Apumaan

Apumaan was unique.

Not for his looks though. If you walk on any road in Kerala, you will see a hundred like him: he was an elderly, small fellow, thin and dark, with teeth that precariously dangled from their perch, a shiny pate protected from the sun by the ubiquitous umbrella and a handwoven mundu that defined his Malu identity.
Not for the work that he did, for he did nothing in particular.
Not even for his intellect, for after many attempts at law, he came to the robust conclusion that the examiners had hatched a collective conspiracy to suppress natural talent.

Three decades after he passed away, Apumaan remains in my memory for his unique, unsurpassed ability as a story teller.

Every year, when my family made the annual trip to Kerala from Assam, my only question would be to know when Apumaan would visit – for I had waited a year for the hour. On an evening, around dusk, he would duly shuffle in, just as we had finished our baths, a crooked smile playing around the corners, a tooth or two at a rakish angle for sheer effect. Apumaan’s entry was always dramatic in its own way. He was the only one who could call my grandmother – his cousin – ‘Mayi’; taking a chair he would rag her with outstanding good-natured ribbing, while the rest of the joint family giggled by the side. My grandmother had a wonderful sense of humour as well and, as I write this, I can see her bobbing up and down in her chair, the loose skin on her hands swaying under the weight of her laughter. Yet this adult talk was but the prelude, the overture, to something more. Turning to me, Apumaan would then say, “so, since your coming here, have you seen Gudugudu Panda walking about outside?” The children would now bunch up together, their small figures erect, eyes as large as saucers, mouths ajar, for it was a name that evoked trepidation, mystery and the horror of the omnipresent evil one. No, we would say, in unison.

“Well, I just met him,” Apumaan would continue merrily, “ and he had the little drum in his hand as always, the one that goes gudugudu-gudugudu and he was asking about all of you. (Involuntary shivers from the audience). I told him that there was a little boy who had just come from Assam,……” as I cringed, he would add “… but I also told him there was nothing much for him here. Did you know what this cunning fellow did the other day?”

…and the story would begin and go on for a long, long time, each moment challenging our imagination and moving us from mirth to fascination to consternation and then back again. As he spoke of the evil fellow's wrongdoing, his face would darken up, the pitch would lower to a whisper (for Gudugudu Panda was outside listening in) and the eyes would narrow. And, as he regaled us with how this same fellow had slipped and fallen in the banana patch of the farm, there would be the crooked smile at the corner of his mouth and a twinkle in the eye. The twinkle, yes, that described Apumaan best.

All of us children would sit transfixed, bewitched by the story and the story teller, while the rest of the family sat at a distance and marvelled at his ability. When the performance was over, the tea sipped, a last little dig taken at Mayi, Apumaan would look at us once with a serious eye, “When I meet Him on my way out, what shall I say?” and then carefully listen to all our answers and messages. He would then shuffle off into the darkness, with his torch and his umbrella, a lonely (and heroic) figure.

Could anyone have asked for more ?

Ramki gets a wrinkle

Much of what I know of animal nutrition owes itself to Dr. Venkateswarlu Rao, a most interesting, if eccentric, character.

Dr. Rao owned a company in Chennai (that still exists), specialising in providing nutritional supplement to the poultry industry. I had prospected his company, found it interesting and got my fund to invest a tidy sum of money in it. It was not a bad decision, for the company’s business seemed profitable, its bank was very happy with it and the market was attractive and growing.
The problem was not the company. It was Dr. Rao.

He was (and possibly still is) a man with a colossal ego, with three favourite subjects for prime-time discussion : his achievements, his brilliance and his (outstanding) future. These subjects gripped him and he would analyse himself with delight, much as an archaeologist would dance around mummies. He, in a sentence, could not actually believe that he was real.

