Jay Rege’s Blog

We had visitors last evening. My old time buddy and his wife dropped by to say hello. The nice thing was that they got us a gift. The not so nice thing was that the gift was a bag of tomatoes. Now I have known my friends doing weird things that at times freak me out, but I still could not understand the whole idea behind gifting me a bag of tomatoes. I am no tomato connoisseur to fancy them (for that matter I don’t fancy any vegetable at all). So why gift me tomatoes? Well I have heard mom complain about growing vegetable prices, so I can understand that a kilo of tomatoes would have cost my friend dearly, but still I feel that a bar of chocolate (Dairy Milk – the Fruit and Nuts one preferred) for my daughter (which of course I would gulp down most of) would have made a better gift than a bag of tomatoes – however expensive tomatoes might be. The bottom line is that tomatoes don’t make gifts. Period!

Now as I was staring at the tomatoes in disappointment, my friend’s wife blurted out “They are farm fresh tomatoes. Straight from the farm.”. There was an unusual excitement in her voice with an extra emphasis on the word ‘farm’. ‘Oh, so giving me tomatoes you got for free. That’s even more horrible’ was what I thought. Well no, I didn’t say that. “Oh, I didn’t know you had a tomato farm” was what I said instead. “No we don’t have a farm, we went to one yesterday”. Apparently my friends had spent the weekend at a farm at Lonvala (a two hour drive from Mumbai) doing what they termed as ‘Vegetable Picking’.

Now I have heard of people doing such things. I have known my friends in the US going ‘Strawberry Picking’ and ‘Potato Picking’ and all. I personally have never done that. I have never understood the whole excitement of getting a vegetable or a fruit straight from the farm. Don’t they all come from farms? So what’s the big deal in going all the way to the farm and getting it yourself, when you can get an equally good (and often better ones too) from the vendor just a few blocks away. I frankly cannot tell the difference between a ‘straight from farm’ fruit or vegetable, from the one purchased from the market. Anyways, people do strange things. This is just one of them. Never mind. Now as I was trying to discard those tomatoes from my mind, my friend said “You should go there sometime. They just charge 400 bucks per head and you can spend a whole three to four hours picking vegetables. And then you can buy the ones you pick too. That’s extra though.”. (So the tomatoes were not actually free ones)

I have heard people say that there comes a moment in your life when your whole perception changes. It’s like your ‘defining moment’ the ‘Eureka Moment’ of your life. That is exactly how I felt when I heard my friend talking about paying the 400 bucks for picking tomatoes. ‘Wow’ I though ‘what a brilliant idea was that. Getting people to work for you and then making them pay you too. Why did I not think of it before?’. My mind was racing in all directions and I was seeing things in new light. I could visualize the happy farmer sitting and counting his money while people queued up to work for him, all eager to pay him too. I could also see the smile on the winemaker’s face who made people pay for letting them stomp his grapes. Even the old lady outside the temple who sat there with her cow and some grass, whom people paid just to feed her cow that grass, suddenly seemed to me like a smart entrepreneur.

I had actually found a brilliant idea. I should also do that, is what I decided that very moment. I should also let others do my work and let them to pay me for it. That would be perfect. When I came up with this idea last evening, I had a ready customer sitting there right in front of me. I did offer him to work for me for a day and pay me for it, but he didn’t seem interested. He mocked me off. He thought I was just kidding (These days, people have stopped taking me seriously. Wonder why?). Never mind, I thought. I will find somebody else. There will be many others who would be interested in ‘Working in Jay’s office’.

So here’s an open offer to all. ‘Work as Jay for a day’ only for Rs. 1000 (Remember: You are the one who’s going to pay me the money, just like you do when you go when you go fruit/veg picking). You get to work from my office, from my desk. You can reply to my emails, answer my phone calls and even talk to those who come to meet me. And as a special limited time offer, I would even grant you permission to write my blog, I bet you will find it as exciting as working in the farm or stomping grapes. Hurry, offer ends soon !!! Only limited entries !!! (Damn, I suck at writing sales pitches)

Well, any takers?

