Today's buffett special: cheese from Mohenjadaro

One of the undoubted joys of my occasional corporate work is that I get to have the buffet lunch in a large hotel. Every time I see the plethora of colourful dishes, with their marvellous French-sounding names and Urdu superlatives (‘paneer lajawab-e-pasandila-Mumtazi-dilruba’ sort of thing), two ‘Which’ questions die to be answered, both of which are intellectually deeply engrossing:
1.Which original dish was this before its leftover was made into another dish, the leftover of which is in front of me in another form? and
2.Which financial year was the original dish prepared in?

Hot chocolate pudding is a great example.  When you see one in front of you, be reminded that it is an archeological marvel, originally baked around Aurangzeb’s time, then soaked in sugar and stored in deep freeze, removed and cooked to pulp, marinated in chocolate syrup (and, maybe, some leftover fish sauce) and now on the hot plate.  If the sign says ‘Walnut chocolate pudding’, remember that they take their singular sign seriously: the pudding will have one walnut piece that a South Korean ahead of you has lifted.

Yesterday, I picked up a piece of fruit cake and pointed out to the unsmiling steward that it was so old that it had wrinkles on it and a walking stick on top.  The fruit tray itself had, by weight, the cheapest fruits going – pineapples, watermelon and musk melon, the last mentioned being cheaper than cow dung (ton for ton – I am not joking because I checked online and showed the steward the data).  I asked if, being in season, I could have mango instead.  The steward looked surprised, possibly at the existence of such a fruit and even more at the sheer impertinence of a diner to ask for it, and scurried away.  He came back to say that there was no mango, sorry, but could I have mango ice cream instead?  Well, mango ice cream is flavoured, coloured, preserved and murdered, so I said no, give me a South Indian dessert, so he brought semiya kheer that had been boiled on the stove till the lactose asked for forgiveness and promised never to misbehave again.

But you know how I exaggerate the negatives.  I must admit that the white rice was very authentic and clearly white in colour, so they didn’t mess around there.

From Narayanan to None

When I first read of the controversy at ICICI Bank – the Chief Executive accused, on social media, with more than anecdotal evidence, of a conflict of interest, her husband having been a direct beneficiary – I could only think of the giant of a man who had occupied her post for much of the late 1980s and 1990s.  His name is Narayanan Vaghul and this is an unashamedly flattering tribute to a legend.  In contrast to his stature and ethical standards, the current incumbent (and the flamboyant, cowboy before her) is a pale, almost lame shadow. 

I did not work at ICICI (as it was then known), but then, neither did I not work in it.  That sounds funny, so let me explain.  For about five and a half years, I worked at a subsidiary – TDICI - that later became ICICI Ventures: Vaghul was the Chairman of our little enterprise.  Indeed, it was his baby and I got the marvellous opportunity, as a fresh grad out of business school, to learn from every interaction that he chaired. 

At IIM, the best and brightest of my classmates were vying to get into ICICI, and, when the final list was released, it was clear that the interviewers had chosen well: Hawa, Bhushan, Dahiya, Kannan, KG, Vinod - these were the crème de la crème, who joined a quasi-Government enterprise offering an average salary, in the rather quotidian business of granting loans.  The reasons were clear: the freedom the enterprise provided young grads, the level of engagement with finance, the opportunity to meet senior leadership in corporate India.….and the quality of ethics and leadership that Mr. Vaghul set.  The cultural transformation of ICICI was led by him, for, in the senior leadership team, he seemed to tower over everyone else.  Among India’s financial institutions, ICICI stood out, not just for its team capability, but also for its style of working and values; IFCI and IDBI were considered to be ethically dodgy and bureaucratic, while the Indian banks were, simply, incapable and could not offer adequate project finance. 

I did not even make it to the shortlist on campus, but a few months later joined TDICI, its subsidiary, which had a similar culture, possibly even more daring under KSN, the President of the company.  Meetings led by Vaghul were, if you were only an attendee and not a presenter, most enriching and fun.  A big-made man, with heavy spectacles, a predilection for curd-rice  and a visible dislike for exercise (he had had a couple of bypasses in his 50s), he would walk in to a meeting and take things over effortlessly, his razor-sharp mind cutting to the root of an issue or the core of the discussion.  There were liberal doses of humour (he would laugh in a open, engaging way, engendering a little twitter around the room), occasional references to the Bhagavad Gita and the Thirukkural, loads of stories about Indian businessmen – some very spicy ones –  whom he had met in the course of his work, bits from conversations with the glitterati amongst US Univ academics, particularly the Indian-American ones with whom he hobnobbed quite a bit  (the CK Prahlad types) and from their books, and little gems of wisdom (of which one example shall be provided later). 

