MISSION MAID IMPOSSIBLE
(Published in MINT Lounge on 19th April 2008)
It was a brewing crisis that I had been hoping would resolve itself. I had an infant at home, the maternity leave was over, family support was not immediately available and several local maids had been interviewed and found wanting. I was praying that the patron saint of harassed working moms would smile at me and beam down the perfect nanny, but it wasn’t happening.
An “agency maid” seemed to be the only option- a maid from one of the agencies specializing in providing domestic help to desperate urban women. I had been hesitant to go down that road as I had heard some unsavoury stories about them. A friend’s agency maid had bouts of acute homesickness resulting in much melodrama. A colleague had one who would burn the daal because she would be engaged in conversation with her beau on the mobile. But adversity makes (wo)man reverse all preconceptions and I was soon asking colleagues and friends for references.
I called up Chowdhury Placement in Maharani Bagh and learnt the basics of the agency maid business. “Fully trained with experience in baby care for 3500 to 4000 rupees, semi trained for 2000 and untrained for 1500,” said Chowdhury in a thick paan stained accent.
“I’ll send you my own sister in law- gori chitti, saaf sutri,” he said, as though one attribute naturally led to the other. He invited me that weekend to choose from an array of maids waiting in his “office”.
The office, it turned out, was mythical. After an hour’s search, I found the patli gali that Chowdhury had been exhorting me to, through continual mobile phone instructions. Open drains ran on both sides but I covered my nose and took the path less traveled, (at least by me). At the end of it was an entire settlement, with houses whose plumbing probably dated back to the Delhi Sultanate. I plodded along through a maze of narrow twisting by-lanes and finally reached the address, an old four-storied house. I took the stairs to the top floor passing dozens of Nepali children and women drying their clothes. Chowdhury Placement Agency was a one-room residence. The proprietor was away. Inside were a Nepali matron and her bored companion. “Are you the people trained in baby care?” I asked hopefully. They denied having ever had anything to do with other people’s babies. “Are there some other candidates…maybe in some other room?” I asked, and received blank stares in response.
Next stop: Priya Domestic Services, South Extension, Proprietors: Dabbu and Pappu Gupta. At least this one had a proper office in the basement of a shopping plaza. There were three girls waiting at the reception, who I learnt were fresh off the train from the interiors of Bengal. Dabbu Gupta summoned one of them. A nervous girl of about 21-22 years came in dressed in a pink salwar kameez and brought along a faint smell of sweat.
“Saraswati has three years of experience. But since she is dark she hasn’t got placed yet. So she’s a bit nervous.”
“Tell Madam how you would make aloo gobhi,” ordered Dabbu Gupta. The girl rattled off a recipe, looking at the floor, fists clenched tightly. She was then asked to leave.
“ She doesn’t look clean now. They are from the villages you see, so they don’t have proper soaps and shampoos. Once she starts working, in one month she will become unrecognizable,” he assured me.
I said I had no problems with her complexion if she knew her job. He said she would be ready to go with me the next day.
The next afternoon, when I reached the place, I was furious to learn that Saraswati had been sent elsewhere.
“Bhaiyya, you have wasted my time!” I concluded my tirade.
It was the cue that Dabbu Gupta was looking for. He implored me to take a seat and ordered a minion to bring coffee. “Now that you have called me bhaiyya, you cannot leave without having something!” he said ignoring my protests.
It was incredible how an angry customer had been mollified in a cloying, insincere way that is uniquely Delhi.
He assured me that by Monday evening, he would personally drop a skilled maid to my house. “My people have gone to collect more labour from the Kolkotta and Assam,” he said. “Normally, a whole lot of them come from the tribal areas of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhatisgarh. But those are Christian girls, so they go home for Christmas and don’t return until February. That’s why there is a shortage now, else I get entire train fulls of labour,” he explained.
We could have been in Lousiana during the era of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As he spoke, he handed over wads of cash to a young man leaving for Assam. “Remember, it is ULFA territory. So don’t roam around, just focus on transporting the girls,” Dabbu Gupta warned.
On Monday, I eagerly called Priya Domestic and learnt that Dabbu Gupta was in Kolkotta and would return on Wednesday. In dogged persuasion, I called on Wednesday. “He is still in Kolkotta,” said his brother Pappu. I tried another number and a lackey spilled the beans that he was very much in Delhi but had just stepped out for lunch.
I decided to tap my last contact- MR Placement in Bhikaji Cama Place. Within hours of calling, a rep stood at my door to collect thousand rupees as advance. I thought that was odd, but once again desperation prevailed over sense. Two days later, the promised maid never arrived.
“Arre madam, I told you there’s some problem. Tomorrow I’ll send okay? Pucca. Theek hai?” the owner said and hung up, leaving me fuming.
On Monday, the husband and I took half days off to tend to baby and waited breathlessly for the evening. At 7.p.m. a the unmistakable voice of a Delhi lout informed me that he was just bringing the maid on his bike but she fell off and hurt her foot, so it was all cancelled.
While I contemplated the exact wordings of my resignation letter, a neighbour suggested Balika Seva Sadan, an unpretentious outfit that didn’t call itself fancy names like “placement agency” or “domestic services”. The next morning someone walked into my house. What is that, I wondered….Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s Supermaid! Hallelujah! She was finally here!