His bank manager, Dr. Rao would proclaim, blanched at the thought of losing his client and possibly had his picture up on the wall with the pantheon.. His competitors slept with their lights on at night, his customers stood in serpentine queues to buy his products and joint venture partners crowded every flight into Chennai. His employees, he would freely admit, were rather vacuous in the head, yet the company average for intelligence exceeded the ordinary by miles, thanks to one brilliant man (he would add the last bit with much modesty). Such encomium to himself was often substantiated by examples in graphic detail. Somewhere along this rather tiresome monologue that I was subject to every time I visited, there would be some information for me on the market and the current issues he faced (nothing, of course, was a challenge to this eminent personality). I must add that the man was very good at his business - most such men are – yet the self-praise was way out of proportion.

In keeping with this personality, he had a large house in Chennai, with statues and fountains (and statues-cum-fountains), a couple of nasty guard dogs, many servants and a couple of imported cars that underlined his perceived stature, and was a member of the city’s golf club, where he remained a rather petulant novice, for golf has an abrupt way of deflating self-esteem.

Notably, he liked me a great deal due to my hearing of his achievement list every time we met. I would nod politely as he spoke and pay the odd compliment if I sensed he was fishing for one. If this put him in a good mood, a discussion on the business would begin. When he visited us in Bangalore, he would be escorted right to a conference room for a few minutes with a VP or even possibly the CEO. The hope, of course, was that the hours I spent would translate one day into a satisfactory return on investment for my company.

The company expanded its capacity as a result of our investment and grew well for the next three years to about Rs. 25 crores, yet the stock markets had changed in the period, making it very hard for small companies to raise public funds or provide us a market exit for our initial investment. Dr.Rao had little desire to let go of his baby in any way (this is hardly uncommon amongst Indian entrepreneurs). He approached us for a buy-back of our shareholding in early 1997. It was a time of change in the fund : we had a new CEO who came with strong preset ideas, including a dim view of the animal feeds business. After many happy years at TDICI, I had got a job elsewhere and was leaving, so a colleague of mine, Ramki, less used to the remarkable Dr. Rao, was assigned to the task of negotiating with him.

Ramki was (and remains) a gentle, self-effacing soul and I made one rather silly error in handing over in not telling him my partly successful, if utterly tiring, method of dealing with Gods-Gift-To-Mankind Rao.
Within a few days of my departure from TDICI, there was a distress call from Dr. Rao. Could I please get involved again, he pleaded. His tone now changed to anger : the new fellow (Ramki, of course) and his boss (TDICI’s new CEO) were both hopeless, most arrogant and had had the temerity, the cheek, the bloody gall, to make him, the Dr. Rao who was the gold standard for animal nutrition, sit in the reception before a meeting. During the meeting, his company apparently was referred to as a ‘small’ player in the animal feeds business, in the course of conversation. This was, of course, factually true: the company was a small player, but facts are most irrelevant to such people anyways.

I politely declined to be involved and made some noises in sympathy, itching to put the phone down and get on with life. Dr. Rao’s anger though, was unflinching, and he had to let it all out.  Subsequently, I am given to understand, he did make life difficult for the fund during the exit discussions, but all's well that ends well, if philosophy is a sop to use on such occasions.

Ramki developed his first wrinkles then.  You will be surprised to read then that he remains a dear friend and has most likely forgiven the stress I put him through.

A final point : What struck me as most remarkable is an oft-ignored aspect of a person’s display – his signature. Dr. Rao’s was a lengthy sign-off that took about a tenth of a page’s surface area and had stylish peaks as he wrote his name and a long line in the middle, followed by a flourish in the end. Could his personality be one with his signature, I wondered. Or, to put it differently, was it possible for a reader to deduce a person’s personality by the signature? Over subsequent years, I have tried to study this in considerable depth and must have looked at a thousand signatures. My conclusion is that the signature often tells us little, but there are many occasions, possibly five times out of ten, when it stands out and exposes a person’s personality very accurately.

A Tale of Two Ambulances, One Doctor, Zero Impact

Earlier this week I was out on the road, travelling to two villages, both close to Bandipur National Park but about forty kilometres away from each other. As we neared the first village, I noticed a vehicle that looked like an ambulance parked by the side of a road in an hamlet. I stopped the car, got off and decided to learn a bit about how rural health care worked.

