Three Train Tales

It was early 2000. I used to travel frequently between Bangalore and Kochi by train.  One day I boarded Kanyakumari Express from Bangalore city station and occupied my seat in a reserved compartment.  My seat number was 42.  The train pulled out at 8 pm.  The next station was Bangalore Cantonment.  A middle-aged passenger boarded the train at Cant., came straight to my seat and said, ‘this is my seat’.  I was a bit annoyed by the way he spoke to me.  I said, ‘this is my seat’.  He said, ‘show me your ticket’. I said, ‘why should I show you my ticket, I am sure this is my seat.  You better check your ticket’.  He was in a fighting mood, as if I had wrongly occupied his seat.  Finally, he pulled out his ticket, looked at it and said, ‘look, 42 is my seat’.  I looked at his ticket.  The railway reservation tickets usually have the seat number, sex and age of the passenger printed on it.  Pointing to his ticket, I told him, ‘see, 42 is your age, your seat number is something else’!  He didn’t know how to face me.  Realising his folly, he said sorry and moved on.

The second incident took place a few years earlier to this, when I was at Ahmedabad.  Venkataraman, my roommate, was travelling from Ahmedabad to Chennai by an early morning train.  I saw him off at around 5 am and went back to sleep.  After some time, I heard someone knocking on the door – it was Venkataraman. I asked him, ‘what happened, you missed the train?’.  He said, ‘no, something strange happened. When I reached the railway station, the train was already on the platform.  But when I got into the compartment, I saw another passenger with his family in my allotted seat.  I told him, this is my seat.  He said, no this is my seat.  He showed his ticket, yes, he was right.  I took out my ticket.  I was surprised, how could railways allot the same seat to two passengers.  Suddenly, he asked me, are you supposed to travel by today’s train.  I said, yes.  He continued, oh, this is the train that was supposed to depart yesterday.  Due to a derailment somewhere enroute, all trains are running late and this one is running 24 hours late.  Your train has not yet arrived at Ahmedabad.  Then I checked the dates on our tickets.  Surprised, I got down and went to the enquiry counter, they said today’s train is expected to depart at around 1 pm.  So, I came back.

The third incident happened when I was in college.  My uncle and family were travelling to Bombay from Kollam in Kerala by Jayanti Janata Express.  Jayanti Janata Express ran between Kanyakumari and Bombay.  When they were about to leave their home, he made a phone call to the railway enquiry number and asked, ‘is Jayanti Janata on time?’ ‘No Sir, it is running 60 minutes late’.  Relaxed, they went a little later to the station.  When they reached the station, they were told that Jayanti Janata was on time and the train had already left Kollam.  Then he came to know that the Bombay-Kanyakumari down train was running 60 minutes late.  Since both the up and down trains crossed Kollam almost at the same time, there was this confusion.  They didn’t know what to do.  Jayanti Janata was the only train connecting Kollam and Bombay back then and to get another ticket they had to wait for more than a month.  The station master suggested, if they could drive fast by road and head straight to Ernakulam, where the train stopped for 20 minutes, they had a bleak chance of catching the train.  He told them not to try in any other station in between because in all those stations the halt was just 1-2 minutes.  Ernakulam was 150 kilometers away.  Somehow my uncle showed courage.  He took his brother’s car and drove straight to Ernakulam.  Since I was at Kochi (Ernakulam), his brother called me and asked me to go to Ernakulam railway station, so that I could help them board the train, in case they reached at the neck of the moment.  When I reached the station, I could hear the announcement of the train’s arrival.  Their car had not yet reached (remember, no cell phones those days).  Shortly, I saw the train arriving on the platform.  Holding my breath, I waited there.  Suddenly I could see their speeding car in the distance.  As soon as the car stopped at the portico, we swung into action, picked up their luggage and ran towards the train.  As they stepped in, we heard the whistle and the train started moving! All of us had a sigh of relief.