His vision encompassed ICICI and its subsidiaries, yet, in operations, there was loads of freedom.  He had strong opinions on issues and on people (which were backed by experiences and an uncanny gut), but he would listen to contrarian views and debate them firmly at times, letting go on occasion.  Above all, there was a consistent focus on the ethical aspect of decision making.  This had two aspects: firstly, ensuring that the organisation’s team stayed ‘clean’ and above board and, secondly, that their decisions were not influenced by power influencers.  An example of the second: early in my career at TDICI, we got a proposal to invest in a large, commercial mango plantation, many hundreds of acres of it, in partnership with local farmers.  I did not think this was good investment material, wrote a note and rejected it.  The promoters of the venture knew an irascible, mercurial, hugely influential character whom I shall call R.  He headed the newly-formed SEBI and had apparently earned the epithet Mad Dog R, for being rather vicious.  He sent a letter – a terse one – to Vaghul, asking why this highly noteworthy venture had been rejected and seeking a re-opening of the issue.  Learning of it, a senior colleague of mine asked me to expect Trouble, for Mad Dog R was known for it, and got me most nervous indeed.   

But my colleague didn’t quite know his super-boss.  I was not asked to re-open the issue or indeed justify this to the Chairman.  The only thing I was asked to do was to prepare a reply that he could sign off; he trusted my decision and wanted to stick with it.  This, I will emphasise, was not just a signature – the key message was that he backed his team - and got him loyalty amongst his juniors (despite the usual cribs about salary, in-company politics and so on). 

On another memorable occasion, I learnt one piece of wisdom I have never forgotten: we often speak of the ‘first-mover-advantage’, the poster-example of this, often quoted, being Microsoft.  Vaghul believed this to be a myth and the more you examine the successful businesses of today, you more you agree with his assessment, for starting later enables you to learn from the pioneers’ mistakes.  You didn’t need to be First, he argued, but you needed to the Best (adding the word Big to this later).

Yet, Vaghul had his biases and flaws - one investment decision was made by him after meeting someone in a lift and he liked Gum India’s Narayanan much more than necessary - but who doesn’t?  He could be acutely manipulative (the old Amar Chitra Katha comics speak of ‘the wily Brahmin’, a phrase that fits the description to a V), possibly as a result of the experience of negotiating Government bureaucracy, and was touchy about certain topics.  A colleague once made a case for a hike in salary for all of us and what followed for the next few minutes was trademark theatre: the Chairman was appalled and offended that we, people he regarded as his own, worked for money and benchmarked our pay against other less-notable companies.  He did not expect this from us and hoped we would correct our myopia as soon as possible….and so on.  If we wanted to leave, he thundered with emotion, we were free to do so.  And then he left the room, with about a dozen of us shaken (and stirred).  But the big leadership flaw he had was an intolerance to ideas on organisational growth and direction not consistent with his own.  He preferred Yes-Men (and notably Yes-Women) to take up key positions.  I saw one such example at a meeting in 1995: he was convinced that our organisation needed to be Big and that we needed to do it quickly and when the President did not show entire agreement (the disagreement was only a short, quick, laugh actually), he was replaced by someone who agreed, but, clearly, was otherwise a poor replacement.  It’s a flaw the best of leaders possess, and Vaghul was no exception. 

His successor was a hard-nosed, deal-making sort of fellow who, while he was superbly knowledgeable on Finance,  did not attend Moral Science class in school, a rather yawning gap in an otherwise impeccable education.  He was initially a Yes-Man of sorts too (till he got the top job), but without the same ethical leaning that the Grand Old Man had, willing to tread grey zones in gum boots and with an end-justifies-the-means approach.    

..and that seems to have begun the slide.  In the last two decades, when ICICI Bank has been in the news, much of it has been unsavoury: the quality of loans provided (asset quality, as it is termed), the deals done by a branch abroad, the utterly shoddy treatment of retail customers and depositors,  the dressing up (and ever-greening with abandon) of non-performing assets to mislead investors and the Reserve Bank, and even a short run-on-the-bank that occurred some years ago.  At its root – the root cause, as it were – isn’t misplaced yields-to-maturity or poor financial acumen: those, rather, are the symptoms.  The root cause is the insane urge to grow at the cost of everything else, excluding in that vision a system of values that should have necessarily been enshrined as non-negotiable but which were forgotten, as were the other lessons the Charismatic Chairman had taught. 

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

If you have been a Wodehouse fan and know of Aunt Agatha – the one who eats broken glass for dinner and has been known to maim people for life with an unspoken word – it will gladden your heart to hear that I had an aunt made in that mould (which word, as you know, could mean fungus as well.  English is a funny language, but any such resemblance would be utterly coincidental).  

Her name, as I shall now amend and christen, was Aunt Susheela.  