It’s a month now and some jewelry is missing… but I don’t think she’s a suspect. No, she’s not. She cannot be. She musn’t be…
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Moving with the stationery
Published in HT 19th Feb 2008
Mumbai, circa 1979. A group of schoolgirls gather around a classmate, gawking at Sapna Melwani’s latest acquisition from Hong Kong. The object of desire is a magnetic pencil box in neon pink, covered in a cushiony material and opening on both sides, one for regular pencils and the other for colours. In pre-liberalised India, even in an uppity south Mumbai school, you could count on one hand the number of kids who possessed fancy ‘Made in China’ stationery. The majority used plastic pencil boxes priced at Rs 2 to hold their black and red Nataraj pencils or Apsara’s white Flora pencils with delicate pink flowers. Erasers were from Sandoz and resembled industrial rubber. Colour pencils were an unchanging set of 12 from Camlin that had a picture of a little boy with floppy hair on the yellow box.
Despite the limited range, stationery was a preoccupation in junior school. Pencil tips were sharpened until they became weapons that could be used to poke someone and make them yelp. Spirals of wood shavings from such activity were collected for their artistic value. Scented erasers were tested for quality assurance by rubbing the hell out of a page, until small heaps of rubber shavings were produced and the paper wore thin.
Cut to 2008, Delhi. Some things haven’t changed. My 6-year-old daughter is obsessive about stationery, as I understand are her friends. Expensive toys or outings can’t send her into raptures the way a new 64-piece art kit can. New pencils are diminished in stature within a matter of hours as they are mercilessly sharpened in the quest for the perfect lead point.
What has changed is that today’s under-10s are aided by a dizzying array of options. We seem to be witnessing an interesting phase in the evolution of stationery in India. Cheap, Colourful and Chinese are the three Cs of the stationery world. There’s ‘glitter’ — shiny powder in different colours that you can use to adorn your artwork. It was banned at home after we found that it flies all over the place and sticks to everyone’s face and hair. That’s when my daughter found out from a friend that ‘glitter’ is also available in a more parent-friendly package. Young Prakriti squeezes some on to the paper in funky designs, lets it dry and produces some edgy primary school art. Let’s just say
I remembered why stationery was such fun. And it seems to have doubled for these kids of liberalised India.
Published in HT 19th Feb 2008
Mumbai, circa 1979. A group of schoolgirls gather around a classmate, gawking at Sapna Melwani’s latest acquisition from Hong Kong. The object of desire is a magnetic pencil box in neon pink, covered in a cushiony material and opening on both sides, one for regular pencils and the other for colours. In pre-liberalised India, even in an uppity south Mumbai school, you could count on one hand the number of kids who possessed fancy ‘Made in China’ stationery. The majority used plastic pencil boxes priced at Rs 2 to hold their black and red Nataraj pencils or Apsara’s white Flora pencils with delicate pink flowers. Erasers were from Sandoz and resembled industrial rubber. Colour pencils were an unchanging set of 12 from Camlin that had a picture of a little boy with floppy hair on the yellow box.
Despite the limited range, stationery was a preoccupation in junior school. Pencil tips were sharpened until they became weapons that could be used to poke someone and make them yelp. Spirals of wood shavings from such activity were collected for their artistic value. Scented erasers were tested for quality assurance by rubbing the hell out of a page, until small heaps of rubber shavings were produced and the paper wore thin.
Cut to 2008, Delhi. Some things haven’t changed. My 6-year-old daughter is obsessive about stationery, as I understand are her friends. Expensive toys or outings can’t send her into raptures the way a new 64-piece art kit can. New pencils are diminished in stature within a matter of hours as they are mercilessly sharpened in the quest for the perfect lead point.
What has changed is that today’s under-10s are aided by a dizzying array of options. We seem to be witnessing an interesting phase in the evolution of stationery in India. Cheap, Colourful and Chinese are the three Cs of the stationery world. There’s ‘glitter’ — shiny powder in different colours that you can use to adorn your artwork. It was banned at home after we found that it flies all over the place and sticks to everyone’s face and hair. That’s when my daughter found out from a friend that ‘glitter’ is also available in a more parent-friendly package. Young Prakriti squeezes some on to the paper in funky designs, lets it dry and produces some edgy primary school art. Let’s just say
I remembered why stationery was such fun. And it seems to have doubled for these kids of liberalised India.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
A Dessert Maniac Speaks Up
Once you cross thirty, the world expects that you have attained a fair amount of control.
Control over your emotions, temper, spending habits and - in this age of food policing – over the amount of dessert you eat. The look of disgust mixed with pity, which I get from onlookers when I am on my third helping of chocolate mousse or peach sorbet, is therefore perfectly legitimate. But I have accepted that there is little I can do about that reaction. Desserts are a congenital obsession with me. It maybe something my mother ate when she was expecting me but I have been gravitating towards gooey treats ever since I realized their existence. My first memory of over indulgence is when someone brought home a Dutch truffle cake when I was nine. From the first nibble, the lush dark chocolate on its surface consumed me like molten lava. Some days later I developed a skin rash just as fierce as the greed with which I finished the confection.
I studied in a residential school where on two days of the week, dessert would be served on a first come first serve basis. On those days, I would maneuver my way to the head of the line, ready to beat everyone to whatever milky-sugary-fruity-nutty dish that the chef had created. The other girls would pick at something light and rush off to class while I lingered on at the table to enjoy my dessert alone, immune to all academic obligations and the disapproving glances of those with more restraint.
