73. Capital Gains
Ajay Palvayanteeswaran never felt so ashamed of himself in his entire life. He felt as useless as a pizza coupon that was way past its expiry date. Why, he felt exactly like a seven layer burrito that was missing two layers. In fact, his self-esteem hadn't reached such a rock-bottom since that fateful day when he took his departmental 'hot chick' on a dinner date and discovered at the end of the day that his fly had been open the entire evening. Why does he bring such things upon himself ? Why do stories get written about him ? He lit an ego-boosting cigarette, while Srini and Bala, his IIT friends visiting him from Columbus, Ohio, continued to lecture to him.
"It is true Ajay. You are just wasting your time" Srini told him point blank. "While you are merrily doing your Ph. D for the tenth year, the real action is in business. Even in India, there has been a whole new economic revolution going on - ever heard of the terms 'liberalization' and 'Manmohanomics' ? That's the way to go.."
"Let me tell you a story" Bala interjected."When I was in Bombay last month I ran into my old telawala (pushcart vendor) who used to sell apples. Now the same bugger is pushing the same damned cart. But instead of apples, he peddles Apple computers ..."
Ajay was flabbergasted. "Tell me more" he begged Bala and Srini.
Bala continued. "The telawala's wife - she used to be a gaazwaali in IIT Kanpur. Now she has started a software company in Bombay and wants to come to the USA. In fact, when I asked her why she wants to come here, she said it was because the grass is greener here. Even if you discount the gaazwali PJ, there is a powerful message here for you, Ajay.."
"No invention is really unglamorous and no business is too dirty, Ajay" went on Srini "Really. Take this bugger in Madras. He has invented a machine that puts holes in Vadas and now he is making millions. And I hear that now he is working on a completely automated Bhel machine. This is Industrial Engineering for you. The bottom line is that you should take an idea that is hot in the USA and sell it in India and take a desi concept and sell it in this country. Why, you could be the first person to start a National Kabbadi League in the USA and establish an Avacado farm in Maharashtra. Lateral thinking, machi." "Yes, Ajay. Get out of school first. Ph. D is only for losers." Bala spoke on "Look at all the successful people around you. How many of them are Ph. Ds ? I can empathize with you and your ideal of wanting to do research ...."
"It is not ideals - really - it is more because I just want to goof off and have a good time" Ajay interrupted.
"Whatever" Bala continued "If you are an Einstein or a Feynmann, then it makes perfect sense to do research and dig the funda stuff. Otherwise, you might as well take the easy route out. Start a business. I and Srini have already talked to several people in India and in California about setting up our own companies. If you are interested, we can give you more details."
Ajay felt a surge in himself. There was such a powerful flow of adrenalin, that he felt almost as if he was standing right at the head of the buffet line in the desi restaurant. Srini and Bala were right ! Ajay knew he was no Einstein. And that's perhaps why he was struggling through his Ph. D. Yes, he is just a mediocre person. He might as well recognize it. Maybe, business is his calling ! Ajay lit up another cigarette and resolved to become the best darned mediocre person in the world.
Srini and Bala have now been talking for three hours in a row - and they haven't finished yet. It was almost as if Ajay was sitting under a Bodhi tree.
"Hit me, Srini." said Ajay emotionally. His voice quivered and became as raspy as Bill Clinton's. "Yes, Bala, hit me with your chappal. Maybe then I will learn." At which point, Bala removed his chappal and beat up Ajay with it.
Soon after Bala and Srini reached Ohio, they sent gobs and gobs of email to Ajay to get him started on his investments. There were files on how to invest in India, Frequently asked, but never answered questions, protocols in bribing officials, how to avoid paying income taxes - ad nauseum. There were also messages about several exciting money making schemes in India which involved setting up windmills across the country, raising silkworms and developing beachfront properties.One email suggested that he forked his money in a 'Teakwood forest' in India and showed colorful graphs detailing the skyrocketing demand for teakwood worldwide. Ajay could visualize his teak trees completely dominating the Indian landscape. He could see himself cracking a number of PJs about them. For a starter, he could point to the sacks and sacks of teak seeds and tell his friends "That is my 'seed capital'" or tell them "In my case, money actually grows on trees, hee hee." and finally, if they ask him how his forest was doing, he could respond "Sub 'teak' hai." and have a good laugh. Ajay loved the idea.
To be perfectly in tune with India, Ajay studied the Mandalization of the Dunkel document. Not content, he also looked into the Dunkelization of the Mandal issue.
Ajay did not want to limit his investments to India alone. He wanted to set up a thing or two in the USA. He bunked work the next week and rushed straight to the library and snatched the Wall Street Journal right out of the hands of a business prof. He brought home with him obscene books on Stock market. In a week's time, he even started unloading his knowledge on guys around him.