 

 

Investment Scam – DIY (Do It Yourself)!

Hey, if you are wondering which is the most profitable business, I can tell you without any doubt, it is Investment Scam.  Yes, you heard it right.  Nothing can be as profitable as ‘cheating people’! So, if you want to try, here are some useful tips.  

• Start a Finance Company and give it a catchy name.  Set up a fancy office (take it on lease or rent, but pretend it to be the company’s own)

• Start an investment scheme offering exorbitantly high rate of interest (for example, 4% per month, which amounts to 48% per annum)

• Create as much publicity as possible.  Create an image as if you have a variety of businesses and you are stingy rich.  This will instill a lot of confidence in the investors, because they would believe that even if the investment scheme does not work, you have enough assets to repay their money.  The more flamboyant your life is, more is the confidence the investors have in you!  Appear in media and give sermons. Always promise to protect your deposit holders at any cost.

• Now the money game starts.  To begin with, assume 10 people invest Rs.1 lakh each for three years in your scheme.  You have Rs.10 lakhs in your pocket.  Pay 4% (Rs.40,000) towards interest in the first month.  Continue to pay the interest every month promptly for few more months.  

• As the saying goes, ‘the proof of pudding is in eating’, when you pay the interest promptly, the investors’ confidence will skyrocket.  Now, they will become your brand ambassadors and bring more investors to you.

• In one year, even if you get only Rs.10 lakhs as deposit, the money required to pay interest is Rs.4.80 lakhs.  The remaining Rs.5.20 lakhs are all yours!  Imagine what happens when more money flows in.  In fact, what you are doing is just rotating the money – collect from A and pay B, collect from B to pay C, collect from D to pay C and so on.  Your success depends on how efficiently you manage this flow.

• At the end of three years, when the deposit made by the first set of investors becomes due, if you are lucky, you would have collected enough money from others to repay them.  But this cannot go on for long.  So, you need to envisage a day when your scheme bursts.  When the scheme is running, it is better to keep an escape plan ready.  When it bursts, abscond.  If you are lucky, you can avoid the police. Otherwise, be ready to spend a few days in jail, till you get bail.  Anyway, the case will go on for a long time, the public and media will forget your case, and the investors will be fed up fighting.  You can live on!

What is your investment in this business? Almost nothing.  The returns are very high.  Yes, as they teach you in Finance, you need to take risks, rather high risk!

(The above write up is satirical, but unfortunately, this is the modus operandi of most of the scamsters.  No, I don’t have the experience of running such a scheme.  But I have been reading about investment scams since my college days. If you think only uneducated people get trapped by the scamsters, you are wrong.  Everyone is attracted towards high rate of returns promised by them, because ‘greed’ has no color, sex, religion, or class – all are greedy!  So, people forget one simple Economic principle that if someone offers 48% interest per annum, he/she should be able to invest the money somewhere else and generate more than 48% to sustain the scheme.  Common sense is enough to realise that it is not possible to generate such rates of returns consistently from any business.  So, next time you come across any scheme that offers rates of returns far above the rates prevalent in the economy, just ignore them or be prepared to lose your hard-earned money)

Recipe for Growth

Recently I read an article written by Prof. Ajit Ranade in India Today.  An alumnus of IIMA, he writes about why IIMA has always attracted the best students in the country and remained at the forefront of management education.  One sentence by him caught my attention, ‘many gold medalists got their egos deflated in the very first term’.  Having been part of IIMA for two years, I could very well relate to this.  I remembered another instance.  Few years ago I met the Director of a B-School at Bengaluru, who was also an alumnus of IIMA.  She told me, ‘I was a rank holder in my school. I got first rank in my pre-degree and again a first rank in my B.Sc. Mathematics from Bangalore University.  I was considered an extraordinary scholar in my family and friends’ circle.  With this aura of superiority, I landed at IIMA.  Within no time, I realized that everyone else was more intelligent than me and nobody cared about my ranks’.  