When I started my professional life, I had to attend conferences to “network” with others from my industry. My bosses never wisened up to the futility of sending me to seminars where a lavish buffet inevitably included a groaning dessert table. While important looking men gave their opinion on the swings in the stock market, one woman with thirty two sweet teeth would be eyeing the ice creams and the gateaux that awaited her.
I faced my toughest time when we stayed in France for a while. Life there isn’t easy for a dessert maniac. Tartes des framboises, charlotte aux fruits, éclairs and profiteroles winked at me tantalizingly from behind the glass facades of the numerous patisseries.
It was there that I began resorting to slyness to get my fix, like a classic addict. I never openly bought dessert for myself; I always bought it for my four year old daughter. But deep in my heart I knew that she did not like sweet things. I knew that she would have just one bite and hand it back to me saying “Mamma, I can’t have more, you finish it…” That’s the moment I have begun to live for…when the drool threatens to drip off my tongue and my irises have the manic twinkle that comes from pure greed…
Once you cross thirty, the world expects that you have attained a fair amount of control.
Control over your emotions, temper, spending habits and - in this age of food policing – over the amount of dessert you eat. The look of disgust mixed with pity, which I get from onlookers when I am on my third helping of chocolate mousse or peach sorbet, is therefore perfectly legitimate. But I have accepted that there is little I can do about that reaction. Desserts are a congenital obsession with me. It maybe something my mother ate when she was expecting me but I have been gravitating towards gooey treats ever since I realized their existence. My first memory of over indulgence is when someone brought home a Dutch truffle cake when I was nine. From the first nibble, the lush dark chocolate on its surface consumed me like molten lava. Some days later I developed a skin rash just as fierce as the greed with which I finished the confection.
I studied in a residential school where on two days of the week, dessert would be served on a first come first serve basis. On those days, I would maneuver my way to the head of the line, ready to beat everyone to whatever milky-sugary-fruity-nutty dish that the chef had created. The other girls would pick at something light and rush off to class while I lingered on at the table to enjoy my dessert alone, immune to all academic obligations and the disapproving glances of those with more restraint.
When I started my professional life, I had to attend conferences to “network” with others from my industry. My bosses never wisened up to the futility of sending me to seminars where a lavish buffet inevitably included a groaning dessert table. While important looking men gave their opinion on the swings in the stock market, one woman with thirty two sweet teeth would be eyeing the ice creams and the gateaux that awaited her.
I faced my toughest time when we stayed in France for a while. Life there isn’t easy for a dessert maniac. Tartes des framboises, charlotte aux fruits, éclairs and profiteroles winked at me tantalizingly from behind the glass facades of the numerous patisseries.
It was there that I began resorting to slyness to get my fix, like a classic addict. I never openly bought dessert for myself; I always bought it for my four year old daughter. But deep in my heart I knew that she did not like sweet things. I knew that she would have just one bite and hand it back to me saying “Mamma, I can’t have more, you finish it…” That’s the moment I have begun to live for…when the drool threatens to drip off my tongue and my irises have the manic twinkle that comes from pure greed…
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Natal attraction
First appeared in Times of India, November 21st, 2001
If any endorsement were needed of Mumbai's cosmopolitanism, you will find it, as we recently did, when a new-born arrives in your family.
You will be inundated by a torrent of gratuitous advice on baby and mother care-sometimes complimentary, very often contradictory, but always well-meaning.
The right diet for a nursing mom proved to be the most controversial subject. A day after we came home from the hospital, Aunties Parekh, Parekh and Dalal arrived like the Biblical kings, bearing gifts of sonth (dry ginger) laddus and packets of sava, a variation of the common saunf. ``We Gujaratis give 1.25 kilos of sonth to a new mother in the first few months. Creates heat, which the body requires at this stage,'' they said excitedly.
It turned out to be precisely the reason my Tamilian mother tucked the stuff discreetly out of my sight. ``Too much heat is bad for the baby,'' she said firmly. ``Her eyes will burn and she will get constipated.'' ``They wouldn't be giving it to their daughters in that case,'' I ventured. ``As long as I am in charge of post- natal care, I will do only whatever my mother did for me,'' she said in a certain tone I recognised from my childhood. This was clearly a touchy area involving maternal pride, so I quickly shut up.
Soon afterwards, Ms Gulati from the top floor came bustling in with ghee-en panjiri, redolent of the prosperity of Punjab. A bhangra beat played in my head as she animatedly explained how the wheat flour and dry-fruit mixture was the secret behind the bonny babies of her community. ``Don't touch the stuff,'' shrieked my colleague Ritu on the phone when I told her about the magic food. ``My sister's mom-in-law fed her panjiri all the time after her delivery and she ended up looking like a giant tractor. She has still to lose those kilos after two years.''
Baby care was vast, uncharted, free-for-all territory. The most powerful voice here was that of Sangeeta Panshikar, an ex-neighbour. She came home to see the baby and left me reeling under the overload of information on baby bathing, wrapping, sleeping and even burping. ``This is the way we do it,'' she kept saying, implying clearly that it was also the best way.
``Call a dai to do maalish for the baby,'' she urged. ``And when you wrap the baby, hold her limbs tightly and wind the cloth around her firmly,'' she added. Our bai who came in to serve tea got into the spirit of the conversation and nodded vigorously. Then, in a display of community bonding, the two of them proceeded to demonstrate the skill on the unsuspecting baby, while I stood on the side making small, protesting noises. Just as they left, my mother and Ms Krishnamurthy, her friend from her music group, came in and saw a shocked baby lying like a bandaged doll. ``Poor girl, how will she move her limbs? It is important for blood circulation. Active babies hate to be tied up like this,'' they declared in unison and proceeded to free the child.
