Frank Kusy's Blog
July 2, 2014
PUSHKAR – GET BLESSED!
A charming oasis on the very edge of the Great Thar Desert, Pushkar is one of those places where you come for a day and end up spending a week.
I still remember my first impressions of the place – a small jewel in the navel of India, all ablaze with its colourful mix of pilgrims, hippies, merchants and holy men, its outdoor menagerie of cows, pigs, dogs and monkeys, and most of all its unique blend of romantic mysticism and hard-nosed business practice. I first arrived in 1985, just as the tourists began trickling in, and found it wonderfully unspoilt. The ancient buildings were all whitewashed and flaky, the lake was peaceful (apart from a few leaping carp), and the sleepy marketplace was dotted with just a few browsing backpackers.
Sightseeing is probably the last thing on your mind when you come to Pushkar. It's a tiny, sleepy town which instantly envelops visitors in a calm embrace of inertia. The little activity there is – shops, cafes and rooftop restaurants – centres on the single long street which tracks round the northern end of the lake, parallel to the bathing ghats. There’s a regular parade of travellers trooping up and down this street – trying on hippy clothing, buying silver bangles, doing puja (prayer) at the ghats, or organising camel treks.
And they all end up at the same place – the Sunset Café below the Tourist Bungalow – in time for sunset.
At sunset, Pushkar comes into its own. The dry heat is relieved by a cool breeze, the glare of the sun dies away, and the fading desert lights turn the lake a fiery blood-crimson. As the time approaches for darshan (worship), the hundreds of little temples by the lakeside come to life and the air is filled with the clanging of bells, the beating of drums and the hypnotic drone of prayer.
For many westerners, this will be the nearest they’ll ever get to a ‘mystical’ experience of India...
Rupee Millionaires
I still remember my first impressions of the place – a small jewel in the navel of India, all ablaze with its colourful mix of pilgrims, hippies, merchants and holy men, its outdoor menagerie of cows, pigs, dogs and monkeys, and most of all its unique blend of romantic mysticism and hard-nosed business practice. I first arrived in 1985, just as the tourists began trickling in, and found it wonderfully unspoilt. The ancient buildings were all whitewashed and flaky, the lake was peaceful (apart from a few leaping carp), and the sleepy marketplace was dotted with just a few browsing backpackers.
Sightseeing is probably the last thing on your mind when you come to Pushkar. It's a tiny, sleepy town which instantly envelops visitors in a calm embrace of inertia. The little activity there is – shops, cafes and rooftop restaurants – centres on the single long street which tracks round the northern end of the lake, parallel to the bathing ghats. There’s a regular parade of travellers trooping up and down this street – trying on hippy clothing, buying silver bangles, doing puja (prayer) at the ghats, or organising camel treks.
And they all end up at the same place – the Sunset Café below the Tourist Bungalow – in time for sunset.
At sunset, Pushkar comes into its own. The dry heat is relieved by a cool breeze, the glare of the sun dies away, and the fading desert lights turn the lake a fiery blood-crimson. As the time approaches for darshan (worship), the hundreds of little temples by the lakeside come to life and the air is filled with the clanging of bells, the beating of drums and the hypnotic drone of prayer.
For many westerners, this will be the nearest they’ll ever get to a ‘mystical’ experience of India...
Rupee Millionaires
June 13, 2014
HOW TO STAY A RUPEE MILLIONAIRE
Once you’ve become a rupee millionaire, do not sit on your laurels, it can all fall apart overnight. Here’s a few useful tips to help you stay on top:
1) CUT LOOSE PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
The final straw, when it came, was brutal.
Spud had sold the entire contents of his van to another wholesaler – and for a lot less than it had cost to buy them.
‘Half that stuff was mine!’ I raged. ‘And you sold it at a loss?’
‘None of your business. I’ve been asking around, and you’re the one who’s been giving people big discounts. I always wondered how you sold more than me, and now I know. You’ve been undercutting me for years!’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But you’ve cut your own throat in the process. That van had over fifty grand’s worth of stuff in it!’
‘So what?’ shrugged Spud. ‘Call it a lesson.’
I went very quiet inside. ‘This is the end of the road,’ I said. ‘You’ve just lost yourself a partner!’
‘Yeah right,’ mocked Spud. ‘You leave, and you’re good as dead!’
2) EMPLOY A BORING ACCOUNTANT
On my own now, and faced with a massive VAT bill, I rang my new accountant Gerald and asked his advice.
‘Okay,’ drawled Gerald. ‘Do you want me to have a word with them?’
‘Oh, could you?’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re so very good at this sort of thing!’
And with that I sat back by the phone and waited. I had drawn Gerald, an immovable force of verbal tedium, into negotiations with the VAT man, an irresistible object of trained tenacity. Gerald was at once the most polite and the most boring person on the planet. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever finished a conversation with him without wanting to die.
Sure enough, when the phone rang it was Gerald, and he had good news.
‘I’ve just been onto the VAT,’ he droned ponderously, ‘and I spent over an hour explaining your situation to them.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, just as I was about to explain everything for the third time, I heard this low moan at the other end and they hung up on me!’
