Rise of a Salesman and A Manager of Skaters: Two Indian stories

Two extraordinary stories of ordinary Indian villagers whose lives were transformed in the past twenty years:

Story 1:

“Twenty years ago, he was a salesman in Pallapatti village in Salem district, knocking at doors to sell sarees on 10 instalments. Later, he sold radios and tape recorders. Unable to make ends meet, he migrated to Perambalur, where he met AIADMK’s Varathur Arunachalam. This was his stroke of luck, his key to fame and fortune. Arunachalam introduced him to Raja, a small-time DMK politician. Both were ambitious and ready to take risks. It was Raja who told him to venture into real estate. With small investments on both sides, they grew together. Today Batcha’s real estate empire is worth more than Rs. 2,000 crore.”

Story 2:

“He discovered his inferiority at school, noticing that the Jaiswals and Agarwals and Guptas, the children of merchants and shopkeepers, bought 2-rupee ice creams at recess, while his mohalla friends bought the 50-paise kind. He realized that when guest speakers came to the school, the children of daily-wages people were rarely chosen to introduce them. He noticed that at the wedding of a big man in Bhiwapur, he had to wait until the “guests” had eaten. “You come afterward,” he remembered being scolded. He used to watch his classmates roar into the schoolyard on the backs of their parents’ motorcycles. He did not even have the two modes of transportation below motorcycles on the Indian staircase of affluence: the bicycle and shoes. He wore no footwear until ninth grade. “Whenever I saw other people wearing expensive shoes and socks and slippers, I used to get very angry, and I felt very bad,” he said. “Why am I not getting all these things? Why only I don’t have all these things? And at that time I decided that I will earn great money, and I will remove my poverty. I considered poverty as a disease.”

….

I began to see self-invention as a theme of India’s unfolding drama. Misal, the shoeless son of a porter, was the manager of an Indian roller-skating team, was going to Hong Kong, was teaching at six colleges and was building a house.”

The first story is depressingly familiar: in a corrupt society like India, those with access to scum like A Raja (who in turn thrive because of their access to the likes of Kanimozhi or Karunanidhi) are more likely to make it big – you might be a humble saree-salesman in a remote hamlet in India, but with evil on your side, there’s nothing to hold you back – I am sure Sadiq Batcha will only consolidate his empire and one day, take the natural leap from crime/business to politics, and one day be a lawmaker.

The second story fills me with hope: it shows that if you continue to back yourselves and tap the opportunities that a liberalizing India has begun to present, you might rise. You won’t be a business tycoon like Sadiq Batcha, for sure, nor enter lucrative businesses like being a people’s representative, but you could still live a life of dignity and ambition. And own the first motor vehicle in the history of your family.

“On his 21st birthday, in September 2002, he [Misal, the protagonist of the second story] bought a motorcycle. It was the first motorized vehicle owned in the history of his family. He drove it from the showroom to his home and took his mother for a spin around the village. “She didn’t say anything,” he recalled. “She just cried. And she said, ‘Take care of the bike.’ ”