The vehicle, owned by a foundation, was a rural mobile clinic really, not an ambulance and does a round of four villages a day, covering about twenty villages a week.

The driver of the ambulance was welcoming and invited me to take a look inside. The doctor – a young, thirty year old fellow, who could speak English only with an effort - was sitting by an empty bed, inside the vehicle. I introduced myself and asked him if I could learn more about their work, to which he nodded.

“Are you an allopathic Doc ?” I asked.
“Siddha, allopathic, anything.” he replied.
Anything?
“Yes, depends on the ailment,” he answered.

He sensed the doubt in my voice and shifted his gaze to the cardboard box by his foot, which was full of used syringes – there must have been a fifty or more in there. By his side, were eight bottles of injectables, some of which I recognised as paracetamol, B Complex and pencillin. All these injections were this morning’s work, he said, not without a tinge of pride.

As I spent the next ten minutes watching him as he attended to patients, the conclusion was clear : here was a Siddha medical practitioner (Siddha being a largely Tamil variant of Ayurveda), who was shooting a syringe of allopathic formulation (about which he would know a damn) into every patient who popped in, the indication of his success not being the state of the patient, but being the number of syringes in the box. His choice of injection seemed bizarre and, without any particular line of questioning. This is not healthcare and can indeed harm ignorant, largely illiterate people, whose unspoken contract of trust is being mis-used with nonchalance.

If I take this up with the foundation, I will get predictable answers such as, “Which allopath would want to spend his days in a vehicle in a remote rural area?” or “Villagers have a fetish for injections and do not accept tablets or syrups as solutions.” Both these are right, yet they do not justify doing the wrong thing.

The next morning, I was at Karemala – at the primary school there - and another rural mobile clinic toddled up, this time belonging to another foundation, run by a remarkable man of high personal integrity. At the sound of the vehicle, all the children in class stood up and asked the teacher permission to visit the doctor – every single one of them! It was remarkable to see a line of them standing patiently by the ambulance, even as I decided to board the vehicle from the front.

For starters, there was no doctor inside, only a bored-looking chemist. He had decided that he would elevate himself on this day and had therefore taken the doctor’s chair. The first child – a scared six year old - shuffled in; he spent ten seconds taking the child’s pulse and asked her the problem. She had a cold. Out came a strip of tablets. “Take half a tablet in the morning and half at night, and now make way for the next child.”
Fifteen minutes later, the man had dismissed seventeen patients – all the chidren of the school - and I was suspicious. I went back into the school and, as the children trooped back in, I took the tablets from them. Here’s a sample of what he had given them, other than paracetamol, which he seemed to ration out at the rate of one tablet per child to most of the kids, as if it was some delectable toffee.

• Etofylline – 1 tablet per head for five children. I learnt later that this is an anti-asthmatic drug and would be useless if given this way.
• Amoxycillin 250 mg ( an antibiotic) – he gave 5 capsules to a child who complained of throat pain. This child had no temperature, no white spots near the tonsils, no cough or cold and seemed to be fine otherwise.

….and so on.

In addition to his frivolous dispensation of medicines, he seemed to have touching faith in the ability of the six year olds to remember dosage and regularity; there was no need to write something down for the teacher to monitor or even ask if a parent was around to join the consultation.

I tried to hide my anger and, instead, taught the child with throat pain to gargle with salt water, while the teacher, at my request, took the medicines away from the children. We both decided to work urgently on a better system that ensured minimum quality at least for this village.

What is common to these ‘clinics’? They are both set up by remarkable people, whose integrity and intentions are beyond doubt and who would not tolerate such slack. In their ambition to scale the program, though, they have lost sight of just what it is doing for its target audience.

In the train to Bangalore, I pondered on the old maxim of quality being inversely proportional to quantity. Perhaps, in humankind’s most important needs of healthcare and education, less is more.

