That day I got down to washing the dishes myself because no one else wanted to do it. I still recall the runaway boys. They stood at the entrance of the hotel, a bundle in hand, looking anxious, a little pathetic, shivering in the cold. The bundles contained just a spare shirt and a pair of shorts. ‘Is there any job?’ they would ask. I was touched by the aspect of these kids who came looking for jobs. Many enterprising ones set up their own Udupi hotels years later; careers of some ended tragically.
I dabbled in other businesses as well. The farm was of course the focus of my activities. I only forayed into others when an opportunity came my way. V. P. Singh was the finance minister and the prime minister was Rajiv Gandhi. They initiated changes in the way the monetary market and stock exchanges worked. A friend who had lived in the US and returned to India wrote to me about a business prospect in stocks and shares. He said the Bangalore Stock Exchange had been set up. He was a member of the stock exchange and his company was looking for somebody to represent them in Hassan. He suggested that I operate the representative office at my existing premises. Those were the early days of stock market boom. My friend said, ‘Why don’t you establish a stock-brokerage firm in Hassan? You are well known there. You have office premises and require no additional investment. You would only need an officer to engage in day-to-day work.’ The stock exchange in Bengaluru was new and stockbroking was fast becoming a business for educated people.
This particular friend, Satya Prakash, had an MBA from the US. He had set-up his own brokerage firm in Bengaluru and had taken the initiative to get me interested. I was drawn to the idea. It looked like a good learning curve. I therefore set up Hassan Investments and ran it for two years. People came and handed over their shares to be sold. I sold them for customers and I bought other ones for them. In order to understand the nuances of the business, I organized a seminar in Hassan and invited the president of the Mumbai Stock Exchange and the president of the Bangalore Stock Exchange to address it. The seminar was a success: participant registration was good and, newspapers reported on it. I did not however want to be a broker, so suddenly one day I decided to wind-up the stock-brokerage firm, having worn the stock-broker’s hat for a short while!
Agricultural Consultancy
The silkworm business had become profitable, bringing in substantial financial gains. Its success had brought me into the limelight, making me into a celebrated farmer; it felt good to be recognized. I had also won the Rolex Award for Enterprise. People knew me already because of my other businesses. I now figured in the local newspaper and radio features mentioned my work. I had begun to write too, and my articles appeared in Kannada magazines and those published by the agriculture department. Journalists interviewed me.
I wanted to remain on the farm for a couple of years longer and ensure it was fully stable. My experience in farming and what I had seen in the US taught me both—how to and how not to farm. I also had to think of the future. As farming was something close to my heart, I decided I would do something in agriculture. Those were early days for micro-irrigation, water management, and horticulture management. I therefore teamed up with a friend of mine to explore these futuristic specialities. I had seen dealers in Hassan or Bengaluru selling hardware for managing water or for micro-irrigation, but these devices never produced a permanent solution. Some shopkeepers gave advice but there was no concept of end-to-end solutions for horticulture or agriculture. Water resource management and consultation for agriculture had not come to the fore. I had office premises, a computer, telephones, fax machines, i.e., the entire infrastructure required to set up a consultancy and undertake turnkey horticulture and agriculture projects. I thought end-to-end consultancy would be one stream of revenue; selling equipment would be another. I would therefore get into consultancy, design, execution, sales, and installation of micro-irrigation projects. Our solutions would integrate river water, groundwater, and rainwater, and deliver irrigation through effective systems. They would also help conserve water, soil, and electricity. It was a new field. Being a well-known farmer, I could count on other farmers coming to me for advice. At the time, there was a new company called Jain Irrigation, the first company to produce complete micro-irrigation systems.
Bhawar Lal Jain was an inspiring figure. He had started Jain Irrigation in a small building in Jalgaon and had moved on to build a Rs 100-crore business. He was a pioneer in agriculture related businesses. His most notable contributions were the manufacture of papain, an extract of the papaya fruit used in the pharmaceutical industry and as a meat tenderizer, and micro-irrigation systems. I had read about him and admired him. Just as I had done with the Enfield dealership, I went straight to Jalgaon. I met Bhawar Lal Jain and the company officials, and told them about my background. I asked them to give me the entire sales, distribution, and installation of equipment. I spent time with Mr Jain’s children and tried to understand how he had built his empire from scratch. I said I would set up a team comprising agriculturists and horticulture graduates, technicians, engineers, and mechanics. It seemed a good idea to set up the business in Hassan as well as in Bengaluru. My farm, complete with dairy, sericulture farm, and coconut farm, would be fully functional in ten years. My second daughter would be growing-up and I would be able to move to Bengaluru in two years. I, therefore, needed to set-up the business in Bengaluru too, in order to extend service to Karnataka as a whole.
