I Dn Calcutta Mail - 1988

That’s the train I had booked myself into and I had booked First Class since I had a lot of luggage and I was entitled to it when compared to a Gitanjali Express 2nd AC!! The farewell was super and then on the final day I left Mumbai for good. Thankfully there was no body to see me off at the Station and I had a quiet exit from Victoria Terminus!!

Mumbai was not off my mind atleast for some time and the train journey was long and time consuming. I had boarded the train on an evening Day1 to reach Howrah on the morning of Day 3.

It was time to reflect and remember. After K Ravishankar left Mumbai office it was getting different. Sanjiv Sarin had taken over and I thought we got along well. A new Area Sales Manager joined in Worli office and I reckon the team was being enhanced. Nobody touched my office and I was quite happy with myself and my separate team.
The hierarchy in Mumbai office was also being enhanced and by the time I was counting my days in Mumbai they had inducted Rajeev Lal who was in charge of total sales. I had handed over to one Kumar who later on left and started his own office automation company (Jayanti Bus Machines).

As usual when hierarchy increases things become formal and Mumbai was no different. Sanjiv's secretary (I am not recollecting her name) was made in charge of hounding people on reports and stuff. Nariman Point was regular but sometimes logistics would create issues but I given the person I was, did not give a damn to her bossing around. Sashi an ASM in Worli used to get seriously affected by her antics!! There were newer people joining every day and later on when I communicated with Eunice and Rahil and Siddika and Jennifer and Mohan and Apoorva and so many more, things were not the same. They never are!!

Back in train while glimpses of history were floating by, I was also excited by the fact that I was about to get married, I was going home and I could meet my girl close distance rather than long!

My cousin had come to the station and finally I reached home and it just felt heavenly to get back to some Mom cooked food and my own surroundings that I was away from for about five years.

Network Kolkata was situated in one of the better buildings of Kolkata in Camac Street. The office was on two floors with the Sushil Joshi the RM and paternal figure occupying the 6th floor posh office while all the others were shoved into a big hall in the 10th floor. There were again three teams in Kolkata. The erstwhile LAM that was being headed by one DP Chowdhury with a Civil Engineering Architecture work background while the other two sales teams based on Geography were to be managed by Prithvish (ex Guwahati office) and myself. Prithvish was my roommates at the institute and I did not foresee any issues just like I did not have any with Rachna in Mumbai!!

The colourful lot of Kolkata office had disappeared by the time I came in. The service team was headed by one Asit Pal who had literally risen from the ranks, he earlier being an Petty Officer in the Indian Navy. The office was quite well knit and guys were cool to get along with.

There was a Regional Sales Manager named Sujoy Ghosh whose only agenda in life was good English, manners and etiquettes, women and porn movies!!! Sales was perhaps the last in his agenda. Whatever it was, we got along fine and it was a case of mutual non interference as far as our professional duties were concerned!!

Sushil Joshi had these preconceived and pre worked out rules on whom he liked or disliked. So it was a sort of whims and fancies organization where personal feelings overtook and influenced personal calls whenever they had to be taken. He was old fashioned in his own way, the Saturday Club of Calcutta culture and a lazy British life. He was from the Army all right but quite different from a lot I had seen! He had this fantastic sense of humour and everything he uttered in the office had to be double analysed for hidden meanings.

The first day in office where I was introduced to the team, he mentioned to the others that I would be shortly showing my Mumbai sparks and they better be careful. I did figure out that it was perhaps a dialogue to let "me" know that how careful I needed to be and not them.

Days passed and a month passed quickly and we got busy with our work lives. I had a team that had a gentleman named Raja Sen. One of the funniest guys you could along with he was a shirker of the first order. Fraud sales calls, fraud outstation tours, et al, it was a nightmare to manage him. He unfortunately became a mental case later and needed serious psychiatric help. Prithvish however had no love lost for him. After leaving Network they both had partnered a business that was quite a heartburn for Prithvish!!

Kolkata market was a different ball game altogether. Decisions were slower, people did not want to part with money, and a lot of times the so called sales pitches on image and print quality did not work, especially with SME clients. For the marwaris it was absolutely different and they were tough price negotiators.

The Government sector was corrupt and and so was the Armed Forces. So much later when Amit Raha of the Lam team was trying to sell machines to Fort William with a "deal", my father-in-law asked me name of the pesrons. Needless to say, I denied him the benefit. He was part of Bengal Area too.

The typewriter sales were going though a churn along with Network too. Network had invested a lot in these machines for printers named Letracomp that really bombed in the market. Keeping separate Lam teams were not worth its while and they were disintegrating too. The market was getting extremely price sensitive as machines were now flowing down the value chain. The higher value machines were being sold only to high worth customers.