Then there were the modernists. Like Sister Susan at the paediatric's. ``Don't powder the baby. No lighting dhoop around the baby after a bath. These things cause allergies in later life,'' she said. ``Only milk until the baby is four months. No honey, jaiphal or sugar either. Not even water,'' she said, waving a warning finger.
Here, there was a sudden shift in the battlelines. The traditionalists all ganged up against the new cultural invasion. ``Hmph! We did all this, and as if our children have allergies!'' snorted one of the aunties when she heard of the hospital's diktats.
``My mother had six children and always followed grandma's remedies. Doctors nowadays say absurd things,'' said another. ``What's wrong with honey? Honey improves digestion,'' said my mother, while the bai lit a dhoop.
As for the new mom, she no longer has any control. Caught in a blur of sleepless nights, nappy changes and baby feeds, she has just enough energy numbly to follow the post- natal advisors. So, if the next person was to say that she should swallow a live toad whole first thing every morning, for that's what they did in ancient China and the kids turned out really smart, she'd probably do just that.
(This weekly column aims to capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind.)
First appeared in Times of India, November 21st, 2001
If any endorsement were needed of Mumbai's cosmopolitanism, you will find it, as we recently did, when a new-born arrives in your family.
You will be inundated by a torrent of gratuitous advice on baby and mother care-sometimes complimentary, very often contradictory, but always well-meaning.
The right diet for a nursing mom proved to be the most controversial subject. A day after we came home from the hospital, Aunties Parekh, Parekh and Dalal arrived like the Biblical kings, bearing gifts of sonth (dry ginger) laddus and packets of sava, a variation of the common saunf. ``We Gujaratis give 1.25 kilos of sonth to a new mother in the first few months. Creates heat, which the body requires at this stage,'' they said excitedly.
It turned out to be precisely the reason my Tamilian mother tucked the stuff discreetly out of my sight. ``Too much heat is bad for the baby,'' she said firmly. ``Her eyes will burn and she will get constipated.'' ``They wouldn't be giving it to their daughters in that case,'' I ventured. ``As long as I am in charge of post- natal care, I will do only whatever my mother did for me,'' she said in a certain tone I recognised from my childhood. This was clearly a touchy area involving maternal pride, so I quickly shut up.
Soon afterwards, Ms Gulati from the top floor came bustling in with ghee-en panjiri, redolent of the prosperity of Punjab. A bhangra beat played in my head as she animatedly explained how the wheat flour and dry-fruit mixture was the secret behind the bonny babies of her community. ``Don't touch the stuff,'' shrieked my colleague Ritu on the phone when I told her about the magic food. ``My sister's mom-in-law fed her panjiri all the time after her delivery and she ended up looking like a giant tractor. She has still to lose those kilos after two years.''
Baby care was vast, uncharted, free-for-all territory. The most powerful voice here was that of Sangeeta Panshikar, an ex-neighbour. She came home to see the baby and left me reeling under the overload of information on baby bathing, wrapping, sleeping and even burping. ``This is the way we do it,'' she kept saying, implying clearly that it was also the best way.
``Call a dai to do maalish for the baby,'' she urged. ``And when you wrap the baby, hold her limbs tightly and wind the cloth around her firmly,'' she added. Our bai who came in to serve tea got into the spirit of the conversation and nodded vigorously. Then, in a display of community bonding, the two of them proceeded to demonstrate the skill on the unsuspecting baby, while I stood on the side making small, protesting noises. Just as they left, my mother and Ms Krishnamurthy, her friend from her music group, came in and saw a shocked baby lying like a bandaged doll. ``Poor girl, how will she move her limbs? It is important for blood circulation. Active babies hate to be tied up like this,'' they declared in unison and proceeded to free the child.
Then there were the modernists. Like Sister Susan at the paediatric's. ``Don't powder the baby. No lighting dhoop around the baby after a bath. These things cause allergies in later life,'' she said. ``Only milk until the baby is four months. No honey, jaiphal or sugar either. Not even water,'' she said, waving a warning finger.
Here, there was a sudden shift in the battlelines. The traditionalists all ganged up against the new cultural invasion. ``Hmph! We did all this, and as if our children have allergies!'' snorted one of the aunties when she heard of the hospital's diktats.
``My mother had six children and always followed grandma's remedies. Doctors nowadays say absurd things,'' said another. ``What's wrong with honey? Honey improves digestion,'' said my mother, while the bai lit a dhoop.
As for the new mom, she no longer has any control. Caught in a blur of sleepless nights, nappy changes and baby feeds, she has just enough energy numbly to follow the post- natal advisors. So, if the next person was to say that she should swallow a live toad whole first thing every morning, for that's what they did in ancient China and the kids turned out really smart, she'd probably do just that.
(This weekly column aims to capture that quintessentially Mumbai state of mind.)
Sunday, August 06, 2006
An NRI returns
(First published in Sunday Mid Day
No place like home
By: Vandana Vasudevan
June 8, 2003 )
After a year’s stay abroad I returned to Mumbai recently. A few days later I took the AC bus from Churchgate to Andheri. The bus took the inner road — through Marine Lines, Sandhurst Bridge, Kemp’s Corner and Peddar Road — before reaching Mahalakshmi and joining the main artery of the city.