So, what happens when we are surrounded by people who are more intelligent and knowledgeable than us?  Before answering that question, let me touch up on two more instances.  Prof. Ravi J Mathai, the first full-time director of IIMA, was not even a postgraduate.  But what he did at IIMA was to create a team of academicians, where almost everyone was more qualified than him and led the institute to greater heights.  Prof. P V Indiresan, the ex-Director of IIT Madras, spoke about his contributions to IIT at a function organised to confer the IEEE Fellowship on him.  He said, ‘the best thing I did for IIT is to induce a number of outstanding persons to give up lucrative careers elsewhere to join in the struggle for life here in IIT. That is my pride: I persuaded a number of minds greater than mine to join IIT’. 

There lies the answer to my question.  When we are surrounded by people who are slightly less in caliber and intellect, we would definitely feel a sense of superiority.  But that feeling is of no use.  It doesn’t allow us to push beyond the comfort zone, to scale greater heights and grow.  But when we are in the company of people better than us in terms of knowledge, intellect, and skills, we will be motivated to work harder and grow.  But, we need to carefully keep away jealousy.  It is very much possible to find people younger than us and coming from lesser backgrounds to be more knowledgeable than us.  We need to humbly accept the truth and go hand in hand with them. 

Even our ancient wisdom advocates ‘Satsang’, being in the company of good (better) people.  So, one of the recipes for growth is – Surround yourself with people who are better than you!

 

Shoe Story

There was a short story by Leo Tolstoy on a shoemaker in my English textbook.  His name was Martin, and he was the only shoemaker in the town.  So, he recognized everyone by looking at their shoes.  Only when he saw a pair of shoes not made by him, he would lift his head to see who it was! Martin’s life was full of sorrows.  He lost his wife and children and was living alone.  But he continued praying.  One night God appeared in his dream and said, ‘Martin, I will come to you tomorrow’.  Excited, he got up early the next day, finished his morning chores and sat down to make shoes.  But he kept looking though the window for the God’s arrival.  He saw a man shoveling snow in the biting cold.  He offered him hot tea.  Later, a poor lady came holding a baby in her arms.  Martin gave her food, warm clothes, and some money.  In the evening, he saw an old lady selling apples, who had caught a small boy trying to steal an apple from her basket.  Martin intervened and asked her to forgive the boy.  He took an apple and gave it to the boy, telling the lady that he would pay for it.  When the night fell, disappointed that the God didn’t come, he retired to bed.  After a while he heard a voice, ‘Martin, I came to you, did you not recognise me?’ Suddenly the faces of the man shoveling snow, the poor lady and the old lady selling apples flashed in his mind.  I loved this story so much that I read it many times and it remained in my memory.   

One of my friend’s father had a small unit manufacturing chappals at Kochi.  The unit operated from his house.  So, whenever I visited him, I saw two to three workers involved in making chappals using an awl and chisel.  Cut pieces of leather, plastic etc. were seen all over the floor, which they used to clean in the evening.  So, when I read Tolstoy’s story, I could imagine how a shoemaker worked.  

The government school where I studied didn’t have shoes as part of the uniform.  So, I never wore shoes during my school days.  Not that my father could not afford shoes, but he told me, ‘In your school, there are many kids coming from poor backgrounds who can’t afford shoes.  So, it doesn’t look good if you go wearing shoes’.  Today I understand the meaning of what he had said more than what I did those days.  But, my brother, who studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya, had to wear shoes and I used to polish his shoes every morning.  When I completed my school and joined college, my father bought me the first pair of shoes in my life – a black leather one. 

