‘Shut up. And work.’
Pinto hired an engineer and contracted with a local manufacturing company. It took around ten lakh rupees and five months to assemble a commercially viable FoodMaster. If this machine was produced in mass, it’d cost somewhere around a lakh a machine to make, so the selling price could be somewhere around two lakh.
The phone rang. It was Salil, a close friend from Lucknow, who was visiting Pune. ‘Let’s have dinner together at my place,’ Pinto offered. ‘Lavanya’s away. I’ll cook.’
‘That’ll be fun. Get some scotch.’
Salil arrived in the evening. After some chitchat Pinto asked, ‘Would you like to have samosas with your scotch?’
‘Yes, that’d work.’
The samosas came through Goodsnet. Salil was impressed.
‘While we are drinking, let’s decide on the menu too.’ Pinto suggested.
Salil was taken aback. ‘What? Are you going to order from a restaurant? I thought you’d give me a home-cooked dinner.’
‘No, it’s not from a restaurant.’ Pinto described the FoodMaster to Salil.
‘I am double impressed!’ said his friend. ‘Okay, so I’ll have malai kofta, daal fry, pulao, stuffed naan and gulab jamun.’
Pinto entered the information into the FoodMaster. In two hours, the full meal was delivered in the dining room, and they sat down to eat. ‘How did you like the food?’ Pinto asked when they were finished.
Salil was a satirical person. ‘I liked the food,’ he said. And I think your invention is one of the greatest machines I’ve seen. But I didn’t like the way you served the food to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have served it tastefully in serving dishes with nice serving spoons. You just served it from the vessels it was cooked in. I felt like an unimportant guest.’
‘They are chambers… not vessels.’
‘Whatever.’
Pinto downplayed it, ‘That’s easy. I could have transferred the food to nice serving dishes. Today, Lavanya has gone to see Harsha, otherwise she’d have definitely done that.’
‘That’s not the point. You need to do something special which is on par with the stature of Swachalan,’ pointed out Salil.
‘I don’t have an aesthetic sense. When I was single, my house was a complete mess. In fact, I feel clutter adds warmth to a home. I don’t think I can do much here.’
‘I’ll give you an idea. Have you seen those “lazy Susans” in some restaurants?’
‘Oh yes, the circular platforms on the table that guests can rotate to choose the dish they want a helping of.’
‘You got it. Another idea, I once visited Gwalior Fort, and saw how our old royalty lived in their day. The guide showed me a toy train which connected the kitchen to the vast dining table. The cook filled the compartments with various dishes and sent it on the moving train to the table. Once it reached there, the guests could open the lid of any compartment. The moment the lid was opened, the train would stop. The guest could serve himself to that particular dish, put the lid back on, and train moved off around the entire table.’
‘If you think it’s that important I can connect a train with Foodmaster directly. That should work.’
***
Salil left, and Imran arrived, looking restless. ‘We need to start mass production soon. We haven’t released a product for a while.’
Lavanya had arrived by then. Pinto talked to them about the idea of the ‘food train’ that Salil had shared with him. Imran liked it, ‘Yes, we can sell it as an optional feature… and call it Royal Dining.’
‘You can decide that, since it’s you who runs the business.’
‘You know, Pinto, in future, people will sell Foodmasterreadable recipes just like iTunes. I’ll create an online market place for eRecipes.’
‘Marvellous, so they don’t need to feed in anything, just copy recipes to the computer directly.’
‘Exactly,’ said Imran. ‘Later, we should also add a beverage-dispenser to the machine.’
‘That depends on how the business goes,’ said Pinto. ‘You can always add features like auto-ordering so that Swachalan automatically orders an item when it drops to the 25 percent mark.’
Lavanya jumped into the discussion, ‘One thing troubles me. If everything is automated and you don’t have to do any work, how much would you need to eat then?’
Both of them burst out laughing at the innocent way Lavanya said it.
Imran suggested they ‘pre-launch’ in a week. He knew that it’d take another six months for him to produce it commercially but press coverage was really important. He also suggested that the house be kept open to visitors for two hours before the launch. Lavanya was upset about her house being turned into a tourist destination. But she didn’t have a choice, so she got her money’s worth out of it by insisting that Imran charge five hundred rupees as entry fee. The day before the pre-launch, Pinto prepared a speech for the press conference.
Next day the programme was well-attended, thanks to Imran who had a shrewd sense of advertising. Many builders around the city came to visit, and there was a long queue despite the pricey tickets. After the tour came the press conference. Pinto clicked on the notepad from his mobile app to be delivered to his living room and just then, the power went off.
Pinto sounded gobsmacked in the gloom, ‘Why is the power backup not working?’
Shyam, his neighbour, came to tell Pinto: ‘I’m really sorry. I’m getting my boundary wall fixed. While digging, those idiots damaged the cable. They are fixing it; should be done in ten minutes. Sorry for the inconvenience.’
The biggest problem was that only Swachalan knew where Pinto’s notepad was. It was a big embarrassment for Pinto. Somehow, he managed to go through the motions of a press conference. Imran congratulated Pinto, ‘You did great.’ Pinto smiled, ‘Never take things for granted. I didn’t think to have the location of the item also available through mobile app, so at least I could take things out myself in case nothing worked.’