60% of Mumbaikars feel that school buses should be made compulsory for school going kids. This according to them would help ease the city’s traffic woes. 82% of Mumbaikars feel that smoking should be banned in public places. Now I have nothing against kids going to school in dad’s car nor do I hate smokers. The only thing that bothers me when I read such statistics in newspapers is ‘How come they never asked me for my views on these issues when every other Mumbaikar’s opinion was counted?’

I often wonder, how do media and other market research agencies come up with these statistics? Interestingly, they come up with all sorts of claims - that 74% of Mumbaikars are not interested in politics; 80% of Indian adults admit that they have given or accepted bribe at least once in their life; and 65% of Indian internet users feel that it is OK to download and listen to pirated music. My question is how come I never got surveyed when these agencies were putting up these interesting numbers? How did they all miss me out? Or is it like my statistics professor had once remarked “In this world there are lies, damn lies, and these are statistics”. So are these numbers all made up? Nah…. I don’t think so. I would like to believe that these news guys are honest people. They don’t lie. I feel that it’s just that somehow they missed me out. They forgot to ask me my views, not once, but every single time a survey was conducted. Why did they not ask my opinion?

Recently I read a claim by a research group which said that 80% of married Indians feel that it’s OK to occasionally lie to their spouses. Obviously, this time too, my opinion was not counted. I even asked my wife if she was consulted when they conducted this survey and she said she wasn’t (leaving me wondering if this was precisely one of those ‘lying to spouse’ moments that the survey was referring to).

I have a humble request to all those surveyors – The next time you do a survey on the views of Mumbaikars or Indians, please ask my opinion too. I will try to be honest while answering your questions. I am an Indian and very much a Mumbaikar. Just because I don’t blog in Marathi (errrrr…!!), please don’t brand me as a non-Mumbaikar and leave me out. My opinion matters, please count it.

Note: All characters mentioned in this blog are real. Nothing is imaginary. Any resemblance to any individual or organization is purely intentional and NOT a coincidence -:)

The year was 2000 and the month October. Now I don’t remember the exact date, but it was a Friday. The place was Dallas, Texas (USA) and the time sometime around 7 PM. I had just entered my apartment after a not so exciting day at work, wondering what to eat for dinner and how to spend the rest of the weekend. Suddenly the phone rang. It was my college friend Raghu calling to check if I was available on Saturday evening for a ‘get together’ (Raghu stayed in Austin, about 3 hours drive from Dallas).

It’s been about 8 years now, but I vividly remember the conversation I had with Raghu after our usual exchange of Hi and Hellos:
Raghu: …… I am coming to Dallas tomorrow evening. We are having a small business meeting in Dallas, and I want you to join us.
Jay: Really…Sure, what business meeting is it?
R: This is about an exciting business opportunity. We are looking for partners and I really want you to be part of this.
J: Of course, but what is this opportunity? (Well I was not being skeptical here, I was just being curious)
R: I can’t give you more details now, but all I can say is that, this is really a big opportunity, has huge potential. Meet us tomorrow at 5 and you will get to know. I will email you the address.
J: But still tell me what is it? Come on, please tell me. (By now I was dying to know more)
R: Well I can’t tell you. I want you to hear the complete thing tomorrow from the ‘horse’s mouth’. I don’t want to spoil it for you by giving you part information. You will hear it from Raj tomorrow.
J: Who’s Raj?
R: You will meet him tomorrow. Chal, bye. I got to go now. See you tomorrow.

…and before I could bug him for more, Raghu hung up, leaving me hanging with wild thoughts on what this big opportunity could be. Damn, I hate such situations. Waiting 22 hrs to hear about the opportunity that was going to make me a billionaire (at least a millionaire - in dollars) was like torture. But I had no choice. I had to wait for the ‘horse’ to come, to enlighten me, to take me for a ride -:) So I waited, impatiently and dreaming. And that’s night as I logged on to check my email to get the address that Raghu had sent me, I checked out some of the Porsche models on Edmunds.com. “$85,000 ONLY,.. Hmmm, Well I think I can afford that.” is what would be millionaire Jay thought.

