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.