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Lessons from Gandhi land

Last Updated 22 September 2017, 18:54 IST

My early professional years in a bank were at a small town in Gujarat. I was fresh out of college from Bangalore, but the friendly Gujaratis put me at ease almost immediately. My conversational link was Hindi. While the Gujaratis were quite comfortable when they spoke in their own language, their Hindi, however, was broken and mixed generously with Gujarati. As a young, fledgling 20-something, I cut my teeth on finance, banking, thrift, and business from these enterprising and genial people.

My learning curve started here. For over five years, I had an intriguing and exciting time. Barely after a year in the bank, I had this strange and surprising offer from a customer, a wholesale rice trader. “Come, join my firm as a manager,” he said. He was ready to compensate me more than what I was earning at the time. Over the years, I learnt that Gujaratis have an uncanny knack of spotting the right people to man key areas. This is one of the reasons they are more successful in business or as entrepreneurs.

During my regular walks with my colleague Parekhbhai, I found him frequently enquiring at the local grocery store. I was curious — what was he enquiring about every day? When I asked him one day, pat came the reply: he was monitoring the price of groundnut oil! When it reached the expected lowest value, he said, he would order a quantity adequate for consumption for several months. Yes, this was a great lesson for me in how one must use thrift, and stretch the value of money and increase savings.

The Gujaratis had a hierarchy for saving money and for investment. It went something like this: first, one has to have enough liquidity and, hence, one must always keep some money in a savings account. The rest of the investments would be in fixed deposits, gold, shares, mutual funds and, finally, land and buildings, in that order. It is no surprise then that even in the 1980s, when equities were relatively uncommon, every other Gujarati had some investment in the stock market.

That they were calculative and shrewd was proved by their actions. Interest on working capital overdraft accounts were charged on daily products. The bank absolutely could not afford to make mistakes as the customers invariably maintained daily products in parallel! Our customer Desai bhai of Desai Brothers, a retail firm, would rush in at the very last minute before close of cash hours on a Saturday to deposit the maximum possible cash into the overdraft account so that the product for two days — Saturday and Sunday — was minimised!

Indeed, my stint in Gujarat was the clichéd paradigm shift in my maturity, wisdom and thought process. I came out stronger and ready to face the world, thanks to the land and the people of arguably the greatest Indian — Mahatma Gandhi.

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(Published 22 September 2017, 18:54 IST)

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