3) CHECK INTO REHAB
Shopped to the tax man by Spud and addicted to Valiums, I hid out in a drug detox ward.
Nights were the worst. That’s when the communal dormitory turned into a living hell of snoring, hallucinating, screaming psychos. They’d been issued their daily ration of methadone earlier in the day, and it hadn’t been enough. I jammed in my earplugs to drown out their nightmares, but I couldn’t sleep. My body, pumped up with enough sedatives each night to tranquillise a full-grown pony, was suddenly wide awake.
I lay a prisoner in my bed for hours. When I did finally drop off, I woke to find a razor at my throat.
‘If you snore one more time,’ whispered a ghostly voice, ‘I’m going to slit your throat.’
4) PLAY MONOPOLY, INDIA STYLE
Each time you go buying in India is like a game of Monopoly. You start out with a fixed amount of money to spend, a clear idea of what to buy, and a fairly clear idea of who to buy it from. But then you begin to move your piece across the board and the whole neat strategy quickly disintegrates. The dice fall for you, but mainly against you. And for every plus card you draw – like cheap merchandise, good foreign exchange rates, and fun travelling companions – you get a lot more penalty cards, like national strikes, early monsoons, and unforeseen sickness. Somewhere along the line, inevitably, you’ll run out of money and start playing on credit. And that’s when it gets tricky – because while Indian traders insist that ‘credit is not a problem’, if you didn’t pay them back soon, it’s a case of ‘Go to Pakistan, go directly to Pakistan, and don’t come back...ever!’
1) CUT LOOSE PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
The final straw, when it came, was brutal.
Spud had sold the entire contents of his van to another wholesaler – and for a lot less than it had cost to buy them.
‘Half that stuff was mine!’ I raged. ‘And you sold it at a loss?’
‘None of your business. I’ve been asking around, and you’re the one who’s been giving people big discounts. I always wondered how you sold more than me, and now I know. You’ve been undercutting me for years!’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But you’ve cut your own throat in the process. That van had over fifty grand’s worth of stuff in it!’
‘So what?’ shrugged Spud. ‘Call it a lesson.’
I went very quiet inside. ‘This is the end of the road,’ I said. ‘You’ve just lost yourself a partner!’
‘Yeah right,’ mocked Spud. ‘You leave, and you’re good as dead!’
2) EMPLOY A BORING ACCOUNTANT
On my own now, and faced with a massive VAT bill, I rang my new accountant Gerald and asked his advice.
‘Okay,’ drawled Gerald. ‘Do you want me to have a word with them?’
‘Oh, could you?’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re so very good at this sort of thing!’
And with that I sat back by the phone and waited. I had drawn Gerald, an immovable force of verbal tedium, into negotiations with the VAT man, an irresistible object of trained tenacity. Gerald was at once the most polite and the most boring person on the planet. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever finished a conversation with him without wanting to die.
Sure enough, when the phone rang it was Gerald, and he had good news.
‘I’ve just been onto the VAT,’ he droned ponderously, ‘and I spent over an hour explaining your situation to them.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, just as I was about to explain everything for the third time, I heard this low moan at the other end and they hung up on me!’
3) CHECK INTO REHAB
Shopped to the tax man by Spud and addicted to Valiums, I hid out in a drug detox ward.
Nights were the worst. That’s when the communal dormitory turned into a living hell of snoring, hallucinating, screaming psychos. They’d been issued their daily ration of methadone earlier in the day, and it hadn’t been enough. I jammed in my earplugs to drown out their nightmares, but I couldn’t sleep. My body, pumped up with enough sedatives each night to tranquillise a full-grown pony, was suddenly wide awake.
I lay a prisoner in my bed for hours. When I did finally drop off, I woke to find a razor at my throat.
‘If you snore one more time,’ whispered a ghostly voice, ‘I’m going to slit your throat.’
4) PLAY MONOPOLY, INDIA STYLE
Each time you go buying in India is like a game of Monopoly. You start out with a fixed amount of money to spend, a clear idea of what to buy, and a fairly clear idea of who to buy it from. But then you begin to move your piece across the board and the whole neat strategy quickly disintegrates. The dice fall for you, but mainly against you. And for every plus card you draw – like cheap merchandise, good foreign exchange rates, and fun travelling companions – you get a lot more penalty cards, like national strikes, early monsoons, and unforeseen sickness. Somewhere along the line, inevitably, you’ll run out of money and start playing on credit. And that’s when it gets tricky – because while Indian traders insist that ‘credit is not a problem’, if you didn’t pay them back soon, it’s a case of ‘Go to Pakistan, go directly to Pakistan, and don’t come back...ever!’
May 24, 2014
HOW TO BECOME A RUPEE MILLIONAIRE
Rupee Millionaires
So you want to become a lakhpati, a rupee millionaire? Well, it’s not so hard. All you have to do is follow these four simple steps:
1) ACQUIRE A SPONSOR
‘What am I doing here?’ I asked the Colonel. ‘I came to India with one idea: to check out the birthplace of Buddhism. But so far, all everyone wants is either to buy my watch and walkman, or to sell me something!’
