Donald Duck in Cowboy Gear

In the early 1990s, I began a corporate career working with TDICI, then India’s premier venture capital fund and, almost at once, I was handed over a portfolio of companies in which we had invested over the years.  Of the two vexatious companies in this portfolio, Gum India was, by far, leading the charts.  It made Big Fun, a rather disgusting pink bubble gum and Gum India was, to use an equally disgusting pun, a sticky mess.    

The bubble wasn't in the gum though, but in the financials (call it a hot air bubble) and the Income Statement and Balance Sheet were products of inspired fiction.  The company owed money to nearly every pedestrian in Chennai, was a marginal player in most markets and made a product that destroyed kids’ teeth, which didn’t quite put it on a pedestal anywhere. The company was driven by its sales people who, inspite of an alleged business education, understood nothing of finance, collections or profitability, leaving all of that to the man who will shortly be introduced as the Chief Protagonist of this story.  

And, if this was not enough, the company founder, a tall, lean chap called Naru, was (and still is) quite a character: full of bluster, grand ideas (never supported by reality, which he perceived to be but an irritant), and an ability to talk the hind legs of the most skeptical donkey you’d meet. In us, he had found not just a donkey, but a pack of them. 

This chap had a mean streak of arrogance, sometimes communicated in the vein of sophisticated humour.  This was partly a result of what he saw as superior breeding and partly his opinion of himself and his education from IIM (blame, Calcutta). Naru knew everything.  Naru had the last word.  This hauteur meant that he consigned me to his beleagured finance manager.

This note then is about Ramk, Gum India’s finance manager. He was a short tubby chap, grey haired, with a moustache and an ingratiating, sly smile that hid more than it revealed. It was a slyness that was cast within, for his was an unenviable position to be in: hounded by creditors, harassed by employees and impaired by a management team that found him to be an impediment in their grandiose plans.  There is no doubting the stress he was under, which at some point presented him with a slipped disc (he wore the collar to every tricky meeting to generate sympathetic vibes).

This is not to imply that Ramk was a suffering, silent saint; on the contrary, he was a skilled manipulator, generating superior, highly convincing fiction on a spreadsheet.  His job was to convert a complainant into his victim - a job he did with unmatchable skill - each of whom was guided gently down a primrose path to nowhere (ask me, I was Victim #1).   

In our regular meetings in his office in Chennai, I was always prepared with stern messages and sometimes rehearsed my lines.  One hour into the meeting, I would be putty in his hands and rich fodder for his spreadsheet-led fiction recital.  The next quarter, he would assert with what I can only call Inspired BullShit (which he had learnt from his boss), would be spectacular for the company. Since that quarter never ever arrived, the next quarter would be a repeat in an astonishing display of chutzpah.    

Ramk’s room was a drab, grey cabin, with little to please the eye, except for a worn poster that was stuck on the wall behind him. It had Donald Duck in a cowboy suit, hat, holster, the works, twirling a gun on his forefinger, with a broad grin across his engaging face. The byline said, “Nothing will happen today that I can’t handle!”. 

And everytime I met him in his room, my eyes would fix on that poster and then on him.  And then back to that poster.  That sly smile, the chutzpah and brazenness....

As the years have passed by, Donald Duck in Cowboy Gear has stood me in good stead, much before the film '3 Idiots' popularised "All-is-well"!  When faced with a fire in my family home in the middle of the night, an airline employee who had closed the flight gates when I reached them or a child who ran headlong into my car (he ended up fine), I have despaired, only to see that poster on the wall and breathe again.  Followed by a picture of Ramk in my mind, his easy, at times sly, smile reflecting confidence in his deft hands and in getting out of this one, skin (and neck collar) intact.  

But then, I hope the writing on the wall - the poster and the idiom - is the only thing I learnt from the inimitable Ramk.

I Once Lived in a Vacuum

About thirty years ago, a company called Real Value, that made fire extinguishers that did not look like they were for exclusive use by the Asian Weightlifting Champion, decided to make a new product called the Vacuumiser.  The principle of this gadget was to put your leftover food in their specially-designed dishes, which were then vacuumised under a motor, making it last forever (make sambar in summer, consume in monsoon, sort of thing.  You get the pic, even if it seems yucky).  

The company I worked for then had a ‘hard furnishings allowance’ (which is the dumbest idea for tax-saving ever.  Ever.  Take it from me).  Not needing any furnishing, hard, soft or in-between, I bought the vacuumiser with that allowance, because the ad by Trikaya Grey, an agency that specialised in doing funky ads for gullible imbeciles who had hard furnishing allowance, looked good.  The product was clearly useless for us, since we had a cook who used to come in everyday, and hence I bought it (most of my decisions follow this pattern.  If you are looking for someone to take charge of a nuclear reactor, ignore my job application in the larger interest).

The first day, I vacuumised the leftover idlis from breakfast in one of their dishes and put it in the fridge.  On day 2, the idlis had shrunk like a Chinese T-shirt (XXL to M in one wash, guaranteed, says the label, but in Chinese).  They were also flatter than a helipad and were now a colour best described in the Asian Paints brochure as Zinnia Bloom.

The math is as follows:

Idlis without air inside = bricks without air inside

Remove ‘without air inside’ from both sides.

Idlis = bricks.

After nearly losing two of my finest teeth, I abandoned the effort to eat them.  So did the neighbourhood cow that, with a look of disgust, deposited some dung in clear expression of opinion and  I briefly considered shipping that dung (vaccumised in one of their bloody dishes) to Real Value.  In a week, we realised that anything with air inside – which is about 97.245% of all food that I know – would no longer have air inside and hence needed rehydration therapy, meditation and motivational speeches and tender loving care before consumption.  

Yesterday’s vaccumised chappatis tasted like the ones found while excavating Harappa, and the chana could be used in construction, particularly of highways, no questions asked.  And the khichdi was transformed into a grim forbidding cake, needing a knife, protection glasses, two hammers and GPS-type navigation. 

When I told my friend and senior at IIMB, Aloo, who was at Trikaya Grey, that I had bought a vacuumiser, he seemed aware of it.  He told me this after he had stopped laughing, which, from a guy who is the closest human form to a potato, was the last straw (no, not a vacuumised straw.  He liked his carbs.).  

He was thoughtful for a minute and then let me know that it wasn’t the vacuumiser, but the fifteen customers who were the only purchasers of this bloody liability who were the Real suckers.