"Abhey, PJ. I don't know what is wrong with the 'greenback' - I mean the dollar, yaar. It has already dropped two yens and is below its last year's 'support level'. If the 'Bundesbank' doesn't intervene, then it will go south and the 'bellweather thirty year...."
"Ah, shut up and quit boring me...."
"PJ, you are just wasting your time in grad school while millions are waiting to be made. I can give you fundas."
"I hate all those guys who are lusting after money and not enjoying life. Who has been brainwashing you ?"
"No, PJ, nothing like starting a company or two. Eventually I want to return to India and start something out there as well..."
"You are saying all this crap because of your immigrant angst, You will be okay in a couple of days. If you want to get your kicks out of life by starting a business, go right ahead. If I want to get my kicks out of drinking beer and watching Miss America pageant tonight, I will do so. If your prof wants to get his kicks out of life by doing research, then that is okay too. The point is, everybody wants to get kicks out of life. Arrey, Palvy, that is the bottomline. Sub ko ek hi formula hota hai..."
Ajay was stung by what PJ said. But then, he quickly brushed PJ's pessimism aside. If he wanted to be an entrepreneur he should learn to face difficult circumstances.
Enthused by all his new knowledge, he even called his dad in India."Hey ho, daddy dude ! How you doin' buddy ? Where are the terrorists bombing in India this week ?"
"Shut up, you idiot. I have never heard you talk like this to your own daddy. Are you okay ?"
"Daddy, big boy, You are talking to the new and improved Ajay. The future billionaire and entrepreneur.."
"You ? A businessman ? You can't even spell the word entrepreneur. Are you being thrown out of the graduate school ?"
"It is precisely such attitude as yours that kills the enterprise in youth like us. You should encourage us by putting down your own money that you have stashed away in a dumb bank account, earning a piddling interest. There is no point having an unproductive wealth..."
"And there is no point in having an unproductive son either. Just what business are you thinking of doing ? I won't even trust my TV remote with you."
"I want to buy a plot of land in Bombay ...."
"Do you realize, moron, the land prices in Bombay are so atrocious that with your savings, if any, you can perhaps buy a square inch of land and even then, probably a goonda is standing on it right now. Finish your Ph. D soon and come home. With my influence I may be able to get you a government job..."
His mother was more sympathetic and promised to steal some money for him from the family vault. But then, she has always been sympathetic to his ideas and never put him down. Even that one time when he told her that if and when he thought about getting married, he would choose his wife from among the Singapore Airlines hostesses.
All of a sudden, Ajay was pole-vaulted into a distant future. Such a distant future that Ajay had actually finished his stupid Ph. D at last. The small software business he had started while he was still a graduate student - 'Palvy Software and Stuff' has now mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar corporate giant.Being the company President, Chairman, CEO, CFO, CTO, COO and UFO, Ajay gave himself a plush office suite, complete with a desi-style string cot to help him take power-naps between business meetings. Several computers blinked and breathed on his sprawling desk, including one which was dedicated to updating soc.culture.indian bboard and IRC. Yet another computer was being used exclusively to put talk messages to Srini and Bala, whose company "Srini, Bala, The other Srini and The other Bala Software", though not as big as Ajay's company, was still doing very well.
Ajay pounded on the bell on his desk, for the heck of it.
"Sccc reettt aarryy" he yelled, being totally intoxicated by money and the feeling of power.
He hadn't realized that this had set off a chain reaction outside his office among his secretaries Juhi Chawla, Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai. They were pushing and shoving each other, wanting to be the one to answer Ajay's call. Finally, Madhuri Dixit put one of her 'Tezaab' moves and rushed in, leaving the others quite defeated.
"Madhuri, Get me that file on 'Re-engineering' - that has been on the 'super-set' of my 'List of things to do' for a while. I want to put a 'closure' to all these..." Ajay ordered her.
"Uh-oh, Ajay, Yeh tum kya kah rahe ho" Madhuri cooed. Years of being in the movies had limited her speaking skills to just filmy cliches.
After dismissing her, Ajay rang the bell onceagain. This time to summon his peon outside, who was sitting on a tiny bar stool, with half his butt sticking out, drooling at the secretaries. The peon was none other than Ajay's old Ph. D adviser, Prof. Ringo Rangopadhyay.