The Colonel laughed. ‘Yes, we Indians do like to do business. It is in our blood. It is the key to our soul. You should try business, Frank! It would be a most spiritual experience!’
And that is how it started. One minute I was a struggling travel writer with five guides in print but not enough money to pay the rent. The next, I was checking out semi-precious stones with the Colonel in Jaipur’s seedy Johari Bazar.
2) HAVE A WORD WITH MAGGIE
Love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher did achieve one good thing: her popular Enterprise Allowance Scheme to encourage new businesses.
I was given a bank loan of £3000 and a weekly stipend of £40 to get myself going, and I spent it all on silver jewellery hand-picked by the Colonel in India. Six months down the line, when the Scheme called me into its offices to see how I was doing, I brought the whole place to a standstill by selling trinkets hand-over-fist to bored secretaries.
That was when I knew I had it made.
3) EMPLOY A DEDICATED MATERNAL RELATIVE
My mother was totally wasted as a housewife. She should have been an estate agent or a stockbroker.
One wintry day in 1989 she helped set up my very first market stall in London. It didn’t look like much at first—a bare 6x4 table with a rainproof awning—but she quickly arranged it into something reminiscent of an oriental boudoir. Then, as I stood timidly behind the table, she stormed forth and began tackling passers-by. She stopped them dead in their tracks, barraged them with stream-of-consciousness inquisitions about their lives, hopes and dreams, and generally made them feel like the most important people on God’s earth.
By the end of the day the stall was virtually empty.
4) TAKE ON A PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
Spud wanted to become a rupee millionaire. He figured that if he had a million rupees—about £20,000—everyone would forget he was a small, fat, bald plumber from Peckham, and scores of nubile women would flock to his cash and shag him senseless.
Spud had a unique sales technique, I learnt, and it was fast and furious. Upon entering any new town or city, he drove slowly around it, scouting any possible shops which might buy from him. Once he located the biggest one he barged into it, informing the reluctant owner, ‘If you don’t buy off me, I’ll just go up the road and sell to someone else.’ This was the last thing they wanted to hear, of course, so he got his foot in the door. If they still refused to entertain him, he just stood there looking manic – one arm full of clothing and the other full of jewellery – until all the customers fled and the owner nervously enquired, ‘So what have you got then? It was as close to bullying as Spud could get without being arrested.
So you want to become a lakhpati, a rupee millionaire? Well, it’s not so hard. All you have to do is follow these four simple steps:
1) ACQUIRE A SPONSOR
‘What am I doing here?’ I asked the Colonel. ‘I came to India with one idea: to check out the birthplace of Buddhism. But so far, all everyone wants is either to buy my watch and walkman, or to sell me something!’
The Colonel laughed. ‘Yes, we Indians do like to do business. It is in our blood. It is the key to our soul. You should try business, Frank! It would be a most spiritual experience!’
And that is how it started. One minute I was a struggling travel writer with five guides in print but not enough money to pay the rent. The next, I was checking out semi-precious stones with the Colonel in Jaipur’s seedy Johari Bazar.
2) HAVE A WORD WITH MAGGIE
Love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher did achieve one good thing: her popular Enterprise Allowance Scheme to encourage new businesses.
I was given a bank loan of £3000 and a weekly stipend of £40 to get myself going, and I spent it all on silver jewellery hand-picked by the Colonel in India. Six months down the line, when the Scheme called me into its offices to see how I was doing, I brought the whole place to a standstill by selling trinkets hand-over-fist to bored secretaries.
That was when I knew I had it made.
3) EMPLOY A DEDICATED MATERNAL RELATIVE
My mother was totally wasted as a housewife. She should have been an estate agent or a stockbroker.
One wintry day in 1989 she helped set up my very first market stall in London. It didn’t look like much at first—a bare 6x4 table with a rainproof awning—but she quickly arranged it into something reminiscent of an oriental boudoir. Then, as I stood timidly behind the table, she stormed forth and began tackling passers-by. She stopped them dead in their tracks, barraged them with stream-of-consciousness inquisitions about their lives, hopes and dreams, and generally made them feel like the most important people on God’s earth.
By the end of the day the stall was virtually empty.
4) TAKE ON A PSYCHOTIC BUSINESS PARTNER
Spud wanted to become a rupee millionaire. He figured that if he had a million rupees—about £20,000—everyone would forget he was a small, fat, bald plumber from Peckham, and scores of nubile women would flock to his cash and shag him senseless.
Spud had a unique sales technique, I learnt, and it was fast and furious. Upon entering any new town or city, he drove slowly around it, scouting any possible shops which might buy from him. Once he located the biggest one he barged into it, informing the reluctant owner, ‘If you don’t buy off me, I’ll just go up the road and sell to someone else.’ This was the last thing they wanted to hear, of course, so he got his foot in the door. If they still refused to entertain him, he just stood there looking manic – one arm full of clothing and the other full of jewellery – until all the customers fled and the owner nervously enquired, ‘So what have you got then? It was as close to bullying as Spud could get without being arrested.