My Best Friend

When I woke up on February 25th this year, I knew it’d be a special day; sometimes you just feel it in your heartbeat, there’s a spring to the step and all seems right, as Wodehouse would say, with the World. After an early breakfast at the Digboi Guest House, my new acquaintance, Raju Sharma, and I set off to search for an old friend.

The old friend was Mali.


Mali was not just a friend, he was my first real friend. He must have been employed by our family when I was but an infant, and he was at least thirty years older than me. Yet, when I was a little child just beginning to understand the World around, Mali held my hand in support as much as my parents did, by my side all the time.

Mali (whose name was Man Bahadur) was a short, muscular Nepali and our gardener-cum-Man Friday. He was a reticent man who spoke little of himself, but would be around for any work that needed to be done, as long as it did not remotely involve the intellect - God had thoughtfully omitted to fill the cerebrum from this creation of His, consistent with the old equation, Brain X Brawn = Constant.

Mali's background was quite a mystery. He once told me that he came from a remote Nepali village and had earlier worked in a beedi factory; this fascinated me and, on the many occasions when my parents were visiting friends or out for a party at the Club, Mali and I would spend endless happy hours rolling mock beedies out of plain paper, while engaged in light banter. He took his job of minding me very seriously and would sit by my side, as I slept. When my parents returned, often beyond midnight, Mali would walk back alone to his servant’s quarters at the bottom of the hill on which our beautiful home stood. He occasionally walked me to my friends’ homes and, during those strolls, would point out the many flowers and trees along the roadside; these were my first Nature Walks in the little town of Digboi. As most children do, I took him entirely for granted and assumed he existed to serve; his uncomplaining nature only made this assumption a reality. He hardly ever went back to see his family, even when my mother would offer to pay him for the while he was away – in every sense, we were his family.

On occasion, we would see evidence of his astonishing strength. When my brothers turned up for the vacation with their large, cumbersome hold-alls – alas, now extinct as a piece of luggage – Mali would simply swing one onto his back, pick up a suitcase and ascend the stairs, his back bent much in Nepali style, while we all watched in amazement.

In those magical years of my childhood, I made friends in school and had my differences with many, as all children will do. Yet Mali was the only friend I could never find any fault with. As for any adult, it must have been trying for him to humour a child all the time, yet he did so with silent sincerity, never asking for a quid pro quo that would have been granted by my grateful parents. When, in the winter of 1977, we packed our bags and left Digboi for good, I was inconsolable because I believed, despite my Mother’s statements to the contrary, that I would never see Mali again.


When I visited Digboi again this year, thirty three years later, I met Raju Sharma, an attender at the guest house where I stayed. It was a wonderful coincidence; he had had known Mali when he was growing up himself, and instantly recognised him from an old photograph that I had remembered to pack.

“I am not sure if he is still alive,” Sharma said, “but he had shifted to Margherita many years ago.” I then remembered that my father had got Mali a job in a tea estate. Raju put his mobile to good use and we were off to track him down. There was a sliver of a chance that I would meet Mali, and all that I had to find my way was an old photograph.

We reached the Margherita estate and spent a couple of hours asking our way around. Up a picturesque driveway and we were on a plateau, close to a large nineteenth century bungalow now occupied by a senior manager at the estate. We stopped about a minute’s walk from a labour line surrounded by tea bushes. I got out of the car, walked across to the few children and young girls standing there and took his photograph out, an old black-and-white one where he had stood next to me and the other servants in our old bungalow.

A girl of about twenty stared at it for a minute and then exclaimed in happy surprise. “That’s my father when he was young,” she said. Yes! I thumped fist-on-palm.

Just how does one describe the emotion of seeing a dear childhood friend after these years? When Mali shuffled in - an old man, bent with age and infirmity - I had difficulty recognising him……and then, I saw his fingers, gnarled and rough, that I instantly recognised from that childhood long, long ago. He looked at me inquiringly, while the girl grinned and told him that his Gopu Sahib had come.


Mali dropped his bundle of firewood, walked right up and hugged me, tears forming in his eyes. I felt a lump in my throat as well, as I struggled to calm him down. The man had changed little, his simplicity and affection intact in the evening of his life. We spent a few minutes in silence and the years rolled away as I went over my few memories of a childhood long past.