Aunt Susheela was (for she is no more) a legend in her lifetime.  A dumpy, rotund lady, with thick spectacles, she spoke in short, rapid bursts – the analogy to gunfire is entirely appropriate – in a tone that varied from the blunt to the censuring and, on suitable occasion, to the hysterical.  The impact on humanity in the city in which she lived was most devastating: street vendors otherwise known for their aggression would cower and plead, maids would walk faster once they reached the floor on which she stayed, lest they were made an offer of a job they couldn’t refuse, taxi drivers –  of those days, in the black-and-yellow ambassadors -  would be hushed into a petrified silence and so on.  You get the picture.  

Yet, none of this language equalled, or even came close to, what must have been the most frightening stare of all, an unspoken, unblinking, malevolent glare that was the first catalyst for climate change, for it was known to melt glaciers.   

There she’d sit, by the large window in her living room, shaking her knees in a rhythmic way and fixing you in the spotlight as parts of your body seem to disengage and shiver independently.  Her husband tried hard to work late, run errands and keep himself busy outside the home.  Being a gentle, warm sort – the classic Lord Elmsworth of Wodehouse – he was accommodative and understanding, yet that empathy seemed to have little effect on Aunt Susheela.  Indeed, his spirit of accommodation in larger family matters only seemed to have pulled the trigger on occasions, engendering volleys, barbs, sarcasm, innuendo and rancour that would unsettle a Donald Trump.  

The only person who seemed entirely inured to her stare and verbal assault was a faithful manservant who did all the cooking and about everything else (for Aunt Susheela did, in a nutshell, nothing).  He must have been secretly deaf or dense between the ears to be this immune to what can most politely be called feedback, and, under the circumstances, it was an asset to the family to have him. 

We met the family typically once a year when I was in my young, formative years (I am now in older, formative years), and I learnt to spend the day in their home giving the Rock Star a wide berth.  When I did make a public appearance, it would be by clinging to my mother’s sari.  In those years, Aunt Susheela seemed to have some fondness for me, if a rapid volley of statements and instructions followed by a smile could be termed fondness, but I had once seen her go after her son with a kitchen knife, so it was best to wear a helmet at all times and go for the bunker.  I understand from family lore – we need more of it – that my father, who was considered to be the senior statesman, had a sobering effect on the aunt,  for when he was around, she seemed to be a trifle constrained, held back on a cloth leash, if you see what I mean but such setbacks were temporary and piffling in nature for what I have termed, post facto, a cask of trinitrotoluene talent.

Among her unusual traits was a certain parsimony: she'd ask my mother exactly how much each of us would eat for lunch or dinner – and exactly so much would be made.  Now, this is hugely appreciative, for wasting food isn’t high on anyone’s agenda.  Yet, this also meant that if, like Oliver Twist, you asked for more, you would receive a stare that would instantly fill your belly; you’d then find yourself lowering the head and pleading silent forgiveness.  The family trunk we carried always had emergency rations - biscuits - to tide over this unforgivable lapse in assessment of need. 

In later years, she took an active dislike to me for reasons that I shan't labour on, and,  recognising that I was now in august company of about a million people, I chose to keep it that way.  Thankfully, all interaction – the stare and the short, rapid burst, followed by serve and volleys – ended.  Yet, meeting other family members, all of whom were most amused, if not somewhat concerned by this path of avoidance that I took, kept me fully informed of Aunt Susheela’s current state of tongue motility - lashes per second for the uninitiated. 

Much later in years, I had a nightmare in which I visited their dwelling.  In this horrific experience, I was in Aunt Susheela’s house, seated uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa with another relative, while she stared unblinkingly at me with malevolence, her pursed lips holding back vitriol and the fingers clenched around an imaginary throat.  About ten minutes later when I awoke with a fright, it was unsurprising to know that the knees were rather liquid inside and the heart was doing a lively gig.  For such was the legacy of the legend.  

And, that was when, in a flash of inspiration, I developed the now world-famous (and patented) Stare Index, which measures intensity of stare, the unit of measurement being – as you have no doubt rightly guessed – the Richter Scale.  

My friend, Jams, has a poster in his office room, right behind his chair, so that all who sit in front of him see it.  It says, “Everybody brings joy to this room.  Some when they enter and others when they leave.”  When I learnt of Aunt Susheela’s demise, a silent obit that formed itself in my head took its inspiration from that risible piece of literature.

