Why can't hard working smart people do business?

How a small town boy started his business journey and continues to find the answer.

As a curious small town boy growing up in Patna in the times of one TV per colony, one cartoon per week, one car per sq km, life was busy with friends, fire and food. School was just getting discovered as another cool place to have fun, study meant looking outside the window while the book was open. Love meant mothers' chole bhature and a hug. Maggi/noodles in our tiffin boxes was a luxury we got once every few months. Discipline meant my father cleaning his two wheeler every day and shining his office shoes the night before.?

Summers were times of spontaneous fires, yes we did have those even in cities, mostly one of us trying to play with our new friend, the fire, lighting up the waste papers and anything flammable. And then playing ignorant about the smoke.?

Old games like gulli danda, kancha goli, pitto, tilangi, chakka, were still hanging around with cricket, snake and ladders, ludo, etc. Too much to do and so little time. By the time one game was over it was already lunch time and soon dinner. Always felt we ate too much and played too little!

In monsoon, flooded streets would not make you crib but instead poke around to find crabs, snails, learn to dig out the earthworms and then go fish with stitching thread and a safety pin. And then go home to hear “daag acche nahi hain” from mother.

You see, living with nature had a different meaning for me and “Earth is made of 70% water'' was not introduced to me as a statistic.

It was experienced as a reality with frequent flooding when I would put my school shoes to dry under a fan or clean up the weeds from my bicycle. The simplicity of life is admired when you get complex things to handle. Like expensive leather shoes, or a car with an exhaust pipe.

Above- Relevant image from the internet. Though mostly looks what we had to endure!

Winters were a time for colorful sweaters, gajar halwa, soups and trips to the sunny terrace with patang and rooftop games. The joy of smoke coming out of my mouth early in the morning and trying to make different shapes of it was unreal, wondering how the same breath becomes a white cloud in winter until the basics of heat and mass transfer was revealed to me in science class or maybe my father told me. Few details are sketchy, you know.

Festivals were always a special time for me, not only for the fun with friends and family part, but especially the food. Mother used to make varieties of dishes, sweets, namkeen, to suit every festive occasion and my carefully developed senses. She still wants to, just that I am not around her mostly.?

Life as a curious young kid was super busy.?

Later on as a teenager I would dream up things like shock absorber on cycles as the roads to school were bumpy, my friends would of course laugh out at such atrocious thoughts, until one new cycle came up with one! I still remember the feeling, I felt glad, I was validated, I wasn't crazy. A sort of a win. Much much later in life I figured out I was one of those crazy creative imaginative lots whom many people dont understand and write off as a corner case.

In all that time, something stuck around with me. First time as a 10-12 yr old, I heard “sher bazaar” on DD evening news I chuckled and asked my father why would anyone buy and sell “sher”? He ended up explaining business to me and what remained with me as a summary was that business is dirty, difficult, and is for big, ambitious and rich people. Smarter, hard working people do a nice, clean job. I could never reconcile both statements and was left with a question: Why can't hard working smart people do business??

And then a few memories from my younger self came up like the kid with best bicycle, remote control cars, newest shoes and the biggest houses were all from “business families” and we were from “service class”. Something was not right I felt but my small mind was too busy with other things then.

?And then I started reading the newspaper, and listening to adults in the room. Conversations around business and economy interested me more than sports, unlike my friends. Ever thankful to my father for getting me to read things so early on in life.?

Life moved on and all the household conversations centered around getting a great “officer like” job and the small town boy graduated, figured it's not enough and got a postgraduate degree. The question though still remained somewhere looking for an answer.

After over a decade of working in banks and fintechs and being close to startups, possibly as a way of finding answers to that decades old question, one final day I decided it was time to investigate that question closely and find the answer. And it started with another question!

What would it take to build a successful business?

I asked a group of fellow founders whom I had acquainted myself with in the exploration of the land unknown. The answers ranged predictably from knowledge of finance, family backing, money in bank, team but the convincing one came from within.?

“Courage, everything else comes around”

Mr. KV Kamath (ex chairman ICICI Bank) once said or so I imagined, later.

So I gathered what I had and jumped in. No backing, no money, no real experience, no team. Just a desire to find the answer to that question from childhood. After all, I was smart and hard working and had all the tools to make a good start or so I thought!

I sold my dream apartment in Mumbai to remove the EMI burden, my wife cried at the registrar office, I cried later. We then moved to Bangalore, the startup hub of India in a low cost locality to keep expenses low. Changed my lifestyle, my family and I gave up many things which are considered essentials of modern life.

It's been two years and now many failed experiments, product launches, collabs, logical-looking steps later, in the quest to find the answer I ended up with my childhood favorite, food. That story for another day.

It has been a few months trying to understand things with villageaffair.com and sometimes it feels my father was right but I am determined to stick on and say look “A hard working smart person from a small town with no backing built a business.” It's possible.

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