These happened later. But before that in Feb I was to be get married. My marriage was held at Fort William Service Officers Club and it was quite grand though I landed up with a major headache. My leave was approved but as it happened the office called me later to validate whether I was joining back on time. They perhaps had no idea of the loyalty that some of us had developed and how such questions could just uproot the concepts instilled. But that was Kolkata office and its management!! This was perhaps also a start of personal conflicts that I had with Network.

I enjoyed my stint in Kolkata in spite of SJ's deep down intolerance where finally he wanted to give full control to his protégé. Sujoy left the organization and we were going through a churn. The team, at our levels was still closely knit and we did go out for Weekend outings, etc. We got invited to each other's houses and there were a number of marriages too Kaushik, Prithvish, Pradipto - they all got married.

The think tanks tanks in Network Delhi were obviously concerned about the market conditions that I talked about earlier. Cost reduction in all counts had become imminent and therefore Utpal Bharali and team at Network R&D needed to churn out something new. We already had bilingual machines. Now the question was to penetrate the market and also kill competition and basically add on to the revenue and profit totals.

As one would have it a Sales Conference was announced and we knew that something exciting would be coming our way, given the history of the past conferences. The conference venue was unannounced. Locally we found that machine supplies were dwindling and customer orders were not getting delivered. Managers were called to Delhi for special meetings on Collections since traditionally Network was weak in collections. For such situations the culprits were mainly the LAM team and there was a lot to be cleaned up in the later years.

In November 1988, the conference was announced. Srinagar was the venue. While new machines were surely destined to come, there were rumors about changes in Kolkata office too. For better or for worse only time would tell.


In my team in Kolkata I had this girl named Sharnistha. She was a tomboy in her own way always in trousers and shirts and driving a bike on the streets of Kolkata. Once when we visited Gangtok, Sikkim we reached the hotel and she walked up to the reception and asked for "a" room. I had to intervene for two rooms and she would understand why!! Whoof!!

There were many other interesting characters. One of the Service Engineers I was impressed with was William Wu. He was the highest AMC earner and the best CE in town. There were a few ex-Airforce guys who used to patiently wait for the monthly salary and had no motivation to gear up!! Asit Pal I guess had a tough time managing the show.

November 88 just passed handling customer complaints on deliveries and then it was again time to board the train. This time we were booked in the Rajdhani Express in Spondylosis Compartment(Chair Cars). There were people from our Guwahati office to Jayanta and others. One of them had a roaring affair with one of the Kolkata girls. We will talk about that in the next episode. Srinagar!! Here we come!!

William Marked US - Hyderabad 1986-87

A deviation from the flow but this is a much promised one.

Just about a month before I was destined to leave Vizag, a new Area Sales Manager joined Hyderabad Office. I guess there were some disappointments there since now teams were getting divided and as usual change without proper communication brings about a lack of confidence amongst people. I was away from all of this but also in it because of my inherent relationship with Hyderabad office.

The gentlemen who joined was one Markos Williams. The only claim to fame he had was all that he bragged about - his connection with Jagdish Tytler (how that helped Network that is still unclear to me but I guess he managed to impress some seniors at Delhi with his glib talk). We also came to know in due course that he was a major contract supplier to ICRISAT (an UN organization based at Hyderabad that had one of the most corrupt Purchase Departments you could find). He was a major high society animal in terms of private parties and such things. All these information were made available to us by him and we really did not have to do any research as such.

The guy was a lanky fellow as you can see in the picture (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkgqRls9G0-xYm79Ab3uJYtCxKxjkK6eQUoN5RTjQbRj-alE3jk34Ky0BhNOENrCIYL14TiopDrMTMQpanVPblAJJxwPGUxMu7hnu7tRWO3v170y4UQ-QB9KsKrzuJk_wC0MjKQ5wwBNc/s1600-h/img049.jpg) and to begin with the Network Higher Ups was quite intimate with him. He was part of the Agra conference and while other managers were perhaps giving a lot of time to his team he was of course roaming around with the people at the helm like RK and so and so forth from Head Office. Surely his dubious and debatable background and charisma was working on them!!.

My interaction with him was limited, officially none while social etiqueete wise at a minimum level. His wife use to land up at Hyderabad office and I remember teaching her some games like Pacman and stuff on the PC. The office bachelors including me were of course a bit hee-ho-hum about her since she was pretty attractive in her own way!!