Distance had obviously made the heart grow fonder as with each familiar sight, related memories surfaced — my sister and I stuffing our faces at Tewari Brothers, studying at Villa Theresa, buying fresh paav at City Bakery, praying at Siddhivinayak before crucial exams.
I saw billboards with movie stars who I felt I’d grown up with, and in some cases even knew their parents. I laughed at the sight of a cart displaying a sign-board proclaiming Rs five for a glass of juice, with “carat” painted in orange and “graphs” in bright purple. On the way home, I bought three business magazines and read about familiar people, companies and issues.
I realised how acutely I had been missing the comfort which comes from being inherent to a milieu.
In a foreign country, you remain an observer, an admiring onlooker on the fringe of society. I’ve found that its not because you are from a third world country or the foreign societies deliberately exclude you. It’s simply because there are hundreds of small cultural reference points that you cannot hope to grasp unless you have spent a lifetime there.
Picture an American, even one who’s spent a few years in India, listening to a conversation between two English-speaking Indian friends. How is he to comprehend the concept of a “behenji” or “pseud-Bong” or how a cousin is having a tough time finding an arranged match, or the pleasures of papdi chaat, or the numerous colloquialisms that have their origins in Bollywood.
Each society has it’s own equivalent of such references and not being privy to them, one can never integrate into that world. Attending office, shopping at the mall, zipping on modern highways, walking on clean roads, dealing with systems that work, are finally just activities.
The difference is welcome and enjoyable for some time, but after a point, it leaves you feeling bereft in an amorphous, unclear way that most people recognise, but don’t know why it’s happening. There’s money, apartment, car, foreign goods, and hey, isn’t this what I’ve always dreamt of?
So what am I missing? Not figuring it out, we spend year after year in the same state, turning to the local Indian association’s cultural evenings for succour. Which is a bit like being served five star fare each day, then getting fed up and going to the restaurant that promises “home style food”, knowing it’s a poor substitute for mom’s cooking.
On the flip side of the orderliness and standardisation found in first world countries, is a certain dullness and predictability. Everything is standardised, so no matter which part of the country you go to, you’ll find the same products in the outlets of the same set of retail chains.
Buses and trains will come on the hour, the ATM is never down and the public loos always have water. Does all this make for efficiency, hygiene and safety? Of course it does. But it also makes life as sterile and lacklustre as the grey skies in many of those lands.
You are robbed of the spice that diversity and choice bring to life. In India, if I want to buy a cell phone, the mind boggles at the number of shops that I can find in a single bazaar of a city. Abroad, I would head straight for the two or three chain stores that everyone goes to for electronic goods.
Ironically, the consumer is much more of a king here. This is not to romanticise the anarchy that defines life in our country, but to know that neatness and automation come attached with strings of monotony.
So here’s a secret from an insider — it isn’t as perfect as it seems. Do forgive the NRI hordes when they descend on you wielding their designer labels and mineral water and muttering about how terribly dusty it is here.
Because they’ve had a few lonely days back in that far away land. Wishing they could be with mom when she was ill. Wanting to attend a childhood friend’s wedding. Celebrating a festival when it’s meant to; not on the convenient weekend.
Talking to a loved one back home for as long as they want without the call meter ticking away in their minds. Reading Indian news from a crisp newspaper held in their hands instead of viewing it on the Internet. Having bun maska, kadak chai or ganne ka ras and suspicious looking street food.
Just aching for the disgusting, hot, mad, chaos that is India.
(First published in Sunday Mid Day
No place like home
By: Vandana Vasudevan
June 8, 2003 )
After a year’s stay abroad I returned to Mumbai recently. A few days later I took the AC bus from Churchgate to Andheri. The bus took the inner road — through Marine Lines, Sandhurst Bridge, Kemp’s Corner and Peddar Road — before reaching Mahalakshmi and joining the main artery of the city.
Distance had obviously made the heart grow fonder as with each familiar sight, related memories surfaced — my sister and I stuffing our faces at Tewari Brothers, studying at Villa Theresa, buying fresh paav at City Bakery, praying at Siddhivinayak before crucial exams.
I saw billboards with movie stars who I felt I’d grown up with, and in some cases even knew their parents. I laughed at the sight of a cart displaying a sign-board proclaiming Rs five for a glass of juice, with “carat” painted in orange and “graphs” in bright purple. On the way home, I bought three business magazines and read about familiar people, companies and issues.
I realised how acutely I had been missing the comfort which comes from being inherent to a milieu.
In a foreign country, you remain an observer, an admiring onlooker on the fringe of society. I’ve found that its not because you are from a third world country or the foreign societies deliberately exclude you. It’s simply because there are hundreds of small cultural reference points that you cannot hope to grasp unless you have spent a lifetime there.
Picture an American, even one who’s spent a few years in India, listening to a conversation between two English-speaking Indian friends. How is he to comprehend the concept of a “behenji” or “pseud-Bong” or how a cousin is having a tough time finding an arranged match, or the pleasures of papdi chaat, or the numerous colloquialisms that have their origins in Bollywood.
Each society has it’s own equivalent of such references and not being privy to them, one can never integrate into that world. Attending office, shopping at the mall, zipping on modern highways, walking on clean roads, dealing with systems that work, are finally just activities.
The difference is welcome and enjoyable for some time, but after a point, it leaves you feeling bereft in an amorphous, unclear way that most people recognise, but don’t know why it’s happening. There’s money, apartment, car, foreign goods, and hey, isn’t this what I’ve always dreamt of?