When I went to IIMA, I was fascinated by the design and quality of the shoes worn by some of my professors.  One brand that caught my attention was Hush Puppies.  But it was too costly for me.  So, Hush Puppies remained a dream.  Later when I moved to Tumkur, I saw advertisements for a highly attractive shoe in Business Today.  Florsheim - it was claimed to be the most popular shoe in the USA.  Florsheim was made popular by Michael Jackson who wore them for his concerts.  The advertisement also said that the shoes were sold in India by Shoppers Stop.  Around that time, Shoppers Stop had opened its first store in Bangalore.  So, during my next visit to Bangalore, I went to Shoppers Stop.  Yes, to my surprise, the same shoe which was shown in the advertisement was on display.  I was very happy.  But when I looked at the price, I was shocked.  It was almost sixty percent of my monthly salary.  When I returned my friend asked me, ‘you didn’t buy the shoes?  I said, ‘There was a small misunderstanding.  I was looking for a pair of shoes to wear on my feet.  But if I buy the one which I saw, I will have to keep it on my head!’.

Florsheim was imported from the USA in those days.  Today, Florsheim is manufactured in India, and is available at much lower prices.  More interestingly, my ability to buy has gone up significantly!

(You can read the story by Tolstoy here: https://mywonderstudio.com/en/level-2/where-love-is-god-is-also2/ )

New Year

New Year evokes many interesting memories.  I grew up in Kochi, which is a port city.  My earliest memories of New Year are associated with various events at Kochi.  Kochi is probably the only city in Kerala which can claim to have people belonging to a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.  Apart from Hindus, Muslims and Christians, we have Jews, Gujaratis, Marwaris, Punjabis, Sikhs, Jains, Kutchi and many more at Kochi.  Each of them has its own festivals.  But New Year means Cochin Carnival for Kochites, especially for those living in the western part of Kochi.  Cochin Carnival, similar to that in Goa, is a weeklong festival from Christmas to New Year. Many events are organised as part of the Carnival.  It concludes with the burning of the ‘Papanji’, a huge effigy erected near the beach at Fort Kochi at midnight of December 31.  The effigy is filled with firecrackers and its burning at 12 in the midnight is a spectacular scene to watch.   

Another attraction of Kochi is the loud siren from all the ships anchored at the Kochi port.  The captains of the ships organise New Year parties.  At exact 12 in the midnight, all ships would blow the siren for a minute to welcome the New Year.  The siren from ships was the signal for Kochites that the New Year has arrived.  My house at Kochi was close to the port and we used to wait for the siren.  If you are planning to visit Kochi, the time between Christmas and the New Year is the best!

New Year Greeting cards are another thing of my childhood.  We used to get 10 days holiday in school for Christmas and New Year.  So, as soon as the vacation started, we used to go to shops selling greeting cards and buy cards for family and friends.  Wiring the message inside the card, writing the address on the envelope, and sending it by post was fun.  Then, we used to wait to receive the cards sent to us by others! The WhatsApp forwards of today can never evoke that feeling which we had when we received the greeting cards by post.

There are a few not so pleasant memories as well associated with the New Year.  In 2018, when my mother was not well and was admitted to the hospital, I used to stay in the hospital during the daytime and my brother during the nights.  On the night of December 31, when my brother relieved me from the hospital, I went to his apartment, which was on the fourth floor.  We can see the huge cranes of the Kochi port from the balcony of the apartment.  At midnight when the ships blew the siren and firecrackers were burst all around, I stood there, in a pensive mood as my mother’s condition was critical.  Three years later, in 2020, I travelled to Thiruvananthapuram from Bangalore on 30 December.  Due to the Covid restrictions, I was supposed to be quarantined for a week.  So, I checked into a hotel meant for quarantining people travelling from outside the state.  I was allotted a room on the sixth floor, from where I could get a beautiful view of the eastern part of Thiruvananthapuram.  At midnight of 31 December, when the New Year arrived, I could see very few firecrackers as there were restrictions on the celebrations.  Though people were celebrating the arrival of the New Year, the atmosphere was filled with a lot of apprehension and anxiety.    

I hope and pray that we are out of that phase. 

Let me wish all my readers a Very Happy New Year - 2023