So this gentleman basically started taking control over most staff in the office unofficially too. Mind torture games with people who did not tow his line started and I know of situations where office people were beaten up by hired thugs. His private business with ICRISAT and others were still on and he even started using Network infrastructure in terms of Telexes, International calls and any other means at hand.

I once visited ICRISAT with him and more than Network business, we were basically talking about wire fences that he was contracted to supply.

So the saga continued and the atmosphere in Hyderabad office started to deteriorate. Employees were being hassled including their family lives. I left Vizag and an engineer named Srinivas was put in charge of Vizag. He was absolute in cahoots with Markos and consumables for sale started disappearing from stocks.

News travel and perhaps one fine day the blinkers that were put on by some HO blokes were taken off. GP was in New Delhi too and he for sure could not mentally tolerate the affairs.

So some of them came down to Hyderabad one day and that was the end of Markos Williams. The departure was not without threats and such but Network finally prevailed. In my later stints at Head Office I have seen how people at the helm also need disciples at the lower level in order to thrive but this one was a case where everything had gone wrong and it took time for HO to exactly differentiate the good from the evil and that was entirely due to their own doing!!

Once from Mumbai myself and BVR had traveled to Hyderabad to visit old friends and I remember visiting Markos's house too. At that point of time MW was in full control of Network and he was the King of Hyd office. The news of our visit was relayed instantly by him to RK, Now you could imagine how close he was with powers at Delhi and how insecure he was that he had to report even a social Hi-Hello!!

In Banks we deal with PEPs(Politically exposed Persons) with extreme care, caution and they carry their own risks. I reckon even the professionally run establishments in any business should also have their own teams working behind investigating PEPS in terms of referral checks for appointments or business dealings or even employee relationships!!

Loss of Innocence - Mumbai 1986

Everybody would have their own preferences but the best territories to work in Mumbai would be perhaps the Nariman Point or Fort Area. The potential is immense and the area would keep anybody busy without time to think. I liked both these territories personally because of the ambience, the food and of course the color!! The skirt and jeans regiment was a common sight unlike Delhi where it was mostly churidars!!!

And then when I shifted to Bandra I was in the thick and thin of Sandras!!

Llewellyn D Souza used to be an interesting character in my team. He is the sort of guy who would say that he liked cold beer but could’nt drink it chilled!! Basically a lot of “b.………g” of the first order was his way of life. But then who cared as long as he got orders. He had this uncanny knack of making fast friends with the opposite sex quickly and efficiently and since they were mostly secretaries going goo-goo-ga-ga over him, the order for a typewriter from that office was naturally for network. We did not have to depend on elaborate marketing and sales pitches for the sale. Competition was taken care of, prices were taken care of and features(ahem!!) were taken care of too!!

The best part is that sometimes he would try to set me up for situations with some of the good looking ones. Well, the prude(!!) I am, these were just professional hazards that I took on my stride!!!

From a business point of view, even from this there was one learning that I always wanted to instill among teams and this is not true just for sales. Relationship building is the key and that works in all aspects of our professional life.

When I landed up in Mumbai the first time, there was this support executive named Laxmi in Worli Office. She was a charmer in her own way and she used to regularly invite the office colleagues to her home for some puja or the other. A couple of times when I did go, I found that almost all of the Mumbai office bachelors were conspicuous visitors! I of course remember my first day straight from station landing up in office with all my luggage(!!) and she greeting me “Good Morning” and me replying “What’s so good about the morning?” A kick ass reply that definitely proved how big an ass I was!!

So while we had a colourful outside the network team was no less. Nalini our office secretary resigned and Rahil came in her place. Suddenly Tulsiani Chanbers Office used to get overcrowded and finally I had to put an embargo and that too especially on the erstwhile LAM team talked about earlier.

The sales lot were overall good but we had some unique characters too. I don’t know where they are today but one of them I know is Keith Rowe. From very humble beginnings he has worked his way hard and is now a renowned People Provider in Delhi. There are some dubious rumours about his working style but who cares.

As BV Rao in his comments talked about the motivation triggers of different sales persons, saying money was the major motivation would sound too clichéd. Who after all did not want the money? But it was the general enthusiasm in everything that we did in cohesion was the key!! Our planning, our team meetings our camaraderie, it was a full time holistic genuine effort that lead us. There were the dreaded sales reports all right but over time K Ravishankar visits to Nariman Point office reduced and that was a good indicator.

