47 The Graduate

The year was 1976 and I was a graduate, but the future looked bleak and confusing. My father was retiring from the Reserve Bank in 1979 and I was still unemployed. The Sabbath challenge of not being able to work on Saturdays added another challenging dimension in my quest for my career. Nevertheless, I had faith and conviction that I would be able to surmount all these looming obstacles and carve a niche for myself.

My close friend Rafeeq Ellias was a role model for me, and he was an exceedingly good copywriter who had joined in the early 70s Clarion McCann and later spent some years again as a copywriter with an American advertising agency in Tokyo, Japan. Taking a cue from Rafeeq, my heart was set on taking up advertising and copywriting as a possible career for me. Advertising agencies at that in Bombay were foreign agencies and followed a 5-day work week and hence getting a Saturday off was possible!

Luckily, my father’scousin was a director of Phillips India and through him I managed to get an interview appointment at Clarion McCain which had Philips as their Client. Very soon, I was facing Ms Syeda Imam who was then the Creative Director of Clarion and she gave me a copy test. I was told that Clarion would contact me if I passed this copy test- I waited for several weeks but there was no call from Clarion and I soon realized that I was not going to be hired by Clarion and all my dreams of being a copywriter just fell apart! With the Clarion disappointment still fresh in my mind, I was wondering what to do next.

I think the answer came out of the blue- we had a family friend one Mr M P Agarwal who had also converted to Seventh-day Adventism, and he unexpectedly paid us a visit at home. We had lost touch with him as he had gone back to Calcutta where his extended family was based. The Agarwals were Calcutta based Marwaris who were Industrialists and had made it big first in the Mining business and then in Jute & Cotton Textiles- they also owned a Sugar Mill in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh. After his return to Calcutta Mr Agarwal had got married and he was asked to take charge of their business interests in Bombay, Surat & Mandsaur. He had known me from the age of 14 and now on his return to Bombay, as I mentioned earlier, I was 25 years old and wondering what to do next. Mr Agarwal suggested that I should try my hand at business and offered to guide me in this direction. He also said that I could use his Mill address in Bombay and look at the possibilities of exporting Cotton Textiles to Europe. I grabbed this opportunity at once and thus began my Entrepreneurial journey towards the end of 1976 / beginning of 1977!

Mr Agarwal was popularly called MP and he had his textile unit- a process house called New Era Fabrics in Mogul Lane, very close to where we used to reside earlier in Mahim. With MP’s encouragement I set up a proprietorship company and I named this Company Argosy which meant ‘a ship laden with merchandise’ as I planned to get into the Export business. The next step was to open a bank account for Argosy and since my relations many years ago had promoted the Canara Bank, I thought it would be appropriate for me to open my first bank account with them. So, I went to their oldest Branch in Bombay in Tamarind Lane in the Fort Area and got myself a current account there!

We lived in Krishna Sadan in suburban Mahim till 1959 and our immediate neighbour on the 1st Floor was the Kottary family- Mrs Kottary was very close to my mother, and it was saddening when Mrs Kottary contracted Rheumatoid Arthritis at a very young age and was later bedridden for many years until she finally passed away. Sailesh, her son was known to me from my Krishna Sadan days and when I started Argosy, I suggested to him that he could join me as a working partner and develop the Export business. Initially, Sailesh was reluctant but after much persuasion he agreed and both of us somewhere in early 1977 began our adventurous foray into the world of business together!