We then exchanged updates – after we left, he had got married and had two grown up children. He told me of a serious fall, a battle with malaria and the other hazards of life in Assam, his feeble voice now mumbling more to himself, frequently wiping a tear away. I called my mother from my mobile and gave him the phone. He spoke to her in a voice that was barely audible or even coherent. After the call, when the conversation ceased and the far away look in his eyes stayed put, I knew it was time to go. I kept a smile on my face, and cheerily bid him farewell.

I will be back, I said. And, I meant it.


Post Script : as I post this, it has now been about three months since Mali has been missing from his home. He had been admitted to a hospital for a cataract and, on the day of his discharge, just walked away. I cannot help thinking that meeting me had something to do with this, yet I hope I am wrong and that he is safe.

The Genius

Thomas Edison famously stated that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well, he knew his light bulbs alright and perhaps got the music industry off the block, but he knew nothing about genius, even his own. I say this, because he had never met Venu (Venu was born in the early 1950s, after Edison was had been dead for two decades, so a meeting was unlikely).

Venu (not his real name, else I could get into trouble) began his stint in modern history by enrolling for Chartered Accountancy under my Uncle. He was a thin, dreamy eyed sort of fellow, who walked as if he could always fall in a heap on the ground and had his mouth always open in a sort of unhinged way. In the few years of articleship, he acquired a cult reputation for simply being brilliantly clumsy and absent minded. He would be holding a glass of water and would find, for no reason whatsoever, that it dropped and shattered by his feet. He would then wait, mouth open and gulping in air, much as a fish would do, eyes goggling and hands frozen, until the mess was cleared up. When he walked down stairs, spectators watched with bated breath. And if this wasn’t quite enough, his skills in auditing were particularly unique: while going through vouchers, he could fall asleep in the oddest of poses, with his fingers continuing to automatically vouch the bill in the front of him. Fifty years on, the very mention of his name makes my Uncle double up with laughter; it is a laughter not unmixed with some frustration, and, as I learnt later, this was much the common reaction to Venu.

This was sheer genius, unrecognised. His parents continued to believe that their son would pass his CA if he put in the requisite preparation. Sorry, perspiration. Poor souls. Every exam would find Venu working damned hard at his books. He would eschew all pleasure, stop dropping glasses and glare fiercely at the ominous Shukla & Grewal in front of him. His resultant scores in the accounting paper varied from 5% to a high of about 20% and there is little doubt that the examiner had his moments of satisfactory mirth.

The next stop after his articleship was to join my father’s accounts department in Digboi. Those were days when jobs were got largely by whom you knew and my father had his blind spots; Malayalees was one. Venu quickly distinguished himself with some outstanding performances – my father, in later years, recalled watching the fellow spend a couple of hours at his desk staring into nothingness and smiling beningly on occasion, even as passers-by watched him curiously. This was no one-off event. When disturbed from such thoughtful reverie, he would stand up and sit down continuously a number of times and stretch his body and, in general, be all over the place, gulping continuously, the fish impression intact. Amidst all this, he never lost sight of two fortnights in a year, when his CA exams were held. He knew the pages intimately, the answers to all the sums in the book by heart and made the textbooks his constant companions in those weeks, yet the results remained astonishingly consistent. His genius – 99% inspiration and just that bit perspiration while he slept – was in being himself, not in the smaller game of life that is chartered accounting.

His parents saw the imperative in getting him a sensible wife and this they certainly did. My friend, Rajiv, who was their neighbour, recalls the now legendary incident in the early 1980s, when Venu purchased a second hand car. His wife – bless her – prohibited him from ever touching the wheel in her absence. On day, driving with her beside him, Venu got a bit mixed up with the many levers at his foot and, while down a slope, pressed the clutch rather than the brake, despite a screaming wife pointing out the technical error repeatedly. Rajiv rushed out of his home on hearing a loud noise to see a rather bedraggled Venu using all his strength pulling – yes, you read this right and I shall repeat it – pulling at the bumper at the back to bring the car (a two tonne Ambassador) out of the ditch it was now firmly in. The bumper came right off and Venu quickly found himself in the opposite ditch. Both the car and the driver were treated as outpatients in their nearby respective clinics.