Typically. people at Head Offices thrive on rumours and that’s especially for organizations where the major actions are in the regions and branches!! So when K Ravishankar left Network for a job in the Middle East, somebody had the gall to ask me about whether I was having problems with him. This was when the new incumbent took charge of Mumbai office and even Rachna was asked the same question. Head Office perhaps thought that Mumbai needed to produce more that it did not!! R. Kannan our Godfather had left too!! So we now knew the source of rumours that emanated from Mumbai itself (basically some disgruntled members of our special team that I have talked about earlier) and they were all against KRS!!! Pitiful is the only word that could be used!!

It was about a year now that Canon machines were being sold and now we slowly figured out the problems that started hovering on us. The Printer carriages were giving away….all those high funda magnetic fields were throwing up I guess. Parts were in short supply so our Service Engineers started playing around with customer machines. Get a machine, cannibalise and use the parts for another. PCBs that earlier used to get repaired at NOIDA factory now would undergo torture from hand held soldering machines on work desks worse than a municipal classroom!! But that was that, and after all India is all about making do…top to bottom!!

The organization was growing, newer people from Delhi coming for visits. The old hats were leaving at HO or were being removed!! New marketing concepts, new pitches things were changing fast. Arvind Wable left for the advertising world and we had Deepak Maira coming in with his newer thrust on the basic 400 that nobody wanted to buy!! Later on he was instrumental for one of the unique machines produced by Network but that’s too early for us to delve in, at least right now.

I remember walking the streets of Fort with Deepak making cold calls and creating some projects while getting rejected in others. I gathered that he just wanted to get a feel of the market at ground level, because given visits being organized by the regional office, visitors would be taken only to “nice” places!!

Mumbai office went through some major changes. KRS left and Sanjiv Sarin(now CEO of Medison India and also big time advisor to Nucleus Software) took up the mantle. They were staying at the Ashiana Building in near Mount Mary’s Church in Bandra a stone’s throw from Almeida Park where I was parked. So just like when KRS was here there were many a times when I used to get called for these self invited dinners to relish Poonam’s cooking(that’s an oxymoron but that was how it was!!)! Mohan George was nearby too and many a Sunday morning was all about beer, fishing and irritating Usha. Bachelors can get on your nerves and I was one!!

The travel to office from Bandra for me was easy. Take an auto rickshaw or walk down to the station. Take a typical 8:13 or 8:23 train from Bandra and then take a share cab from Churchgate Station to Nariman Point. Sanjeev or for that matter KRS had to take this BEST bus to the main road and then change buses for Worli. I remember one day asking Sanjiv about cars and he said that things are in the pipeline. Next year Network launched its well-known car schemes that were available at a steal for the employees.

I had four flat mates in the Bandra Apartment and after coming back from office it was on very few evenings that we stayed at home. The other three had bikes while I was the pillion rider. We used to paint the town red right from Colaba to say Madh Islands. The famous Bombay dancing bars, the best street food, the best beaches, we covered them all!! And of course some good parties here and there were there in the agenda too. I miss those days, they absolutely rollicking and the nights were quite a sharp contrast to our otherwise staid day time existence.

This was also a time when BV Rao came in from Hyderabad Office. To reminisce our days we went to Hyderabad for a weekend and met up with most of the people and that included Markos Williams too!! I will perhaps talk about Markos Williams in a separate entry!!

My father was not doing too well with his health in Kolkata and I requested for a transfer. Sanjiv dangled the carrot in front of me but I had to go. I also wanted to get married and my girl was already in my life! So one fine morning in Dec 86 I left Mumbai and I was given a first call farewell from Mumbai office that I cherished. Mumbai is the place where I became a major!!

I met Chaitali however earlier in May earlier when I had gone away to Kolkata since I had caught Chicken Pox. I had more hair then and though there were spots on my face, I took the flight with sunglasses and a covered face!! The previous day AKD had treated us to a fabulous dinner at the Oberoi’s Polynesian Restaurant but next day was when I was falling sick!! In fact reviews were going on while I slept off on three chairs in the PC room!!

I was on to Kolkata and as luck would have it most of the colours in Kolkata had either left or turned grey. I was excited though since it was hometown and that was that!!

Cannons from Canon - 1986 (Mumbai)

Mumbai had not changed. But the Networkers returning from Agra were a changed lot. Brimming with excitement, the train journey was all about the 411s and the 511s. While new orders were fine, discussions were on how to convert the Hermes machines to the new Canon ones.

The Canon Machines gave us some new perspectives about Typewriters. Now the daisy wheels were plastic compared to the earlier steel. So the sales pitches had to change where now we would go and say that the new world wheels are easy to handle and you don’t have to bother about individual petals bending and stuff. We were all turncoats for our own advantage!! The printer carriage was something unique. It was as they say noiseless, wireless, using magnetic fields and therefore no parts were touching while movement. It was all about magnetic levitation just like those trial French Trains and it was all sounding serious high funda stuff!! The price of course was attractive and now you had a typewriter at 9995/-(INR)!!