Palm Off

The other day, I met someone who’s been a consultant to the biscuit industry for the last couple of decades.  Over the course of a conversation, I mentioned (initially lightheartedly and later with seriousness) that our family had pretty much stopped eating biscuits (and a whole lot of processed snacks), because they all used palm oil, which was the single biggest cause of deforestation and climate change.   His response was, “Don’t believe what you read, it’s all written by vested interests.” What worries me, I responded, is that palm is now being planted in North-East India as well, and those priceless forests mirror those of Indonesia and Malaysia, which have been devastated by palm.  “There are 7 biscuit factories in the North East,” he responded, now with increasing belligerence “and palm oil provides livelihoods there.  Also, isn’t a palm plantation also providing green cover to deforested areas? One has to be open minded.”

I was astonished, not just at his ignorance, but his spirited defence of the indefensible. Equally, I was worried, for even as wildlife NGOs in India are fighting micro battles, the commercial foods industry, led by business consultants like this guy and others, are pitching the case for large-scale oil palm cultivation in India, particularly in the North East, with gusto.  To me, this is one of the biggest threats India’s  wildlife and forests will face in the near future and the sooner the scientific community, forestry specialists and non-profit organisations take cognisance and action, the better. 

But first the macro-economics of edible oil:  In 2015-16, India’s edible oil demand stood at 24 million tonnes, out of which only about 9 million tonnes was met from domestic production and 15 million tonnes were imported. Over 60% of the edible oil imported was palm oil: illustratively, in December 2017 alone, India imported 7.22 lakh tonnes (source:Economic Times).  

The proponents of oil palm have the following arguments, all of which are supported by economic data:

1.        India’s oil imports in 2015-16 was around Rs. 65,000 crore, constituting around 2.5% of India’s total import bill for that year. 

2.       Oil palm promotes livelihoods/employment and can be part of the overall make-in-India program.  Indeed, oil palm is the most productive commercially grown vegetable-oil crop in the world

3.       Palm oil is used extensively in haircare and beauty products and in the production of soap, not just in food. 

4.       The clear trajectory for per capita consumption of edible oil in India is up, with a current consumption of about 19 kg of oil per person per year (source: ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research).

5.       Palm oil is cheap.  Substituting it with other oils fuels consumer inflation.  

Indeed, these arguments have made considerable headway in the offices of policy makers: the government is currently running ‘National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP)’ to improve agro-techniques in oilseed crops, including palm.  In parts of the Western Ghats and in the North East, palm oil plantations are beginning to appear, not just in areas that were earlier planted up with other crops, but in newly chopped forests as the gestation period, prior to productivity, is, as earlier mentioned, about 6-7 years.  So, many planters who have taken to palm, keep their existing lands under another crop and chop up forests, in a case of having the cake and eating it too. 

….and this is the real problem.  Oil palm is doing to the planet what tea, cocoa and rubber have done earlier.   

The ecological costs of substituting imports of palm oil with its domestically produced version are too horrific to bear.  Photographs of rain forest devastation in South East Asia, taken by GreenPeace and others, significantly due to oil palm cultivation can break your heart; large stretches of felled forests up in smoke, beside virgin rain forests that would soon suffer the same fate.  In 2006, the World Resources Institute released satellite images of Borneo in Indonesia that effectively showed a 50% reduction in forest cover over half a century, driven primarily by oil palm cultivation.  Between 2000 and 2005, when oil plantations in Indonesia grew rapidly, the country lost 1.8 million hectares of forest per year or 51 square kilometres every single day (source: Ashish Fernandes, Sanctuary Asia, December 2009).   Now, this loss was not just due to oil palm but for timber and paper as well, but the number itself is mind-boggling.   

 Source: WRI, taken from treehugger.com 

Alongside this widespread destruction of priceless habitat and the burning of forests – which gave Indonesia a dubious emerging-nation status, that of entering the list of the World’s largest emitters of green house gases (about 2 billion tonnes) – has been the killing of orangutans in their thousands, often in the most horrific ways; they have been clubbed to death, buried alive, burnt, shot and speared.  Over 140 mammals identified as Threatened and 15 that are Critically Endangered originally inhabited these landscapes (source: IUCN), and their fate now seems sealed as the destruction goes on: these include the Sumatran tiger and the Sumatran rhino, which is the most endangered of all rhino species due to its rapid rate of decline. Numbers of the Sumatran rhino have decreased more than 70% over the last 20 years, with the only viable population now in Indonesia. The species was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia in 2015. (source: rhino.org).  By encroaching on rhino habitat, oil palm plantations had, make no mistake, a role to play in that extinction.

Yet, moving that production to India is a horrible solution, for the North East and the Western Ghats are as vulnerable as Indonesia was (and is).  Both these biodiversity hotspots have their orangutan and rhino mammalian equivalents, in addition to a quarter of the World’s bird species diversity.   