Over the years Prof. Rangopadhyay fell into bad times. President Newt Gingrich had already cut wasteful government expenses by totally eliminating the NSF and NIST and so Ringo's grant money trickled to a stop. For a time, Prof. Rangopadhyay simply published and published to avoid perishing. Yet, he reached a tragic end. Ajay saw him one day outside the grocery store trying to pass off as Santa Claus, gave him a job as his personal chaprasi - both for old time's sake and also to exact revenge for all the nasty things Ringo had done to him.
Almost fifteen years of having had Ajay Palvayanteeswaran as his student had taken a heavy toll on Prof. Rangopadhyay's physical and emotional health. Ajay had so completely driven him nuts that now Ringo was about as psychotic as a hindi movie villain. Even now he would utter Sholay dialogs every twenty minutes, followed by a throaty laugh. He also carried a picture of Hema Malini's horse, Billu, in his wallet.
"Quick, fetch me the files on Bill Gates and Ambani. Those buggers want to meet me tomorrow. But I don't have time. I am meeting Bala and Srini. Here, keep this dollar...."
At which point Prof Emiritus. Rangopadhyay exitted and came back carrying a small floppy disk containing the files Ajay had asked for, bent his body into a totally servile 'salaam' and left.
That filled Ajay with glee. Then, left to himself, Ajay became contemplative. When he is finally dead and gone, shouldn't the world remember him for something other than his billions ? Perhaps he should institute his own version of the Nobel prizes to be awarded for example to the most prolific soc.culture.indian poster or for the fun of it, for the most annoying poster - but then he realized that Jai Maharaj would walk away with the prize year after year, no matter what the criteria were. Finally he decided that heck, if he made the billions and if he were to leave the world one day, he was going to take it all with him.
After a week, Ajay discovered that he could not read past the comic section of the Wall Street Journal. It was simply too boring. He had already given up on doing business in India because he was deathly scared that his uncles in India would sabotage his efforts.Suddenly the scene shifted. Ajay was time-machined into an ancient stone age civilization where men and women were milling around with the chimpanzees. The Neanderthals were living in caves, eating berries and scratching their beriberis. Some spirited cavemen among them were hunting and farming. There were some others who were inventing - or in this case 're-inventing' the wheels - they were the ancestors of Tatas and Birlas. The ancestors of Madhur Jaffrey and Meenakshi Ammal were also there, busy creating fire and whipping up a nice meal of 'Tandoori Dinasour' in huge primitive clay ovens. Strangely, there were also Piccasso's ancestors painting the cave walls with primitive obscene pictures of primitive stone age women with primitive breasts.
Then all of a sudden, almost incongruously, some sleepy cavemen and women walked out wearing dirty straw-dhotis. They were so lazy they were not even aware of all the goings on around the caves. They were scratching their bellies, yelling at each other, "Abhey oy, ek primitive bidi pilao" Ajay recognized at once that they were his ancestors ! Yikes ! This sent Ajay into a deep depression. No wonder he doesn't have that entrepreneurial touch. Sheesh ! It is not in his genes. Being a Palvayanteeswaran has automatically eliminated him from being a businessman. Ajay figured that through the generations, his family had formed a peculiar substratum of society whose only social role was to be a general comic relief to the larger community.
What an utterly middle-classy family I am from ! Ajay snickered. Look at the role models his family had through history. In the Vedic times, total nerds like sages Vashist and Vyas were the role models. And now as he was growing up, it was his Washington Uncle, who graduated from IIT such a long time ago when the B. Tech degree used to be seven or eight years long.
Suddenly he remembered that the deadline for his journal paper was coming up and his sponsors were due in next week. And his advisor Ringo was no longer sitting on the bar stool outside Ajay's office. Rather, he was standing behind him, breathing hot air on him. He resolved to do at least his Ph. D well and get a decent job and be good at ratrace. His family may not have been business-oriented, but even in his extended family there were occassional successes who managed to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Take for example, the coroner in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Given his name, Lakshmanan Vignawageewaran, Ajay was pretty sure he was distantly related to him.
The next day Srini and Bala called Ajay to find out what he thought about the Silkworm project."Srini, Bala. I want to tell you something. I thought over everything and I don't think I want to be one of those heartless, money-grubbing businessmen who don't know what life is all about ..."
"What ?!?! What the hell are you talking ? I thought we put sense in you..."
"Srini, Bala. If you want to get your kicks out of life by being investors that is perfect. For me, life comes in six-packs. That is where I get my kicks. After all, what does everyone want - to get his kicks in life. Here is something for you to ponder over - Sub ko ek hi formula hota hai..."
"What crap ! Who has been brainwashing you ? Who came up with such an absurd statement ?"
Ajay paused for a while and then replied. "That quote is directly attributed to one of my ancestors, the ancient saint, Ved Vyas...."