Guided my Mapquest, and lured by ‘million dollar’ dreams, I found myself at the address Raghu had sent me at dot 5:00PM on Saturday. The place was a small community hall with about 100 chairs arranged neatly, and just a handful of them occupied. I enthusiastically went and sat in the first row, hoping to catch the millions faster than the rest. By about 6 the hall was full with about hundred people all eager to grab their millions, but the horse was still missing - and so was Raghu. In the meanwhile, as the waiting was making me restless, I initiated conversations with few of my fellow ‘would be millionaires’. Everybody there had been invited by some acquaintance of their, but none of them had a clue on what the big opportunity was. They were all waiting to hear it from the horse’s mouth too.

Finally at about 6:30, ‘Mr. Raj – the Horse’ arrived with a few horsemen and horsewomen by his side. Raghu was one of them. I waived at Raghu - trying to show off to my fellow chair holders that I knew one of the horsemen and hence I was maybe a little closer to the millions than they were – but Raghu was too busy for him to notice me (or maybe he acted that way) ..aur mera ‘Popat’ ho gaya. Little did I know that this was my first ‘Popat’ for the evening, and the smallest one. The bigger Popats were on their way. (Just FYI: the term ‘mera popat ho gaya’ means ‘made a fool of myself’. It’s a typical Mumbai lingo)

After apologizing for the delay and welcoming us all, the Horse began his speech with a question “Do you know how Ray Kroc became a billionaire?”. When he found that nobody was making an attempt to answer that question, he started picking on people. Oh, how much I hate it when speakers do that, and I hate it even more when I am the one who gets picked to answer the question. Now despite my attempts to avoid eye contact with the horse, he invariably had to pick me to answer that question. This was my second Popat of the evening, because to begin with I didn’t even know who Ray Kroc was. How was I supposed to know how he became a billionaire? But again I was too ashamed to display my ignorance on Ray Kroc, so I politely said “No, I don’t”. Suddenly somebody in the back rows shouted “By selling burgers” (Ray Kroc apparently turned out to be the founder of McDonalds, and my mind was going ..”Oh my God, is this some burger selling business, that I am getting into?”). But fortunately the speaker had asked about Mr. Kroc only to talk about the franchising model of McDonalds. Soon he moved over to Michael Dell (of Dell computers), and from there to someone else and then again someone else and a lot of blah blah blah and blah..

For about an hour the horse bragged about a lot of stuff, except on how do we, the 100 odd people in that room, could make their millions. What was his business proposition – we still didn’t have a clue. And the horse was going on and on dabbling between franchising models, stories of what some of his partners did with their millions, about ‘residual’ incomes and parallel incomes, about the benefits of continual flow of money in your life even when you stop working etc etc….but not a word on how to make that money. After a while the horse’s mouth started appearing like the back side of a bull, because all that was coming out of it was nothing but bullshit..and a lot of it. Finally after about an hour and half, of beating around the bush, the horse hinted that this was some kind of a membership scheme, where each one makes more members and they make more members and at the same time each member buys expensive soaps and shampoos and aftershaves and sugar and coffee from their website and everybody gets a small portion of the money they spent. The company was called something, but overall they were all products of Amway. There I could see my million dollars going down the drain (My Popat No. 3).

We were then told to buy a $10 CD and starter kit, which thankfully I didn’t (thus avoiding Popat no 4.). When the speaker finished, I slyly excused myself from the room and drove home straight. That evening when Raghu called me, I blasted at him for robbing me off my millions and told him not to fall prey to such con games. But he was too convinced of the scheme that my words fell on his deaf ears. It took him a good two years (and a few hundred dollars spent on memberships and some expensive purchases off the Amway website) for him to realize that he wasn’t good enough at convincing people to fall in this trap, and these so called MLM (Multi Level Marketing) schemes were not his cup of tea.