The North East has a history of poor local governance, inept or absent institutions and a large population seeking employment opportunities and, finally (and dismally), much of the region has a legacy of hunting.  As the latest forest map of India reveals, the region has lost an enormous amount of green cover in the two years 2015 to 2017, about 1500 square kilometres in all (source: India State of Forest Report 2017).  The entire zone is prone to landslides and earthquakes and floods, and the destruction of forest cover is catalysing a crisis that, ironically, is as unreported as it is serious: rapid loss of biodiversity, increased incidence of natural disasters, leading directly to crises faced by local communities living there.  

Oil palm plantations could take such deforestation off the charts and fuel a wildlife and human-rights crisis, as local vested interests lobby for land acquisition for palm (as has been the case in South East Asia). 

The urgency for action is because India’s taxation policy on palm oil has moved towards import substitution: in late 2017, the import tax on crude palm oil was raised to 30 percent from 15 percent, while the duty for refined palm oil was raised to 40 percent from 25 percent.  

So, if domestic cultivation of oil palm is to be discouraged and our import bill curtailed,  while inflation is kept under control and livelihoods are encouraged, what needs to be done?

There isn’t any one substitute that will sort all of this out, of course, but the primacy of India’s forests must be treated as sacrosanct, not a negotiable factor.  The options that clearly emerge for the Government’s policy makers then are:

      1.        Stop doing the wrong thing.  Ban the cultivation of palm oil in India.

2.       Improve the productivity of existing acreages of other oilseeds.  This process has already begun, but a clear Government impetus is needed.

3.       Encourage the use of non-edible oil in the production of soaps and beauty products: oils such as those of mahua and pongamia, which are used in small quantities today,  are not just far better for the skin, but their usage could improve rural livelihoods in different parts of India and actually protect tree biodiversity. 

4.       Promote the use of healthier oils – palm oil is unhealthy and its derivative, palmolein is particularly heavy on transfats – by increasing taxes further on palm oil and promoting the usage of traditional oils in India.  

The goal that the Government needs to particularly emphasise on is the reduction of palm oil usage in India, whether sourced domestically or imported.  For such actions – as detailed above – to be taken, there must be informed pressure on the Government to act; pressure from scientists, non-profit organisations and citizens, for the demands of industry are the ones being heard as they are the loudest.  Those demands centre around cheap and abundant edible oil.  Yet catering to these demands entail a cost that the country ecology cannot afford to bear.

On March 3^rd – World Wildlife Day – we must rethink our policy on palm.  It’s the least we can do for our planet. 

All Balls

I have a window seat in the bus from Mysore to Madikeri and we have stopped for a moment on the outskirts of Mysore.  I look out of the window at the shell of a now-abandoned industrial shed – a two-storied structure running along the length of the road for some distance.  I can see right in, for some of the glass panels in the windows are missing, the result no doubt of assiduous miscreant action, and the resultant view is of an empty, forlorn structure.  By the gate in front, there is no security guard, only an equally forlorn temple with stained, patchy marble on its walls, the red paint on the 3 little domes on top now peeling off, yet suggestive: Hanuman once resided within.  Weeds abound and, amidst the unkempt front patch of green, there is no signboard of a company or indeed any sign of occupation.  Yet, I know this shed well as, in the 1990s, I often passed it by on my way to Coorg and in the mind’s eye I see the signboard in its simple font just behind the wall by the side of the gate.

Make no mistake, this relic in the industrial bin deserves much more, for it serves up a timeless lesson we must never forget.

For, a quarter of a century ago, in the economic euphoria of 1991-1992, this industrial shed represented all that could go wrong with the liberalisation initiated by Dr. Manmohan Singh, providing us with a window into gluttonous excess and the insatiable desire of human nature to gamble.  Indeed, - no exaggeration - this now-defunct industrial shed was the symbol of an India that had never been seen before and that,since those years, has been seen in episodic bursts.    

I had just got a job after my MBA in 1991.  Being a careful sort and loathe to take risks that I couldn’t understand, I put my savings – that were, at best, meagre – into bank deposits, while everyone around me enthusiastically participated in the stock market to get a piece of the fireside sale of a lifetime – an opened-up India that seemed to be going very cheap.  The stock market saw a stratospheric rise over a few months in 1991 and early ‘92 and every conversation centred around the companies that were, to use a cliché, the flavours of the moment.  I felt left out, almost incompetent, and decidedly ill-equipped, despite an education in corporate finance. 