So what am I missing? Not figuring it out, we spend year after year in the same state, turning to the local Indian association’s cultural evenings for succour. Which is a bit like being served five star fare each day, then getting fed up and going to the restaurant that promises “home style food”, knowing it’s a poor substitute for mom’s cooking.
On the flip side of the orderliness and standardisation found in first world countries, is a certain dullness and predictability. Everything is standardised, so no matter which part of the country you go to, you’ll find the same products in the outlets of the same set of retail chains.
Buses and trains will come on the hour, the ATM is never down and the public loos always have water. Does all this make for efficiency, hygiene and safety? Of course it does. But it also makes life as sterile and lacklustre as the grey skies in many of those lands.
You are robbed of the spice that diversity and choice bring to life. In India, if I want to buy a cell phone, the mind boggles at the number of shops that I can find in a single bazaar of a city. Abroad, I would head straight for the two or three chain stores that everyone goes to for electronic goods.
Ironically, the consumer is much more of a king here. This is not to romanticise the anarchy that defines life in our country, but to know that neatness and automation come attached with strings of monotony.
So here’s a secret from an insider — it isn’t as perfect as it seems. Do forgive the NRI hordes when they descend on you wielding their designer labels and mineral water and muttering about how terribly dusty it is here.
Because they’ve had a few lonely days back in that far away land. Wishing they could be with mom when she was ill. Wanting to attend a childhood friend’s wedding. Celebrating a festival when it’s meant to; not on the convenient weekend.
Talking to a loved one back home for as long as they want without the call meter ticking away in their minds. Reading Indian news from a crisp newspaper held in their hands instead of viewing it on the Internet. Having bun maska, kadak chai or ganne ka ras and suspicious looking street food.
Just aching for the disgusting, hot, mad, chaos that is India.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Striding into the stock market
Inside the mind of a Small Investor
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometime during my misspent youth, I attended a reputed business school, because of which I wandered into a bank job and stayed there for nearly ten years. This kind of stuff makes people think you are some kind of deal making smart ass who knows the stock market inside out and keeps money stashed away in an investment which is quietly multiplying itself in geometric progression. But I am not like that at all. You see, the kind of jobs that I did in those huge banks were general management jobs-customer service, quality, that kind of jazz. I never really dealt with money or investment which suited me just fine, coz I had little interest in it anyway, to begin with. So I wouldn't have known an equity if it had come and whacked me on my face.
A couple of years ago, there was this big software company that was doing a public issue-(i.e. going to the public and saying- give me money and I give you shares and let's hope it all kinda works out in a few years time and we both get richer). The office was abuzz with activity and people were filling up forms to subscribe as the last date was nearing and the whole thing works on a first come first serve basis...A couple of hours before the deadline a pesky sales agent caught me and made me fill the form and write out a check to subscribe to the issue and begin an online trading account simultaneously. If this giant software company was going to give me some shares, it would be credited into this online trading account, he said.
I got a user id, lost the password and forgot all about the account, except when I saw the newsletters in my inbox. I left every one of them unopened. This was 2004, when there was a lot of media hype about what a great time it was for the Indian economy and how along with China, India is one of the world's leading emerging markets blah blah and more blah....Such was the optimism in the air that even someone as inert as me was stirred- at least enough to not delete those blessed newsletters about stocks. One night I told my husband that I would forward them all to him and blindly invest wherever he told me too. My husband is even more financially lazy that I am (It's a wonder we manage to eat.) and to possibly wriggle out of the ordeal of reading about mutual funds and bonds, he gave me this whole bit about how I must be the only one so scrip- challenged, despite being an MBA and spending my waking hours in the business of managing money....
Sulkily, one morning I logged onto the online trading site in which I had opened an account more than a year ago. I clicked on “Markets”. A panel showed the changing prices of the day's highest traded stocks. Opinions were flying about a new auto stock on the block and the future of cement scrips. Like someone who's entered a rocking party and can't find a corner to get lost in, I stumbled out and into the Home Page. "Pick of the fortnight" said a headline. Yet another expert had written a column on trends in petro stocks. "Industry Research" took me into 5000 companies and their balance sheets.
Aaaargh….Can someone please tell me how the hell does one log in and buy the stuff?
Then I saw “Trading”. "Log in" it said, when I clicked. I punched in my id and password.
“Invalid Login id or Password. Click here for our 24 hour customer care centre.”
A lady in headphones beamed at me. She looked the type who writes down all IDs, passwords and PINs neatly in a diary. I stared balefully at her. I got the same error message two more times. I knew they would lock me out after 3 tries; so I looked at the badly torn paper in which my login id was printed. It was in CAPS; I glanced down and saw that my CAPS LOCK wasn’t blinking. I had been typing small letters.
If I had not realized this tiny detail at that moment, I would perhaps have been a stranger to the stock market for the rest of my life. If I had got locked out, I know I would have been too indifferent to get a new id and try again. But I was destined enter the trading ring and affect the swings in people’s fortunes.
Fourth time lucky, I arrived on a fresh page. “Welcome to online investing” it said.
Thank You…I said in an awed whisper. My eyes ran over the menu- Equity, Futures and Options, Commodity Trading, Mutual Funds, Portfolio. I was actually here…I was on the trading floor of the stock exchange where tough men make rude signs at each other to cut million dollar deals. Except of course I couldn’t see anyone and no one could see me. Apart from that detail, the fact remained that I was actually there! Live and reporting from the stock market- where corporate history is made and unmade by hot shot brokers and investors.
