TALES FROM THE ROAD 12:
IN MORTAL DANGER
I visited India for a ten day business trip back in 1996. It
was my first experience of the Indian market, and combined visits to a number
of key customers, helping our distributors with an exhibition, a small amount
of sightseeing, and the obligatory indescribably horrible tummy bug!
The journey started with a flight into Bombay that arrived
in the early hours in November temperatures in the late ‘20s, and involved a
scrum for a cab that would take me around the corner to the Connaught Hotel. I
spent the next three days being guided around the city by Shanti Mansabdar, who
ensured that I enjoyed just about every travel experience short of climbing
onto a bus through the window on a busy roundabout! It was fun, if not as
productive as I had hoped.
And so to New Delhi, where I was met at the airport by Sonny
Roy and taken straight to the Park Hotel near to the Defense Colony where he
and his family lived. As our distributors in Delhi they had taken stand space
at an exhibition which can best be described as an outdoor Ideal Home
exhibition, where they showed off their range of metal furniture alongside
images of our fantastic woodworking machinery, and provided a curtained-off
area for ‘Mr. John’ to meet and greet customers and talk to them about why they
should place orders with us.
It was our first time exhibiting in India and I was there
for a full six days, during which time the family Roy had arranged a good
number of meetings with potential customers.
We were adjacent to the British Pavilion where British companies who
actually knew what they were doing had taken exhibition space. But actually it
was far more pleasant being in the great outdoors and watching the throngs of
visitors passing by, with all the colour and bustle that you would expect of an
exhibition in a busy capital city.
The Roys had two sons, the appropriately named Kubla and
Chotu who occupied a position at entirely the other end of the temper scale,
and who remains to this day the coolest person I have ever met in all of my
travels. Directly opposite our stand and adjacent to one of the main
thoroughfares was a stand manned by a group of religious fundamentalists who
had come down from the hills around Delhi for their annual recruitment drive.
Every day they played their music and videos and drew huge
crowds to listen to their words of wisdom, but also every day the volume got
louder and louder, to the point where Kubla went across to ask them politely to
keep the music at a reasonable volume so that it didn’t disturb exhibitors on nearby
stands. That didn’t work too well, and resulted in them doing the opposite to
what he had asked. Kubla then spent the best part of the day with steam visibly
coming out of his ears, and getting slowly more wound up. We left the site at
about 10pm when he again approached them politely to request that they would
turn down the volume for the days that followed.
Well they didn’t do that either, and their noise became
louder and louder and more intrusive until Kubla started to really lose it, and
stormed across to threaten that if they persisted in playing their music at
excessive volume, he would have no option but to destroy their equipment! And
guess what? It got worse again, and Kubla finally cracked and carried out his
threat, flinging their one video recorder, the source of their deafening
output, onto the ground.
Within seconds, a group of 40 or 50 rather determined
looking and extremely loud, bearded men in white surrounded our stand
threatening among other heinous things to burn down our stand! Realising the
clear and present danger, Chotu, who had been coolly encouraging customers to
buy his range of metal furniture amid the din, decided to step in and mediate
before his brother became the victim of a lynching. And who knows what would
have happened to Johnny English?
A calm descended within seconds as Chotu offered to go and
look at the equipment with a view to repairing it, and the throng followed him
across the thoroughfare as disciples would follow their Messiah. He spent about
15 minutes there and returned with the damaged video recorder while Kubla was
banished by his father to the safety of the Defense Colony. An hour later, Chotu returned their equipment
to them repaired and fully functional, and the rumpus resumed for the final few
days of the exhibition.
It was an odd experience because in the whole of the time
that our stand was in mortal danger, I felt quite calm. It was like watching a
film with Chotu in the lead role as peacemaker and general good guy. It was
truly fascinating to watch the transformation of this unruly mob into a
respectful, appreciative, and much calmer group of co-exhibitors. I still
reckon to this day that he must have had a spare video recorder hidden somewhere
in the curtained-off area in anticipation. And Sonny Roy apologised to ‘Mr.
John’ for his other son’s fiery temperament! A fabulous family.
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