On the Tarred Road Between Job and Business

January 3, 2008

Now, to give a clue to how much puzzled I seem to be between making a career in business or seeking a job, I set out right on the next day after the interview in Noida for a business trip to Ludhiana.

I travelled in a car, a friend's car, on the National Highway.

Travel is pretty perspective-creating these days. It is, after all, the massive drive of development, constantly being upgraded, broadened, to add more and more economic vitality, to make it flow through the country's body.

Mechanized layering of tar and stone-crush is now very easy, so they do it more often. The road-making equipment and machinery have risen in the ranks; they have brought in new machines. So road-making and repairing have become much easier now in comparison to earlier lazy road-rolling days, and it takes less time as well.

So this Grand Trunk Road has become the high-speed corridor.

Now fast-speed cars, SUVs, public and private carriers go along thundering—easily, irritably, noisily, silently—all along the highway.

On both sides, you see a massive buildup of enterprise and business. Mammoth flyovers and bridges now provide an inescapable monotony, as if the National Highway would never have borne a different look at any period in the past.

The finger line drawn by Sher Shah Suri during medieval times has now become almost a living, growing, throbbing, tarred biological corridor, which has its own soul, perhaps even beyond the control of mankind slipping over its wheeled surface.

Ludhiana, the industrial town, is spread out like a large open-cast mine of labour, struggle, profits and gains.

It is a big city, like a big, irritable, slow-paced chariot of mammoth proportions. The mighty Sardars pull it along, possessed in a lighter, adventurous way.

Since it is a major place for scrap dealers and iron works, if you are not that energetic in your market manoeuvres, you tend to stick to any average, tolerable guy in the market instead of hunting around for better sources.

We had sold heavy metal scrap to Mr. Babu in the past.

He is a lighthearted, silently calculating young businessman, and I was successful in getting him interested in the business opportunities in Djibouti.

He has agreed to visit the place in order to see the chances of working with us in the form of a partner, and I think after some time he will fly with me to have a firsthand experience of how we are managing there.

Being a very clever businessman, he first wants to see our setup there, and he also knows that we are simple people, so seems to have some plans up his sleeve.

When our container of scrap iron landed in Ludhiana, we simply reached his scrap yard because somebody had referred his name. Since we were new to the trade, we could not bargain, and we got the average price.

But when the container was opened, he was wonderstruck because it was such heavy scrap, including heavy machinery parts and engines.

In fact, there were even heavy machinery rims of tyres which could easily be used here in India after painting.

So after that, he has been giving us some importance.

He knows that we are at a place where there is profit.

So I am happy that I have been able to gain his trust.

He has never travelled outside India, and if somebody who has never gone out of the country agrees to visit a poor country in Africa, that means he has started to trust you.

It seems to be an achievement.

Let us hope that we soon go to Djibouti with Mr. Babu and take him around on visits to various scrapyards, so that he gives us advance money, assured that he won't be losing it and that we won't run away once he sees our setup firsthand there, so that we can start a kind of business cycle.

With his advance money, we can pay the scrap owners there and bear the cost of cutting, loading and shipping.

And once the containers reach here, for the next lot again he will send us some advance money.

So this is what we expect.

As I sat with Mr. Babu in his posh office, almost as a partner, as a business owner, it gave me a very strange feeling that only yesterday I was there in the poor suburbs of Noida, in another plush office, but there as a struggling job seeker intending to join as a content writer.

So when I look at it—my destiny being stretched in two directions—it is a strange feeling. I don't know what am I seeking really. Seem to have lost the way during those hard days of civil services competition.