Among the few Malayalees in the Digboi-Tinsukia area, Venu became a legend. He was a great conversation starter and my father, who had a ringside view of the fellow from his room, spent many happy hours practising Venu’s mannerisms that could be later used to set the tone for a memorable evening. When we left Digboi in 1978, Venu was hard at work on his exam, as always. Some years later, I learnt that he and his daughter had written the CA exams together. The bets on the outcome were very predictable and, indeed, Venu stayed close to his now twenty-year average.

Yet, Venu did something none of us could ever achieve in many a lifetime. He proved Thomas – the Thomas Alva Edison – wrong.

Doing Business with Friends.....

…..is a bad idea.

There are far too many things we do not learn in Business School (or any other school) that are learnt later the hard way. When I first interacted actively with Dada, as I shall call him, I knew that two of my classmates, who were going into the stock broking business with him, had made a big (very big) mistake.

Dada was (and, unfortunately, continues to be) full of himself. There is no doubt that he is a smart fellow, knows his Poisson distribution from the bell curve or onion peel, can pattern a technical analysis out of a cow’s random burps and make a presentation on the random walk theory that will stone a professor (but have a somnific effect on the audience). On campus, I had stayed away from Dada, but we now met often, as he lived in a bachelor pad in Indiranagar with other classmates, one of whom was a close friend.

A tall, generously built fellow, with a smile (that superior knowledge of the Poisson distribution always endows) and an infectious enthusiasm for anything to do with the stock market, he always dominated a friends’ conversation. What made his company particularly tiresome were his paens to his three loves - I, me and myself - never ceasing to advertise his proficiency. This made me step back and question the friendship – he didn’t, I reasoned, need friends, he needed an audience.

After a year and a half at a dead end job in Bangalore, Dada mooted the idea of starting a stock broking firm in New Delhi. It was late 1992; Harshad Mehta was on a roll, the stock market was ringing away and all was right in the best of all possible Worlds. One evening, there were five of us sitting in the bachelors’ pad, amidst a sea of stock market reports, magazines and dusty newspapers (that never failed to induce a bout of sneezing). I watched his voluble persuasion - a sales pitch to the gang to join up and start a broking company - affect two vacillating classmates, while the third (the friend I was close to) stayed unmoved. He spoke about the Tata Steel Secured Promissory Notes with a conviction that would have done Newton (or JRD) proud. Research was sniffing out the little gem, he intoned, not re-establishing that a donkey has two ears. Dada had his way; the two came onboard and another classmate joined later.

The company began with much promise. This was actually its problem, for it promised much to all those who chose it to manage their wealth. Dada, as the team leader, had the self-anointed role of the Brains Trust, the Bright Ideas Guy and he backed his ideas with Other People’s Money (that you could christen, OPiuM). This was taken a step further when Dada began to trade on his account – using savings or personal loans to buy shares in his own name.

Now, the problem with the markets is this: when things are going well, a monkey can make money, as indeed it did in a famous experiment years ago, for a rising tide lifts all boats. If you get in then, your success goes to your head and you get in deeper, playing for higher stakes, taking for granted that the music will not stop. This phase is, in the sophisticated language of the sceptics, called the Bigger Fool theory - you are buying in the hope of selling at a profit to a bigger fool.

The music does stop. Always.

A couple of years later, the markets had crashed, the broking business was in shambles, huge amounts were owed to all and sundry, and the fallout began as the company disintegrated, leaving one of the four (not Dada) holding the pieces. Friendship can scarcely outlive such trauma.


Yet, you might ask, how is this different from a situation where the four came together as business partners and not, originally, as friends? Would the outcome have been different?