Since that day in 2000, I have been conned into attending such events, twice. Once by a decent looking couple whom we (my wife and I) bumped into at Wal-Mart. They befriended us (that’s what we thought) and invited us over to their house for what they said was a ‘weekend get together with friends’ – which turned out to be another Amway type thing. This time it was under the name Quikstar. Needless to say, we never saw those people again. The third time I attended such a meeting was when I was invited by an alumnus of our college, whom I met at our MBA Alumni meet. This time I was invited under the pretext of discussing a potential business proposition which again turned out to be nothing but a Quikstar con meet. However this time the hosts were nice enough to serve coffee, cookies and cake before the bull shitting session started, and I excused myself out of the session the moment I finished feeding myself generously on the cake and cookies and having gulped down the coffee.

I still get calls from people I know who invite me to their homes for a get together or to discuss business ideas. But now I categorically ask them if this is an Amway/Quikstar/Goldquest or any of those kinds of MLM schemes that they want me to be a member of. If their answer happens to be a ‘Yes’ then I politely (and sometimes not so politely either – it entirely depends on my mood then) excuse myself.

“Kaay, Olakhlas Ka?” (Which is the Marathi equivalent of “Do you recognize me?”) is a question that’s sends my mind going ‘O-O, No No No No not again!’. This question really makes me nervous. I dread it. And I dread the awkwardness that invariably follows.

The beholder of this question is often an elderly member of your extended family, whom you bump into at the wedding reception of a distant cousin; and the awkwardness of the situation arises because your answer to their question ‘Do you recognize me’ happens to be a ‘No’. Now for some odd reason answering ‘No, I don’t recognize you’ is a big NO NO. I have been brainwashed, by mom, since childhood that admitting blatantly that you don’t recognize members of the family is outright ‘rude’ and not acceptable behavior. So now you have to say ‘Yes’. With a nervous smile on the face, head shaking in the yes-no swirl, you murmur ‘Yes I do’, hoping that the conversation ends there. But experience tells you, that you ain’t going to get out of this trap that easily.

Your ‘Yes, I do’ only gives rise to the next question “Tell me who am I?”. ‘Dammit!’, you think, ‘what is this - some kind of an identity check? Do you not remember who you are, that you want me to tell you that? I am not going to tell you who you are. Go figure yourself’. You are tempted to blurt all this out, but your ‘good boy’ image does not permit you to do so. So behind the benign smile that covers your face at such moments, is a mind that’s monkeying up and down every branch of your family tree tying frantically to put a name to the face that’s staring at you, waiting for an identity check (and sometimes holding you by the arm too, just to ensure that you don’t run away before you enlighten them with their identity.) And then like a lightening out of the blue it strikes you ‘Yes! I got it, this is Sheela Maushi’ - mom’s cousin aunt’. But such joys are short lived and killed by overriding thought ‘No wait, Sheela Maushi was the one who died two months ago, this must me Radha Maushi’; ‘No, Radha Maushi died, this is Sheela Maushi;… No..I don’t know.. one of them died.. I think… this is Radha Maushi – the dead one. Oh how can she be the dead one? She must be the alive one… but then who died? Forget who died, you are supposed to figure out who is this alive one here.. not the dead one….’ Eventually you give up and opt for what you think is the diplomatic way out. You say “Of course I know you, but I don’t remember your name”.

Well diplomacy works in this case and Radha Maushi caves in and reveals her identity (yes that’s who she is - Radha Maushi – the alive one). Her grip on your arm start loosening and you think that your escape is near, when all of a sudden Radha Maushi gets into the Q&A mode. ‘Where do you work?; Why don’t you take up a job instead, running you own business is risky; Why don’t you go to the USA for work, my son’s daughter and son-in-law are there; Why did you return back?; When are you planning to visit us with your wife and kid; When are you planning your second kid?….’ For a moment you start wondering on whether this old lady runs an employment cum family planning agency of some sort. But you continue to act as if you are enjoying her words of wisdom. And ‘It’s my wish…Meri marzi… I will do whatever I want’ and other variants of this answer, are only thoughts that occur in your head, which are instantly dismissed in the lure to protect your ‘good boy’ image.