‘All’s well that ends well, my friend,’ Imran tried to lift Pinto’s spirits.
The power cut stayed on Pinto’s mind. ‘I should have thought about it. A similar incident happened to me when I was in the US. You never plan for such things there. My car was in the garage and I was not able to open the door as there was a sudden power failure.’
‘Could you not open it manually?’
‘Yes, I could, but I never learnt to do that. Now I know, it’s damn easy. The outage lasted only for some ten minutes, but oh boy, it felt like an era passed before I was able to get into the car and drive to an important client meeting I had to attend.’
‘Let’s introduce a “lazy mode” so that critical operations of Swachalan can still run on local power backup for a few minutes,’ Imran suggested.
‘Absolutely correct,’ Pinto nodded.
A lot of builders approached Imran. All the bigger ones wanted to buy exclusive rights to Swachalan so that they could provide end-to-end home automation to their clients. Imran offered Swachalan for thirty lakh rupees, which included all the appliances, applications, hardware and robotic arms. He invested heavily in advertisements which eloquently urged people who could spend money on luxury, to think of luxury homes, since that was where they spent most of their day. The demand for this unique machine kept increasing exponentially. But then something unexpected happened which changed the direction of Pinto’s work.
TWENTY-THREE
A
s Imran was not able to fulfil the pending orders of Swachalan through his small factory, he decided to go for financing in a big way to set up a state-of-the-art factory to make several Swachalan, FoodMaster and Royal Dining units at a time. One of the builders, Deepak, agreed to finance the majority of the project. At the same time, Deepak imposed a condition: Imran would have to sell all of his products to him on an exclusive basis for Deepak’s real estate projects for the first two years.
Deepak wanted
to launch multiple luxury construction projects across India with full automation as a unique selling point based on the indigenous technology. He’d create a competitive advantage. Nobody in the country offered the luxury apartment and bungalow automation features which even came close to matching his own. Other builders could import some of the technology but that’d be very expensive and again, nothing close to what Imran and Deepak had to offer feature-wise.
Imran signed the agreement with Deepak. He launched his first luxury bungalow project with a teaser tagline: ‘Maids not allowed!’ He didn’t mean that literally. The ads were meant to really catch everyone’s attention and get people talking about the new technology that could reduce dependency on household help.
In one ad, a man dressed in his bathrobe, and enjoying his newspaper, prepares his entire breakfast at the touch of a button. The man doesn’t even look up from his reading as his breakfast is served to him steaming hot through a delivery station by his master bedroom. In the background, maids and cooks are shown sitting by idly, looking bored and unhappy. The man appears to experience the height of contentment. The tagline reads: ‘Every king should run his kingdom with a button!’ Then, a bejewelled crown is shown delivered by the same station. His eyes still on the newspaper, the man reaches for the crown and puts it on his head.
Unfortunately, the campaign was responded to negatively. Newspapers and TV channels criticized the technology as being against poor people. They speculated Swachalan would snatch away employment from poor women who were struggling to bring home a second income.
It created an even bigger storm when a pre-recorded hallway chat with Lavanya was aired on TV where she was shown bragging: ‘My husband is trying to change the lives of the middle class and lower middle class. Labour has really exploited them through their unprofessional attitude towards work. I’m planning to remove most of the maids from my house. So many maid agencies have cheated me in the past. Without maids, and with my husband’s new technology, not only can I keep my house clean but also maintain better hygiene.’
It seemed that Pinto had made some indirect enemies in the past. The public and media both had very short-lived memories. Both of them had forgotten how Pinto had created a great healthcare system for the poor through Double H. People began to say that scientists were solving problems only of the rich, and that poor people didn’t have any place in their vision.
Newspapers went beyond that and dug out some of Pinto’s childhood friends, quoting them as saying Pinto’s upbringing ‘was too elitist’. They said, even as a child he’d never touch a poor child wearing dirty clothes, would play only with rich kids, and never tolerate beggars. Similar, baseless, made-up charges against Pinto were brought up from people who started coming forward to seek cheap publicity.
The public was always interested in celebrities’ personal lives, it added some spice to their day-to-day life. One day, Pinto woke up to find a mob of around a hundred people, mostly women, in front of his house, shouting slogans against him. They were maids from a nearby slum area.
Lavanya was frightened and asked Pinto to call the police. ‘Meanwhile, let’s stay inside,’ she whispered. But Pinto was not one to lose heart easily. He showed himself to the unruly crowd and asked, ‘Who is your leader? Why are you here?’ One woman, Laxmi, came forward saying, ‘I belong to the Garib Morcha political party. I have brought them here because I look after their welfare.’
Pinto asked further, ‘What is the problem?’
She said angrily, ‘You invent machines which will take away our jobs. You need to promise them you’ll stop such projects and won’t start on any others. Otherwise, we’ll give sit in dharna here and go on a hunger-trike.’
‘Which technology are you talking about?’ asked Pinto.
