea rox, Firmiana and the Ironwood tree, photo taken in March 2022

Just Another Story. Just Another Scam

February 20th 2024

I see the name of the driver on the app and it is clear, at once, that he is a Malayali.  He arrives fifteen minutes before schedule – which used to be a Blusmart feature (not a bug) – and I walk up to the gate and request a few minutes to get ready. ‘Aren’t you from Kerala?’ I ask, for we Mallus tend to pop that question sooner than later.  ‘Yes, sir,’ he replies, with an enthusiastic smile, ‘and I thought you were a Malayali too, from your name.  Please take your time, we can leave fifteen minutes after schedule as well, not a problem.’  A cab driver saying that; doesn’t the surprise make your day?

As I get into the cab, his dignity and bearing are evident.  He speaks fluent English, is courteous to a fault.  After I tell him the time of my flight, he thanks me for booking the cab three hours earlier.  He is at the fag end of a twelve-hour night shift and I feel deep sympathy for him (along with, of course, the hope that he is awake enough to drive a car).

So, we get chatting; the stories of mortal men and women – pedestrian tales of existence, resilience, connections and hope – are the most enthralling, aren’t they?  Those beguiling encounters of comfort and dissonance offer so much for reflection, certainly as an alternative to reading the short-term, high-intensity feeds of transient inanity on the media on my phone (which I cannot do anyways as it makes me queasy in a moving vehicle).

I learn that he is a Bangalorean and has been a Blusmart driver for a couple of years and enjoys the experience.  ‘I occasionally meet someone like you, sir, who speaks Malayalam and enjoys conversation, which is special (vishesham, in Malayalam).’  For two decades, he drove night buses to Mumbai – a twenty-hour journey – and rested for a few hours before driving back to Bangalore.  A seven-hour sleep at night was reserved for one day a week and he had made a deal with the devil on that, but then he missed his wife.  No kids, he says without my prompting.  He begins to speak about his wife and then checks himself.  I wonder why. 

Education did not really interest him, which was a source of great stress for his well-educated dad.  There was contrast too: his two siblings – a sis and a brother, both older to him – studied well and have done well in the Great Game.  While on the airport flyover, he points out an utterly grotesque apartment-city (no other term will suffice in vehemence for this apparition) and says his brother, who is a techie in the US, has a four-bedroom apartment in there.  

‘Yet, I am happy as a driver, no regrets’ he says, and there is a stubbornness, a sense of indignation in that tone which makes me feel that he is talking to himself, justifying, quieting the inner voice of dissent…..

An hour of conversation and we are on the final stretch to the terminal.  ‘My wife is a Maharashtrian,’ he says, ‘and she has a physical disability. Ours was a marriage no one wanted to attend. Yet, today, my parents are deeply attached to her. She has a job too, but this income from driving keeps us going.’  He pauses. ‘She is everything to me.’  

I can feel the emotion in the voice, sitting there in the back seat of a car driven by a stranger I will perhaps never see again. I hope my short reply, in words and tone, has been one with empathy.  We complete the journey in silence.

As I step out of the car with my bag, he smiles with that now-familiar enthusiasm.  ‘Please call me anytime if you need a car,’ he says, and I nod in assent, though we both don’t really mean it.  

And, today, I think of his future.

And I am angry at the flagitious and greedy men who ran this company and have played with human lives.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/who-is-anmol-singh-jaggi-blusmart-gensol-founder-banned-sebi-epc-11744787594839.html

Water From Stone

About thirty years ago, I worked in an investment team that was led by one of those superior types, who walked around with his nose at 45 degrees to mean sea level.  For the record, he had much to be modest about, as indeed all of us did, but that was lost on him (self-delusion cannot be suppressed with paracetamol – old jungle saying). 

One day, a proposal for investing in a textile mill in Coimbatore that had gone bust landed up. The company was up to its neck in debt (and it had the neck of an ostrich, lemme tell you), yet needed more money and the family that ran the business asked one of its own – a US-MBA type - to take over (the fact that he agreed was indicative of his IQ, but it did not occur to me then).

If you know anything about textile mills, you are probably in stitches by now and laughing yourself sick.  The general rule is, the more spindles you have, the higher your societal value in Coimbatore, and the more losses you show in the financial statements.  The only way to make money off a textile mill is to keep digging below the factory floor till you strike oil.  

Under every circumstance, we would have neatly stacked this proposal document in the weekly waste paper sale to the raddi-wala (which was at that time the only profitable activity we did), but that year we were hopelessly behind the annual investment target (those who set targets should be tried in a court reserved for War Crimes), so the team head – I shall call him Mr Vapour – decided that I should take a look.

…which in his language generally meant, We should take a Good Look and hit the Invest button.    

I was ok about it for two reasons:

- I had now some work to do to keep myself occupied

- I was heavily into reading Warren Buffett in those days and he too had begun with a bust textile mill (Warren, do note that’s where the similarity sort of ends).

(talk of vested interests)

Now, there were a thousand reasons to be cautious as hell about this deal, but Vapour had made up his mind (or what was left of it).  So, I waded through mindless stuff on spindles, cotton and jargon, without understanding anything.  What I did understand – the balance sheet – reminded me of Jaws 3, because it was terrifying.  We then made a case for investment (which must be under the Deep Fiction section somewhere in the archives of the company now), while I prayed for divine intervention (Indian Express headline, “Lightning strikes Coimbatore Mill, machinery to be exchanged for eighteen bags of peanuts”) and waited anxiously for the Big Day to present this basket case to our Board. 

If you have ever doubted the existence of The Higher Power, please note: He’s There, alive and kicking.

A day before the Big Day, the company’s MD – influenced no doubt by a kamikaze pilot or by something he had illegally inhaled – called me and set out a list of conditions if we were to invest. 

Hang on: we should have been setting the conditions! 

So, knowing what Vapour would do (which is to succumb to this lunacy), I went to his boss, i.e., my super boss – that’s nowadays called ‘doing a skip level’.  He let out a sardonic, low-decibel sort of laugh-cum-growl, used a string of rich, colourful adjectives to describe the MD, his parentage (which was cast in serious conjecture) and about most of Coimbatore's textile industry and asked me to tell the MD to fly a kite, which message I passed on at once, asking him to choose from either flying kites or digging for oil.  

ps: I did not actually do the last part, but it makes the ending sort of cool.  

ps2: Vapour may have forgiven me, I suppose, but he does not show it.   

…and, finally, 

ps3: and, here is what the Oracle from Omaha has to say in general:

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.