New machines, new consumables, new typestyles(fonts) and new energy combined gave us that push to attack the market with vengeance. There were these full-page advertisements and all analysis were concentrating on enquiries - Nos received, covered, converted, etc etc. Calls from Mumbai Chief, Head Office and even AKD were galore and I thank my stars that there were no mobile phones then. Life would have been pretty miserable, answering calls rather than actually working!!

So orders were pouring in and I remember PCL sales guys almost in tow of our sales guys to try and figure what the hell was happening. So every evening I used to take these orders with advance cheques and OCAs (Order Confirmation Advice) to the Worli Reg Office and dump them in front of Ravishankar K. After that it was all about playing Digger with Mohan George on the office PC. I remember even Sudhir Sethi (Shalini Sethi’s classmate hubby- now a big cat) coming and playing with us.

The Worli office was still under renovation and was a mess. Another thing I hated about that office was the lunch supply. The sight of the insipid Dal Rice and papad that was a favourite of many was my biggest sorepoint!! So it was a great occasion when Open House opened up nearby. The Tardeo Chinese Carts were good too. But all these were nothing to beat the variety of South Mumbai. The Ballard Estate Irani Restaurant, the Stadium Restaurant beside Churchgate, Sundance Café beside Eros and so many more were all institutions and that where all the sales people would congregate to share information.

In terms of sales we also noticed that now we had started penetrating organizations. Earlier while MDs would use ETs, we now found the machines were reaching down in the organizational hierarchy. So there came the case of analyzing organizations into Major Accounts depending upon their size and network. We started realizing that sales pitches, and the type of salespeople for such accounts would need to be different and therefore came in all sorts of restructuring, different types of incentive schemes and reviewing procedures. The senior managers were also learning and that was apparent in the types of questions that would get asked. It was the start of the golden era after all where we started getting orders in bulk from various customers. The value per machine of course had gone down but we started making money on consumables.

In the meantime even Godrej came into the market with their so-called indigenous machines. While they were cheaper in price, to our advantage they were definitely not good enough in terms of technology, looks and ease of use. We could counter almost everything that they did except for the consumables prices.

When that dawned upon Network our marketing team swung into action to figure out cheaper alternatives. Now Network started sourcing large spools of carbon-coated sheets that needed to be cut into size for our “ET Ribbon Cassettes and then sold at a cheaper price. We had this extra work in terms of refilling old cassettes but then it was the requirement of the day. We knew that some tall guy named Mohor Sen was involved in managing this ribbon cutting plant (sic) at NOIDA factory premises.

Days were passing by quickly and installations were increasing manifolds. That put pressure on our service personnel and the teams needed to expand. That’s when YKC (chacha) was also figuring out in his brain on how to make money out this channel. Service Contract Revenue Targets started getting discussed seriously in forums. Though quarterly reviews were still heavily oriented towards hardware sales the timeshare of regional heads towards the subsidiary channels were increasing with passage of time.

My office territory was South Mumbai and those familiar with the city would understand when I say that it started off from the southern most tip that is Navy Nagar up to almost Tardeo. You could say that the cream of Mumbai was in this territory and that would mean additional pressure on the team. To cover every nook and corner off congested almost ghettos like Fort or Kalbadevi was not an easy task and required a lot of self- motivation. There were days of frustration in terms of not finding the reasonable prospects or perhaps losses. But then overall it was rosy most of the time and thank god to our people, the machines and the backup support we got from Service!!

Bombay House is an important landmark in Fort and you would be surprised at the various companies that exist in that same building. One could spend a whole day in just one building. I had divided my team accordingly in terms of aptitude and thoughts in terms of territories that were based not on geography but on types of accounts in spite of stiff pressure from the higher ups. If LAM could happen for a city, I fathomed that even I could have my own LAM!!! My own time was rather spent on meeting the higher ups in an organization while others would do a lot of on site pre sales and image building.

I remember Alex Jacob a Saudi returned highly motivated Keralite spending money from his own pocket and giving demonstrations all over town. Leaving ethics aside, I did reimburse him a lot of times by claiming those conveyance bills myself. As long as we were winning the end game, I really did not care!!

I was residing at Dadar East those days in a lane that could be defined as the worlds most congested road. There were no vehicles on that lane but when I would peak down from the balcony it were only the heads that were visible and no tar!! Thankfully this torture did not last for long and I shifted to Bandra. That was when the entertainment started!!