Ha! Now I would show them- I would buy an alarming number of scrips of a small obscure company making say, cling film or zippers or potassium permanganate and have everyone wondering who this mysterious trader is who is suddenly skewing market dynamics. I would use a combination of my analytical bent of mind and my sharply honed woman’s instinct to pick a few undiscovered gems and then…and then that flat where the sea breeze strokes the face may be mine sooner than later.
I sat up straight. Let’s see now….Perhaps it was time to open one of those newsletters after all. “Stocks on the Move” said a column. In this were listed the stock of a sugar company deep in a northern district notorious for its criminal activities. Maybe it belongs to some mafia henchman whom I may end up supporting by investing in his company… But baby you are in the stock market, I reminded myself. No sentiment, ethics, nationalism and any of that gooey stuff. Just cold, ruthless decisions with your eye on booking profit. Greed is good, were the immortal words of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. And greed it shall be… I told myself determinedly. Eyes glinting like Michael Douglas’, I jumped to the open trading window and commissioned a hundred dollars of my honest taxpayer’s money into the hands of the sugar mafia by clicking “Buy”.
The next recommendation was a software major whose stock price was way above my budget. (The plan was to invest low and reap big, remember?). The last was a southern company making raw material CPC for aluminium. “Buoyant global aluminium sector & rising aluminum smelter capacity is expected to push growth to over 4% in the period of 2005-08 as compared to 2% in the period of 2002-05.” Neat. While the rest of the herd is mindlessly aping one another and buying FMCG and Telecom, savvy me would get rich buy investing in Calcined Petro Coke stocks and then…time for that luxury cruise in the Agean Sea around Cyprus.
Uh-oh. What was that written below? “The company faces risk in the form of the changing dynamics of its principal raw material, GPC. Higher demand due to smelter expansion has lead to lower production of traditional GPC resulting in a gradual shift towards non-traditional GPC. However the company is gearing up to meet the dynamic GPC situation.”
I paused thoughtfully, considering this new information. I read the last line again. They were gearing up, weren’t they. And which business doesn’t face risks? They were a southern company and southerners were typically sincere and honest, so how bad can things get? Besides, who will read up more of this boring stuff and search for some other stock all over again? Also, I needed to log off and run an errand, but didn’t want to quit without beginning my bull run…
So with 20 shares of sugar and 30 of Calcined Petro Coke, I, Stock Market Duffer, announced my grand entry into the wild jungle of bulls and bears.
After that I was unstoppable. Market indices and EPS became part of my being. I had a finger in every pie-petroleum, telecom, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals…the very vitals of the Indian economy were sitting like golden geese in my portfolio. I paid rapt attention to the ramblings on business news channels. If I had bought cement stocks and the anchor expressed surprise at the sudden buying in that sector, I would smirk knowingly. My portfolio had hardly any entries in red. At one point, I showed my husband how I was making a 15% return on my investment within 3 months. I suspect he started imagining himself in the SUV he had been eyeing…
And then it happened in May 2006. Gravity registered its inevitable presence. The worst crash ever of the Indian stock market. The newspapers called it a bloodbath. My portfolio page was drenched in red. The small investors are the worst hit, they said. The finance minister cautioned retail investors from investing directly in equities as they lacked research. For some days I logged on frantically to see if the losses would diminish because the experts on CNBC kept saying that it was an aberration and the long term India story was still strong. But those red scars don’t seem to go away. I’ve stopped logging in now.
“I told you I was lousy at this kind of thing,” I tell my husband.
He nods and asks me to fill out the bank deposit form that is inside the middle drawer.
Inside the mind of a Small Investor
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometime during my misspent youth, I attended a reputed business school, because of which I wandered into a bank job and stayed there for nearly ten years. This kind of stuff makes people think you are some kind of deal making smart ass who knows the stock market inside out and keeps money stashed away in an investment which is quietly multiplying itself in geometric progression. But I am not like that at all. You see, the kind of jobs that I did in those huge banks were general management jobs-customer service, quality, that kind of jazz. I never really dealt with money or investment which suited me just fine, coz I had little interest in it anyway, to begin with. So I wouldn't have known an equity if it had come and whacked me on my face.
A couple of years ago, there was this big software company that was doing a public issue-(i.e. going to the public and saying- give me money and I give you shares and let's hope it all kinda works out in a few years time and we both get richer). The office was abuzz with activity and people were filling up forms to subscribe as the last date was nearing and the whole thing works on a first come first serve basis...A couple of hours before the deadline a pesky sales agent caught me and made me fill the form and write out a check to subscribe to the issue and begin an online trading account simultaneously. If this giant software company was going to give me some shares, it would be credited into this online trading account, he said.
I got a user id, lost the password and forgot all about the account, except when I saw the newsletters in my inbox. I left every one of them unopened. This was 2004, when there was a lot of media hype about what a great time it was for the Indian economy and how along with China, India is one of the world's leading emerging markets blah blah and more blah....Such was the optimism in the air that even someone as inert as me was stirred- at least enough to not delete those blessed newsletters about stocks. One night I told my husband that I would forward them all to him and blindly invest wherever he told me too. My husband is even more financially lazy that I am (It's a wonder we manage to eat.) and to possibly wriggle out of the ordeal of reading about mutual funds and bonds, he gave me this whole bit about how I must be the only one so scrip- challenged, despite being an MBA and spending my waking hours in the business of managing money....