Accompanying me to Jalgaon was Harsha Gaonkar, an old friend of mine from Sainik School, Bijapur, and a retired air force officer. Harsha was already into farming in Bengaluru. I suggested that he partner me in the new venture. I offered him partnership too in my motorcycle business as well as in the irrigation business to increase his interest. He agreed and we set up the agriculture consultancy company. We hired 45–50 technical and non-technical people in Hassan and Bengaluru. They were mostly graduates from agriculture universities or civil engineers. Based on the human resource profile, we were in a position to take up landscape irrigation, horticultural advice, and end-to-end water management. We called the business Espak Agro.
I sold off the stockbroking business and the hotel business, and I sold the motorcycle dealership to my manager who had come to me as a small boy looking for apprenticeship. I had groomed him and he steadily grew. I withdrew from the other businesses because I needed to concentrate on my new one. In Hassan, for about two years, I loaded all the agricultural equipment that I set out to market in the car boot and hit the road. While on these business development forays, I combined the roles of MD, consultant, and manager of the company. I knew every aspect of the business and only booked orders from farmers. My manager would follow up and execute the orders. Every morning, I got into the car and travelled from farm to farm and from one coffee plantation to another. I did this every single day for two years, I found it to be the most difficult job in the world, the most challenging, and also the most rewarding. Each sale I made was an emotionally and financially rewarding event. Each time I missed an opportunity was a wake-up call causing me to hit the road once more with greater determination and aggression. I was often reminded of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. It depicts the tragedy of modern-day America where a salesman wakes up each day to a job he does not like but must bring in sales if he has to survive competition. It ends in tragedy. I was also keenly aware of the parallel with Albert Camus’s Myth of the Sisyphus. Camus tells the story of a man, Sisyphus, whose task is to roll a stone up to the top of a hill. He does not know why he has to do it, but does it every day of his life. That is god’s punishment. When the stone reaches the top, it rolls down and Sisyphus has to begin all over again. It is futile, meaningless labour. The gods thought the best way to punish recalcitrant humans is to make them perform meaningless labour. Most jobs in large cities have become very much like the toil of Sisyphus. People do not love what they do, but do it nonetheless for the money it brings. The tragedy today, as was the case with Sisyphus, is that workers have no idea of the value they bring in. I
realized how tough the job of a salesperson is, and also how important it is to get the salesperson involved with your vision and let him/her know what the true, not merely monetary, value of his labour is.
The knowledge that the product s/he sells to the farmer would help save money, increase yield, save energy, and benefit the farming community at large, brings a sense of purpose, and joy, to the work s/he does. This was what motivated me on the road. Going to every farm and telling the farmers how to save water had become a religion with me. I also shared many other insights I had gained as a farmer myself. I told them not to lose topsoil, not to destroy it by the use of chemical manure and chemical fertilizers. The farmers became great friends of mine; it proved a great life and learning experience for me.
4
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
—Ronald Reagan
Dabbling in Politics
I
began to get into the heart of agriculture-related businesses. Farming brought me close to people: farmers and farm workers, dairymen, donkey traders, silkworm growers, merchants, agricultural scientists and technicians, local and state-level bureaucrats, journalists, and the common man. In the best sense of the term, I was exposed to life in its rawest dimensions. And I witnessed, without blinkers, dire poverty, bureaucratic cynicism and indifference, corruption and apathy, and high levels of toil and struggle among the common people. It bothered me that this was rampant and that it often made the life of the common Indian difficult and miserable.
The system that functioned, if it did, was driven by the vagaries of political and bureaucratic decisions. It was arbitrary and self-seeking. We had slipped and fallen into a morass from which it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves. The morass was expansive, and it mattered little whether we faced the tentacles of this vast system in towns such as Hassan, or in villages, or in the larger urban conurbations. Most roads were indeed no-roads. Sanitation and hygiene were entirely absent from the diction and dictionary of villagers and small town dwellers. It was no better in the so-called district headquarters, commanding greater monetary and political resources.
It was a time when the government was only just beginning to wake up from its slumber, promising free power to villages. There was however insufficient electricity to distribute freely. While on one hand, there were the government, politicians, middlemen, bureaucracy, and the power brokers, on the other were the people: the consumers of government services, the payers of taxes, the large, middle and lower-middle income earners, the farmers, and landless labourers, all victims of the rot in the system. I set out to look at our own role here, conscious that we too were to blame. The manner in which many of us interacted and colluded with the system ensured that it continued to function in its indifferent, corrupt fashion. What were any of us doing to resolve the problems? What indeed was I doing to set matters right, I asked myself.
The system has its secondary-level charges: a euphemism for bribes. There is grease money, speed money, and as incidental charges you even get receipts for speed money from service providers: from lawyers and chartered accountants. You pay under the table if you want certificates issued by an authority. You pay a tip if you expect the electricity department, the telephone department, or the civic authorities to respond quickly to your problem or need and provide basic service, which is really what they are expected to do in the normal course. If you do not pay, your work does not get done. The equation of the bribe to the service provided is still a happy one; it can be considered to be a service charge. There is however a mathematical inequality entailed in the relation between bribe and work. Often bribes are paid but the work does not get done and there is no one to whom to appeal.