Laxmi was a small-time uneducated leader, had no idea what technology was, so she cleverly shouted, ‘Why should I tell you? Do you not read the newspapers?’
Pinto silently ordered tea and samosas for everyone from a nearby shop through his Goodsnet system. The crowd relaxed a bit.
Pinto continued talking while they ate, ‘Laxmi, do you have a problem with machines as a whole, or with my automation project in particular?’
Laxmi, who had come there to only to highlight her leadership, had no clue what automation was. She had only heard that machines generally replace labour. So she said in a much calmer tone, ‘We respect you, sir, you are a big scientist. We don’t want you to stop working on automation but please don’t build machines.’
Even in this tense atmosphere, Pinto hardly could stop his laughter.
He turned to another lady and asked in an undertone whether she knew why she was there.
‘Oh no, sa’ab, we are uneducated people. Laxmi said we’ll receive fifty rupees each if we stand in front of your house for two hours and shout a bit.’
Pinto hid a grin and asked Laxmi, ‘Do you know anything about the machine I used for Double H which prescribes treatment for poor people? It’s almost free for anyone who joins up with Double H.’ Almost the whole crowd said they had used that machine and couldn’t even think how they could afford any other treatment. They didn’t know that Double H relied on machines. When they realized Pinto’s machines were harmless, they started accusing Laxmi of deluding them.
By now the women had understood that machines were not necessarily bad things since they were useful in taking blood pressure and temperature as well. The crowd disbursed after some time with a favourable outlook. In fact, some people came to touch Pinto’s feet before leaving and told stories with tearful eyes about how the lives of their little and loved ones were saved by Pinto’s Double H health machine. Then they apologized in their own way that they had made a big mistake by showing disrespect to a person who cared about them so much.
Pinto recorded this conversation using a pen camera. While news channels started flashing the news that the Garib Morcha party had demonstrated in front of Pinto’s house, he called a couple of TV channels and told them he had something to say. When he showed them the recording, they realized the truth behind the fake demonstration.
Now, there was a fight between journalists over who could use Pinto’s tape so they could telecast it on their channel first as breaking news. Most of the channels telecasted the news as ‘Our exclusive tape—The truth about Garib Morcha Dharna.’
The entire happening left Pinto sad. The media, he strongly felt, were not acting responsibly. They were not reporting for the good of the public. In the beginning of the shameful episode, they had attempted to malign him, with no responsible investigation. Now, the same folks were competing with each other to get the tape from him, so they could appear to have uncovered a twist in the story. It was all about TRP, nothing else.
Whatever the other consequences, the political party behind it was exposed. Pinto came out clean. A new group of his childhood friends emerged who claimed all the allegations against Pinto were baseless. According to them, he had been a kind-hearted person from his childhood. Once, he gave his lunch to a hungry destitute, an incident which even Pinto couldn’t remember. Another person claimed Pinto did a lot of work for the poor. When asked what work, he was not able to name a single act of charity.
TWENTY-FOUR
P
into’s interaction with the mob gave rise to many questions in his mind. Why were a country’s people left so ignorant of their real needs? Why were people so poor? And why were their cunning leaders allowed to benefit from those so-called shortcomings? And why were people so timid that they didn’t put up a fight against those leaders who had been fooling them for three-quarters of a century? Since the time his name was dragged into the Garib Morcha episode, he began reading newspapers with an entirely new perspective.
A certain report drew his particular attention one morning. In Pune, the police had raided a dhaba which was famous for its tandoori chicken. It had been said that the dhaba also served liquor but without a licence.
Police arrested all the cust
omers present and brought them to the police station. The superintendent of the police issued a statement to the effect that people who were not found drunk would be released after the breathalyzer test.
Pinto showed the news to Lavanya and said, ‘We have worked on consumer products for some time. Let’s focus on social issues now.’
Lavanya didn’t want to deal with the police. ‘How would you help in such cases? When people go to those shady unlicensed dens, they should be ready to face the consequences.’
Pinto didn’t go with Lavanya’s argument. ‘There might have been 60 per cent of the people there who were drinking illegally, but what about the others who came just to enjoy some tandoori chicken? Couldn’t police have tested them for alcohol at the spot and arrested only the owner and those whose alcohol level was high—instead of subjecting the rest to the humiliation of being herded off to a thana?’
Lavanya interrupted, ‘It’s called moral policing. In a country like India it’s really important. You are not a girl, otherwise you’d have realized the value of it.’
Pinto was not happy with the argument, ‘Moral policing features in our jargon so commonly these days, that it has become a dirty phrase for government interference where it is not required—and sometimes leads to abuse of privileges. It has nothing to do with cleansing society, as they claim.
‘In the instance of the dhaba arrests,’ he said, coming down to facts, ‘it may be related to the dhaba owner’s failure to give the weekly bribe to the police. It may also be that the police wanted to make an easy focus on soft targets to brandish their power, because they don’t have the courage to fight with real criminals.’
Lavanya came to their defence with a lame argument, ‘They released those who were not drunk.’
‘But only after arresting them. Think about these simple people, who will carry the stigma for life, in those little villages they belong to, for being arrested in public.’
Pinto Has An Idea Page 20