Sulkily, one morning I logged onto the online trading site in which I had opened an account more than a year ago. I clicked on “Markets”. A panel showed the changing prices of the day's highest traded stocks. Opinions were flying about a new auto stock on the block and the future of cement scrips. Like someone who's entered a rocking party and can't find a corner to get lost in, I stumbled out and into the Home Page. "Pick of the fortnight" said a headline. Yet another expert had written a column on trends in petro stocks. "Industry Research" took me into 5000 companies and their balance sheets.
Aaaargh….Can someone please tell me how the hell does one log in and buy the stuff?
Then I saw “Trading”. "Log in" it said, when I clicked. I punched in my id and password.
“Invalid Login id or Password. Click here for our 24 hour customer care centre.”
A lady in headphones beamed at me. She looked the type who writes down all IDs, passwords and PINs neatly in a diary. I stared balefully at her. I got the same error message two more times. I knew they would lock me out after 3 tries; so I looked at the badly torn paper in which my login id was printed. It was in CAPS; I glanced down and saw that my CAPS LOCK wasn’t blinking. I had been typing small letters.
If I had not realized this tiny detail at that moment, I would perhaps have been a stranger to the stock market for the rest of my life. If I had got locked out, I know I would have been too indifferent to get a new id and try again. But I was destined enter the trading ring and affect the swings in people’s fortunes.
Fourth time lucky, I arrived on a fresh page. “Welcome to online investing” it said.
Thank You…I said in an awed whisper. My eyes ran over the menu- Equity, Futures and Options, Commodity Trading, Mutual Funds, Portfolio. I was actually here…I was on the trading floor of the stock exchange where tough men make rude signs at each other to cut million dollar deals. Except of course I couldn’t see anyone and no one could see me. Apart from that detail, the fact remained that I was actually there! Live and reporting from the stock market- where corporate history is made and unmade by hot shot brokers and investors.
Ha! Now I would show them- I would buy an alarming number of scrips of a small obscure company making say, cling film or zippers or potassium permanganate and have everyone wondering who this mysterious trader is who is suddenly skewing market dynamics. I would use a combination of my analytical bent of mind and my sharply honed woman’s instinct to pick a few undiscovered gems and then…and then that flat where the sea breeze strokes the face may be mine sooner than later.
I sat up straight. Let’s see now….Perhaps it was time to open one of those newsletters after all. “Stocks on the Move” said a column. In this were listed the stock of a sugar company deep in a northern district notorious for its criminal activities. Maybe it belongs to some mafia henchman whom I may end up supporting by investing in his company… But baby you are in the stock market, I reminded myself. No sentiment, ethics, nationalism and any of that gooey stuff. Just cold, ruthless decisions with your eye on booking profit. Greed is good, were the immortal words of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. And greed it shall be… I told myself determinedly. Eyes glinting like Michael Douglas’, I jumped to the open trading window and commissioned a hundred dollars of my honest taxpayer’s money into the hands of the sugar mafia by clicking “Buy”.
The next recommendation was a software major whose stock price was way above my budget. (The plan was to invest low and reap big, remember?). The last was a southern company making raw material CPC for aluminium. “Buoyant global aluminium sector & rising aluminum smelter capacity is expected to push growth to over 4% in the period of 2005-08 as compared to 2% in the period of 2002-05.” Neat. While the rest of the herd is mindlessly aping one another and buying FMCG and Telecom, savvy me would get rich buy investing in Calcined Petro Coke stocks and then…time for that luxury cruise in the Agean Sea around Cyprus.
Uh-oh. What was that written below? “The company faces risk in the form of the changing dynamics of its principal raw material, GPC. Higher demand due to smelter expansion has lead to lower production of traditional GPC resulting in a gradual shift towards non-traditional GPC. However the company is gearing up to meet the dynamic GPC situation.”
I paused thoughtfully, considering this new information. I read the last line again. They were gearing up, weren’t they. And which business doesn’t face risks? They were a southern company and southerners were typically sincere and honest, so how bad can things get? Besides, who will read up more of this boring stuff and search for some other stock all over again? Also, I needed to log off and run an errand, but didn’t want to quit without beginning my bull run…
So with 20 shares of sugar and 30 of Calcined Petro Coke, I, Stock Market Duffer, announced my grand entry into the wild jungle of bulls and bears.
After that I was unstoppable. Market indices and EPS became part of my being. I had a finger in every pie-petroleum, telecom, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals…the very vitals of the Indian economy were sitting like golden geese in my portfolio. I paid rapt attention to the ramblings on business news channels. If I had bought cement stocks and the anchor expressed surprise at the sudden buying in that sector, I would smirk knowingly. My portfolio had hardly any entries in red. At one point, I showed my husband how I was making a 15% return on my investment within 3 months. I suspect he started imagining himself in the SUV he had been eyeing…
And then it happened in May 2006. Gravity registered its inevitable presence. The worst crash ever of the Indian stock market. The newspapers called it a bloodbath. My portfolio page was drenched in red. The small investors are the worst hit, they said. The finance minister cautioned retail investors from investing directly in equities as they lacked research. For some days I logged on frantically to see if the losses would diminish because the experts on CNBC kept saying that it was an aberration and the long term India story was still strong. But those red scars don’t seem to go away. I’ve stopped logging in now.
“I told you I was lousy at this kind of thing,” I tell my husband.
He nods and asks me to fill out the bank deposit form that is inside the middle drawer.
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