I was deeply troubled by all this. I realized that as I had myself, through sheer frustration, paid an occasional small bribe , consoling myself that it was merely a tip, I was both the perpetrator and the victim. Often, alone in my field, in a state of anxious agitation, I would think of the first sentence from Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield: ‘I was ever of the opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single and talked of population.’ I told myself, at such times, that doing one’s job well was far better for society than mere cynicism and criticism.
I was in this deeply disturbed state of mind, when one day I got a call from someone in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asking me to join the party. The BJP was then making an attempt to establish itself as an alternative to Congress. The caller said, ‘You are one of the most celebrated farmers in Hassan. Join the BJP and become the president of the party there.’ The BJP barely existed in Karnataka, the state’s political landscape being dominated by the old guard of the Congress, and Deve Gowda and Ramakrishna Hegde of the Janata Dal. The BJP was keen to make an inroad and field new faces. They thought I might be a suitable candidate to lead the party in Hassan.
I was on the horns of a dilemma: should I or should I not? I remembered the saying: ‘There are only two tragedies in life: to have and to have not,’ as Hemingway would have put it, and I was caught in this dichotomy. I wanted to play a part in public life but abhorred the idea of becoming a politician. On the other hand, it often struck me that while I was on the farm it was easy to spend two to three hours a day working for the party. I was however always consumed by the fear that rather than bring about change, it might be me, who became the subject of change and end up like any other politician. Many people from the party and well-meaning insiders from the local RSS unit called on me and said: ‘What is the point of remaining outside and complaining, Captain? If you are so concerned you must take the plunge and clean up the rot!’
I spent many sleepless nights. Each time I looked at myself as a politician I hated the idea. The emotion changed its polarity if I looked at myself as a politician who could bring about positive change, I disliked the idea of my becoming a political agent of change. Prof. Thiru Narayan, teaching of marketing at IIM, Bengaluru, was one friend with whom I had long discussions on the issue. He said, ‘You should give it a try if you feel so strongly about it.’ I also thought it would amount to cowardice on my part not to take up the challenge. I must do my bit to improve the state of affairs.
My farm is in Gandsi Hobli, a legislative assembly constituency of Karnataka in Hassan district. I became the district president of the BJP and was appointed as a member of the national council and state executive council. I was determined that I would familiarize myself with the constituency even as I lived and worked on the farm. In that way I would not have to take my eyes off the farm, which remained my first love. I had also made it clear that I would accept party membership and the leadership responsibilities only if I was allowed to do things my way. I was uneasy about the reported links between the BJP and the RSS. I was apprehensive too about the party’s communal overtones. This truly bothered me. I am not a believer. I do not, as a rule, go to temples. The party’s association with the RSS might require me to take part in morning rituals or to profess a religious or RSS ideology. I wanted to have nothing to do with that. I have always cherished the idea of a pluralistic society that accommodates and nurtures a diversity of religions, belief systems, cultures, and traditions. The India of the dreams of Tagore, Gandhi, and Nehru was an India that was imbued with these characteristics. I was in favour of a multi-party system and it was necessary that an alternative be found to the decadent Congress. I nonetheless had my reservations and expressed them in clear and unambiguous terms right at the outset. The BJP assured me that the party was a separate and independent entity, and that there would be no interference in my functioning. I therefore joined the party at a time when it still had no clear form. It was led in Karnataka by a skeletal team comprising leaders like B.B. Shivappa, B.S. Yeddyurappa, and Ananth Kumar.
It was decided that Gandsi would be my constituency. I would visit all
its 400 villages and study how they were faring. In this I was in my humble way emulating Gandhi. Gandhi had returned from South Africa and travelled the entire country by train before launching the freedom struggle. My father used to read to me episodes from the lives of great people. Gandhi’s national expedition was one of them. I would do the same. I would go from village to village, house to house, meet people, and understand their problems at first hand. How then would I go about it? There was no such thing called BJP in my constituency so how would I actually, physically, go about visiting the villages? You couldn’t simply enter any village and say that you are a BJP member and you have come to deliver them from their problems! No one would take you seriously if you did that. Probably that is why somebody said, ‘A politician without a party is like a snail without a shell’. Then it suddenly struck me that I had to mobilize people to accompany me to visit the villages rather than going there on my own.
Who would accompany me? On any normal working day, people are busy at work, women staying home are busy cooking meals, and the children are away to school. The only people left in the village are the old people, the sick, the jobless, the idle rich and their hangers-on, and the lumpen. There is also the smooth-talking village tout who interfaces with the gullible villagers and the government. They are those who promise but who either have no intentions of fulfilling their promises or are unable to do so. The village politicians and their hangers-on are often also the local goons and the lumpen. It is they who eventually end up in the political process almost as a last choice. Of the nearly 550 members of the Parliament, the majority come from rural small towns and villages. It is this group which is politically active and engaged. Indifference keeps the educated out of the reckoning. There is an inevitability to the process: the best among them will rise to the top.
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