Finally after a rapid crossfire of questions and suggestions, you think you have almost come to your escape point, when from nowhere your wife sneaks up oblivious of this whole situation, coolly sipping on a glass of coke. That’s it. Radha Maushi does not miss out on the opportunity to cast her spell of another awkward moment. She says “Why don’t you introduce me to your wife?”. Now this is a tough one. A mere introduction saying ‘This is Radha Maushi’ is not accepted. You got to explain the exact relationship starting with mom as the focal point and navigating through every node and branch of the family tree that connects her and mom. So now you are back on the tree again, dangling, and slipping, trying your best to cling on, when suddenly there is a pat on your shoulder. You turn around and there is another of your extended family member smiling at you asking “Kaay, Olakhlas Ka?”

“Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?” was a question thrown at me by my interviewer during my first job interview. ‘What a stupid question is that?’ was the instantaneous thought that crossed my mind on hearing it. ‘How the hell do I know where I would be 10 years from now?’. But I remained silent, trying desperately to think of something nicer to say. But I couldn’t. Seeing the perplexed look on my face the interviewer rephrased the question and asked me to elaborate on my future plans. But that didn’t ease my situation either. I was still without an answer. But back of the mind I was now thinking, ‘If this is how job interviews are going to be, I don’t think I would ever get a job. Oh my God! 10 years from now, I will be 30 and jobless’

I hate interviews. That’s because they ask weird questions during them, most of which don’t make any sense to me. I mean how did that guy expect me to know (I was barely 20 then) what I would be at 30? Back then, being 30 was like being ‘old’ and I still addresses people in their 30’s as ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ (now I don’t think that way though). How would I know how much my life would be messed up in the next decade? And how did it even matter to the interviewer. He was not my insurance agent. The fact was that I had no 10 year plans with me (for that matter I didn’t have a 5 or even 2 year plan either). I had no idea how my future was going to unfold. And I wasn’t an astrologer to make predictions either. Nor was I a kid to say Fireman, Detective, Cop, Doctor, Astronaut, Driver, or Lawyer and get away with it, like I did as a child when was often asked ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up?’. But as the silence in the interview room started getting a little uneasy on both of us, I decided to break it with saying something to the effect of ‘In the future I see myself rising higher in the industry and some blah blah blah,…’. Thankfully the interviewer didn’t probe deeper into my future and we moved on.

For many years, the question on ‘future plans’ remained on the top of my ‘most hated questions’, until I came across what is known as the ‘Elevator Pitch’. When my career counselor at the American B-School told me to prepare a 30 second Elevator Pitch, I was benign enough to display my ignorance and ask her what an ‘Elevator Pitch’ meant. “If you are riding in an elevator with a potential employer or an investor and you have just 30 secs to put forth your proposition, what would you say? That is an elevator pitch” was her reply. I never had a fancy for elevators (I like escalators better). But that day on, I started hating them; and moreover those companies that made such fast elevators.

I could never come up with an elevator pitch. I mean 30 secs is too little a time for me to frame anything, let alone a value proposition to a potential employer/investor. I need my time, and I need my space. I am an elaborate thinker. The only thing that I can say in 30 second in an elevator is a quick prayer for my safety - nothing more than that. I can’t convince anybody of anything is an elevator. Fortunately I have never been in such a situation either, where my opportunity has ‘gone in 30 secs’. (Or maybe it has, just that I was too slow to even notice it vanishing). But I wonder if things really work that way. I wonder how many people have actually got jobs or struck business deals in 30 secs by virtue of their elevator speeches. Nevertheless my American colleagues and my professors and my career counselor were all obsessed with the whole idea of this elevator pitch. I just never had one. (Now that probably explains why guns are so popular in that country. It sure must be a lot easier to drive your point in 30 seconds in an elevator with a gun in hand, than with just words and no gun.)

Well it’s been a long time since that first interview. Yes I did get that job :-) and I did join it too. Although ten years later, I was nowhere close to what I had told the interviewer on where I thought I would be. But even today I dread that question and I really hope that someday when I bump into you in an elevator, I am able to, in 30 secs, paint a perfect picture of where I see myself as a man in his 40’s (that’s when I am old and ‘uncle’ types) -:)