Harshad Mehta was the icon then, of course, and we all now know just how much of a rogue he was, manipulating the public sector banks (that, led by SBI, were happy to be manipulated, many of the managers swimming with the tide and putting up their own money too) to finance his stock purchases, buying stocks in full public view to lift them up and then dumping them for profit, only to move on to bigger prey.  His favourite theme was ‘replacement value’; he’d pick a company and fantasise (often in interviews, so that the gullible were lured to their siren song) on just what it would cost you to build this company from scratch – much more than the current stock price, needless to add.  Hence, he’d assert, buy the stock today.   ACC, for instance, was a favourite of his.  But no company exemplified his egregiousness, perhaps even daring, than an anaemic, plebeian enterprise on the outskirts of Mysore called Karnataka Ball Bearings, run by promoters who could, at best, be described as ‘dodgy’.  It had defaulted on bank loans and was on the verge of going bust (though there was little doubt that the promoters, in true-blue Indian promoter style, would emerge unscathed from the debris).     

As I stared at that now-hollow building, I recalled the many stories Mehta had spun around this company: on its replacement value, on the land it held, on the prospects of future business growth (for ball bearings, for Pete’s sake!)  and so on, all of which was spun out of thin air, in a slick exhibition of contrived fiction.  Across the country, speculators ranging from dhobis to doctors (to dieticians, donors, drivers, directors, dancers – desis, in general) began to punt on this seemingly bejewelled enterprise, thronging the offices of their brokers who traded (in those days) on the stock exchanges in the big cities.  No one knew anything about this company, many possibly did not even know what it purported to produce, some had not heard of the stock market until a week ago, yet ignorance ruled.  They bought because Harshad did, and that entitlement was both thrilling and liberating.  The resultant boom in this company’s stock price only reinforced their resolve to put in more money in a fatal display of what is now known to be the Confirmation Bias, even as Mehta made it known that he was buying more every day. 

He was India’s first stock scamster, a Johnny-cum-lately with a desire to be rich in double-quick time, for whom means – any means, particularly those involving chicanery – justified the ends.  He was, equally, India’s stock market bull, and his visage, one must admit, did resemble the bovine, as cartoonists were quick to capture (one wonders if they missed out on the casino action and got their revenge in print).

Ivan Boesky, a repulsive corporate raider in the US after whom Gordon Gekko, the character in the film “Wall Street” is modelled,  once said (to students at UC Berkeley) in the 1980s, “Greed is all right, by the way.  I want you to know that I think greed is healthy.  You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” And Mehta, with his smooth snake-oil salesman demeanour, massaged logic, colourful suits and masterful art of pretence, was the representation of this unleashed, sanctioned-by-society greed; he had the entire system in his pocket, meeting the heads of industry and government and, in some cases, managing their money.  The stories around him – a luxury apartment and a Lexus, for instance – enhanced his stature and, to a still-socialist India, straining at the leash of the Mahatma’s need-vs-greed legacy, The Big Bull provided the sanction they needed.

When the music finally stopped, as it always does, the mayhem began. Sucheta Dalal first wrote of the scam and boom turned to bust.  The price of Karnataka Ball Bearings collapsed in a heap, leaving speculators aghast.    As Warren Buffett once said, "Only when the tide goes out, do you discover who's been swimming naked." Suddenly, Mr. Invincible, the man-who-could-do-no-wrong was the Target and his downfall only hastened the demise of the company housed in that building by the Mysore-Madikeri road.  

While both are now a forgotten asterisk in the episodic recounting of turbulent post-liberalisation economic history, a quarter of a century later there is another stock market boom and the ‘this-time-it’s-different’ story resounds in the hall of delusion.  

…and it was in 1996, when I first read The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom Jr that I first understood the principles of investing.  As the bus drives past, I finally see a small signboard in a corner.  “Trespassers,” it says, “will be prosecuted.”  

I’d imagine this building is a heritage that Mysore, the Heritage City, does not want.  Yet, perhaps, by the gate, the honest story of this enterprise must be written – much as Ashoka wrote his edicts – with the post script that I first read in Bhisham Sahni’s immortal novel, Tamas: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.    

Judge A Man By His Questions.......

 “Ma’am, I have two questions, which are related to each other.  The first question is divided into two parts, the first of which is related to the third part of the second question and has direct relevance to your assertion that……” by which time I had switched off, staring at my fellow student in rather open astonishment. 

Every batch has its talented stalwarts: academics (who are the most uninteresting, particularly those who stand shoulders above the rest), sportsmen, clowns, sleepy-heads, drunks (called ‘bewda’s), late-nighters, gossips, Cassandras (in my batch, the Cassandra was a male though and his eternal byline was ‘Be careful’), dare-devils, the depressed-in-love-and-will-complain-to-you Devdas’ and the corpo (short for Corporate, ie, Goldman Sachs or McKenzie) type.  Our batch had all of these, with this one addition: a professional questioner. 