If, I contend, they were coming together as possible partners (and not friends originally), the three would have been careful before saying ‘Yes’, sizing the others up and listening to their inner voice of caution. Friendship makes ‘No’ much more difficult and its easy to assume that all will be well tomorrow. It gets worse – friendship leads one to believe that the friends-cum-partners will agree on everything. Disagreements, as there always will be, become personal. When, to protect the friendship, a partner keeps quiet, the ‘lose-win’ result does not go away; it lingers beneath the surface. Doing business with those related to you, by the way, whom you know well, is just as risky.

An excellent book by Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational”, provides more light on all this (you should read it). Ariely notes that there are two norms for all of us : a social norm and a market norm, both of which don’t really go with each other. Any indication of money moves people (irretrievably) to the market norm. Say, you are a young male software techie who lives by yourself in an apartment complex. An elderly couple live next door : their son is about your age and he lives in the US. The couple tell you that they miss their son deeply; they are keen to build a friendship with you. As you become friends – the chat in the lift, the odd favour to each other including setting Skype up for them – the lady offers graciously to provide you dinner on weekends, cooking a bit more than they need. Home food!
Must you offer to pay?

Ariely says ‘Don’t’. If there is a cash exchange that results, the norm changes significantly to market: is the food good enough, you ask? Is he paying a market rate and what’s my margin, she muses? As the questions increase, the arrangement – a win-win otherwise - becomes tricky to sustain. A far better option is to provide her (or them) a gift occasionally to keep the reciprocity firmly in the social norm zone.

So much for theory. But, what happened to the gang of four and to the Invincible One, in particular? The two initial followers had to toil hard to pick themselves up and have just not met their potential as talented people. The One Who Stayed Back learnt his lessons on crisis management realtime and has done a pretty sound job – always the quiet one, when the going got tough, he got going. And Dada? A tribute to his resilience is the fact that Dada continues to provide advice – generally unsolicited – even as he tosses in the sea of the stock market.

Humans, except the good and the great, never learn.

Very interestingly, relationships where business partners become friends work much better. There are numerous examples, but I cannot think of one better than the equation my uncle had with his business partner, Sukumaran Menon, in Kochi – they ran an accounting firm for, hold your breath, about 52 years together, before this gentleman passed away. Along the way, they - and the families – became friends.


A final note :

I made one exception to my rule of not working with friends. When we decided to build a small cottage in our farm in Javalagiri, I had no hesitation in asking Peeyush, a close architect friend, to help design my home. The final outcome has been wonderful – a lovely home, even better friendship. How did that happen ?

While we set expectations and focussed on each other’s strengths, it was his genial, collaborative nature that was the key. You don’t find many like him.

With Malufide Intent

I find it very hard to understand the average Malayalee, though I am allegedly one. ‘Allegedly’ since I have never lived in Kerala, but visit a couple of times a year. Where your parents come from or what language they speak has nothing to do with your ‘native’, as we Indians refer to our homeland within the country; it is, instead, where you grow up and what you speak that determines who you are.

The Malayalee I refer to here is the one who has had his upbringing in Malu-land (hence, his ‘native’ is Kerala) and, while you could accuse me of a male bias when writing, particularly since Kerala has more women than men, it is the men who are the subject of my note. The reason I find the average Malayalee a tricky fellow to cipher is because he a bundle of contradictions. But let me start at the beginning…..

The average Malayalee is, well, average. You will find the odd flash of brilliance here and there, yet, unlike his counterparts in the other southern states, you do not find masses of people who invent wheels, silicon chips and stuff, the way, for instance, TamBrahms do. His (the Malayalee’s) primary skill is in being street smart, which is quite different from being brilliant. Put a Malu into a difficult situation and he will emerge, generally, unscathed, his white Mundu spotless and quartered at half mast, while others around him are on all fours, picking up the pieces. Take him out of Kerala into a hostile desert, charmingly and inappropriately called the ‘Gulf’, and he will work his teeth out to survive first and then prosper, showering that prosperity on his relations back home and building a mansion dressed in the colours of the rainbow. Transplant him now on the moon and, since he has once read of Richard Branson’s space flight plans in the Mathrubhumi, he will set up a tea stall that can brew a local arrack as well. Bangalore’s kirana stores business is dominated by friendly Malu souls who will not hesitate to smile and have a brief social word, while they do their jobs with astonishing zest. Yet, in Kerala, the Malu will do nothing.
This is contradiction number one.