Most of us, when we strained ourselves to participate - for there were marks for that - could only produce a question like, “Could you please explain that again?” (the primary driver behind this question being that the Professor hopefully then remembered our name at the time of scoring Class Participation).  “What are the topics for the exam?” was about the most intellectual we could get.    Hari – for that is the name that I shall assign our professional questioner – was different.  He asked a question, because it was not just a question, but an inquiry, if you see the difference, a way of delving into the recesses of something, and emerging breathless for oxygen at the end of it.

Hari was one of the earliest students I befriended on campus back in 1989, possibly because we both had (and still have, by the way) the same surname.  I wasn’t in the same section as Hari, but over the two years, there were courses that overlapped and, when I did find myself in the same classroom, I’d wait for The Hand to rise, for it was fascinating to watch.   He came into his own in the right-brain classes – the ones involving social sciences, strategy, creative thinking of any sort or shades of grey – and stayed right out of the quanti courses that require in-built masochism and suicidal intent, in which respect, as you have already surmised, we were both alike (but that’s where the resemblance ended).     

A  well-built chap with curly hair and specs and a bit of a loner, he had a particularly intellectual look about him as he strode around the hostel block, taking large steps with a slight trademark stoop.  His habit of taking his specs off and chewing on the stem, while gazing penetratingly at the Professor only intensified the appearance of an intellectual, and when he put his hand up to ask a question, there’d emanate from the class a collective groan, for it meant that the next few minutes would be spent in phrasing, paraphrasing, re-emphasising and adjudicating the question itself.  At the end of his question, it was normal for the exasperated Prof to ask in mild irritation that the question be repeated please and could it now be kept short, for the class is only of an hour’s duration?   

But, it was when he invented a new style of financial investing that the World sat up and took notice.  

First, a prelude.  My class included the pre-eminent Godfy, whose primary passion apart from academic excellence was to smoke the 555; indeed, when we referred to him as carrying six packs, it had an entirely different meaning.  Hari noticed with astute attention - for he was a smoker as well - that Godfy tended to discard his cigarette just a touch before it extinguished and was quick to have the last smoke or two of the 555, something that hardly escaped the attention of those jobless worthies (called ‘fatru’s), who then passed this priceless information on to the gossips, who then relayed it to the finance whizkids, who then looked for stocks that had long lost favour but possibly had one last smoke left in them, resulting in a style of investing called the’cigarette butt strategy’ subsequently promoted by mere mortals such as Warren Buffett in the US and Harshad Mehta in India.  But, make no mistake, it all originated with Hari.  

Sometime late in the second year, Hari asked me if I would act in a play – a Greek tragedy called ‘Antigone’ - that he intended to direct for a theatre festival.  The last time I had acted was when I had pretended to be ill on seeing a  particularly healthy, revolting dinner and on that occasion Mum had clearly had her way.  So, there was, where the theatre department was concerned, a clear and present (and yawning) gap in my education, but Hari would have none of it, insisting that I fitted the part like a glove.  In retrospect, one thinks that there was only one glove on the rack, so he just made it fit.  Once into it, I realised, with growing concern, that he had slotted me into the role of an important chappie in the play, probably the most important fellow in it and there were pages and pages reeking of medieval stuff to be mugged. 

I decided to be the questioner in this case and use his key skill against him, create enough nuisance for him to say, ‘Let thy be out or whatever’ but before I could get my act together, he asserted that I was to kiss the lady protagonist on the cheek and that was when the true horror of what could follow struck me in the pre-frontal.  I imagined the hooting while I was on stage, all engineered by garrulous, raucous, fatru, entirely worthless classmates who lived for a laugh and couldn’t empathise to save their grandmothers.  I imagined raunchy comments and ‘once-more’ calls.  I imagined  subsequent months on G-Top in the company of my best friends, each of whom was, beer in hand, recounting how I had messed up the most rudimentary of tasks while they were all trying to help in the audience. 

Those were the days when it wasn’t uncommon to have wild elephants a couple of kilometres from our campus on Bannerghatta Road and, if you had asked me if I preferred being left amongst them to this dreadful fate, I might have thought deeply and weighed the options.  

So, I went up to Hari and said, ‘I am dropping out of the play’.  He asked me to take on a side role instead – say, one of the Second Guards, where all you had to do was to stand at attention and take away the dead bodies when the third scene ended - and I continued with a ‘No’. 

When the play was finally staged, I was in the audience alongwith my garrulous, raucous, fatru, entirely worthless classmates and happily one among them.  We all gave Hari a standing ovation, though none of us had a clue on what the play was about. 

The ovation had a clear reason: for while the play was being practised and perfected, Hari had missed a number of classes and, in turn, many questions each of which would have had parts, sub-parts, conjunctions, prepositions, contradictions and dilemmas. 

My Kabuliwala

It’s a dark monsoon afternoon and I have just read Kabuliwala, Tagore’s beautiful, haunting story again.  When I first read it in school,  I remember,  I had sat there by the window, staring out onto that street in Indiranagar, lost in thought.  The story was moving and filled with imagery, and as the mind saw what the eye could not, I felt goosebumps and a moment of thrill.  For those images in the mind were from that magical childhood in Digboi.  

Because in Digboi we had our Kabuliwala too.  I see him now, as I peer through the sepia-tinted mist and look back in time, a tall, slim man with a scraggly beard, sitting on the floor of the portico of  Bungalow 75, my beautiful, immaculately British home.  Behind him is the circular driveway, with the large banyan in the middle, against which he is silhouetted on this bright day. 

He has come a long long way with others from his land, walking for days on end, jostling for space for himself and his sack in packed, claustrophobic train compartments, marking town after town and language after language to get here,  and those worn, compressed Pathani slip-on shoes have borne the travel with forbearance.  His dress – the Pathan’s trademark kurta-pyjama – was once white, but now wears a brownish-cream hue, as indeed does the cloth sack which has now been opened out on the floor.  He brings out one tin after another and opens each up for view, in front of Mum and me.  He takes his time, for human endurance is but a prelude to patience.  

All agog with excitement, I eagerly sniff into each tin,  which are filled with mystery and enchantment.  The most fascinating smells emerge from these tins: of spices – clove, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg - and dry fruits – walnuts, dates, badam and raisins, which he calls ‘kishmish’, with a certain flourish.  Yet, beyond those strong fragrances of spices and dried fruits, enticing enough for a child to be wide-eyed and snuffling, is the smell of that old sack itself.  It is the odour of experience, of a World-weary traveller who has lived the rough life and walked the earth.  If you close your eyes and breathe with depth and discernment, there is the resonance of blood and sweat and a thousand stories that speaks the history of this man, the Kabuliwala.  The smells tell you that he has walked the highways, slept on logs being transported on goods trains and in railway stations that reek of compacted humanity, tussled with those who harassed him, starved in difficult times and eaten where he could afford to.   

Yet the man is hardly the weary sort; he has a smiling, hesitant countenance that laughs easily and speaks in a Hindi-Urdu combine that is comical, oddly sing-song, but effective enough.  When the child in front of him laughs at this unfamiliar language with its expressions and intonation, he joins in too.  Is that grace or innate simplicity, unable to understand that some aspect of his manner is being laughed at?  I see this man's face and figure in Gurudev's Kabuliwala: one that speaks of honour and dignity and an extraordinary physical strength that will be used to protect these oddly anachronistic values.  

The Kabuliwala hasn’t come to sell us his wares alone; he is a halting, shy story teller too.  In every new house that he visits, the questions must be the same: Where are you from?  How did you come here?  Whom have you left behind, back home?  Religion isn’t a question, for, as I see through that mist, those are liberal days.  Mum’s questions are more familiar, as the man has been here earlier:  What is it like there now?  Where will you go next? Questions of work and detail, rarely one of learning, for the Itinerants are the World's real teachers.

He knows that these conversations draw customers in; the more time he spends telling a story, the easier the sale.  These customers are the negotiating sort though, so his bargaining is good-natured and gentle and appealing, and he is in no hurry to move on.  He looks at me with a kindly eye, and it helps that that’s the way to a good sale too; ‘Baba, please try the kishmish,’ he urges, and, of course, I oblige, taking a handful and popping them in, hygiene fears be damned.   

When Mum gives him the money, he brings out, from the recesses of the kurta, an old cloth pouch with a drawstring and shakes out the contents - lots of coins -  on a cloth. My excitement is now at its crescendo, for the coins, which smell strongly of cardamom, are, in themselves, a revelation; I ask him for the old brass-coloured, flower-shaped ten paise coin, in exchange for a more modern one that I have,  and I do a couple of more investigations and trades, examining all the coins with fascination, in particular the 1-paise and 2-paise ones, before Mum holds me back.  But the Kabuliwala doesn't really seem to mind at all.   We watch him pack up at leisure even as the conversation flows, and the fragrances dissipate into the warm air; he requests Mum to recommend another home that he could go to. 

And then he stands up, this tall, gaunt, yet powerful figure and, in a smooth motion, hoists the sack onto his back.  He is off, walking down the driveway in a long and easy stride. I stand by the portico, jingling the coins in my hand, and watch till he has turned the corner - beyond Bulbul Auntie's home - and is lost to view.

The mists of memory recede away, a reluctant lift of nostalgia on this cloudy, gloomy afternoon.  There is a whiff of cardamom in the air, a memory that has lingered for the last fifty years, preserved by Gurudev’s abiding genius. 

It is time to close the mind's book and return to the present that awaits with impatient expectation.  There is work to be done.