On second thoughts, I am wrong. The Malu does one thing, when in Kerala – he talks. And talks. In the power of speech, he is second to none. He will hold forth, with considerable expertise, his tone expressing disdain, always animated, rarely laudatory, on a vast range of topics, and offer opinions and advice on subjects on which he hasn’t the faintest idea. I have sat silent (no mean achievement, for there is a small part of the Malu in me), while worthies around me have exchanged cogent, contrasting views on genetic mutations in agriculture. Yet, this never translates into action as long as he stays in Kerala. Contradiction number two.

Malu-land is itself a contradiction – the countryside is breathtaking, yet the towns are an urban planner’s concrete nightmare. Everyone recognises this, yet there is an overwhelming rush to convert the country into the town, so much so that the length of Kerala is today one large town, and, as you drive, a breather of the countryside is visible, before the next nightmare appears on the horizon. On the same plane of contradictions, the birth of India’s environment movement was in Kerala (Silent Valley, remember?), yet the State houses some of the most polluting factories in India (including the public sector, Hindustan Insectidies Limited, that makes the dangerous pesticide endosulfan), and is itching to convert most of its forests into hydro dams for the energy needed to light up its gold malls.

The State has an excellent palliative care program that is second to none and a developed network of healthcare. A significant part of this program caters to (and here comes the contradiction) alcoholics. Why I see this as another contradiction is because no one has the will to reduce consumption of liquor (as it adds loads of cash to the State’s coffers), but the State offers the best treatment in this country to one who has drunk enough and more to help the State balance its budget. One Malu army man once proudly told me that you could take a Malu out of Kerala, but cannot take Kerala out of the Malu. I am convinced that the itinerant Malu-on-song uses this argument while nursing his whisky. Contradiction four.

The Kathakali is the epitome of Kerala’s fine culture, an intricate and evolved dance form aesthetic and subtle requiring the viewer’s undivided attention. This is in sharp contrast, of course, to the Kodangallur temple’s annual festival, where large groups of men and women sing the most obscene songs and recite salacious poetry, composed in moments of heightened creative endeavour, with devotional fervour. Contradiction five. I am told that the common link is that practitioners of both forms of art imbibe the local brew for inspiration.

The women of Kerala are apparently amongst the most emancipated (if you go by statistics) and, yet, on the footpaths of its towns and on village trails, there cannot be more hazards for them, as men, drunken or otherwise, showcase their humour in peer company. This definition of emancipation is an oxymoron.

Malu TV is equally fascinating and contradictory; the most involved discussions are on human rights – reviling the US’s presence in Iraq or the role of the French in the Ivory Coast – yet, in Kerala, the human has few rights: on the narrow roads that weave in and out of the towns of Kerala, private buses drive with maniacal disregard for safety, their speed only matched by the tongue lashing served by unsmiling conductors on their customers, a conversation that adds richly to your vocabulary.

And, the last contradiction comes to mind. The Communist Party first came to power as a protector of agriculture labour, its main constituency. Well, today, there is no agriculture labour. Indeed, there is hardly any agriculture, when compared to other states. Kerala imports a huge part of its food, even rice (Palakkad was once the rice bowl for the state). Seasonal labour is imported from Tamil Nadu, since much of the local labour does not exist anymore. If the average Malu is not in the Gulf or outside Kerala, he is, of course, in Kerala. Where he does nothing (refer paragragh three).

Perhaps there are some that I have missed, but you get the gist: this then is the contradiction that is Kerala. I sometimes wonder if the Malu figures these contradictions out in his quick thinking mind. A travelogue I once read on Kerala describes the Malus as a ‘simple people’. If that is true, then I clearly am Pink Floyd.